A huge shadow looms over the characters of “Jurassic World: Rebirth”, and is the same that has been chasing composer Alexandre Decat since he was a teenager in Paris.
That shadow? John Williams' music.
“It is a legend for all of us,” says Decat, 63, in a zoom call from London, where he has been burning midnight oil at the score for the next “Frankenstein” by Guillermo del Toro. “He is the only one that follows.”
Like Williams, Decat is now a gray veteran (although a handsome picturesque), with hundreds of films in his name. He has already completed three scores only this year: for the nominated “Eagles of the Republic” of the Palma of the Republic of Swedesh French-Swedish, by Wes Anderson and the “Jurassic” heavyweight this week.
He will also make his debut in the North American direction on July 15 in a great survey of his film career in the Hollywood Bowl, an adequate, late although back, of his two decades as composer of list A in the United States.
WHEN DIVAT Began Scoring Hollywood Films in the Early 2000s, His Music Swept in Like A Breath of Fresh French Air – Elegant, Restrained, Melodic, Idiosyncratic – and The List of Filmmakers Who Soough Him Out Reads Like A Sizable Section of The Criterion Closet: Malick, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, Greta Gerwig.
“He is the last magnate of American film music,” Decat said in 2010 of his idol John Williams. “He drew one line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try to challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It is a kind of battle.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
His traveling companion or Moreno is Anderson, who first employed him in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in 2007 and that increased the first victory of Dive with “The Grand Budapest Hotel”. (It has been nominated eleven times). May's “Phoenician scheme” marked his seventh collaboration.
“When I began to be a film composer, I had my idols, of course, Hitchcock and Herrmann, David Lean and [Maurice] Jarre, [François] Truffaut and Georges Delerue, “Decat told me in 2014.” All these duets were strong and showed how important the intimacy between a director and a composer for both. Not only is it good for the film, it is good for the composers, because these composers actually developed their own style making several films with the same director. “
In a city too often full of generic factory scores, his people were like a gourmet French meal, even though he grew up with the same diet as US films and their iconic scores. The young Decat was obsessed with American culture, listening to jazz, watching baseball and Oscars, and decided that he wanted to score movies after listening to “Star Wars” in 1977. Executed on the cover of that iconic black album were the words “composed and directed by John Williams.”
“That,” Divat told his friend at that time, “is what I want to do.”
It is appropriate and fun that two decades after the charming public with a delicate Valsal score for the prestigious image Scarlett Johansson of 2003 “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, the composer now promotes a monster score for a behemoth blockbuster starring the musical Johansson and a Bunch of CGI by John Williams.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” is not the first time you have to challenge the footprints of the T-Rex size of its hero: Decat scored the two final films in the series “Harry Potter”, and was also the first composer in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”. He left the latter when Tony Gilroy took over the project of the original Gareth Edwards director, and before composing any note.
“I went as far as the change of directors and the change of plans,” explains Dive, “and the weeks that passed, and then I had to move on because I wanted to work with Luc Besson” (in “Star Wars” of 2017 -Sque “Valerian and the city of one thousand planets”).
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” says Decat, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies did not offer that, or the producer did not offer that. I had to learn to sound big with a very small number of musicians.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Like his work in “Harry Potter”, the Odes of Decat to Williams in “Rebirth” are more whisper than the screams, although there are a handful of manifest statements of both the iconic anthem and the anthem for the masterpiece of Dino-Master of Steven Spielberg. More subtle tributes are arrived in its use of piano in solo and ghostly choir, and in the first three notes of his reason for the team led by the character of Johansson, a melody that almost It begins as the anthem “Jurassic” of Williams.
“Then there is a connection,” says Dive. “I take the cane and move away from it.”
He composed new leitmotifs for Wonder, by adventure, by danger. Its score, like the original, is a tour of amusement park full of sudden drops, humor and family terror, with some moments of cathartic and introspective relief.
For the most part, Edwards continued to push him for more humble reasons.
“When I was tempted to return to something more abstract, you know, French film“, Says Disat, winking:” He only asked me to go back to John Williams's inspiration to write great reasons that you can remember and that you are catchy. “
Decat worries that this is becoming an extinct art in Hollywood. “I don't hear much about that in many movies that I see,” he says. “It is a kind of environmental texture, which is the easiest to create.”
At the university, I listened to the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” score in a loop, already measured its own score career, was paying attention to the most intimate camera scores of John Williams as “The accidental tourist” and “presumed innocent”, as well as Juggersouts as “Jurassic Park”. In addition to the music that is filtered, he learned that it was important to write down all kinds of film, regardless of how large or small or small. Williams's work also taught him “that he could have something elegant, classic, but with some jazz seeds in the chords or in the way the melody evolves.”
Every time he listens to someone to talk disparagingly about Williams, Decat becomes defensive. “I want to hit them,” he says, only half a joke.
“He is the teacher, what can I say?” Divat told me in 2010. “He is man. He is the last magnate of American film music. So that is all that is said there. He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try to challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It is a kind of battle.”
Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in the movie “Jurassic World Rebirth”.
(Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures)
When Dive received his first nomination for the Academy Award, for “The Queen” in 2007, the only person who called Los Angeles to congratulate him was Maurice Jarre, composer of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago”.
Decat had met the French legend several times over the years, including an early invitation to a mixing session for the 1990 film, “after Dark, My Sweet.” Divat was horrified when he saw director James Foley removing the melody of Jarre and all the various musical elements on the mixing board, except for a simple electronic blow.
The young composer expressed his dismay and Jarre said calmly: “It's his film. I have to accept that.”
“That is a lesson that I learned very early,” says Dive. “I have never forgotten that, because it is still the same,” he laughs.
He was also warmly received as a young man by Georges Delerue, the great serene of the new French wave in films such as “Jules and Jim” and “Disregard.” “They were very friendly,” says Dive, “such sweet men, both.” (Michel Legrand? Not so much, Decat says: “He said horrible things about me in books”).
What everyone has in common, in addition to an inclination to compose beautiful music, is the challenging transatlantic jump of the French film industry, where they began the highest hanger of Hollywood. Jarre left Paris in the early 1960s after the enormous success of “Lawrence” and never looked back, forging significant associations with directors such as Peter Weir and Adrian Lyne. Dellerue uprooted from Paris to the Hollywood hills after winning his first Oscar in 1980 and scored some successes, including “Steel Magnolias” and “Beaches”.
“I really believe that people who work a lot are lazy,” says Disat, who has already completed three scores this year. “That's why they work a lot, otherwise they would not work at all.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Decat began professionally in France in 1985 and wrote approximately 50 scores before “Girl With a Pearl Earring”, the English film that put him on the Hollywood radar. He continues to make French films in the midst of summer box office and photos of the American art house.
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” says Decat, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies did not offer that, or the producer did not offer that. I had to learn to sound big with a very small number of musicians.”
Enjoy the freedom of a large budget project. “To be able to say a study: 'Go, write what you need to write.' The director wants an orchestra, wants 95 musicians.
Even so, the limitations with which he trained gave Decat some of his greatest strengths: creativity, ingenuity, speed. He had to orchestrate all himself, which means that his music has a distinctive fingerprint. And the composition of small sets, sometimes unorthodox, gave his music a clean and transparent firm instead of the sludge wall too typical.
You cannot say much about its 100 -minute score for “Frankenstein”, which has just ended up recording with a giant orchestra and choir in Abbey Road and Air Studios, and which comes out in Netflix in November. The reason he makes so many films, Decat proposes, is because he is lazy.
“I really think people who work a lot are lazy. That's why they work a lot, otherwise they would not work at all.”
