Batman: Caped Crusader Composer Frederik Wiedmann On Creative Risks & Classic Villains

Warning: SPOILERS for some of Batman: Caped Crusader’s key villains to follow

Batman: Caped Crusader is a bold new iteration of a classic character. The Prime Video show is essentially a spiritual successor to the highly influential Batman: The Animated Series and boasts the same co-creator in Bruce Timm. The series’ all-star pedigree also includes Matt Reeves (The Batman) and J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) as producers and has Hamish Linklater (The New Adventures of Old Christine) stepping into the role of Bruce Wayne. Set in the 1940s, Batman: Caped Crusader leans into a film noir atmosphere and tells the story of a grounded Batman with a scaled-back arsenal of tools at his disposal.

To musically match the feel of the series, the filmmakers turned to Star Trek: Picard composer Frederik Wiedmann. Wiedmann is no stranger to the world of DC comics, having served as the composer for a long run of animated films including Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, Son of Batman, and Death of Superman. Still, Batman: Caped Crusader is Wiedmann’s first DC project since 2020’s Justice League Dark: Apokolips War.

Wiedmann spoke with Screen Rant about his work shaping themes for Batman: Caped Crusader characters, and how the series required him to take a different approach to the music. He also reflected on his joy upon joining the project, and discussed creative risks he took in bringing the show’s key moments and characters to life. Note: the discussion touched on some key moments and villain reveals from the full run of the series.

Frederik Wiedmann On The Joy Of Working On A Spiritual Successor To Batman: The Animated Series

Screen Rant: I know you’ve done so much DC work before, but what was the thing that made you excited about this specific project?

Frederik Wiedmann: I think all of us fanboys are just genuinely in love with Batman: The Animated Series. I’m in my forties now, so that’s the show I grew up watching. That was my first intro to anything Batman or even DC-related, I think. This was back when I was in Germany. It’s such a legendary show. Everything about it: Kevin Conroy, the villains, the music that Shirley Walker scored, the Danny Elfman main title… there’s so much magic in that particular show.

When I heard from Bruce (Timm) and James (Tucker) that they were doing a new Batman series that was basically under Bruce’s creative supervision and being treated as a distant cousin of Batman: The Animated Series—versus an entirely new modern take on it—I really got excited. I was like, “Wow, I get to basically continue what they’ve started.” It’s in our own separate universe, I don’t think anything really does connect specifically to the show, but that’s an equivalent of somebody saying, “Hey, do you want do the next Star Wars?”

To me, it’s continuing something that has been so great and so legendary from the get-go, that inspired so many artists. Looking back, that may have very well been the igniting point for me as a 10 or12-year-old boy to want to become a film composer. You don’t know where those sparks initially come from, but that was definitely one of them. It was amazing opportunity for me to do something that I’ve admired for decades of my life. It was truly a great honor.

Because of that legacy, and because of your own musical legacy with DC, how do you square all of that? When you start writing music for this, how much do you want to call back to that series?

Frederik Wiedmann: Right from the get-go, it was told to me, “We don’t want this to be related to anything you’ve done.” I did the show called Beware the Batman, which was a very different, edgy, modern take with lots of electronics and drums and things like that. Then, Green Lantern: The Animated Series was very orchestral, with kind of typical superhero orchestral music. All the New 52 movies that I’ve done—13 or 12 of them—had an established sound and a palette of themes for the characters that was reoccurring. The idea was to not lean on any of it, not even in the slightest. Don’t lean on Danny Elfman, don’t lean on Shirley Walker, certainly not Hans Zimmer.

And no disrespect, those are amazing pieces of art that I hugely admire, but they really wanted it to be, “How do we make this our own bubble universe sonically and visually that is reminiscent of Batman: The Animated Series, but really does its own thing?” That’s how we came up with matching the music to this visual setting that they’ve created, which is this beautiful art deco-type Gotham city. [It’s moved] into the 1940s, 1930s, with mechanical machine guns, those types of cars, and not [the kinds of] electronics and gadgets that Batman normally has. The music had to just follow suit and be part of that palette sonically, and I think it makes perfect sense to just treat it as its own thing.

Wiedmann Was Told To Look For Musical Inspiration In Movies With No Music

So, were you looking at noir movies because you have that kind of intrigue, or did you have other specific influences?

Frederik Wiedmann: Yeah. I was all ears for the producers, especially James and Bruce. Those were the two most hands-on with music. We had a lot of conversations and conceptual chats about the mood we were trying to create. They gave me a lot of great movie references, like Hangover Square, Mystery of the Wax Museum, all these old Warner Brothers 1940s monster movies—some of those movies where they first invented color. It goes that far back. And early Hitchcock stuff, though that was already a bit past what we were trying to do. What was really interesting is they would reference those movies, like, “That’s a good vibe. That’s a good tone,” and I would watch them, and some of them had literally no music.

Mystery of the Wax Museum is a perfect example. There’s no music in the whole thing, and it’s a very suspenseful movie. I’m watching it, and an hour in, I’m like, “I get the vibe,” but in terms of musical direction, I’m not getting any of it. I had to write Bruce back saying, “Hey, is that the movie you meant? Because there’s no score.” He’s like, “Oh, yeah. I know, but that’s the mood.”

[If someone says,] “I want my movie to feel exactly like The Bourne Identity,” then you’re like, “Yes, I get it. Drums, percussion, and that violin and cello lick has to be in there. Perfect. Got it,” but didn’t really exist as an actual template, let alone in a superhero environment, which changes things. This didn’t exist in 1940s. They didn’t have a Batman movie that you could look at and say, “Oh yeah, they did this well.”

I kind of had to go, “What if I take sonic elements from those really old scores, Erich Korngold, Max Steiner, early Bernard Herrmann, and Alfred Newman even? What did they do? How did they use the harmonies, melodies, and orchestration?” and then use those pieces to put together something that fits into a Batman environment. That’s what I think took the most time—figuring out how do you make this mashup, so to speak, of all those things while still maintaining this integrity over a 1940s sound.

Everyone “Talked A Lot About” How To Handle Bruce Wayne’s Origin Story In Batman: Caped Crusader

To get a little spoiler-y, I really loved episode three because we get Bruce Wayne in therapy, and we get his origin story in a way that doesn’t feel tired. So much of the show, I feel, takes things that people have a familiarity with and presents it in a way that’s fresh. I imagine that probably weighed on you in music too. How was it to tackle that and be in discussion with your collaborators about it as well?

Frederik Wiedmann: Very well said. There are a lot of things you would expect as a DC fan, but there’s a little bit of a twist on it. I think that just keeps it interesting. I think it’s important to stay true to what people love about certain characters, but at the same time, it doesn’t hurt to give it a little bit of a change and a twist.

The moment you’re describing where young Bruce is standing in the doorway, waking up Alfred, and basically proclaiming what he’s going to do for the rest of his life… that’s such a poignant but really dark moment. [There’s] this child, [and] that’s what he’s turned into through this trauma. We talked a lot about how to deal with that particular moment, even though it’s just 10 seconds long. “How much weight and darkness are we going to overlay during this very pivotal moment of this character’s transformation into Batman?” I thought it was a really powerful moment, the way they designed it and the look of it with the door frame. It’s night. It’s dark. I thought it was beautiful.

Wiedmann Details Scoring The Show’s Villains

Do you have a moment from the series that felt like the biggest risk creatively?

Frederik Wiedmann: Yeah, Catwoman. We did this thing slightly out of order, so Catwoman came up pretty quick. I think she was the second villain I had to score. The idea was that we wanted every villain to have their own unique theme or melody. That’s possibly one of the most fun things of scoring anything Batman-related—you get to do all these cool villains. Catwoman was a fun one. She’s such an interesting character. She’s sexy and seductive, but she’s also a thief, so she’s kind of heist-y and cheeky. And she’s “cat”-woman.

So, I was in the studio, and I had my little violin—I don’t play very well, but enough to get some basic ideas across—and I was in there for hours just trying to figure out what I could do. “What instrument sounds the most like something is meowing?” I didn’t want to do the Peter and the Wolf clarinet for the cat because I feel like that’s been done, so I came up with these meow-type violent phrases.

It felt okay on the solo violin to play them, but then I thought, “What if 40 people play that together?” I hired an orchestra from one of my go-to places in Eastern Europe, and I spent an hour just experimenting with that idea with them. That’s how we came up with that little theme that sounds like strings meowing, which, to me, is perfect.

Bruce and James both seemed to like it a lot, so that became the Catwoman theme. The moment I had that figured out, the whole episode was done. It just worked in every single spot where I put it, and I was super happy with how that came out. It’s not a subtle theme. It sounds like a meowing thing, but I think it’s perfect because it really mirrors her character and all the nuances of who she is.

Do you remember a scene or an episode that required the most back and forth between you and the showrunners?

Frederik Wiedmann: The one with Onomatopoeia—the villain who speaks with sound effects. We collectively decided that this should be more of a gritty gangster episode. These dark, New York City-like gangsters show up in Al Capone style with machine guns, so we were talking about, “How can we make this feel more like that versus [the suspense and horror] we’ve done so far?”

We experimented with the idea of these West Side Story finger snaps alongside percussion. I think (Ennio) Morricone does something similar in the opening of The Untouchables, if I’m not mistaken, and the whole train station sequence. It’s a very rhythmic piece, and I think there are some finger snaps in that too. So that was Bruce and James’ idea, and we did a little bit of back and forth on it because it at times felt silly and not dark enough. They are a very menacing group of people in the show, and it wasn’t meant to make them more friendly or groovy or something. So, it took a little bit of work to find a way to incorporate that element into the template that we had.

There’s another season coming, and there’s an end-of-season tease of a new villain. Are there any other villains you’d like to score that you haven’t written music for yet?

Frederik Wiedmann: The last episode ends with the Joker, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a Joker in any of my movies. Joker has been one that I just have never done. Even with Beware the Batman, the whole concept of that show was to use the more obscure, unknown villains like Anarky and Killer Croc, so not many people knew many of them. I’ve never actually had the pleasure to do something with Joker. It’s going to be interesting to see how that develops, because judging from the last scene, it’s a very dark character. Very creepy.

“Everybody’s Hoping” That Batman: Caped Crusader Launches Its Own DC Continuity

The original animated series was a building block for the whole DC animated universe at the time. It spawned so many things. Do you think or believe this show can kind of open the door to other heroes coming in, like the Justice Society? Any there hopes for that kind of lasting continuation with this?

Frederik Wiedmann: I think everybody’s hoping that, but ultimately what the producers’ and the creators’ plans are for those type of things—I can’t speak for them. Obviously, it’d be nice for this to go on for long enough so that we can do all that, but who knows? Let’s see how many people watch it first.

Wealthy socialite Bruce Wayne, transformed by tragedy, takes on the mantle of Batman to combat the rampant corruption and crime in Gotham City. His vigilante actions attract both allies within the GCPD and City Hall and deadly adversaries, leading to unforeseen consequences. The series delves into the noir roots of Batman, exploring the psychological depths of Gotham’s inhabitants.