Nicholas Britell

Nicholas Britell is an American composer, pianist, and producer whose scores have become closely associated with filmmaker Barry Jenkins and director Adam McKay. His work combines orchestral writing, studio processing, and carefully chosen popular-music references, rather than treating film music as a detached background layer. Born in New York City in 1980, Britell studied at the Juilliard School's Pre-College Division and later attended Harvard University, where he was involved in music and film. Britell first drew wide attention for The Big Short (2015), McKay's adaptation of Michael Lewis's account of the financial crisis. Its score uses piano pieces and arrangements that include Ravel's “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” while Britell's own music helps give the film's abrupt shifts in tone a formal throughline. He also scored McKay's Vice (2018) and Don't Look Up (2021), the latter a satire about political and media failure amid an approaching comet. Moonlight (2016), Jenkins's three-part film about Chiron at different stages of his life, gave Britell one of his defining assignments. He built its sound around piano and string writing and around “chopped and screwed” manipulation, a technique associated with Houston hip-hop and DJ Screw. Slowing and pitching material down allowed the score to connect Chiron's interiority with the film's Miami setting and its musical world. Britell received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score for Moonlight. His second Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score came with If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), Jenkins's adaptation of James Baldwin's novel about Tish Rivers and Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt. Britell wrote romantic, lush cues centered on strings and piano for a story whose lovers are separated after Fonny's wrongful arrest. The score is especially identified with the recurring composition “Agape,” whose melody returns in altered contexts across the film. Britell's music for HBO's Succession (2018–2023) supplied another widely recognized theme. The series follows the Roy family as its members fight over control of Waystar Royco, their global media conglomerate. Britell's main-title music sets clipped piano figures against strings and a hip-hop-influenced beat, establishing the show's mixture of inherited wealth, rivalry, and menace. The theme won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music in 2019. Across these projects, Britell has treated the piano as both an acoustic instrument and raw material for transformation. His collaborations show how recurring motifs can clarify character, structure, time, and emotional perspective without reducing a film to illustration.