Composers
Composer Benjamin Wallfisch Talks Composing Scores For HIDDEN FIGURES, A CURE FOR WELLNESS And BITTER HARVEST
Musician Benjamin Wallfisch is redefining the way audiences hear the sounds and feelings of movie music.
His recent scores are DESERT DANCER, HIDDEN FIGURES, A CURE FOR WELLNESS, LIGHTS OUT as well as upcoming films ANNABELLE 2 and BITTER HARVEST, so understandably it’s been a busy time over the past few years for the British film composer.
Recently Wallfisch spoke about the elements of composing and the opportunity to tell stories through his music.
Coming from a family of musicians, and classically trained at the Royal Academy of Music, Wallfisch says it was a happy accident that he discovered the sounds that have been instrumental when composing scores. “I’d spend hours examining this fascinating sound and would experiment with it, while exploring other avenues as I was learning the craft and creating electronic sounds.” What sustained him through his years of schooling and training was his love of storytelling. “From a very early age I loved film scores. Hearing John Williams’ iconic scores in the cinemas had a huge impact on me. I grew up in a family of musicians who had a work ethic of music making. It’s a constant striving for something better. My parents, who are both instrumentalists, were always perfecting their craft. After practicing the same music over and over, he’d remark there’s still something to discover.”
The composer has adopted the same approach to writing and scoring film music has been a gradual approach. Years ago Wallfisch began as a conductor and composing concert music before honing his craft of film music. “My fascination with film scores has been the one constant in all of it. Telling stories through music has always been my focus and I’ve felt like my prior experiences were training me for this. It’s a very exciting time for me now.”
Surrounded by music in his younger years, Wallfisch reflects that his music was influenced by his parents. “I’d wake up in the morning and hear my father practicing Bach and then my mother would be practicing Vivaldi. Sometimes they’d be composing some new contemporary music and I’d see a new piece being crafted. That sense of music and family is symbiotic – when I think of family I think of music. It’s a sense of home and comfort.” He adds, “as composers we depend on the artistry of musicians to bring our music alive and I see new music being alive and living.”
Audiences can feel the influences of music being “alive and living” in Wallfisch’s classical piece “Escape Velocity” (2006) as well as his score for DESERT DANCER. “There is narrative even in a concert piece like Escape Velocity and I’ve always been fascinated with outer space and Physics.”
In his music for the 2014 film, there is a real sense of the sand, the wind, and the characters. “With Desert Dancer, there is a basic human need to dance. Look at any child when music is playing and instinctually they’ll dance. We were telling a story about a person who is not allowed to dance because of a political situation and the desert was the only place he was physically free to realize that passion. You’re at one with the flow and space around you and all those ideas I tried to evoke in the score.”
Oscar-nominated HIDDEN FIGURES is a very technical score but with soul and synergy. The film’s songs by Pharrell Williams co-exist with the score from Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer. “It was a most amazing collaborative experience with Pharrell and Hans and myself. Very early on, we got into a room and played the music together to discover our instrumental language. Pharrell’s songs imbued this 60’s kind of sound. The harmonies, the melodies, we used it as a springboard for the score. We wanted the songs and score to be symbiotic.”
With the “MISSION CONTROL” track, you can really hear the sounds of NASA. Wallfisch says, “there was this great process of discovery and we used electric guitars and acoustic cues to create these computer-like, technical textures. What I was so passionate about this score was how we brought gospel harmonies into it. The use of African-American music is at the DNA level of the score. We used the core-progressions and harmonic sensibility of gospel music, even with a choir, it’s the way you voice the string chords, somehow effortlessly gave us that language for the score. It was amazing process of discovery. It was wonderful to be a part of and an incredible, uplifting story. I love that it’s influencing younger people to go after their dreams and especially young girls to pursue a career in engineering and in NASA.” He adds, “there is so much love in this story, and real heart in the film. I was so grateful to be a part of it.”
Wallfisch also composed the score for the horror film LIGHTS OUT. From producer James Wan (“The Conjuring”) LIGHTS OUT is a tale of an unknown terror that lurks in the dark. It marked the feature film directorial debut of David F. Sandberg, who directed the film from a screenplay by Eric Heisserer (“Final Destination 5”), based on Sandberg’s own short film.
An unsettling and frightening film that stays with you after you’ve left the cinema, the composer says he tested the genre by bringing it to the extremes. “It’s a PG-13 movie and it’s not a gruesome horror movie. It plays with your mind and does it in a way which is quite Darwinian – it’s very subliminal because the idea that there is a dark spot containing evil. We humans are hardwired for that and it plays into a basic need for flight from danger. There are some very visceral scares throughout the movie.”
Gore Verbinski’s A CURE FOR WELLNESS is a mind-bending psychological thriller. On being asked to work on the chilling film, “Hans Zimmer and Gore have worked on many films together and Hans, my mentor right now, couldn’t work on it for scheduling reasons and suggested that I write the score for the movie. I worked on it for over a year even before they shot any footage. It was an extraordinary journey which started with me setting up my writing desk in Gore’s editing room and while he was editing, I was writing the music. There was no temp score at all. It was one of those processes that required a lot of time, but that made for a better score as everything was written and edited from scratch, uninfluenced from any other score.”
Of working with the visionary director to compose such a ominous score, Wallfisch says, “Gore is a total genius and I was truly honored to be working with him and we became great partners in the process. It was an incredible canvas musically. Gore and I literally worked together every day for months creating some very atmospheric music and sound design. The music department provided some great textures and a true collaboration.”
The Academy Award winning filmmaker brings his inimitable style and vision to A CURE FOR WELLNESS. Visually breathtaking, the film is compelling and thought provoking, exploring the true meaning of wellness and the trappings of avarice and power, while asking what fulfillment really means. There is a music cue that even sounds like a lullaby. “It sounds innocent and simple, while underneath the surface there’s a dangerous symmetry – it feels symmetrical because of the harmonies, but it’s not. The theme is designed so as the story progresses there are various shifts in the melody that conveys someone losing touch with reality. Even today it’s hard to discern fact from fiction. The modern world is kind of a strange place right now and this film goes to a massive extreme of that. It’s a slow burn.”
One not to miss is the historical movie BITTER HARVEST. Based on one of the most overlooked tragedies of the 20th century, Bitter Harvest is a powerful story of love, honor, rebellion and survival as seen through the eyes of two young lovers caught in the ravages of Joseph Stalin’s genocidal policies against Ukraine in the 1930s. As Stalin advances the ambitions of communists in the Kremlin, a young artist named Yuri (Max Irons) battles to survive famine, imprisonment and torture to save his childhood sweetheart Natalka (Samantha Barks) from the “Holodomor,” the death-by-starvation program that ultimately killed millions of Ukrainians.
Against this tragic backdrop, Yuri escapes from a Soviet prison and joins the anti-Bolshevik resistance movement as he battles to reunite with Natalka and continue the fight for a free Ukraine.
Wallfisch’s moving score BITTER HARVEST has brought new life or a renaissance to classical music. With the music that might have echoed the sounds of Russian composers Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Wallfisch says, “there’s a period in Ukrainian history that many don’t know about and it’s a long movie. It is an epic movie with lots of music and its shot as an epic romance. There were lots of tropes which I was aware of and I didn’t want to necessarily write an old school score for this epic film. I wanted to try to use and be influenced by Ukrainian folk music while composing the score. I had zero knowledge of it when I started and I was incredibly lucky to work with Ukrainian musicians who showed me the stylistic piano – it very joyous music with asymmetry notes and sounds. There is a very classical feel to the movie.”
Starring Max Irons, Samantha Barks, Barry Pepper, Terence Stamp and Tamer Hassan, there is a warm acoustic, symphonic sound to Wallfisch’s score to BITTER HARVEST. “I’ve always been drawn to Russian music. I wasn’t trying to make the score sound Russian, but because of my love for Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, which are my absolute heroes, I was very aware to stay away from it and it wasn’t deliberate. My favorite part of the score was the Ukrainian songs and the vibe of it.” Wallfisch reveals he has direct ties to Russian music. ”My grandfather was the chief conductor of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia in the early 20th Century. I have a family connection to all that incredible time of music in Russian history.” As to being a part of BITTER HARVEST, Wallfisch concludes, “I wanted the music to bring the story to life and the film honors the people who died.”
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