Scoring two films this year

I started on Tár first, but I think I finished Women Talking before Tár.  They were running a little bit at the same time, but in a nice way that didn’t totally overlap. I had chunks of time on each one.

I really prefer being present for a project that I’m working on, so I don’t love working on multiple things at the same time. I was on Tár for one and a half years, but I’m not 100 percent full-time on that for one and a half years. I do have some flexibility within that time to take on other stuff, so if the process is extended, it can work out to maybe work on two things at the same time.

Beginning of composition process?

Both directors asked me if I was up for working with them! Both projects were so wonderful and exciting to work on.

With Tár, I got to work on the subject that I’ve dedicated my life to, in a film with phenomenal artists who I really admire.

For Women Talking, it was very different subject matter, but it’s an incredibly strong and important story. I was really happy to get to work on that as well. Sarah Polley is absolutely fantastic as an artist, activist and feminist. She’s so wonderfully inspiring, like how she approaches subjects that are not easy, but I think she has such a wonderful human way of approaching whatever she’s doing.

How did your process differ between the films?

The process was very different, I would say. Tár is more of a character study than it is necessarily a story as such. I was really diving deep into this character and her past, her future, her present, the way she relates to music. It was very different from any other film that I worked on, because I was writing music partly as her, so I was kind of putting myself in her shoes. It was a very complex process and very delicate to work on.

Women Talking is a much more traditional score; it’s thematic score, partly very melodic. The film is based on a novel, so there is the traditional sense of storytelling in how the music follows that narrative in classical sense. It’s based on real events, but it’s also presented as a fable — it’s almost like a fairy tale, so the music falls under that umbrella, which helped us shape the story. You have to look at how the music can really amplify the story that’s being told in a way that’s most helpful, without your ego or your preconceived ideas about how music should be getting in the way.

It was important to me that the sound world was as close to the environment of this colony as could be, because these women would probably not have access to an instrument at all. Their musical landscape would not have been very rich. I imagined that the nearest instrument to their vicinity would have been guitar. I wanted the instrumentation to be down to earth, accessible and folky or rural. It’s so important which instrument you choose to tell a story, especially when they’re based on real events. The orchestration needed to be very humble.

For Tár, did it make it easier to compose for a film about a composer?

It was just such a great process to work on this film, because what I found so interesting about it is that it’s really a film about the process of making music and writing and communicating about music to your fellow musicians and students, so it’s not about the finished version. She’s one of the best at what she does, but she also fails. It’s not about succeeding, and I didn’t really feel any pressure to succeed. I just felt interested in the process, because as someone who’s dedicated my life to making music, it was just so much fun to do a deep dive into that with wonderful artists.

Yes, I really feel there’s lot of change that’s been happening in this industry. When I was starting, and my name came up for projects, they asked, “Yeah, but can she deal with this, because she’s a woman?” It wasn’t that long ago that people were still saying this to me, even after finishing several projects. But I feel like that machine has gone from skepticism to excitement about women composers. It’s much more inviting now for women to start out their careers in this industry, and that’s really fantastic.