I sat down with Tyler Strickland, the Emmy-winning composer of Amazon’s latest documentary, John Candy: I Like Me, which premiered at TIFF.
Tyler has scored a number of docs centered on Hollywood legends, including:
Each of these three biographical documentaries is heavily driven by music. And in each, Strickland uses a powerful orchestral score to capture each performer’s essence.
He shared how he found the right tone for the John Candy doc:
“We talked about doing the score for John Candy with a lot of like synths and having it be more 80s music driven, just to kind of put us in that place in time that he was dominating the market.”
When Strickland saw the interview footage with Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, and Steve Martin, being so heartfelt, he knew the synth pop wasn’t going to work.
Strickland stated:
"Then the score [became] mostly orchestral. And we really wanted to treat John like this Hollywood icon, so it was like, let’s give him a Hollywood score.”
The film has a grandeur to it that paints Candy as glowing with love. But as often happens, Candy forgets to project that inwards and hides a lot of pain. And this leads to his slow unraveling.
Check out the interview above for a deep dive into how Tyler scored the film. We also talk about how he broke into film composing, how he likes to work with directors, and his thoughts on AI-generated music.
Now available to stream on Prime.
