‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ composer Alexandre Desplat on his Hong Kong concert and writing music for Asian cinema

While Desplat’s discography also includes the likes of Godzilla and thrillers like Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, he says: “[Dinosaurs] and action movies aren’t in my DNA.” He prefers a gentler sort of tale. “Love stories are exciting because you can dig deep into yourself and find emotions that you’ve experienced. Running after a dinosaur isn’t the same.”

Desplat believes the messages and emotions in such films inspire us to seek love and courage in troubled times. “The genius of Guillermo [del Toro, in The Shape of Water] is taking you into this fantasy world that seems real. The way he shows you his story is so genuine, true, deep and strong,” he says. “I never see [the film’s main character Amphibian Man] as a creature. [The story could be] Dr Zhivago [the 1965 epic historical romance]—it’s the same. It’s a love story as beautiful as any other epic love story where [the characters defy] death and violence. Lust, Caution is another example: it’s set in a fictional world, but you know this [search for] impossible love amid violence, death and danger” is something you can find in real life.

For the composer, film music is as important a part of storytelling as visuals. “I want the sound to belong to the film that I’m working on and not to any other,” he says. “In almost every film, I try to have a specific [musical] colour that immediately draws you into the story and the emotions that you should perceive. I do not use the same instrumentation to present the sound of rain or the silence of snow. Sometimes, I don’t watch the film; I listen to it and imagine myself dancing with [the characters] in my head.” In Lust, Caution, for example, this led to him writing an exuberant yet melancholy theme for protagonist Wong Chia Chi, a student and spy who falls in love with her enemy, that highlights her sorrows, loneliness and sacrifices. In The Shape of Water, flutes, electronic keyboards and an accordion come together to create a whimsical, slightly muffled “underwater” sound that portrays the unusual love between a human and a fictional sea creature.

As a child, Desplat was classically trained—his primary instrument was the flute, and he also learnt piano and trumpet—and went on to study at London’s Royal College of Music and the Conservatoire de Paris. His Greek mother and French father were also music fans, listening to Greek, Arabic, Egyptian and Balkans music, as well as jazz great Louis Armstrong. When he was a teenager, the family lived in the Caribbean, where he was exposed to salsa, cha-cha and Latin Afro-Cuban music. “There was music at home all the time.

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Such early exposure to global sounds planted the seed that he could make a career out of music that incorporates rich and diverse elements. “If you listen carefully, the rhythms that you hear in the background of my music are Greek, African or salsa bass rhythms,” he says. “Sometimes, there is the little’ ‘tick, tick, tick’ of Brazilian rhythm. All of these are part of my DNA.” He points to the opening theme of the 2005 Bruce Willis vehicle Hostage as an example of a piece featuring a typically Greek rhythm. “Nobody knows about it—well, only you and I now.”

As a flautist, he was accustomed to looking at musical scores that contained only the solo flute part. But he wanted to understand the bigger picture—or sound. “I started to buy hundreds of these score books: Mozart, Wagner and more.” It turned out to be the move that cemented his career destiny. “I never took orchestration [classes]; I learnt orchestration by reading the books. By doing so, I dived into a composer’s world. Suddenly, I understood that composing was a place where you could use your imagination to create a very sophisticated, organised world,” he says.

He had long been a movie buff, and around the same time as his experimentation with orchestration, he became very aware of the power of film music: the themes for Star Wars and Jaws by John Williams, Sunset Boulevard by Franz Waxman, and Alfred Hitchcock movie music by Bernard Hermann were particularly inspiring. Suddenly, he says, “I had the idea that I had to be a film composer.”

He started out by writing music for theatre; a friend’s contact led him to a commission for a short film, then he started landing more opportunities to work on short films and commercials. These early results, he says, were “both about the energy that you give to your work and the luck you have in meeting people,” he says. Not that he was an overnight success: working on one film at a time wasn’t enough to make a living, and building a network of directors took time. Then, just as he thought he might have struck it lucky, landing his first feature film gig, the production was cancelled.

His big break finally came when French director Frank Le Wita came across Desplat’s music and hired him to work on Le Souffleur (1985). This first score for a feature film led to more work for French cinema. And then, in 2003, he was approached to write the score for Hollywood movie Girl with a Pearl Earring and his fate was sealed. Today, Desplat has composed for more than a hundred films, many of them international production.

Two of them—The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Shape of Water—earned him those Oscars. “It’s a great honour. It does give you a status and legitimacy that you didn’t have before,” he say. “Two days after my first Oscar win, I was already back in a studio, recording another score in Paris. I didn’t want to lose this momentum. It was the same after my second Oscars. I’ve always worked a lot, but since the Oscars, I’ve never worked harder.”

Of the differences between films around the world, he says: “We love American cinema because there is an efficiency to it that is so direct. It tells you stories with so much force, which is also very inspiring. But it’s a different type of energy. I do think that our culture here in Europe is closer to [that in Asia].”

He hopes that his work will bring him closer to Asia next. “Since Ang [Lee], I don’t remember scoring for any other Asian directors. I wish there were more Asian directors calling me,” he says. “I love Asian cinema—the restrained emotions, the elegance and the weight of history. It’s fabulous.”

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