Musical Drive

In compositional terms, the soundtracks that Cliff Martinez is asked to write for key collaborators Steven Soderbergh and Nicolas Winding Refn could not be more different. While Soderbergh's requirements are sparse and minimalist, the demands of Refn within his visually stunning (but dialogue-light) films are expansive, at times gargantuan.

During his IFFR masterclass, 29 January Martinez discussed his own work and modus operandi, kicking off by asking his audience to undergo a particular exercise that, he believed, underlined the way that music extends the emotional bandwidth of the cinema we consume.

As he explained, "for as long as my father was around he always used to ask me 'so what is it again that you do for a living', and I thought that he really wanted to know, but I think he also wanted to irritate me. But it’s a good question, and any time I am asked it I always say 'you would kind of have to see a movie without any music to appreciate what composers do, what we contribute'."

The audience, therefore, watched a long sequence from Soderbergh's 2015 series The Knick during which an older doctor (Clive Owen) responds to a younger nurse's (Lucy Elkins) suggestion that he should remain with her in her bedroom. The first playthrough was in silence, the second was accompanied by Martinez's expressive and sensitive score, ostensibly written from her perspective. "I like to say that when film music is at its absolute best it kind of expresses the thing that the images and the dialogue cannot express," Martinez noted. "That is kind of optimistic, because music doesn’t always do that, but I think you can see in this scene a layer of emotion or psychology that wasn't there when you saw the film without music."

Martinez explained how the Soderbergh approach to cinema informed, at least initially, his own approach to scoring films. "This [was] how my minimalist style developed. One of the first pieces I played him, he said 'the melody, let's get rid of that, and that thing at the bottom, well that's the baseline, get rid of that, and that thing in the middle, the keyboard part, let's get rid of that', and all that was left was this kind of drone, and he said 'yeaah'."

His work with Refn allowed for a greater degree of expression, in terms of melody, notation, layering and instrumentation. "He [Refn] wants music to play a large role… there is little dialogue and whenever that happens, people look to the music and the images to understands what is going on… I like music-flavoured music more and more. The early films I did with Stephen didn't have melody or harmony and were very textural and atmospheric. Now I want my music to be [more in the ] centre."

He illustrated this with examples from two Refn films. The first was Drive, for which he used an obscure instrument called a crystal baschet which he first encountered at a modern art show in 1965. ("Alongside seeing The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show it was one of those musical experiences that made me want to be a musician, a weird musician," he confessed).

The other film was God Only Forgives, from which we were shown the fight sequence in which Ryan Gosling receives a proper pasting from the oriental master. "I had to write this [music for the sequence] six times, and I often show it as an example of what I call 'shortcuts to originality', which [means] we all learn by imitation… I find if you often take two disparate ideas and put them together you come up with something that passes for original."

"So here I was really struggling. Nicolas wanted something really sparse, repetitive, electronic. And there was this theme of god, in this scene, he kept saying there was a battle against God – I didn't know exactly he was talking about – but when I thought of that religious idea of music, I thought of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. So it kind of had elements of that, elements of Philip Glass, and then I wanted to shoehorn in elements of Ennio Morricone, but I used a Thai instrument called the phin which is an electrified 3-string lute for the Ennio Morricone thing, and then there is a little splash of Goblin, which is a group that scored Dario Argento horror films, so you put all of those things together and it kind of sounds like something original."

"The most successful collaborations for me have been the repeat customers," Martinez added. He has written ten scores for Soderbergh and four for Refn. "Monogamy has its advantages. You just kind of creatively develop a telepathic communication that you don't get with the people you work with for the first time."

Martinez spoke amusingly about directors who use temporary, filler music to plug a gap or to suggest a musical impression until he is drafted in to write the original score. "Temp music was a great tool working with Soderbergh, because he just knew that if I tried to imitate it I would screw it up in an interesting way." On Contagion, Soderbergh applied the Morricone score for Battle of Algiers as filler music. "He always used it as a way to [say] 'here is an idea, take from it what you will and make it your own'."

Martinez reserved his deepest disdain however for directors who want their choice of temp music to work as a blueprint for the final score. "That's when the practice becomes pure evil. To me on a cosmic, creative scale, imitating other people’s music is somewhere between defecating and dying."