“I wanted to create the score around the film’s two stylistic elements that to me represented the beauty of bipolar,” says Dalio. “The first being ‘Starry Night,’ humanity’s most beloved image of the sky as seen through a sanitarium window with Van Gogh’s manic eyes, and two, the sun and moon coming together and illuminating each other and in the sky into the image of unsustainable beauty that burns too bright and can only last so long. So I used celestial sounding classical instruments, glockenspiel for Marco, the moon and celesta for Carla, the sun, starting them apart with minor chord melancholy melodies for each and then as they come together, intertwining their instruments and melodies into major chords, adding synths as their mania increases with their love. I made the music in logic using a Midi keyboard with virtual instruments, Komplete, Vienna and East/West. Since I did most of the editing myself over the course of a year before bringing on another editor, I had time to make the music and edit simultaneously. I would bring a Quicktime file of the film into Logic and make the music to match edit and then place the music into Final Cut and re-edit the cut to match the music, which became very organic.”
