We all know that music has transportive powers. A few beats are enough to take you back to a time and place in your personal history, evoking memories you might not have even known were tied to a melody.

But what if that concept wasn’t just figurative? In his film The Greatest Hits, currently on Hulu writer and director Ned Benson explores the idea of music literally taking his protagonist back in time and how its semiotic power alters her ability to live in the present.

Harriet Gibbons (played by Lucy Boynton) is mourning the loss of her boyfriend, Max (David Corenswet), whose life was claimed in a tragic car accident. Their past relationship, one heavily intertwined with music, is now accessible to Harriet in the present when she listens to specific songs, using them as vehicles to transport her to moments they once shared. Understandably, she becomes obsessed with isolating the one moment that could lead to a different outcome for him and for them.

But in a grief therapy group, she meets David (Justin H. Min) who is also suffering a loss, and Harriet is faced with a choice. If given the rare and enviable opportunity to change her fate… should she?

Moved to write this story after reading author and neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Benson himself has an intense passion for music. After an initial draft or two, however, he placed it on the back burner and went on to write and direct the Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby series and also co-penned the story for Black Widow.

Ned Benson

The isolation of COVID triggered Benson’s return to this project. The Greatest Hits is a unique spin on both the music and time travel genres, weaving the bliss of romance with the gut-wrenching grief that stems from loss. Creative Screenwriting Magazine spoke with Benson about some of these themes and how he developed his script and characters to let music drive the story. 

What was it in Oliver Sacks’ book that inspired you to write this story?

It was his discussion of musical hallucinations and synesthesia, and how music interacts with the brain. I’m so profoundly affected by music in general; songs really just take me back so easily to specific moments in my life. They are this nostalgia machine for me. So, those two things compounded really were the genesis of what the initial drafts of the script became.

I understand you worked on this screenplay for a number of years. What kept bringing you back to it and what made it ready for an audience now?

Yes, I put it away for a long time. I’d written a few initial drafts, and then put it away until I revisited it in 2020. It was my manager who suggested pulling it off the shelf. I think through the lens of the isolation of COVID it became something different. It really was about how music not only reminds us of our past, but also reminds us how to live. And I think Harriet, being isolated and closed off from the world, was really where I placed myself through that. It was [living through] the lens of lockdown and the pandemic, and all of us having that collective experience, trying to figure out how to re-engage in our lives again.

It can be said that music is very personal and experienced uniquely by different people. Likewise with grief, which is another prominent subject in the film. Tell me about taking this type of subject matter and putting it in the structure of a screenplay.

Loss is something we all have to deal with as human beings. We have periods of time where we lose people… that’s just the beautiful tragedy of what it is to be human. I have a really hard time letting go of things in my past. I think addressing that through this character in this story was me trying to work that out on the page and to remind myself to live my life and be positive, to re-engage and experience. Music has been something of a medium for me. It has really helped me get past my own self-consciousness, and it has reminded me to live my life, to get out and dance and do the things that make us feel good.

How did you go about selecting the music for the film, and how personal was the soundtrack to your own life?

It’s very personal and includes a lot of songs that I love. I worked very closely with Mary Ramos, who’s the music supervisor, DJ Harvey, who is a music consultant, and Ryan Lott, the composer, to really think about what this soundscape was.

One of the things we did was look at songs where, lyrically, we’re giving you the subtext of the scenes and helping tell the story. So if you pay close attention to each of these song choices, they really are speaking to the scene that they’re in and to the character. 

We also thought about the type of music each character liked and what their specific taste would be. So, we approached it from a character standpoint. I gave playlists to each of the actors to really discover who I thought that person was. And then they would send me playlists back and we would have this dialogue through music, which was really fun.

Tell me about your main characters, especially Harriet.

I was initially interested in someone whose life had been music, and Harriet had been a sound engineer and worked in music production. We lightly lay that into the script so you get some sense of what her past was.

But she has had to isolate herself from the world in terms of sound and music. If you really pay attention, music is out there all the time. We confront it in coffee shops. We confront it in passing cars. We confront it in stores. There’s constantly music in our lives. She really had to figure out how to make her world safe since she is so afflicted by music, and I had to figure out what that looked like. Which is why I have her take a job in a library and have noise-cancelling headphones and live in a soundproofed apartment. That was a fun and interesting process in terms of finding all the details of what that type of life would entail. And the analogy is there for anyone going through an emotional or psychological experience with grief.

The character of David was going through something similar. His family had an antique shop, and I think the thing about antiques and the kind of tangibility of these objects, is that they carry stories with them as objects – just like songs do, just like records do, just like Hi-fi does. Each of these objects have a character to them and can tell a story in a weird way because they carry memory with them. So this idea of him having to hang on to all of these objects from the past, through his family, became a theme throughout the movie. And that’s in terms of the objects of the movie, the clothes he wears, the car he drives… all of these things are carrying memory and the past and giving us subtext to each of them.

Harriet Gibbons (Lucy Boynton) Photo by Merie Weismiller Wallace/ Searchlight Pictures

Max’s character is really just that big first love that Harriet had. He’s a musician as well and Harriet maybe can’t see him for quite exactly who he is. With that first love, you haven’t had enough relationships to understand what a relationship is supposed to be yet, but it still is amazing and wonderful, and you’ll always look back on it and be grateful for it. I think she’s just having a hard time letting go of it because of what happened to the two of them and to him specifically. But he was just the person who always said yes to experience and reminded her to get out there and live.

Austin’s character (Morris Martin) was based on a DJ I love named Larry Levan, who had the Paradise Garage in New York. I tried to personify him in a fresher, younger character who went to college with Harriet’s character and is this “last friend standing” for her. He’s had this long-term relationship with her and is really the one person who indulges her to the point where he’s reached his last straw and is trying to push her to move on with her life.

What did you enjoy about writing a story involving time travel? Were there any technical challenges you encountered?

Finding the parameters that made sense. We basically had the length of a song where she was able to go back in time – she could be there as long as the song played and then we had to find the rules of her being able to get out of it (like if she turns off the music in the past).

Whether this was something in her psychology or something real was the biggest question that hung over the story. But there was this idea of the analogy and the metaphor of it all…that the power of our emotions can be so intense sometimes that it could create a scenario like this. I think that’s really what I’m getting at, that our emotions are so powerful that our memories and our nostalgia really can overwhelm us and create these instances where it’s really hard to decipher the present from the past. How do we move on from that? I think for Harriet to meet someone like David, who’s willing to accept it and understand it and who’s willing to allow both of them to let go of their past in order to move on, to experience again, is really the big lesson of the film.