Cassius Obi-Laurent writes most of his music between midnight and four in the morning at an upright piano in a converted schoolhouse outside Ghent. Born in Lyon to a Nigerian father and a Belgian mother, trained as an organist and self-taught as everything else, he has become the composer directors call when they want a score that sounds less like music than like weather. This year alone, three films carried his name. We spoke by telephone as he walked his dog along a canal.
You are known for scores that are mostly silence. Is that a philosophy or a habit? 'Both, and neither was my idea. The first director I worked with took my score and removed two thirds of it. I was furious for a week. Then I watched the film with an audience and realised the scenes without music were the ones people remembered. Silence is not the absence of a score. It is the part of the score the audience writes for themselves.'
What do you listen for when you first watch a rough cut? 'The room tone. Every location has a hum, a particular frequency made by the walls and the air and the refrigerators. I record it, slow it down, find the note hidden inside it, and very often that note becomes the key of the whole score. For the lighthouse film last year, everything was built on the drone of the lamp's motor. You never hear it directly, but you feel it.'
Against the temp track
Directors often edit with borrowed music before the composer arrives. How do you handle that? 'Badly. The temp track is the great enemy of film music. A director lives with some famous score for six months and falls in love with it, and then I am hired to write something that sounds exactly like it but is legally different. I now ask editors to cut without any music at all. Some refuse. The ones who agree tend to make better films.'
A good score is like a good host. It makes you comfortable, it never talks over the guests, and it knows exactly when to leave the party.
Your scores use very few instruments. Why? 'Because every instrument arrives with a history. Strings arrive with a hundred years of weeping. Brass arrives with armies. I prefer instruments that do not yet know what they mean: a detuned harmonium, a bowed cymbal, my own breathing through a cardboard tube. For a film about a flooded quarry I recorded water dripping in a disused mine shaft in Cornwall and tuned the drips. It took three days and a great deal of patience from the owner.'
Do you worry that streaming has changed how people hear film music? 'Of course. Many people now watch on a telephone with the sound off and subtitles on. I cannot fight that, so I write for two audiences: the person in the cinema, who will hear everything, and the person on the train, who will hear only the melody. If the melody survives the train, the score is strong enough to survive anything.'
What are you working on now? 'A silent film. Truly silent, no dialogue, eighty minutes, by a young director from Tbilisi. She wants a full score, wall to wall, which terrifies me. For the first time in years I will not be able to hide behind silence. I have been at the piano every night for a month and I have written, so far, eleven notes. I think they are the right eleven.'
