Composer Segun Akinola had never heard the story of Milli Vanilli when he was approached to score the biopic Girl You Know It’s True: He was too young to remember how, in the late ’80s, two exceptionally good-looking dancer-models named Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus were recruited by German dance producer Frank Farian to lip sync others’ music, and became an international pop sensation.

Girl You Know It’s True, named for their irresistible breakthrough hit, is the story of how Rob and Fab made their Faustian bargain — and how it fell apart when they refused to lip sync anymore. The film, from director Simon Verhoeven, is the first major successful attempt to tell the story onscreen, and follows stalled efforts by the likes of Rush Hour director Brett Ratner. It stars Tijan Njie and Elan Ben Ali as Rob and Fab, respectively, and Matthias Schweighöfer as Farian. All are outstanding.

Because the Girl You Know It’s True filmmakers took care to get the perspectives of almost all the surviving key players in the story — and to present them fairly — they managed to obtain the rights to Milli Vanilli’s music. But many scenes needed an orchestral score that could capture the high-stakes and personal agony behind the pop facade. Akinola was happy to provide it.

We lived through the Milli Vanilli saga and found the film captivating. It also provides the kind of narrative closure that you wish Rob and Fab had received in real life. We talked with Akinola over email about how his sweeping, emotive score complements the songs of Milli Vanilli, which burned fast but bright before it all fell apart.

Girl You Know It’s True composer Segun Akinola. Photo by Charlie Clift.

MovieMaker: How did you end up getting involved in this project? 

Segun Akinola: It all started with an email to my agent one day, completely out of the blue! It turns out they were looking for a composer with orchestral experience who was also very comfortable with synths, as they weren’t quite sure how the score would interweave with the Milli Vanilli songs in the film.

Somewhere during their search, they found my work. I read the script and absolutely loved it – genuinely – plus, I got on well with Simon, the writer-director; Kirstin, the producer; and the rest of the team, so, as they say, the rest is history.

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MovieMaker: Did you know the songs first, or the story of their downfall?

Segun Akinola: It’s funny, I had no prior knowledge about Milli Vanilli at all. My agent, knowing me well, knew this, so he sent an article about them in his very first email to me, and I found their story fascinating. Even more so after I’d read the script and understood how Simon wanted to show what happened from Rob and Fab’s perspective.

MovieMaker: Did you relate personally to Rob, Fab, and/or Frank? 

Segun Akinola: I can’t say that my musical journey resembles that of Rob, Fab or Frank’s in any way, but I can say that it’s easy to relate to those who have ambitious dreams that seem impossible. At some point I was just a kid trying to write music and dreaming of working on films just like this one.

MovieMaker: How did you make your orchestration fit with the existing Milli Vanilli songs? Or did you try to make them as different as you could?

Segun Akinola: This was the vital question Simon, other producers, and I all had for the score from the beginning. Did the score need to match the synth world of the songs or juxtapose them with the orchestra? It took some trial and error, but in the end, there’s a general blend of synths and orchestra, plus a move from slightly more synth-based score cues early on in the film to greater orchestral content in the last third of the film.

At the start of the film, the score is really weaving the story together and letting the songs take the lead musically, but as the story progresses and there’s a greater sense of jeopardy, there are more and more cues, and the orchestra takes on further significance. The film even ends with a new orchestral arrangement I wrote for a Milli Vanilli song.

Segun Akinola on the Comedy and Tragedy of Milli Vanilli

MovieMaker: This movie bounds from comedy to tragedy but is ultimately very empathetic for everyone — no one is a cartoon villain. How did you get the right musical feel?

Segun Akinola: Simon and I were very deliberate about the purpose of the score. In a film that already has a lot of music in it, the score didn’t have to carry the entire musical burden of the storytelling, it just had to play its part well (excuse the pun!).

For example, there are hardly any fun or funny moments that have significant cues in, we just didn’t feel they were warranted. There are, however, a lot of dramatic, moving and euphoric scenes that have cues in as the score needed to help underpin Rob and Fab’s emotional journey from unknowns to stardom and their fall from grace to the next chapter of their lives after Milli Vanilli.

Girl You Know It’s True is now available on video on demand. We recommend it.

Main image: Elan Ben Ali as Fab Morvan, left, and Tijan Njie as Rob Pilatus in Girl You Know It’s True. Courtesy of Vertical.