‘Barbie’ Music Producer Mark Ronson on Working With Dua Lipa, Lizzo, and Creating the Sound of the Year’s Biggest Film
variety.comJem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Whether it’s a soundtrack, a score or a song placement, there are countless wrong ways to do music for film and so few ways to make it feel right.
There’s very little leeway, which is why it can be so challenging for even the most successful hitmakers to make the transition to film music — especially with a major film event like “Barbie.” With albums and songs by Amy Winehouse, Adele, Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Bruno Mars and many others under his belt, seven-time Grammy-winning producer Mark Ronson is one of the most successful pop songwriter-producers working today, yet his work on the soundtrack to Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster “Barbie” film — for which he co-wrote and co-produced five songs, cowrote the score with longtime collaborator Andrew Wyatt, and served as an executive music producer — was a new experience. “I can play a track for an artist and it’s a banger, right?,” he says. “With movies, it’s completely different.
It might be an undeniably great piece of music, but if it’s not matching this unspoken thing that the director has always imagined when they see that image on the screen, it doesn’t work.” That held true not only for the score but also for the 17-song soundtrack, which features bespoke songs by Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Sam Smith, Dominic Fike and costar Ryan Gosling, as well as Nicki Minaj & Ice Spice, Billie Eilish, Karol G, Charli XCX, Tame Impala, Haim and more (Ronson worked on the first five above-mentioned tracks).
The film, which Ronson, 47, gradually became more and more involved with, temporarily sidelined work on his next solo album and a memoir of his early years as a DJ and producer, which he spoke with Variety about almost a year to the day before this
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