3 minute read
New adventures
As he receives this year’s lifetime achievement award, French composer Bruno Coulais tells Mark Salisbury why he is still embracing the challenges of making music
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ather than count sheep when he has trouble sleeping, Bruno Coulais tries listing the scores he has composed. A simple enough task, you might think, except Coulais does not know how many he has written in a career spanning 44 years, from television and shorts to documentaries, animation and live-action features. “Maybe 200,” says the prolific French composer, who is being honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the 22nd World Soundtrack Awards on October 22. “I don’t know exactly.”
Born in 1954 to a musical family, Coulais was naturally gifted. “My parents played the piano, and I was able to play immediately what they played, and I tried to write music, very small pieces for piano,” he recalls.
Coulais subsequently studied at the famed Conservatoire de Paris, where he would later return to teach film composition for five years. When he was still a student, aged 17, he was introduced by a friend to renowned French filmmaker Francois Reichenbach, who asked him to score a documentary short he had directed.
“I was happy to try,” remembers the now 68-year-old Coulais. “We [ended up doing], I think, five or six films together.”
Slow burner
Coulais admits he was not much of a film fan when he started composing scores. “I was not interested in cinema,” he says. “For me, it was only entertainment. But when I met Francois, I noticed how interesting and difficult it was to write music [for films].
“I was also very lucky because in Paris, it’s easy to see all of cinema and I discovered the films of Bergman, Buñuel, Fellini, Walsh, a lot of great directors. I became passionate about cinema and music.”
For the next two decades, Coulais worked mainly in France on various TV and film projects. “I was absolutely crazy, because I compose music for orchestras, and I write my own orchestrations, so I discover both the pleasure and difficulties of writing orchestrations. But cinema was my best school, because I was very young and I had the chance to work with great orchestras and to improve my music writing.”
Coulais does not use an instrument to compose, preferring to write in his head. “It’s dangerous for me to compose on the piano because my fingers become the masters,” he says. “In the head it’s more precise. [Growing up] I had a lot of brothers and sisters, and it was very noisy at home. My mother listened to classical music, my sisters to pop music, and so I used to work my inner ear. It’s precious because now I can write music without instruments.”
In 1996, he was hired to score Microcosmos, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s acclaimed documentary about insect life. “The film didn’t have dialogue, so the music was the commentary,” says Coulais. “We wanted to approach it not like a documentary but like a fiction film. I had this idea of a very simple song, sung by my son, and I worked a lot with [sound designer] Laurent Quaglio.”
The resulting film, which screened out of competition at Cannes, was a breakout hit. Coulais’ music was a large part of its success, mixing score and sound design to dazzling effect and winning him a César. The experience proved life-changing and offers flooded in. “Suddenly I worked too much — I think I did about 10 films per year for many years,” he says.
In 2000, Coulais decided to stop writing film music and pen concerts instead. But it proved a short-lived hiatus, and two years later Coulais was back writing scores, having missed the collaborative aspect of filmmaking. “Now I try to manage the two, working on concerts and working for film.”
Since 2002, Coulais has continued to work at a less frantic pace,
Bruno Coulais receives the WSA lifetime achievement award
Philippe Lebruman
Bruno Coulais
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