Composer Jessica Rose Weiss on scoring Hayley Kiyoko’s debut feature, the intimacy of working with a musician-director, and what it means to build a world out of someone else’s DNA.
We catch Jessica Rose Weiss on the morning of her soundtrack release for Girls Like Girls. She joins the call smiling, and the first thing we talk about is not the film, not the music: it’s the walls behind her in her studio. “Sweet basil green,” she tells us, replacing what she describes as hospital white. A British friend talked her into it, and we told her it was the right call. She says it is kismet. It’s a good way to begin…
Based in Los Angeles, Weiss has spent her career composing across a breadth of projects that reflects both her range and her refusal to be pinned down: Sony’s Cinderella, scored alongside mentor Mychael Danna and the number one streaming film worldwide on its release, Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings, Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Stories, and Pierre Morel’s action thriller Canary Black, before landing at Girls Like Girls, the debut feature from musician and director Hayley Kiyoko
She is an advocate for independent film, for female directors, for composers who are given the space to be storytellers rather than technicians, and for the kind of mentorship infrastructure that actually changes who gets to be in the room. She is also, as she has said herself, categorically opposed to anything safe.
In our conversation, Weiss talks about the challenge of scoring nostalgia without tipping into pastiche, the particular intimacy of working with a musician-turned-director, and what it means to carve out your own compositional space when the director’s DNA is already inside the film.