Yeah, I think it depends on the genre. I’ve never done a comedy. I think comedy has a very rigid style and approach musically and horror films kind of do and action films do, but I think with something like The Knick… I’ve done three period pieces for Steven, including Kafka and King Of The Hill, and every time he didn’t care to acknowledge the period through the music. King Of The Hill uses a lot of source music from the period to help us establish the period a bit, but complimenting the period musically hasn’t been a top priority.

I guess there’s a medical drama genre, but I don’t know what that music sounds like, so I didn’t really feel and obligation to do medical genre music. But I guess a lot of my films, like Spring Breakers and Only God Forgives, I don’t know if they really fall very neatly in to real rigid categories like horror, action or comedy. So I think the dark, psychological stuff – if that’s a genre? That’s how I’ve been typecast.

What attracted you to The Knick initially?

I thought there was a connection between the industrial revolution – the rapid advancements of medicine and science that were taking place and, to me, I guess that was kind of the justification for the contemporary electronic sound. And I suppose in some ways I was trying to create tones of the new, the future and, I guess, of pioneering and innovation. That’s kind of one of the themes of The Knick. 1900 was also a period of one of the biggest waves of immigration in New York, so on some level I was trying to be a little bit ethnically diverse. I don’t think that was an imperative. It was pretty subtle, but that was a little thread of an idea. It probably sounds good in theory, but you may not notice it musically.

Aside from that, what’s familiar to me about all these projects is that most of the time I’m asked to play the psychology and the inner emotions of the characters. Not the situations, not the exterior stuff, but the inside stuff. So I think that’s all kind of common. The characters all have a kind of dark side – Thackery with his drug abuse and Edwards with his addiction to fighting, so I think it was all about the characters to me. Even though it was a unique setting and a unique period and a unique subject of medicine, I guess. In some ways it felt like a very familiar task for the music to accomplish.