Sarah Schachner on Scoring ‘Predator: Badlands’ and Reclaiming her Creativity
Sarah Schachner on scoring Predator: Badlands, channelling trance-like states into her composing, and why her studio is now built around improvisation rather than production.
There’s a rainbow outside Sarah Schachner’s window when we speak, a perfect, enormous arc that stops our conversation mid-sentence. “Oh my god, sorry,” she says, genuinely awestruck. “There’s the most perfect rainbow, I have to take a picture of this.” It feels like an appropriate interruption for someone who has spent the past year learning to trust those moments of unexpected beauty, to let herself be pulled away from the relentless momentum of her career into something more essential.
For the composer behind Badlands, the latest entry in the Predator franchise, 2025 has been a year of reconstruction. Not just for her studio, literally torn down to a yoga mat and two synthesisers during a period of profound burnout, but of her relationship with the very act of making music. “I was not working for a while,” Schachner admits. “I needed to take some time off, honestly, I was suffering from burnout. I didn’t even know if I was ready to come back to work when Badlands happened.”
The burnout wasn’t subtle, “my body was just like, you’re not doing this anymore. It was like a crisis sort of.” For over a decade, Schachner has maintained a schedule of overlapping projects with no breaks, the kind of pace that the industry rewards until suddenly it doesn’t, “I just lost my spirit and my ability to enjoy making music, which is the whole point!”
What followed became a deliberate unravelling. She and her partner, who is also in the creative industry, have never collaborated musically; both found themselves in similar positions. “We both just picked one synthesiser and set them up, and then for months we were only using these two synths and a drum machine, an improvisation kind of situation. We nurtured our personal connection to creativity and music, and it was actually really beautiful and amazing.”
“The fact that that theme came to me so organically, I was just like, ‘okay,’ I think I have to do this project.”
That improvisation table now sits at the centre of her rebuilt studio, two synths facing each other. “That’s one of our favourite things,” she says. “We just do these improvisations, and the best thing is when we black out. We could do one jam for 45 minutes, and it’s like time doesn’t exist anymore. It becomes some sort of ego death, where we just lock into this flow state. It’s that mindset she’s now trying to carry back into her scoring work. “Anything that can get me into a trance-like state rather than thinking and composing with my mind, that never goes well…”
When Badlands came along, she was hesitant. "I was more worried that it was going to completely consume all of my energy again. I didn't want that to happen." The solution came in partnership: co-composing with Benjamin Wallfisch. "It was why we did a co-score, because I was told myself, I don't want to do this whole thing alone.” After Schachner watched a rough cut of the film, a fully formed theme arrived not long after, in full developed form, beat section, pre-chorus, and chorus. It was just how I felt about the characters, about Jack and Thea and that dynamic." It became both the partnership theme and "Alphas" on the soundtrack. "The fact that that theme came to me so organically, I was just like, Okay, I think I have to do this project."
This film is the second time Schachner has collaborated with Director Dan Tachtenberg, “he’s the most hands-on director I’ve ever worked with. He wants to get in there and edit, try lots of different options.” Rather than scoring to a locked picture, Schachner learned to write freely, suites, themes, then let Trachtenberg move around the parts and reassemble them. “He trusts me to come up with the sounds and DNA, and then I trust him to do what he needs to do as the director.”
“I always have to be doing something new for me to be interested or excited. That process of discovery is my most favourite thing.”
The sonic world they built together was anchored in the vocoder sound that Trachtenberg had loved from her work on Anthem, expanded into chants using the Yautja language created for the film. "We began with these chant-like mantras that could feel ancestral, all the predators of the past spiritually motivating Dek, because he was on this hero's life-or-death journey."
Central to the score's palette was the Morin Khuur, a Mongolian horse-head cello with two strings made of thousands of tiny horse hairs. "It gives you this sandpapery kind of texture. So much you can do with harmonics and bow pressure." She played all the string parts herself, with orchestral sessions in Australia adding weight only where essential. Wallfisch was already recording with the orchestra when Schachner decided to join. "Ben was recording with that orchestra. I wasn't going to at all, but I'm really glad I did, because it was really fun, and it added this warmth and weight that you can't get when multi-tracking yourself."
After Predator: Badlands’ release, Schachner was struck by how strongly audiences connected with what she, Benjamin Wallfisch, and Dan Trachtenberg had built: a Predator story with heart. “The internet can be unpredictable, but the response was incredible,” she says. “I really didn’t know which way it would go!” The film is being ranked amongst the highest-reviewed entries in the franchise, cementing its place as a critical and fan favourite.
Now, she’s turning that creative energy inward, preparing to release two albums, a solo project and a collaborative one. “I’d wanted to make an album for so long, but never had the time. You can so easily get pulled into the next project, the next paycheck. I knew that if I didn’t carve out time for this, it would harm me in the long run.”
Her studio is now fully back up and running, flexible and centred around performance rather than production. Gone is the traditional composer setup with everything built into the walls and a professional desk. "Things can kind of move around, rewire and change. It's focused on being a space to play, to bring that back into work." It's a studio now designed not for grinding through cues, but for rediscovering why she started doing this all in the first place.
As we draw our conversation to a close, I ask what this year's taught her, she doesn't hesitate in telling me: "Just trusting, no more doubting. And to follow my gut instincts." It's a hard-won simplicity, the kind that only comes from stepping away and discovering what actually matters.
Listen to the Predator: Badlands soundtrack here.
Follow Sarah Schachner on Instagram here.
