Alexandre Desplat Talks Scoring Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and the Poetry Behind Its Music
Desplat says the heart of Frankenstein is a romance filled with yearning and fragile beauty, not a tale of horror.
You can always count on Alexandre Desplat to break, melt, or strengthen the audience’s hearts. Desplat knows how to communicate to body and soul in general, mind you, making him just the right man for the job to score Frankenstein.
It’s another elegant collaboration between filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and Desplat, who won the Academy Award for scoring The Shape of Water.
There is more beauty than horror in Frankenstein, so Desplat wasn’t scoring a horror movie. It’s more of a love story, whether it’s a love for creation or the family blood that binds us or haunts us. It’s the romance, not the violence, that spoke to the composer.
Recently, Desplat – who’s also scored many Wes Anderson pictures as well as great epics such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Zero Dark Thirty, and Lust, Caution – spoke with What’s On Netflix about his approach to Frankenstein.
Congratulations on Frankenstein, as well as another major achievement this year: playing at the Hollywood Bowl this past summer.
It was quite a dream, I must say.
A long-time dream for you. How’d reality compare to the dream?
When I came in the late eighties and nineties, I saw John Williams there several times. It’s the kind of venue like the Bowl or Carnegie Hall or La Fenice — some places that you wish one day you’d be able to be on the stage. Even as an audience member, it’s magical because it’s an outdoor theater, like a Greek theater, and that’s very rare. There are some in Europe, but obviously this one is fabulous. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, full house, it was fantastic.
If there’s a next time, would you play some Frankenstein music?
Yes. I think there are two movies I did this year: Jurassic World and Frankenstein. I should maybe prepare some suites.
You’ve described Victor Frankenstein almost lovingly as an artist trying to create. What about his artistry influenced how you approached his theme?
The whole process was to avoid making the music gothic or scary. The characters are the key for me. Bringing the actors’ emotions to the audience is my goal. Victor, as an adult, used to be an abused child. He must surpass his father to be a better artist, better everything. So the music has to play this relentless trance and anger that transforms into a creative process. When you’re an artist — painter, writer, sculptor, composer, your system is built by joy, love, hate, anger. Victor’s been bombarded with emotions like the surface of the moon. His creative process is as complex, violent, and exciting as that.
He’s forward-thinking, yet stunted – even in how he drinks milk and throws tantrums. Were there any childlike qualities you wanted musically for him?
The creature has a melody played by a solo violin. When the film begins, we hear it on a violin. When we go into the flashback of the young Frankenstein, I use the same melody but on piano. There’s a kind of circling, twirling little on the left hand of the piano to do that takes us in a gentler world. We don’t have the yearning sound of the violin on top. It’s just a piano. It creates a lightness, maybe that we need at the beginning of the film.
The melody for the creature that appears at the beginning of the film is played by the violin, by this wonderful Norwegian player, Eldbjørg Hemsing. As we go back to childhood, it’s the same melody. I wanted to convey to the audience that this melody is not the melody of the monster, what we call the monster or the creature. The monster might not be the one we think is the monster. By having this melody also on Victor, I create a kind of out-of-focus, blurred sensation with, okay, who’s the villain?
Do the sets as well as the characters inspire your music?
In this film everything is incredibly beautiful and precise. Every detail is tailored and loved by Guillermo. He supervises every object, button, color. The green, the red, the red gloves reminding [of Victor’s] the mother… so many beautiful details. The production design? Knowing most of it is real, like old Hollywood, is amazing. Of course, it inspires me. I’m given this incredible beauty to mirror.
Colors are so important to Guillermo. Between the three films you’ve done together, those must speak to you as well, right?
Of course, of course.. In my work, orchestration is very important. I always think about colors when I orchestrate. I’ll choose a key depending on what’s on screen, which is the right color palette of the chords or key I choose. I have a synesthetic brain. I like to watch the images and be influenced by the colors.
Like The Shape of Water, there’s a yearning for love in Frankstenstein. Did you want cues of romance and heartbreak?
It’s the beauty of the world and the beauty of love. All the characters are seeking love — Victor, the creature, Mia, and the brother. It’s all about the longing for love. That’s why the music is so lyrical. The film is very romantic because the emotions are bigger than life. The score I wrote is actually a bit more restrained, but very, very lyrical. The melodies are drawn, designed, and you can really hum them. We wanted these melodies to be strikingly memorable.
By having this solo violin, this fragile instrument, the violin is the most fragile and the lighter instrument of all. It weighs nothing when you hold it. And yet it’s the one that is the sound of the creature and it’s the sound of love because two notes play on a violin, immediately your heart is broken or elevated into another dimension.
As someone who enjoys the variety of your work, I especially love your romantic scores. What draws you to romanticism as a storyteller?
I don’t know if it’s romanticism. It’s the word love. The Shape of Water is about impossible love. Nothing is more painful than love that cannot happen. Romeo and Juliet – there’s love, but death at the end. There’s either one or the other or both. That’s why the stories are so beautiful – they touch the deepest emotions we have inside of us.
It allows me, in Frankenstein, I can write something extremely delicate with one instrument and then go big with huge moments in the lab, under the storm and lightning. Like the romantics of the early 19th century – Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, John Keats – Guillermo brings poetry. How many films do we see offer a sense of poetry and love? Not many. Guillermo is unashamed, has no shame about that. He’s happy to offer poetry, love, and huge emotions to the audience, I think, with elegance and beauty.
As restrained as the score often is, when Victor is carving up bodies, it’s hilarious how delightful the music is. It’s just another day’s work for him. How’d you land on the levity of that piece of music?
There was a temptation here to play what is on screen, something gory and violent. He’s sewing the legs, and it’s really, really rough [Laughs]. By counterpointing with the music, which is the point of view of Victor, it is the moment for him when he will finally create this masterpiece. For this moment, he’s Michelangelo creating a masterpiece that will be forever.
By turning the music into something exhilarating, like a dance, like a trance with this huge waltz, which connects with the waltz we’ve heard just a few scenes when he’s dancing with Mia – it all connects. But this waltz here gives us the tone of his own emotions. You look at these rough images, but you’re enjoying that because he’s enjoying that.
It’s the sincerity that makes it funny.
Yes. At some moments, I laughed myself while writing. For example, when he’s pushing the ice like he’s ice skating, I make a pause [in the music], then it starts again. There’s dark humor. There’s always humor in Guillermo’s movies, even The Shape of Water.
My last question: one of your great scores is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [now on Netflix]. It’s such an emotional piece of music. What does that score mean to you today?
It means a lot. I played it at the Hollywood Bowl, and I think I seldom played it in a concert. Maybe after playing it once after recording, maybe once in a concert, but long, long ago. I was happy to hear it again. It was a great experience working with David. I think it’s one of my favorite movies, of all the movies I’ve scored through these last 20 years of American movies. It’s really one important pillar for me.
The cast, are you kidding me? Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. So gorgeously beautiful, both of them. The story with all these many adventures going on where the score can play so many different moods. I know it’s a movie I love and I love hearing it again.
It’s a heartbreaking movie.
Yeah, it’s yearning. It’s a very moving film. I wish it had had more success at the time, but I think the history of Cinema will remember that movie. And it does already. It already does.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix