Speaker #0Gabriel knew that I was writing this story very early on, before there was even a script. I'd talk to him about some ideas and I'd show him everything. When I was writing Cobb Mountain, I have a little cottage I go and write in. He came and wrote with me in the cottage. I was writing some scenes and he was playing the piano and I'd say, I love this, it's great, let's play together and look at this. And in Breaking and Entering the Same, I talked to him about the ideas. a long time before there was much of anything to read. And I trust him enough, and he trusts me enough, I think, not to be embarrassed to show our mistakes. And sometimes he plays me pieces which seem crazy, and then there's some tiny thing that I will hear, and I'll know that there's a way to develop. And the same way he will come early to my writing and talk to me about it, and talk to me about what he likes and what he's worried about. We are not... I mean, he's a remarkable man, Gabriel. You must know this by now. He's a wonderful man. He's unlike many composers. I mean, you know, I've thought about making my own music for film many times, but my problem is that I only know how to make one kind of music. you know if you wanted that music i could make it with gabrielle the the the beauty of him as a composer and his genius i think as a composer is that he has enough technique and enough knowledge and enough enthusiasm and enough uh um brilliance to be able to make the music that works for a film and not just give you his music you know there are some composers you don't know what the movie is you just hear the music and you know it's their music because they always make the same kind of music. And then the film comes and shakes hands with their music. You know, hello, hello, whoever it is, music. With Gabriel, he creates the music which is the character for this film. So if you listen to The Lover, the music, which I think is a beautiful score he made, it's got a sense of Indochina and, you know, it goes, it finds its way to the place of the film. because in a way the music is like an actor in the film and has to be cast like an actor and gabriel's skill is that he can he's more like meryl streep than he is you know he's he every time he acts in a film he finds a new personality so you don't recognize him With Gabbro what we've done is we've created a vocabulary of music. This is interesting, this kind of sound is interesting. These kind of ideas could be grown. For me the process is not making a film and then sticking the music on top, like tattoos, you know, or wallpaper. you know, but for me, there's one job, which is to make a movie. And actors contribute, the editor contributes, I contribute, composer contributes, the microphone contributes, we're all trying to make something together. And it's very interesting to me to play, to say, well, let's try this and see, does a lot of music work? Or does a little bit of music work? Is that the kind of music which is telling us enough? Is it? Is it smudging? Is it... Is it making less clear the idea or is it making it more inflected? And to imagine the music as as much a journey as the film is a journey. When you're making a movie, you write, you research, you're preparing, then you shoot and you discover and you witness and then you cut. And it's almost as if you start again. You say, OK, what did I think I'd made and look what I have made and how is this working? And often what you've planned... with music, when you come to the editing room, it's no longer the film you said you were making. It's some new film that has this alchemy of actors and weather and streets and car noise and all the things that create a new event. And so often a new thinking is required in the cutting room. And so for the composer, I think there's a real challenge, a real problem. Because either he or she comes too late, and then the film is already finished without them, and they are just decorating the film, or they come early, and then they have to cope with the number of changes that the film will go through. So they make a very careful piece of music for 25 seconds, and then the next time they see the movie, that place is 45 seconds or 5 seconds. And so the music is... growing, shrinking, maybe he's completely wrong. With Gabriel now, he and I understand this process together and he's getting more and more elastic. For Underworld, for them it was shocking. They make a nice piece for the beginning and then they come to see the movie again, there was no beginning anymore and that music didn't fit anything and they were often very uncomfortable. with this process, whereas Gabriel, who normally is very uncomfortable on this movie, was like the very experienced uncle who said, don't worry. He was suddenly very calm because he knows that the advantage of this process is that he is one of the main creative parts of the film. And the disadvantage is that, like the rest of us, he has to keep reimagining. In terms of clues, I wanted the music to be quiet in the way that the film is quiet. If you've seen the film, nothing happens very much in the film. There's no action, there's no great violence, it's a very quiet film. And I wanted the music to be very internal and not grand. Because sometimes film music is... It's overwhelming. It's like wanting to have a cup of coffee and having to sit down at a table with a feast. You just want the coffee and you don't want the whole table of food. Film music tends to... The studio loves the music to do too much lifting for the film. It wants it to tell you what to feel and sometimes the movie is drowned in orchestra and drowned in... if it's a horror film everything is bang bang bang bang bang and in this movie which is a quiet movie about a marriage and a and the challenges of a city i wanted it to feel more like a a sound world like a like this kind of world outside where you just hear tiny things and it it i think that they've really achieved something like that it's a very gentle uh um tender sound that they've made I think for Gabriel, his, you know, both of us are returning to something we know. You know, Betty Blue, which I think is the most beautiful score, is a tiny, intimate score. That piano, da dee dum bum dum, is very tiny ideas. And this goes back, for me, the first movie I made, Truly Melody Deeply, which was the only movie before I met Gabriel, this tiny London film I made, was also this scale. And for me, going to the scale of breaking and entering was not a new thing. It was to go back to something much more personal and much less operatic. You know, the Cobb Mountain and Ripley, these are very big, opulent films which need a lot of support, a lot of padding, you know, like big couches. And this is much more like a chair, this film. It's like a single wooden chair. And it needs the same kind of restraint as a chair. It's not one of those big, you know, not like one of those couches over here with... lots of cushions everywhere. It's a much more austere film. It's much more a film of, I think, Bernard Shaw called the moral gymnasium. You know, it's like a little moral fable. I'm very trusting of what I'm listening to when I'm writing, because when I go into the process of writing, I always surround myself with music. And how that music starts to infiltrate my work and my thinking seems to me to be a very big clue about what the movie should sound like. So when I was writing the English version, I listened to a lot of Bach and a lot of Puccini and a lot of Hungarian folk music. And so the score, I think, when you listen to it, has elements of Bach, elements of Puccini, and elements of Hungarian folk music. On Ripley, I was listening all the time to jazz, all the time. And so again, when we came to think of the score, we thought of a score like Henry Mancini and the Pink Panther, or those Hitchcock movies of Bernard Herrmann scores, very slightly cool. slightly 50s sound because the movie was set then. On Cold Mountain, because it was set in a period of the mid-19th century in America in the mountains, then when I was writing, all I listened to was early American folk music from the 19th century. So again, Gabriel would hear, I would send him lots and lots of bits of music and try and find a way to give him a key to write in. When it came to Breaking and Entering, the new film we've made together, I wanted to write a contemporary story, an original story, and a story which sounded as if it was made right now and not 10 or 15 years ago. And I was listening a lot to PJ Harvey, a lot to quite new American music, but the American music sounded to the wrong continent. And at... I found a couple of tracks by Underworld. I didn't know they were by Underworld, but very beautiful, very minimal sound and quite urban. And I didn't connect them with Underworld at all because I thought of Underworld as being much more dance sound. But I discovered that there were two Underworlds. There was the Underworld of the disco floor and the Underworld who were very serious musicians who were playing around a lot with different instruments. beautiful sound and and also very good producers so i gave gabrielle uh a five or six of their tracks and also sigurd ross who an icelandic band i've been listening to i like very much too and so i just gave him these things and said you know what about asking these two guys to produce the score with us and then if when we met them it seemed more sensible to ask them if they they were wanting to collaborate. So then Rick and Carl met with Gabrielle. They liked each other a great deal. They started to play around together and jam together and improvise. They made the score out of these series of meetings and encounters. It was a very interesting, challenging, difficult, but I think very beautiful result.
