Partnership is the guiding motif of the World Soundtrack Awards’ Film Music Days, where live performances will give cult films bold new scores and industry mixers encourage emerging composers and filmmakers to find their creative match. To show what such pairings can achieve, two WSA talks will spotlight some of contemporary European cinema’s most enduring and endearing director-composer duos. Composer Valentin Hadjadj and director Lukas Dhont met as students, an early start that has grown into a collaboration built on a shared creative language.
I might draw the intention of a scene, like a spiral, or something cruel, harsh and dark, and that visual way of communicating often works best for us.” Hadjadj, for his part, is especially drawn to the earliest stage of a project. The music can gain an extra dimension that isn’t obvious the first time you see the film. Once the film exists, its aesthetics and narrative are largely fixed.
Whereas I like music to offer another point of view.” While previous collaborations “Girl” and “Close” featured musical performance, neither did so with the same intensity as in “Coward,” a World War I drama Dhont first pitched to Hadjadj as “a musical about the repression of emotions.” For the film’s violent scenes, Dhont wanted the score to evoke “the screams of many men,” as if the buried voices of generations past were rising to the surface. The music, he says, needed to become increasingly loud, present and distinct, blurring the line between score and sound design. Hadjadj arranged archival war songs and revue numbers performed on screen, but he had no interest in making the score a museum piece.
He used the period as a starting point, looking past its familiar musical codes toward something more contemporary. I looked for textures rather than orchestra, using production instincts from modern pop. Because the film didn’t exist yet, I could work from the story rather than the image.
That distance helped make the music more universal, even something that could be transposed to today.” Composer Volker Bertelmann took a similarly modern approach to the Great War with his reverb-heavy, Oscar-winning score for “All Quiet on the Western Front,” though he arrived at it through a very different process. Now on his sixth project with director Edward Berger, Bertelmann prefers to come in late, working from a nearly finished cut. I’m constantly shifting into other worlds, putting myself in someone else’s shoes.
Sometimes I’m not highlighting what’s on screen, but the mood underneath it, what’s going on inside a character’s head. Music can add that extra layer, like a spice.” Bertelmann also came to film late, after establishing himself as a recording artist, and that background shapes his process, at times making him feel more like a performer interpreting someone else’s work. I see those records as a mirror of my inner world.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
