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Before anything else, the Scoremagacine crew wants to thank you for your kindness on giving us this interview.
You were born in Pisa (Italy), but you musically grew in Florence and London, tell us, really, how did you first become interested in music?
There was always music playing as I was growing up. My parents were (are) music lovers, and started taking me to concerts and operas very early. I saw my first Wagner opera aged six, and there was no going back…
At the same age I joined a boys choir in the local church, and fell in love with the church organ. I started taking piano lessons from a friend of my mother at the same time. So I’d say my first musical “growth” was in Pisa, and a lot of it at home, thanks to my parents.
You studied in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and for some years you had written several pieces for the BBC, pieces for Theatre, Contemporary Dance, and Concert Pieces. Your works for film music is rich and pretty amazing, I must add. Do you feel comfortable writing for so many, different mediums? Is there a particular piece or a work in a whole, you are most proud of?
Thanks for the compliment — I never thought of myself as a “theatre” composer, or a “concert” composer, or anything else: I have always tried to take on projects that would push me to do things I hadn’t done before, and treat them as unique. I feel comfortable working and collaborating with other people, directors, or choreographers, or other musicians; in particular I am very happy to write music that has some specific “use”.
Time to speak about your film music career, how did you become interested in film music in the first place?
I was very lucky, when I moved to London in 1990 I met a couple of composers who were doing music for films and TV, and they were very inspiring. I had never really considered it as an option before, but just seeing people who wrote music for a living made me re-think the whole idea of being a composer. I suppose it was precisely what I needed, after years spent as a student. I started doing music for some fringe-theatre shows, just for the fun of it. One day an actor saw one of the shows (it was a Lorca play, “Doña Rosita la Soltera”); I was playing on stage every night my own music, with a few other musicians. He liked it, and passed my name to the director he was working with, who was looking for a composer for his film. That’s how I ended up scoring my first feature film, the director was Paddy Breathnach.
How would you define your style of composing and what kind of soundtracks or particular film music composers have influenced you?
This is a really tricky one. The truth is (I think) that very much of what you call the “style” comes from the project I am working on. And my projects have been quite diverse! I would like to think that there is something recognisable as individually mine in all of them, but to say what that is, is really hard. I know I have a predilection for “horizontal” movement of melody, rather than “vertical” chord based harmony. I also like the “incidents” which can be brought about by improvising, and that can connect musical ideas to some place deep down, which is not so reachable otherwise. But I am sorry, I am beginning to sound a bit too esoteric: I am not sure I can explain much better.
Soundtracks: there are some composers I really am in awe of, and one of them is Alberto Iglesias, who I think has written some of the best music I have heard, ever. Bruno Coulais is another composer that I admire a lot. But of course, the usual big suspects feature quite prominently in my record collection, John Williams, Howard Shore, James Horner and Jerry Goldsmith. And Nino Rota, of course. I don’t know how much they have influenced me, I mean, I don’t know that they have influenced me more than Strauss, or Ravel or Prokofiev or Beethoven, for example.
One of the directors you usually work with is Paddy Breathnach. “Ailsa”, “The Long way Home” and “I Went Down” are the films were your collaboration took place. What could you tell us about your experience with him?
As I mentioned, Paddy offered me my first feature film to score. It was a really beautiful experience, as everyone on that film was at the same stage: it was the first feature for Paddy too, and for the producer, the editor, the actors, everybody. We gave our hearts and souls for it, and it turned out to be not bad at all (it won the “San Sebastian film festival” , that year). There were some surreal moments, as I was working in London and Paddy was based in Dublin: often I would ring him at home, tell him to put the film in the VHS machine at a certain point in the film, and then count “one, two, three… go!” and he would press play on his machine in Dublin, while I would press play on my computer in London, and play a bit of music to him holding the phone right up to the speakers, so he could see on his screen how the music worked.
On the next film, “I Went Down” (which also went on to win the “San Sebastian Film Festival” ), he could travel more often, and came to see me regularly in London.
In 2001, you composed the score for the film “The Warrior”, directed by Asif Kapadia, an ancient adventure project in the “Hindi-Language”. How did you become involved in this film? Where did you focus at, for the music?
I had scored another film by Asif a few years earlier, a short film called “The Sheep Thief”. Asif showed me a script of “The Warrior” quite early on, and it was the composer’s dream, a film with almost no dialogue at all! I went to India while he was filming, and travelled around with some recording equipment for a month, recording musicians I found in different places. The material I recorded became the basis for the score I started to write once I got back in London. The music owes its tone to various influences: I was determined not to write “Indian” music (no sitars and no tablas), but to create a blend of Indian sounds, Spaghetti-Western breadth, and stark, ancient-sounding simple polyphony.
In your filmography, “The Warrior” isn´t the only ethnic-based movie or one film
with a social argument. In 2002, you worked with director Michael Winterbottom in “In This World” a drama about two Afghan refuges who tried to escape to Great Britain. Do you feel comfortable writing for this kind of films? How did your work with Winterbottom?
I had worked with a wonderful Iranian singer, Parvin Cox, on a few other projects, and as I knew she came from a nomadic family, I asked her if she knew any old nomadic songs about displacement and hard journeys. She sung me some of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard, and there was so much heartache in her voice. She had learnt these songs from her mother 50 or more years ago, and they were very old. I thought they would make a wonderful basis for a large orchestral score with a big heart. I also used the other most sorrowful middle-eastern instrument, the duduk, which is the closest thing to a human voice I can think of. The approach to the score was an odd one, as the film is shot as a grainy documentary, with hand-held DV camera, but music sound dialogue and effects were recorded and mixed as spaciously as possible, to drag you right into the screen. Working with Michael was good, especially as during the main bulk of the writing he was away and left me alone to go more or less the way I wanted to go with it…
Max Fäberbock directed “September”, a film exploring the impact of September 11th, 2001, through several fictional episodes all coupled with documentary material. If we are right, you are now living in London. How did you feel while writing the music for that film and if those feelings are the same, after the sad days of the terrorist attack in London?
You are right and I am living in London in these sad days.
I had very mixed feelings scoring “September”, and I was very suspicious of the film to start with: I was not sure that making fictional stories about something so real and present would be such a great idea. But then I met Max, and he had the most infectious enthusiasm, and explained that he wanted to capture something very intimate and personal about his characters, and didn’t want to make a film particularly about 9/11 but about what can happen to people’s everyday life when something occurs that is larger than they can comprehend. I liked this; I like question marks. My own feelings about London at the moment are just that: a very large question mark.
2005 is probably the year for your international recognition, your name was mentioned everywhere, with fans going happily mad about your assignment on Terry Gilliam´s “The Brothers Grimm”. How did you meet and collaborate with Terry?
If I was superstitious I’d be worried you’re pushing my luck…
I met Terry Gilliam through Tony Grisoni, who had written the script of “In This World”. Tony loved the music I wrote for that film, and passed a CD to Terry, who listened to it and asked him if I could also write fast music… The problem seemed to be that most of the films I had worked on, up to that point, were of a more introspective nature, and so I hadn’t yet written any car-chases. However, fishing in my archives, in my concert music, even going back to my student days, I managed to find enough fast music to put together another CD for him. I sent it off and I didn’t hear a thing for another six months. One day, in March last year, the phone rung, and half an hour later I was sitting with Terry watching bits of “Brothers Grimm”. I took away a couple of scenes, and scored them: Terry liked my ideas and gave me the job.
What could you tell us about this fairy tale and of course how is the music? It is a very highly expected project, by fans everywhere, as it´s usually the case with any new Gilliam film. Do you feel the audience will understand and actually “get” the risky Gilliam take?
I can tell you that the film is BRILLIANT! I hope lots and lots of people will go to see it and enjoy it. Terry’s imagination is so volcanic, he is the opposite of a minimalist: he keeps having new ideas at a rate that puts us all to shame. Of course the audience will understand; but even more to the point, they will come out of the cinema with images that will stay with them for a long time.
How’s the music…
It was hard to write: the story is quite mad, and it jumps really fast between comedy, fairy-tale, black-humour, military, action, romance, mystery and magic, horror and farce (I am sure I have left something out…) The bottom line is that any sustained musical idea gets wrong-footed very quickly, as the action shifts so quickly from one mood to another. I hope you’ll like what I have done with it.
Did you write specific music for particular characters in a project, or do you have the general story as the musical scope when you begin scoring? Are you proud of the final result? What can you tell us about it?
Both, the general story and particular characters. Although one might say that the way I chose the characters I want to score is a little “lateral”. I might decide that “destiny” is a character, or “aspiring to the freedom to dream” is another invisible character in the film that really need a musical identity. In Brothers Grimm there are quite a few themes, or motifs, that keep recurring. I am very happy with the result.
Jane Austen´s “Pride & Prejudice” is another film you have scored. And like “The Brothers Grimm” is a film with an ancient, classical ambient and overall tone.
How is the score?Did you utilize your particular classical music training for this score? And where you influenced in any way by a specific composer of that very era?
In spite of being roughly contemporaries, the dark German forests that housed witches and were-wolves are very far from the gentle hills of the English countryside populated by tea-drinkers with a good sense of humour at the end of the 18th century. Same goes for the overall tone of the two films. The score for “Pride and Prejudice” could not be more different: I started writing some piano pieces even before the film was shot, as they were needed for scenes where some characters played the piano. The first references for those early pieces were Beethoven early piano sonatas, which had been written roughly at the same time as Jane Austen was writing Pride and Prejudice. The score however doesn’t restrain itself to historical correctness, and I was more concerned with catching some of the butterflies-in-the-tummy feelings of first love. It’s a great love story, and the film is very fresh in its approach to a novel which could have been written now. We decided quite early that the piano was going to be the heart of the score, perhaps the voice of Elizabeth Bennett feisty and caring spirit, and I am sure my training as a pianist helped in that respect. We were very luck that Jean-Yves Thibaudet, one of the greatest living classical pianist, got interested in the project: his piano playing is just the best I could have hoped for the score.
Did you read the original source, i.e. the Jane Austen´s book to understand the essence of the story? or did you base everything on the movie´s production (screenplay, directing and all) and the adaptation for the film?
I only read the original Jane Austen book after I finished working on the film. The script, the images and the direction were so inspiring in their own right…
I do sometimes read the book before I work on a film, but on occasion it becomes an obstacle, as there are so many layers and subplots that one might be tempted to follow. In a sense, what gets distilled in the script, and what is filmed, helps focusing on which story we are really telling.
For 2005, you have also two new films for the BBC Films, first “Shooting Dogs” a drama directed by Michael Caton Jones and “Pobby and Dingan”, directed by Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monthy). I imagine, They´re two different directors, with wholly different visions. Tell us about your experience in those films. How is the music?
“Shooting Dogs” is about the Rwanda genocide about 11 years ago, and it is based on a true story. It’s a very harrowing film, and I worked with a wonderful Rwandan singer, Cecile Kayrebwa, who now lives in Belgium. It is a stark score, and I hope the idea that in that man-made hell there still was humanity comes across in what I have done.
Peter Cattaneo’s film is a great story about I little girl who has two imaginary friends ( Pobby and Dingan): she’s the only one who can see them, and her father, mother and brother are worried that she is mad. Finally, we realise that the imaginary can be a real as reality, and it can move people to be or become what they really are. I decided to create a sound world where childish sounds mix with more whimsical and sometimes magical sounds.
To conclude, what could you tell about your future works?Any comment about “V for Vendetta”?
I have been so busy with the present that I have forgotten about the future… I hope it brings more work and more collaboration with inspired filmmakers as those I have worked with this year.
“V for Vendetta” is an Alan Moore Graphic Comic, and the film directed by James McTeigue and produced by the Wachowski Brothers.. Actually, It is very much work in progress, and I prefer not to tempt fate by talking about it. If everything goes well, I´ll tell you all about it when I´m finished…
Again, thank very much for your time and for this interview. It was an honour and a privilege for us. We desire you the most prolific future, and to enjoy your new works.
It was a pleasure, and thank you for asking me.
Special Thanks to: Lucy Evans and Maggie Rodford.
English Edition: Demetris Christodoulides
2-september-2005
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