How Music Producing Modernized This Retelling of ‘Cinderella’

Music producer Anne Preven had a goal when working on this year’s “Cinderella”: to make the songs as of-the-moment as the updated story itself. She also wanted to make sure that those singing them—including Camila Cabello, Idina Menzel, and Billy Porter—fit as perfectly as that iconic glass slipper.

For someone who might not know, will you explain the role of the music producer on a film?
I’m sure it varies a little bit from musical film to musical film, but I can speak to my role with “Cinderella.” When I came on...there were pre-records, and the film was already shot. So my job was really to come in and make the final tracks fit the visuals, and to beef them up and add live instruments and finish the arrangements.... [I added] vocals and sort of dressed everything up so that it fit the final movie visuals. And in some cases, that meant editing the songs down or adding to the arrangements.  

Will you walk me through the nuts and bolts process for producing each of these songs? 
The first thing that I would do is listen. I got all the virtual sessions, and I opened them all up, and I saw what I thought should stay and what I thought should go, and what I thought needed either sound replacing or rearranging completely. In some cases, we did a complete ground up overhaul, replaced everything. In fact, we did that on most of the songs in the end.

 

What about vocals? Was any singing captured live on set?
There was live singing done on set. And we used some of that where we needed it and where we wanted it. There’s always that difficult transition from talking to singing. And in order to make that as smooth as possible, we did use transitional takes into the incident recordings. There’s actually quite a bit of live vocals. I would say for Camila especially, during “Million to One,” there was a lot of her on set that got used. 

Camila Cabello sounds very different from Idina Menzel. How do you make sure that every singer sounds as though they are in the same “world”?
The big challenge in this movie is it’s such a genre-spanning movie. There are so many different genres and different kinds of singers. And we did it through a combination of arrangement: who sings where and how high and in what context; a little bit of vocal effects and recording techniques and mixing techniques. I would say that those three things combined helped us kind of make it so that everybody felt like they were in the same world.... It was a little bit of a task, but I think we got there in the end, using those techniques. 

What about vocals? Was any singing captured live on set?
There was live singing done on set. And we used some of that where we needed it and where we wanted it. There’s always that difficult transition from talking to singing. And in order to make that as smooth as possible, we did use transitional takes into the incident recordings. There’s actually quite a bit of live vocals. I would say for Camila especially, during “Million to One,” there was a lot of her on set that got used. 

So did you at any point work directly with the vocalists? 
Yes, after the fact, I did. I didn’t do the pre-records with them. But I did the post-records. So wherever we had to do new takes to match picture, or if we wanted to add something, or if we wanted a different performance, for whatever reason, I sort of oversaw that as well—again, all remotely.

Speaking to the vocalists, obviously Camila Cabello sounds very different from Idina Menzel. How do you make sure that every singer sounds as though they are “in the same world” and in the same story aurally? 
The big challenge in this movie is it’s such a genre-spanning movie. There are so many different genres and different kinds of singers. And we did it through a combination of arrangement: who sings where and how high and in what context; a little bit of vocal effects and recording techniques and mixing techniques. I would say that those three things combined helped us kind of make it so that everybody felt like they were in the same world, even though, as I said, sometimes within even the same song there were two or more genres, like “What a Man” for example. It was a little bit of a task, but I think we got there in the end, using those techniques. 

READ: What Kay Cannon Learned Directing
Her First Feature Film

The tone of the film is very specific and the music plays a big role in that. How closely were you working with director Kay Cannon to get it right? 
She’s really hands-on in the music department and had very specific likes and dislikes, and leanings and input on everything from how much reverb there is on a vocal to drum sounds to wanting more rock guitar. She has to have the vision. And I think the rest of the music team’s job was to just sort of make it real. I loved working with her, because there’s nothing better than somebody who really knows what they want. It made it go a lot quicker. And I think we ended up with a great product because of that.

How do you as the music producer make sure the songs are always servicing the story rather than distracting from it? 
Kay’s main concern was the storytelling. And because that was being done through music, we were sort of an extension of her storytelling ability. We had to make sure that people weren’t seeing anything that didn’t move the story forward, or didn’t tell you something about their journey. And the original songs were written with that very much in mind: describing Cinderella’s wants, and her dreams. And then for Idina, it was giving us an insight into her backstory and her struggles and why she was the way she was.

What advice would you give someone who wants to work on the music side of film and TV?
I used to be a pop writer, and now I really love using music to tell a story. There are so many great examples of that out there, “Hamilton” being one of them, obviously, but also “The Greatest Showman” and “La La Land.” You want to be able to help a director tell their story. So that usually means having some sort of production knowledge and ability to deal with the tech aspects of music and video, and combining the two. And then there’s just the broader, bigger picture, which is: How does music best tell this story, because you want it to be an extension of the director’s vision, not something that’s like, “OK, we’re pausing the story now to sing a song.”