UNPREGNANT is my second feature collaboration with director Rachel Lee Goldenberg. We had worked together on the MGM musical feature VALLEY GIRL. Rachel and I established a terrific working relationship on that movie, learning a lot about each other’s tastes and creative personalities, and how to effectively communicate our ideas to each other. As a composer I want my director to be laser focused on the story, and to guide me in my role as part of the story telling process. Rachel is an expert at that. Every minute shading of emotion and intention needed to be conveyed in just the right way by the music. Some scenes in UNPREGNANT were scored and re-scored many times, as we tried to find the perfect alchemy of wit and poignancy and propulsion. UNPREGNANT was an interesting challenge in that the film crosses a lot of genre types: humor, teen angst, joyful road trip, thriller and action, heartfelt emotion. It was rewarding to hit all those moments as needed, and tie it all together in a unified score. 

At its core, UNPREGNANT is a teenage buddy road-trip comedy. It is a really fun movie. And it's a story about a young women seeking an abortion. That is an interesting mix. The script that Rachel wrote was masterfully structured, and it was my job to push the story through, with each twist and turn, and with each new change of tone and intention. 

The story starts with our heroine, Veronica, getting the results of a pregnancy test. That is the first scene, in the girl’s bathroom at Veronica’s school, and from that moment the clock is ticking. Veronica, along with her friend Bailey, are on a mission. They have adventures and mis-adventures as they try to complete their objective. The music keeps propelling them onward. And that was my mantra as I did my work. Any time during the process where I got stuck as a composer, Rachel would continually re-direct to me to the overall intention - we’re on a mission. Push it forward. But always trying to maintain that with a delicate balance of humor, camp craziness, and sweetness, as needed.

There is one scene towards the end of the film which was particularly challenging and rewarding to score. Veronica has arrived at her clinic and is being counseled by a nurse. During their discussion, the visuals flash forward to show the stages of the procedure: preparation, operation, recovery, and then we return back in to real time with Veronica and her nurse. The music needed to travel a delicate path, to be comforting and compassionate, but also sober and dispassionate. As I wrote, I imagined that there might be viewers, specifically girls and young women, watching this scene who could be getting this kind of information and insight for the first time. What is it like to visit a clinic? What happens there? The music tries to not have a moralistic point of view, but to just simply and compassionately demonstrate what the experience is like. I felt like the score was to supply Veronica some support, to help her on her journey.

I am very proud of the film UNPREGNANT. I think it’s a lot fun. I think it’s important. I hope viewers find it empowering. I do.

 - Roger Neill