It seems like the music is extremely important in a movie like this, especially in those montage sequences where we’re kind of seeing the relationship bloom and progress. And I was wondering what your approach was to working with Bryce Dessner on the score here and getting what you needed for those moments. I was kind of finding myself watching the film and thinking about what those sort of montage-y scenes might be like without music and thinking — it’s a simple thing to say, but obviously the vibe would be completely different without music. So just for a film like this and the connective tissue of the scenes that you’re working for, what do you need musically?
Well, it took us a long time to find the musical identity, is the simple truth. Before I met Bryce, for probably the first 12 weeks of the edit, I had a music supervisor who was trying lots of different pieces of music on all of these sequences in order for me to define kind of what I was looking for, really. And it was hard, because you put the wrong piece of music on this film and it screams out. It’s horrifying. It’s awful. It suddenly makes it lesser and it makes it a different kind of film. It would squeeze it into a kind of rom-com or I don’t know, it was turning into all these kind of non-films. So it was almost like a via negativa, it was like, “Well, I know it’s not that, it’s not that, it’s not that, it’s not that.”
I met Bryce and was a huge admirer — I loved The National, of course — but also a huge admirer of his score work and of his classical work, which is a different sort of strand to what he does. He had a very, very strong visceral reaction to the film and he loved it and it was palpable and he was excited about the possibilities of what the score could bring to it. He didn’t talk a great score then. He didn’t necessarily go, “And it should be this!” It was sort of like, “It could be this, could be that.” And I loved that. I loved the fact that he was willing to then start and go on the journey.
He sent me a huge amount of music in quite a short period, which is his response or responses to the film. He didn’t start on the first scene and go, “This is the first piece of music for the first scene.” So it became about then trying almost like these pieces of music on this lattice work as it were, trying to see, “Okay, that goes there, that goes there.”
About maybe four weeks into that process, the piece that emerged, which didn’t have a huge number of champions in those around me in the editing room, is the main love theme. It’s the one at the very start and it’s the one when they’re back-to-back in the doorway, the leaving the flat montage, and then the very end with the breaking of the eggs. I thought it was an exquisite melody and quite an unusual melody. But the way the original piece was, it didn’t sit on the film very well. It was a little bit too sad, almost. It was quite a melancholy, dark piece of music, almost.
But it sat between a sort of happy place and a sad place, the actual notes. It felt like it was doing the two of those things at the exact same time in a way that I thought was exquisite. So I asked him to rework it and he did, and he did various different versions, a couple of different scales. Then that began to emerge as a beautiful three-point spine for it. And then other pieces, he noodled, he played, he came to London, we sat together in front of the film, he got out the guitar and sometimes he would play along to try and see “Is that the vibe?” and get that.
Then sometimes on some of the abstract pieces where it was, “Look, I think we need to go beneath melody, it needs to be almost more ambient here.” He did a bunch of that in the room as well and took it away and then took those ideas and made it, which was just sort of blocks of chords moving into each other, but allowing the space for the emotion in the scene to shimmer. So that was the process. It was incredibly rich and happy and playful. And then you come to AIR Studios and watch it being recorded, which is always the biggest thrill in the filmmaking process, is to hear an orchestra bring it to life while watching those images.
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