orlando - the movie
Summer 1991. My manager at that time, Bob Last, had just started as Music Supervisor for the movie "Orlando", based on Virginia Woolf's book. He was trying to get me on board as the technical/programming part of the music department. I'd been quite a fan of Virginia Woolf when I was a teenager, but had not read Orlando so, just before my first meeting with Sally Potter, the Director, I thought I'd better run into Foyles and read the sleeve notes. I was none the wiser.
The idea was that I would work with a "name" composer. The only problem was that Sally didn't like any of the name composers that emerged and the only one that she kept coming back to, Arvo Part, didn't want to leave his log cabin in Estonia (where everybody supposed he was). In the absence of any names I was writing all the intermediate passages. Time was running out. Courtship of Arvo Part had run its course. There came a moment when we all thought, why don't we (Sally and I) write it? It was already clear that Sally had a very clear vision of where she wanted her film to go. OK, so let's give it a go. Next day, she came into my tiny studio (4/5/6) in St Anne's Court (the basement workshop of the former Trident studios). She had this idea about the voice. I was impressed how prepared she was. She had several vocal arrangements lined-up. She had already got used to the multitracking/sampler techniques I was using. I provided some tonality and we were off. From then on, we were writing it. Yes, we'd get a name composer in to do something, but that was no longer the priority. There was writing to be done. Lots of it. Underscore. Key passages. The song with Jimmy Somerville, who had a dreadful cold the day we recorded his vocal. We tried again when the cold had gone, but the spontaneous magic had also gone. Real instruments to be recorded. Alexander Balanescu on violin. Lots of tracking. Andy Findon and so on. A session with Sally's mate Fred Frith, the guitarist, who had flown in from Frankfurt or Düsseldorf. He then proceeded to make sounds by dropping small metal chains onto the lid of a tobacco tin sitting on the strings over the pick-up of his guitar, which lay on its back on his lap. Record it all. Bang it into the sampler and relay the bits wherever....
Here was something I could really get my teeth into. As the story ran from Elizabethan times through to the Present Day it seemed to tick all my boxes. In-your-face, grunty, abrasive reed instruments, yes please. Classical. Absolutely. Drifty, moody atmospheres, with long sampled lines played at different speeds and registers with all those fragile timbres. Oh yes. Dance music with Jimmy Somerville's voice sailing over the top...bring it on.
All the time, the movie was shuddering towards its finish. Money was getting tight, the Venice festival deadline imposing. All the time Sally was running around tweaking edits, re-voicing, grading. The mix looming.
I was feeling increasingly liberated. One day, I thought I might have gone too far. A tight, building variation of earlier themes as Tilda Swinton passes through the Maze and piling into a bombastic romantic piano piece with lush swirling strings as she exits into the 1800s. I was slightly nervous about showing it to Sally. She burst out laughing. Yay.
By the last 10 days she and I were mixing at night for her to take the mix of the next roll to Twickenham for its final Dub. I was only ever minutes ahead of the Dub.
I don't know how she did it. I got a couple of hours' sleep in the mornings. She might have caught half on hour on my sofa during the night (5).
There wasn't time for me to get to Twickenham, I had to get the next bit ready. It didn't worry me like it usually did if I wasn't there to fight my corner for the level of the music - I was utterly confident that the music would be present in the movie. Sally could not be compromised.
It was an extremely tiring 10 weeks. Tiring, draining and exhilarating!