Interview

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ADRIAN UTLEY and JONATHAN NOSSITER

JONATHAN: Adrian, what first got me excited was that your music with Portishead is completely unusual in its courage to express sentiment and even nostalgia powerfully without ever failing into sentimentality or emotional cheapness. It has a surface austerely and restraint of expression but a wild daring in the force and memory of its underlying emotion.

ADRIAN: It's very like the qualities naturally in Charlotte (Rampling) and Stellan (Skarsgard), I thought that watching them on the set.

JONATHAN: I was also struck in Portishead by how architectural the music is; how it made me immediately see spatial relationships. Do you see your composing with Portishead in terms of images?

ADRIAN: No. With Portishead, it's a completely different way of thinking. When we work on stuff, we do it completely for ourselves, not for any other brief. Anyway, the way music and images work together is a bit of a mystery. It's like Jonathan, in addition to the stuff we came up with specifically for the film, you used tracks of ours and you used Szymanowski and Tommy Dorsey, but they didn't write their pieces for "Signs & Wonders" either ... but I think it fits in wickedly.

JONATHAN: We have listened to Athens street sounds together as potential elements in composition. And with the Dorsey, Satie or the Szymanowski pieces which I found you were quick to not only embrace them but then find ways of reinterpreting their riffs into music and even sound effects work of your own, helping to create this vast network, spider's web, of echoing and re-echoing sounds and tunes.

ADRIAN: Well, you said from the start you wanted to break down the barriers between what was "music" and just "sound"; make the whole thing part of the same aural world, blurring the lines. That was exciting for me.

JONATHAN: The American mail for instance was an interesting example of a kind of nonmusical music or sound design that organically evolved from different elements of the nightmare production sound from the actual nightmare location, sound effects culled from industrial sources, digitally altered, distorted tunes from other compositions of yours in the film...

ADRIAN: And then, I composed layers of an atmosphere which you blended with some of the sounds that you made in New York.

JONATHAN: And we ended up with an "aural landscape" of that peculiarly American hell, which is musical in its balance and force. I hope, but basically should be absorbed as "natural background sound" by the audience, without them being aware of its musically. If the mall is a character in the film, the sounds that emerge during that scene should be like the unconscious groanings of this post-industrial monster, swallowing up the emotional life, the affections of the two characters struggling to hold on to any kind of feeling for each other in
this wasteland...

ADRIAN: I liked the way we worked together because I'm as terrified as you by the use of music for manipulating the emotions...

JONATHAN: I never imagined in a million years that I'd ever want to work with a composer, scoring music against images. I've always hated the Hollywood style manipulations and superimpositions of gratuitous emotion. What was great about working with you, is that you agree with that outlook. You're also anti-music film!

ADRIAN: Oh yeah! Normally, this whole process is ridiculous... You get sent a final cut of a film by FedEx and then you do you thing on your own and then the director and the mixers just slap the music on top and that's it. Ice cold. Unrelated matter.

JONATHAN: The human exchange, I guess, was vital for both of us. You had to come hand out on the set in Athens, soak up the atmosphere of the place, the personal vibes of the actors, the world we were constructing. There was a human connection between all of us before there was any music or even any talk of music.

ADRIAN: I feel like we covered many years of relationship in the span of one. That was very much the idea that you had of making the music and the sound extensions of each other, part of the same world. Usually, all the different sound elements are just jumbled together by different sound designers, music supervisors, composers, mixers, sound editors, etc., with neither the director nor the composer keeping full account of what's going on... We were at least striving to have the music from the inside.

JONATHAN: From the inside out instead of the outside in ... to have music feel like expressions or extensions of the characters' feelings, to have it feel like some strange echo from some inner part of a person ... or persons ... since the point of view is constantly shifting ... I hope it feels polyphonic ... the use of sound...

ADRIAN: And sometimes we were looking for subtle alterations, changes of direction, to the landscape... I mean you started some wild collages of sound/music in New York during the editing, especially in the ski scene.

JONATHAN: Eventually, in this scene we wanted to be silent, the emotion and the narrative are almost completely determined by sound. You took the accident and gave it a shape and heart.

ADRIAN: The original idea of silence, in the end, wasn't that different from the shifting cacophony or collage at the other end of the spectrum, because they're both about treating a key sequence in a very unconventional way - soundwise - so there was room for us to invent... It seemed mad to use some mambo-Italian 50s-60s jukebox Nino Rota Italian film bit, but you dug it when I played it for you. I'm definitely attached to Rota, Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani ... They're great heroes of mine.

JONATHAN: It was a long time since you've wanted to work for the cinema ...

ADRIAN: Yeah. I've always watched films obsessively but I never quite consciously thought I'd get there as a musician. It's a whole other world from the music world I normally deal with. I thought making albums was crazy, but making films is definitely crazier!