BARDO

sM | BARDO is your second time collaborating with Alejandro Iñárritu, what do you enjoy the most about this creative partnership?

BD ── Alejandro is really one of the great living artists. He’s a very generous, curious, and open-hearted person─working with him is one of the best things I get to do. He always says, “If I'm pointing at the moon, don't draw my finger,” which I think is a good indicator of his approach. Alejandro also assembles an amazing group of creative people around him. He works really closely with his sound design team — Nicholas Becker on this film — who is a really exceptional artist. There are also quite a few pieces of music Alejandro and I did together, including the main theme. He would whistle melodies, and then I arranged them. It's a little like being in a band and he's the lead singer, I would say. It's that kind of feeling of collaboration.

BARDO is, in a way, kind of a Buddhist film about the sense of self and removing the self. That’s also what it’s like to write for a film project: you don’t carry your artistic ego out in front. You have to be open to hearing other voices in collaboration.

sM | As a composer who creates for a variety of formats, how is writing for cinema different from others?

BD ── Writing film music is very different; it's more like creating music for an installation or immersive experience. Not only are you working with images, but you're working with a surround-sound environment. And Alejandro, because of the types of films he's making, requires an unparalleled level of detail. You're never just making a piece of music, because it will be very carefully interwoven with sound design, dialogue, and ambient space. It’s like writing for a new form. Maybe this is how it felt when opera or the fortepiano were invented; it’s a new environment. I used to avoid working on films. I had a bad experience coming out of college with a student filmmaker, and I was busy: I was playing in a band, coming out of a classical conservatory, playing chamber music, and writing my own music. I felt, at the time, that film was one step too far. It's also very difficult to start in film and then to move to making other music. For many major film composers, you've never heard their music in a concert hall. I personally wanted to develop my work elsewhere for a time, and then eventually Alejandro asked me to work on The Revenant, and that was really the first big film I worked on. sM | Your latest film score, for She Came To Me, is notable because the story centres around a composer. Did your approach to this particular soundscape feel more personal?

BD ── It's a beautiful, very special film. It’s about an opera composer who’s experiencing writer’s block, so there are two on-screen operas in the film that I was commissioned to write scores for. I also produced a brand-new Bruce Springsteen song that was written for the film. Writer and Director Rebecca Miller is incredible and extremely open-minded. We became very good friends and she treated me like an artist, with total respect and agency. I just made the music that I wanted to make, and so it’s the first film where the music really resembles my music for the concert hall. We recorded the score in Paris, and it features pianist Katia Labèque, who I work with a lot, and she’s also close friends with Rebecca Miller. It was kind of a once-in-a-lifetime scenario for me.