When 2021’s medieval fantasy adventure The Green Knight finally hit theaters (after a yearlong pandemic-induced delay), Daniel Hart, composer of the movie’s musical score, hosted a friends-and-family screening at Valley View Center’s AMC 16.
“Talk about weird,” Daniel quips.
The Green Knight is almost universally revered by critics and discerning watchers alike for its specific, well-executed and majestic weirdness, but he’s describing oddity of a different ilk.
Daniel worked at this mall when he was in high school — in the Food Court, at Chick-fil-A.
So, standing outside the theater with his guests last August, he pointed to one abandoned space after another, telling them who occupied each in the ’90s.
“Which is strange in itself, isn’t it?” Daniel wonders. “Like, why is that information still in my brain? It does me no good. Very, very strange.”
Absence of Hat World and Games Chest notwithstanding, Daniel cherished the day he rented out that theater. It was a day spent with his parents, Ken and Ellen Hart, to whom he owes his remarkable success.
“It feels like sharing it with them is a reflection on their parenting work,” Daniel says.
Ken and Ellen — both respected musicians in their own rights — played piano and accompanied their son on untold violin recitals, and they drove him to God-knows-how-many Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra rehearsals on the other side of town, Daniel says.
“They spent a lot of time giving me opportunities to explore music, so it feels like it has come full circle,” he says.
Daniel lives with his partner Rachel and two dogs, Daphne and Archie, in Northeast Los Angeles, but they all came to town last summer to celebrate Ken and Ellen’s 50th wedding anniversary. All but the canines made the outing to Valley View.
Filming The Green Knight, Daniel and Rachel traveled to Ireland. She has a role in the movie, too. In a Camelot scene where King Arthur is giving a speech, she is standing behind him. “She’s on screen for about 15 seconds,” Daniel says.
Ellen and Ken still live in the Lake Highlands home they purchased in 1987, near Audelia and Ferndale. Annie Clark — now a famous rock star called St. Vincent — grew up on the same street, though she and Daniel were a few years apart in school and would not become friends (and collaborators) until adulthood.
At 82, Ken and Ellen have both retired from positions at Richardson’s Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, known for its ambitious music program and a magnificent pipe organ. But Ellen still plays gigs all around the Metroplex, subbing in when needed.
“I think they really enjoyed The Green Knight,” Daniel says.
In 2017 for the premiere of A Ghost Story, in which Daniel’s music is as pivotal a player as its powerhouse stars Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, his parents traveled to California.
Ken told The Advocate at the time that he found the movie “profound and thought-provoking.”
Critics call it “haunting” and “piercingly emotional” and applaud the director for “leaning into Hart’s lush, string-heavy score,” so “full of pathos and longing.” (It’s fair to say reviewers out-fawned father.)
Ken says Daniel taught Casey Affleck to play the piano, at least “enough to make it look like he knew what he was doing in a few short scenes.”
Daniel and his brother Justin began their musical education at an early age. Daniel played the violin before he was 3. Music was a family pastime, “something we all wanted to do,” Ken says.
It did not take long to realize Daniel had a gift — specifically, two lessons, Ken says. Daniel had a unique vocal ability, phenomenal for a child.
Daniel was 10 when the family came to Dallas and his father took a position teaching at Southern Methodist University.
Daniel attended Northlake Elementary, Lake Highlands Junior High and Richardson High School (RISD’s arts magnet), specializing in orchestra and drama.
At SMU, Daniel laid off music for a year or so while earning a playwriting degree.
In the theater program at SMU, everyone is good, he says. Among his classmates was Amy Acker, a consistently working Hollywood actor, also a Lake Highlands native.
After college, Annie Clark produced Daniel’s solo album, The Orientalist. They have worked together frequently, including touring with Polyphonic Spree while they toured with David Bowie.
“He was friendly and quiet,” Daniel recalls of Bowie. “He and Tim (DeLaughter) would talk, but he was also very kind to the rest of us.”
St. Vincent’s voice also appears on the new album from Daniel’s LA-based band Dark Rooms, on an ethereal single entitled, Like Battling the Hydra.
Through Polyphonic Spree, Hart met musician, actor and producer Toby Halbrooks (another Lake Highlands native) who made the introduction to David Lowery, who wrote and directed The Green Knight.
Today the two are regarded in movie and entertainment circles as, cinematically speaking, creatively inseparable.
They’ve worked together on many movies, to unmitigated success — Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (another Casey Affleck flick, about outlaws in love), The Old Man and the Gun (Robert Redford’s last movie also starring Sissy Spacek), Disney’s Pete’s Dragon (starring Redford and Bryce Dallas Howard) — and now they are working together on Disney’s Peter Pan and Wendy (whose screenplay Lowery and Halbrooks wrote together).
Sure, it’s fair to call them a pair Lowery says.
“I look at Tim Burton and Danny Elfman or Spielberg and John Williams, and even though they’ve occasionally worked apart, they always come back together, and that’s comforting,” Lowery says.
Aside from the working relationship, the duo has been known to hang at hometown haunts — laser tag in Plano, the occasional game night with the wives (Lowery is married to actor/director Augustine Frizzell) and Lowery says he once convinced Daniel to accompany him on an afternoon of indoor rock climbing.
In addition to his work with Lowery, you’ll hear Daniel’s work in The Exorcist on FOX; the documentary Eating Animals, produced by Natalie Portman; a couple of David Sedaris’ audiobooks and Ira Glass’ S-Town podcast. He recorded strings on St. Vincent’s 2021 album Daddy’s Home and rearranged songs for Anjimile’s Reunion album. To name a few things.
He says writing the musical score for The Green Knight is, so far, the toughest — albeit probably the most rewarding — challenge of his deeply layered career.
There’s this scene in the middle of the movie where Sir Gawain (played by Dev Patel) encounters a traveling tribe of giants roaming across the wilderness.
“It is the biggest moment of the film, literally, thematically, a very big moment. And I wrote this big, orchestral piece of music for the scene. It hit all the marks. It worked on paper, but it didn’t,” Daniel says. “I don’t know why, but the film was rejecting it. David knew it and I knew it. Then he suggested I write a song for the scene instead. That’s what ended up in the film. It was a breakthrough moment.”
What becomes of the “rejected” compositions? “The trash heap — that’s where it goes,” he says. The instrumentation was so specific to the film, he explains.
“There’s a recorder quartet, and there’s a small female choir that does a lot of little dissonant chord clusters, and there is a Swedish medieval instrument called the nyckelharpa.”
He’s right. There is not great demand for the nyckelharpa these days, in this region, although Daniel does mention that use of recorders was inspired by Johnny Greenwood (Radiohead guitarist and cinematic composer) who recently joined a recorder ensemble.
He says work isn’t wasted — “sometimes it is just the necessary building blocks.”
Lowery says he values the way his composer friend and collaborator pushes him creatively.
“I haven’t made a sequel yet, and don’t have any plans to, so for the time being we’ll just keep forging new paths ahead.”
