3 minute read
High scores
and he regularly turns down offers. “When I was younger, I worked a lot on films I didn’t like, and it’s not a good thing,” he says. “I love music, I love cinema and I love the way the composer can find the place of the music on the film. But the film is the master and sometimes the director has the wrong idea of the music.”
Coulais’ scores include The Chorus, for which he received an Oscar nomination for best song, The Counterfeiters, The Secret Of Kells, Song Of The Sea and Wolfwalkers.
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Henry Selick was a huge fan of the Microcosmos score and used it as temp music for Coraline before asking Coulais to provide the soundtrack. The pair have recently worked together again on Selick’s latest stop-motion animation Wendell & Wild, which Coulais describes as “a masterpiece”.
Longer gestation
“With animation the process is very long, so you have time to experiment,” he says. “When you have only two weeks to write music for a film, you don’t have pressure because if it’s not so good, people say he didn’t have the time.
“And if the music is good, they say, ‘This guy is a genius.’ When you have a short time, it’s like a chemical reaction. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but sometimes the film is so strong that ideas come naturally. But I like to start very early in the process because I hate temp music. Temp music is the enemy of the composer.”
Coulais continues to work across live-action, documentary and animation. In addition to Wendell & Wild, he has written the scores for Laetitia Masson’s Un Hiver En Été, Josée Dayan’s Diane De Poitiers and Jean-Paul Salomé’s The Sitting Duck (La Syndicaliste).
“Each project is a new adventure and the composer must experiment,” he concludes. “Each film is a possibility to try something new, to mix electronic elements with an orchestra. I love to do that, not to write what we expect from film music. I prefer the singular approach.” n s
SPOTLIGHT NAINITA DESAI
Last year’s discovery of the year winner Nainita Desai tells Wendy Mitchell why she is thrilled documentary scores are finally getting the attention they deserve
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ainita Desai expects to feel a range of emotions when a concert of her music is performed by the Brussels Philharmonic at this year’s World Soundtrack Awards. “On one level I will feel terribly exposed and vulnerable,” she says. “The other extreme is pure exhilaration and trying to remember every second of it.”
The performance of Desai’s work comes after she won the WSA discovery of the year prize last year. The suite she selected, orchestrated and rearranged for this year’s performance includes music from four of her recent documentaries: autism portrait The Reason I Jump, the personal Syrian documentary For Sama, mountaineering story 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible and wildlife film Untamed Romania.
To hear documentary scores performed on the famous stage in Ghent is especially poignant for Desai. “I’ve been scoring documentaries for years and it always felt like it was perceived as this poor cousin of scoring fiction films,” she says.
“It was usually overlooked at awards and festivals. So when the World Soundtrack Awards could pave the way by including documentaries for the first time in 2021, that was a complete gamechanger.”
Desai strives for authenticity in her work — For Sama’s score, for instance, featured a Syrian violinist. “In documentary, I feel a greater sense of responsibility and weight on my shoulders to do justice to the story,” she says. “I’m serving the film, and above all else, trying to tell the story in the most authentic way possible. Music can be more subtle in documentaries — For Sama and The Reason I Jump were not loud, shouty scores. Whether it’s a documentary or fiction, I try to get to the heart of the story by doing research.”
It has been a fruitful year for Desai, with a Primetime Emmy nomination for 14 Peaks (also in the running for the WSA public choice award) and a bustling slate that includes fiction — BBC thriller Crossfire, Sky’s 1960s-set comedy Funny Woman, Palestine-set feature film The Teacher, and season two of ITV’s police thriller The Tower — and non-fiction such as a freediving feature documentary.
She is also working on video-game project Immortality, and stepping out of her comfort zone to score a 10-part fantasy adventure series for Disney+.
“I like to put myself into uncomfortable situations where I don’t know what I’m going to do,” says Desai. “Every project is daunting and starts with a blank page. That’s exciting.” n s
Nainita Desai: WSA recognition of docs is “a complete gamechanger”
Nainita Desai
Bas Bogaerts
