“When it comes to the score, it starts and ends with the story,” said “Ricky” composer-producer Simon Taufique. “What about this story is going to benefit from music?”
That’s his main goal when composing an original score: to support the story, whether emotionally or structurally. Music can help the audience better understand a character’s emotional state, or development, and it can also help as a transition between two tonally different scenes and to build momentum, Taufique explained.
“Ricky,” which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, tells the story of a man rebuilding his life after getting out of prison.
The film sheds light on the challenges incarcerated individuals face, the injustices of the system in the United States and how often it seems easier to just go back to prison. When Ricky is released after his 15-year sentence, he must learn how the world works, from smart phones to social media to day-to-day relationships.
“He went in at 15, and he comes out at 30, and he’s expected to be a man, but he’s still a kid. And so that’s the nature of his struggle,” said Taufique. “It’s really a coming-of-age story for someone who never had a chance to come of age. So all of that tension, all of that fear, is wrapped up in this guy.”
To capture that storyline with his original score, Taufique uses ambient reverb and hip-hop as the film follows Ricky’s attempts to stay out of prison.
“Part of the nature of the story is recidivism, and how recidivism is a devastating cycle or loop of committing a crime or being sentenced to a crime, doing your time, coming out into a world you’re not prepared for, and then being forced to or taking yourself back into the system, going back to prison, and it’s just a vicious cycle,” Taufique said. “So I thought musically that could be represented by the sound of feedback. … It’s a painful sound, and there are other sounds that do a similar thing, like reverb and echo, and so I was starting to play with some of those textures and techniques.”
The project was a branch off from his other projects, films like “Imperium,” “She’s Lost Control” and “The Weight of Gold,” especially with the use of hip-hop.
“We were deconstructing hip-hop because that’s what this character listens to,” Taufique said.
He described one scene where Ricky and his younger brother James are playing basketball, which starts playful but takes on a darker tone as their psychological anger toward each other comes out in their taunts. When drafting the score for that scene, “Ricky” co-writer Lin Que Ayong, who is a former hip-hop star, lent her expertise to the process.
“She got into it. She’s like, ‘Well, OK, it needs to have this thing,’” Taufique said. “‘The music needs to have that rhythm, but also that opportunity for it to get a little ugly.’ And I’ve never written something that went from playful to ugly and danceable like that ever before. So that was a lot of fun.”
As a self-taught musician, Taufique’s path to composing was a winding one, and he began songwriting as a passion project.
“I didn’t think a career would come out of that. I was studying political science and economics. I wanted to be a diplomat,” Taufique said. “I wanted to change the world. And at some point along the way, I realized that the people that were changing my life were not the politicians and the diplomats. It was the arts, the songwriters, the filmmakers, the novelists.”
In college, he became friends with a film student named M. Night Shyamalan, who would go on to write films like “The Sixth Sense” and “Split.”
“That was very inspiring to see that someone — who you just know as a normal person, gifted, yes, but they’re just normal — how they can take the kernel of an idea and just work and work and work,” Taufique said. “It’s just incredible what he’s been able to do with his stories and his career.”
So Taufique left a life in tech and began to pursue music, soon asked to compose the score for a film. Now, he’s professor of film studies at New York University six years running and an instructor for the Sundance Collab program, with a constant stream of projects.
His work on “Ricky” began with the short film, which premiered in the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. While he was brought onto the project to compose the score, he quickly saw an opportunity to lend his expertise as a producer.
“As soon as I read the script, I saw this short film needs to be a feature,” he said. “And my process in working on short films is that I need to treat it as though it’s a feature film, just on a smaller scale, because if they do graduate to making a feature film, I don’t want them to be shocked by the transition.”
Some of the differences involve dealing with bigger talent, their representatives and schedules, learning to pitch their film to investors, he said.
“A lot of short films are self financed mainly because there’s no marketplace for short films,” Taufique explained. “But if you can find a way to get other people to find passion in the story that you’re trying to tell, it’s really good practice for when you’re making a feature film because you’re not going to be able to self finance.”
“Ricky” director and writer Rashad Frett took that advice, pitching his feature-length screenplay and applying for the Sundance writer’s lab and director’s lab.
“It was good enough that the institute said, ‘Yes, this has promise, but not so good that the Institute wouldn’t look at it and say, ‘Well, you don’t need us.’ So it was the perfect blend,” Taufique said.
“Ricky” is available to watch through the festival’s online screenings through 11:55 p.m. on Feb. 2.