ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 1: MARC FORSTER

Posted by Timothy E. RAW

August 10, 2009

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Marc Forster began his career as the writer/director of the micro-budgeted, Everything Put Together, staring Radha Mitchell. His breakout success, Monster’s Ball earned Halle Berry an Academy Award and his follow-up Finding Neverland, with Johnny Depp was showered with praise from the Academy and critics worldwide.

Audiences may have stayed away in droves from Stay (with Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling), but Forster scored another critical success with the mind-bending comedy Stranger Than Fiction. He then directed an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s beloved international bestseller The Kite Runner, before being selected as a controversial choice to helm the latest James Bond film Quantum Of Solace, the most divisive entry in the history of the franchise for Bond purists and film fans alike.

TIMOTHY E. RAW: Away from making films, do you choose to listen to soundtracks or scores for pleasure?

MARC FORSTER: Yeah, definitely. Always — In my car, I listen to soundtracks at home, I have them on my iPod. I love soundtracks for movies. As we’re in Italy, I’ll point out, I’m a big Nina Rota fan, I’ve been listening to his soundtracks for ages.

RAW: Can you cite any particular scores, especially when you were starting out, that maybe served as an inspiration. Did you use scores to assist you while you were writing your first film, Everything Put Together?

MF: In that process, no. It depends, sometimes when I write I do tend to listen to classical music more than film scores. Film scores make me dream and enjoy a lot and I sort of drift away a little bit, so when I was writing Everything Put Together I felt like I really had to focus and not be swept away by them.

RAW: The collaborative process on one of your more recent films, Stranger Than Fiction was an interesting one. Can you talk about the blending of score and source music?

MF: Brian Reitzell (co-composer of Lost In Translation and composer of 30 Days Of Night) was the music supervisor. I purposely didn’t want to use a composer, so a lot of the music there was pre-existent from other composers. And then (the band) Spoon did write some of the music but only a very small partial part. They wrote the end credits song and some other pieces. We also have a piece in there from Vangelis, a piece from Max Richter, so many different musicians with pre-recorded pieces. It’s really a collaboration between Brian Reitzell and Spoon and music that had been recorded already.

RAW: Immediately after seeing the film, I wanted to get my hands on a copy of the score, which I’m guessing won’t be released anytime soon. The soundtrack that is already available seems to be missing a lot of the music in the final film as well.

MF: Pretty much everything that Spoon contributed to the film is on it. But then for the rest of it, we didn’t have all the rights to everything. It had to be licensed and it got very expensive, that’s why not everything is on the soundtrack.

RAW: You’re known for using such a tightly knit crew on your films, that has been largely the same since Everything Put Together but the “unknown” component is often the composer. Certain directors go back to the same composers over and over, your body of work has a very eclectic mix of composers. How much of that is a conscious decision on your part?

MF: I have a very small team I use over and over and then there are some positions I like to mix it up a little bit and one of them is the composer. I worked with Asche & Spencer twice on Monster’s Ball and Stay, we had a very good collaboration. I used Jan (A.P.) Kaczmarek on Finding Neverland –

RAW: – Has there ever been an instance where you wanted to use one of these composers again and a scheduling conflict prohibited it? Soundtrack fans are often denied the continuation of a great collaboration because both the composer and director are busy working on different projects at the same time.

MF: Not yet. At this point it was always that I wanted to use the particular person because I thought they were perfect for the project. For instance Alberto Iglesias, for The Kite Runner, I wanted to use him because of a certain sensibility. Someone who wasn’t American or European, more a world citizen. I also wanted someone who somehow understood “heat.” I had this idea in mind that I had to find someone who understood heat.

RAW: Someone who could communicate musically the landscape of the film?

MF: Exactly. Exactly. In a sense Alberto understood and understands the country and I wanted to have a mix rather than a traditional Afghan score. A mix of Western and Eastern score flowing into each other and he was really able to accomplish that.

RAW: Asche & Spencer you had mentioned earlier, working on two films with you. I wanted to ask you about that relationship, in particular about the scoring of Stay. I think it’s a brilliant underappreciated film, the music too and my favorite of your films by far. What were some of the ideas being thrown around between the three of you after having developed this relationship very successfully on Monster’s Ball?

MF: It’s funny because that was so many years ago (before the film was finally released after sitting on the shelf for so long). Stay, I felt like, was a film where… for me it was sort of like a moving painting. I felt like the sounds should not just reflect the landscape we’re moving in but the alienation and the dream-like state of the story itself. We had lengthy, lengthy discussions over the kind of instruments we should use, how it should be more electronic or real instruments instead of keeping it electronic, when to use what and how. It was always because for me, the story ultimately is more of a metaphor than anything else. I didn’t want the music to add a shape or clarity to it. It was very important that it adds a sense of an emotional landscape instead of using the score to push a story point across or emphasise what’s trying to be expressed. For Stay, I didn’t want the music to give that sort of support. I wanted it to support the ambiguity the story is telling in a musical sense.

RAW: There’s a lot of quiet, silence and loneliness running through these scores when I listen to them and certainly it’s a characteristic of all your films. For that reason, I’m sure that’s why so many people were surprised about your being selected to direct Bond. Though if you really think about Paul Haggis’ interpretation of the character (as the screenwriter for both films staring Daniel Craig), in that sense, you’re a perfect fit for it. Bond is dealing with that loneliness and the franchise is so much more introspective with these last two films. I’m wondering how surprised you yourself were when you got the call for the job?

MF: Yeah, I was surprised and I didn’t want to do it in the beginning and I had no interest. Ultimately, I was won over by Daniel Craig, I think he’s an incredible actor. First I met with the producers and I told them I wasn’t sure, that I had to think about it and then they said that I should meet with Daniel who was in town. I connected with him because he’s a real actor, he’s down to earth and someone I knew I could make a really good movie with him even though at that point, we didn’t even really have a script. One of the things I wanted to do was bring my crew, the people I’ve worked with in the past to the Bond films, though in regard to the composer, David Arnold had scored several of the previous Bonds, so the producers had me listen to his music and meet with him. I met with him which I thought was interesting because I had replaced everybody else but would have this continuum going into Bond through David Arnold and actually it was a collaboration I enjoyed very much.

080809 1033 ISCHIAGLOBA1 ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 1: MARC FORSTER
Director Marc Forster is an unabashed soundtrack geek.

RAW: You have this close-knit team you brought on board to Bond, one of those people being your long-time editor Matt Chesse. The thing that baffled me, to be perfectly honest was that opening car chase action sequence. It had some of that Michael Bay, I daresay, attention deficit editing style. Is this the studio responding to Jason Bourne breathing down their necks that they feel they have to adopt this very similar “shaky cam” editing style in order to compete?

MF: No it wasn’t. The studio didn’t really say much, it was more from me. I wanted to create that opening to be very disorientating, the feeling of not really knowing where I was. This was the character state for me, that Bond, he doesn’t really know who he is with this world of disorientation going on around him. That’s what I tried to do with that. I hear that there were a couple of people who saw that comparison to Bourne. On one hand, Dan Bradley, the second unit director worked on those movies which definitely adds too that comparison. The sequences he worked on, on this were the opening car chase scene and the exterior of the plane sequence. I shot the interior. In regard to the car chase though, when he shot things, I always watched it and gave him notes on how I wanted to have it different or this and that, so there was a constant dialogue of me pushing for the disorientation of that opening, not so much him actually.

RAW: And in a similar way, you pushing Matt, your editor? It just seems so different from his editing style on the previous films. It was something I didn’t expect.

MF: Yeah. I just felt like I wanted to be thrown into this movie and be totally disorientated. That I don’t know where I am or what’s happening.

RAW: Thomas Koppel scored your first film Everything Put Together a really interesting composition because even as an avid film score listener, every time I watch it, I still can’t tell where the score ends and the sound design begins.

MF: Thomas Koppel has passed away since that film, a few years ago. He was an extraordinary composer, a very gifted man. And yes, the idea was very much to intermingle sound design and score, something similar to doing Stay as well actually, marrying sound design and score. Certain movies I think that really works and it’s interesting because you don’t want to have the sound design and music fighting each other, going against each other. I thought it would be a nicer marriage by having one hand off to the other, or the music carrying some of the sound design and creating design, or sometimes the sound design creating a musical aspect.

RAW: On that film you worked with Radha Mitchell, who had just, not so long ago had had her breakout success with High Art, which subsequently got her known in the states. You then, as a first time director, how is that you get someone like that attached to your film?

MF: Radha and I were personal friends, we hung out a lot in L.A. We met through a friend we had in common and clicked and spent a lot of time together. She was frustrated at the time with projects she was trying to do and they were not going and I handed her this script that I written for her, I told her she’d be perfect for the part, that I wanted to do it and shoot it on digital video and just make it ourselves.

RAW: Would it be fair to say that she was instrumental in giving you a leg up in the industry?

MF: Absolutely, she was. First I had the producer who read the script, liked it and I told him I wanted to make it for $50′000 dollars on digital video. He had the money, then I told him, “Look, there’s this actress I wrote it for and I’d like to see if she does it, if not we’ll go with someone else” but Radha said yes, which was of course, exciting for me because I also envisaged her doing it.

RAW: You already talked about disorientation, but this film is a world away from Bond. Watching it I don’t think I’ve been that disorientated in a way that unnerves me since watching say, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. The film itself has a very 70’s asthetic, it feels right out of that era.

MF: That was actually one of the models, Polanski’s Repulsion and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, those kinds of movies and obviously also, Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. All of those movies were sort of my models and I also watched some of the Dario Argento movies because of the visuals he uses and the way he crafted his early work, I really like.

RAW: He’s here at the festival.

MF: I know, I just saw him when he got an award but I didn’t see him afterwards. I’ve not met him yet.

RAW: That should be interesting for you when you do. Finally, can you tell us what you’re working on next? Are you perhaps looking for something smaller and more intimate that will allow you to reflect after the Bond experience, the tent pole big studio action movie? What’s next?

MF: I’m doing a film called Disconnect. Several interconnecting stories very much like Short Cuts, Traffic, Crash, films like that. The backdrop is technology and the way it effects our human relationships between one another, done in an observational way, that isn’t just a positive or negative way. It will be not even a tenth of the Bond budget. I was looking for a smaller movie, I needed to do that again and I intend in the future to go back and forth between bigger and smaller films.

RAW: Are you even beginning to think about composers for that yet?

MF: There is someone I’m thinking about but I’m still not sure, so I don’t want to say just yet!