The Devil Wears Prada 2: Composer Theodore Shapiro on Scoring Miranda Priestly
Interview with Edith Bowman
Few film composers get to write for a world their audience has been living with for 20 years. Theodore Shapiro is one of them, having scored the original Devil Wears Prada in 2006 and now returning for The Devil Wears Prada 2.
The composer sat down with Edith Bowman to talk about the long shadow of the original score, the theme he wrote on spec to land the first job, building Miranda Priestly’s sound around the idea of timeless beauty, and his favourite cue in the new film. He also walked Edith through how he approaches comedy, location and the unsung art of moving in and out of needle drops.
‘the idea of being back with these characters was so appealing… there was more juice to be squeezed from that orange’
A no-brainer return
For Theodore Shapiro, the decision to come back was made before the pitch finished landing. Director David Frankel is a long-standing collaborator and friend, and the world itself still had room to grow.
“It was an absolute no-brainer. First of all, David Frankel, the director, in addition to being a fantastic director, is just a wonderful person and a good friend. I would do anything with him. But also, just the idea of being back with these characters was so appealing. I felt like there was more juice to be squeezed from that orange. There was room to return to those themes and expand on them, and see where they go.”
The themes he is referring to are not only musical. The script, by Aline Brosh McKenna, dragged the original characters into a media landscape that has been redrawn since 2006. The score had to do the same.
Twenty years of repetition
Composers rarely get this gift: most film scores meet their audience for the first time when the lights go down. The Devil Wears Prada has spent two decades inside our heads, which means Theodore Shapiro could write the sequel knowing that recognition was already doing half the work for him.
“It’s an incredible asset as a film composer to have had your audience listening and steeping themselves in these themes for 20 years. Repetition in music is so powerful. When we hear something we’ve heard a bunch of times before, it means something totally different than something we’re hearing for the first time.”
“So I felt there was a real opportunity to take these themes and lean on them and allow them to be really pleasurable. To just feel great to be back in that musical world, in the same way we’re back in the film world.”
The original themes return, but they have aged with the characters. They are warmer, sadder in places, fuller in others.
Writing the original theme on spec
The reason there is anything to come back to at all traces back to a piece of music written on spec, before the first film had even shot a frame. Theodore Shapiro had not scored a fashion-world film when he first met David Frankel, and the studio executives were unconvinced. He wrote the theme to win them over.
“When I was trying to get the job for the first film, I had a great meeting with David. He was like, this is the guy. One of the executives wasn’t sure, because I hadn’t done a movie about the fashion world before. So I wrote a theme on spec to try to get the gig. That was the da-de-da-da-da. Eventually they allowed David to hire me, but I had laid the first stone of what I was building, even before they started shooting the film.”
The melody he hummed during the interview is now one of the most recognisable cues in modern comedy scoring. It also shaped the architecture of everything he has written for both films since.
‘I wanted it to reflect the world of fashion... to have a sense of international glamour
Glamour, accordions and break beats
Theodore Shapiro talks about scoring the way a chef talks about cooking. The Devil Wears Prada world started, for him, as a stew of unlikely ingredients.
“I wanted it to reflect the world of fashion. I wanted to have a sense of international glamour. There are break beats, which are always an important part of this language. But there was also in that original theme, an Italian accordion that’s doubling the melody. I just wanted these influences that felt to me like international glamour. I often talk about music as making a stew, where you’re putting in elements and trying to come up with a combination that feels like a unique blend of things. Blending electronic sounds and organic sounds and orchestral sounds and rhythm section. A true hybrid approach where you’re finding the right combination to give it a unique feeling.”
Listeners who know the first film’s score will recognise the DNA of the sequel. The textures around it have moved on with the world.
Timeless: Miranda Priestly’s theme
The most ambitious idea inside the new score is a theme called Timeless, which is built around the contradiction at the centre of Miranda Priestly’s character: a woman whose entire profession depends on chasing the next thing, who privately reveres beauty that lasts.
“The idea of time really influenced a couple of the foundational pieces of this score. There’s a theme in this film where what I’m trying to evoke is a sense of timeless beauty. It has some really modern elements, things that feel modern in the current language of music, but they are in fact references from the 80s.”
“A Juno-60 that is cool again but comes from the past. Mancini-esque orchestrations that to me are always cool but obviously speak to the past. The Miranda character is so interested in the idea of timeless beauty and human achievement in the creation of timeless beauty. So I wanted to find language that supported that idea.”
Scoring without tropes
Theodore Shapiro’s catalogue is densely populated with comedy: Old School, Tropic Thunder, Blades of Glory, I Love You Man. His instinct in this score, as in all of them, is to find the laugh without the cliche.
“It’s really tricky. You don’t want to lean too heavily on the tropes of comedy. I feel like I’ve spent my career trying to avoid those things, or finding new ways to say those things. And yet there are places in the film where you really do want to cue the audience that it’s okay to laugh.”
“So I’m always trying to, if I’m doing the feeling of pizzicato strings, double it with synths or guitars, or instead of doing ensemble strings, have a solo pizzicato string that is processed like a guitar. So it’s doing something different in the scene than the standard sound. Coming up with a combination of those things that does its job of letting the audience know it’s okay to laugh, without making it feel old fashioned.”
Dancing with needle drops
The Devil Wears Prada has always lived alongside its needle drops. Pop songs do as much narrative work as the score does, and the seam between the two is one of the parts of the job Theodore Shapiro most enjoys.
“It’s actually something I really love doing. The act of delivering music in and out of songs is one of those unsung parts of the job of film composing. When you do it and it feels seamless, when you feel like you’ve just transitioned from score into song without it feeling like it’s taken a left turn, that’s really satisfying. I love doing that.”
Lake Como, Milan and Italian melody
The Italian sections of The Devil Wears Prada 2 prompted some of Theodore Shapiro’s most distinctive writing on the score, including a Como sequence built around an unmistakably Italian colour palette.
“Most significantly, the Como cue. There is a cue set in Lake Como that really leans on a very Italianate melody. Strings doubled by an accordion. It really leans into the idea of establishing Milan and Como as their own character.”
Milan, in particular, gives the film and the score room to breathe. The fashion event sequences carry their own brief: enormous, energised, the stakes obvious even to a viewer who has never set foot in a fashion world.
“The stakes have to feel really big. One of the things this movie does, that both these movies do, is elevate the world of fashion into something that feels really huge, even for somebody not steeped in that world. The music wants to support that as much as possible.”
Scoring New York from muscle memory
New York is a character in both Devil Wears Prada films, and Theodore Shapiro’s connection to the city is personal rather than referential. He lived there for over a decade and the scoring choices come from that, not from a research file.
“I had the great fortune of living in New York for 11 years after college. I do feel like New York is part of me. So that energy of the city is something that’s very visceral to me. That kind of energy comes out of my experience. It’s more intuitive than something I’ve written down on a piece of paper. The kinds of sounds and the type of energy is just something I feel pretty deeply.”
That intuition is what makes the New York sequences in the score sound the way they do.
Miranda in the arcade
Asked to pick out the moment he is most proud of, Theodore Shapiro went straight to a sequence inside the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan.
“There’s a scene with Miranda in the arcade in Italy. It’s such a visually beautiful moment. It’s an emotionally important moment in the film. Getting to score that scene felt like a real gift. I really love how that came out.”
The cue did not arrive cold. It traces back to the very first piece of music he wrote for the project, before the cameras had even rolled, and to a writing process that starts away from the picture at the piano.
“I did write that to picture, but it also came out of the very first piece of music I wrote for the film, before they started shooting. I wrote that melody, which is a variation of the main theme. I wrote a suite that’s called Timeless, and it’s on the album. It had this beautiful trumpet solo. As it turned out, when we got to that point in the film, it was just the perfect colour to have in that moment. It has a loneliness and winter quality to it.”
Working away from picture is the rule, not the exception, in Theodore Shapiro’s process.
“I do a lot at the piano. I like to write at the piano away from picture. Sometimes the picture can really lead you in a particular direction, and sometimes that’s great. But sometimes being away from it, and being forced to think about it in terms of theme and character, can be really freeing. It can lead to results you wouldn’t get if you were sitting in front of the picture. The moment with Miranda in the arcade is a perfect example of that. The idea was right, and then it found its proper home in the film.”
Be In The Scene with Theodore Shapiro
Edith closed the conversation by asking him to step out of composer mode and pick a scene from The Devil Wears Prada 2 he would happily live inside. He chose a quiet one.
“You know, the thing that just comes to mind is the scene in the Brera in Milan, where they’re looking at that painting of the Last Supper. It’s just such a magical space. And it’s such a beautiful moment. That’s the thing that strikes me, of wanting to be with those characters in that moment.”
The interior of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper Museum was replicated on a soundstage, as any lighting from the production would’ve damaged the real painting. A team of highly skilled Italian scenic painters, led by a woman who manages backdrops for an opera in Rome, built and painted a room about 3/4 of the size of the original.
