Part 2

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please. Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?

I have my process and, after so many years working as a film/TV/game composer, I know that if I sit down at 9 and work until 5 or 6pm, I’ll have a few minutes of music to listen to the next day. I say the next day because that’s usually how I start my day, listening back with fresh ears to what I did the day before. Making sure I still like what was written and that I wasn’t completely off. To me inspiration is about craft and perspiration, you make yourself available and present, draw from your experience, and hopefully the “right music” will start coming out. Especially if you did your homework, immersed yourself in the story/characters and have had good creative conversations with your director.
I have two young girls and really strive to keep a balance of family and work time. My studio is in my house so I’m lucky to be able to take breaks and spend time with the kids. Sometimes it’s hard to keep them away when I’m working but I wouldn’t want to do it any other way.

Can you talk about a breakthrough soundtrack in your career? Why does it feel special to you? When, why and how did you start working on it, what were some of the motivations and ideas behind it?

Elite Squad was probably the breakthrough movie I worked on. I think the music was very interesting. It was edgy and crude, full of energy and angst. Unsophisticated but very original, I believe it’s what the movie called for. I’ve also worked as a music producer on that project re-recording famous Brazilian tracks for the film. That small Brazilian movie became a cult phenomenon in Brazil and went on to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. It opened a lot of doors for all of us involved and started my long-time collaboration with my friend and director José Padilha. Three years later we worked together on the sequel, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, to this day the biggest box office success in Brazilian history, and probably the most successful Latin American franchise to date.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

I’m very pragmatic when it comes to this. I’d love to say I meditate and work on specific techniques. The truth is, I spend a lot of restless nights thinking about scenes and the music I need to write for them. I feel my subconscious does a lot of the work while I procrastinate, like most composers out there. Then it’s a matter of sitting down, putting in the time and allowing ideas to come out. So far it’s worked for me.

Music and sounds can heal, but they can also hurt. Do you personally have experiences with either or both of these? Where do you personally see the biggest need and potential for music as a tool for healing?

I have several experiences of music lifting me up, or pieces of music I go to when I need a boost. I primarily work with dark subject matter, since I tend to get called in for violent projects, and that can take a toll. Especially earlier in my career, I think by now I’ve learned to leave the dark and brooding feelings in the studio. However, what I love most, is finding beauty in dark characters and heavy storylines. I believe that’s my strong suit, scoring the intricacies, finding beautiful and melancholic themes to score villains without necessarily hitting the audience over the head with extremely dark and heavy music.

There is a fine line between cultural exchange and appropriation. What are your thoughts on the limits of copying, using cultural signs and symbols and the cultural/social/gender specificity of art?

All of what we know as Western music, no matter what country it comes from or when it was created is composed of 12 notes. To think that everything you hear, from Jazz, to Western Classical music to heavy metal comes from the same 12 notes is mind-boggling. The job of a film composer is to understand and study what came before, to be able to navigate the requirements of a project. When scoring Far Cry 6, for example, I never tried to create full-blown Caribbean music. I wouldn’t have been the right choice if that were the case. We were rooting the score in traditional elements and instruments but building something hopefully completely new and original on top of it. I don’t think any work of art comes from nothing and is completely original. Everything is derived from your collection of experiences and background and hopefully you’re giving it your twist and making it unique.

Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work?

I agree, especially in film music. As I said you may not even notice you’re hearing music but you’re feeling it. You’re watching a screen, focused on the visuals, but the music is giving it texture and colour. It’s really fascinating to try and breakdown how it all works. And if you’re used to playing a game or watching a show, when you hear the OST on its own, it’s impossible to disassociate it from those images that instantly come to your head.

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

Again, I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m very pragmatic about this. I even have a hard time calling myself an artist. I think of myself as an artisan, a craftsman. Someone who knows how to use his tools to create something that hopefully people connect to. My job is to tell stories and enhance the immersive experience people enjoy while watching a movie or playing a game.

What can music express about life and death which words alone may not?

Music can express a lot about a lot of things but it’s all in the eye of the beholder or, better said, ear of the beholder. I can try and express something when I write a piece of music but it can mean different things to different people. If you ask different composers to write a piece about death, without being specific about mood, instrumentation, etc, I assure you those pieces will sound completely different from one another. What does death mean to each individual composer? It’s the same with a scene, there’s no right or wrong way of scoring a scene, it’s a matter of how does the composer interpret that scene and what the director trying to convey with it.