The director Anthony Minghella has no truck with that way of working. He describes it as “like adding a character that you’ve never met before to the story”, and brings in his favoured composer, Gabriel Yared, at the scriptwriting stage. Minghella’s latest film, Breaking and Entering, is about a young architect in contemporary London who, feeling alienated by his family, has an affair with a Bosnian refugee, the mother of a teenage boy who has broken into his King’s Cross offices.
“Every part of this idea was to make a film that looked at the couple of pages of the A-Z that I know about,” Minghella says. “In the past, I’ve pushed Gabriel to create epic music. Here everything is muted. And I wanted the music to sound modern.” An unlikely collaboration was decided on. Yared explains: “Anthony doesn’t write a script without a musical idea in his mind, depending on what he’s listening to or what is his obsession of the day.” In this case, it was Sigur Ros, PJ Harvey and, most of all, Underworld. A meeting was set up, and the Underworld duo — Karl Hyde and Rick Smith — and Yared eyed each other up “like tigers, like gorillas”, in Yared’s words, before settling into a 15-month period of creation.
The result is a thoughtful, cohesive score that adeptly sets the mood of dissociation and disquiet as Debussian piano figures blend into Underworldian pulsating loops. Yared became an enthusiastic third player in the game of laptop-swapping musical consequences that is Underworld’s compositional method. And there were extended free-form sessions at the Abbey Road studios. “The people at Abbey Road were a little baffled at first,” Hyde recalls. “They were used to seeing the maestro come in with his manuscripts and hand them out to the leader of the orchestra, and here he was, sitting down and jamming.” Yared, born in Lebanon, has lived in London since 2000: “As an artist,” he says, “I have got the London sound, but it’s better expressed by Karl and Rick. Let’s say I was classical and they made it Londonised.”
In fact, Hyde and Smith live in Essex, but Hyde says: “We all agreed to carry on making the music we make, because London is where we get most of our inspiration from. I walk the streets with my notebook, writing it all down and soaking it up. We live out in the countryside, and trees are beautiful — but they don’t inspire me to write any words at all.”
The authentic soundtrack — music that directly represents the time and place of the film’s action — is not the only route. Christopher Nolan’s current film, The Prestige, is about magicians in Victorian London, but the film’s composer, David Julyan, reveals: “He didn’t want a score that reflected the period. The mood we created was much more about the sense of anticipation of magic.” Similarly, in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, the soundtrack is used as a way into the psyche of the hapless young queen. Post-punk and new-romantic songs such as Bow Wow Wow’s I Want Candy reinforce the hedonistic mood.
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While Breaking and Entering was being shot in London last year, authenticity was being taken to the limits in Uganda. The director Kevin Macdonald and the composer Alex Heffes, who made the documentaries One Day in September and Touching the Void together, were in Africa to work on a soundtrack for The Last King of Scotland. Macdonald’s first feature is an adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel about a Scottish doctor who becomes Idi Amin’s personal physician. Ugandan music from the 1970s is little known in the West, but Macdonald wanted verisimilitude above all.
Heffes says: “Kevin wanted to show the vision that Amin had. Amin wanted to shake off colonialism and put Uganda on the map as a modern nation. So, rather than portray Africa as mud huts and tribal music, we wanted the soundtrack to be a bit funky, a bit groovy, a bit 1970s.” They tracked down and recorded musicians from the Amin era, including Afrigo Band, his favourite, and Angela Kalule, who appears in a key scene, singing Me and Bobby McGee in a hotel bar. “We wanted to show West meets Africa,” Heffes says. “But we also wanted to subvert expectation by having a country-and-western song done African-style. Angela looked so great that the scene ended up being structured round her, with the action intercut, almost in the background.” Heffes immersed himself in the music of Kampala, and it shows in his score.
“When I came to write something to bring out Amin’s human side,” he says, “I thought of the East African harp, and used it to do a pattern reminiscent of something I’d heard in Uganda. It has a fragile sound, almost out of tune to the western ear. The score, because it’s orchestral, is out of the African idiom, but having recorded a lot of authentic material for the song side of the soundtrack allayed my worries about it sounding too cod.” In an extraordinary scene, Amin has a choir singing The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond, in a richly harmonic version that Heffes arranged. The collision of East Africa and northern Europe sounds weird and encapsulates the fanatical love of Scotland of a dictator who sent Ugandans there to learn the bagpipes so that he could have a piping band. Copland would have appreciated such an evocative blending of national styles.