#my great-uncle billy was at woodstock

[sinceileftyoublog]

Alex Weston Interview: Scoring the Year’s Most Universal Film

BY JORDAN MAINZER

In Lulu Wang’s fantastic new film The Farewell (A24), a Chinese family chooses not to reveal to their matriarch that she’s dying but want to see her before she goes. So, they do what any good family would do: stage a fake wedding. Right? As absurd as it sounds, it’s Wang’s story, the center of which is presented through the perspective of Billi (Awkwafina), an NYC-based aspiring writer befuddled by what she perceives as her family’s dishonesty and betrayal. At the heart of the conflict are diverging modes of thought, the individualism of the West at odds with the collectivism of the East. According to Billi’s Japan-based uncle, the family, not the grandmother, Nai Nai, should bear the emotional burden of death. As such, the film is chock full of scenes of characters experiencing extreme emotion without trying to make it look like it, so as not to give away the secret they’re keeping from Nai Nai, but often failing and having to make excuses for tears.

This same strife is rife throughout composer Alex Weston’s essential score. Based around a motif of desolate classical string compositions and eerie, high-pitched, wordless vocals, Weston’s music drives along the film as the family tries as best as they can to achieve their secrecy, adding the tension that inevitably threatens to boil over due to longstanding familial disagreements and differences in values and country of residence. At the same time, it’s moments of musical familiarity and tradition that keep the family’s bond strong. Wang’s deft script presents these moments as key--Billi and her father singing “Killing Me Softly” at wedding karaoke, Italian aria “Caro Mio Ben” superimposed over the family getting wildly drunk with booze, splendor, and despair--while Weston’s arrangements supply them with the timbre and tone to allow them to maintain their importance to the film’s impassioned journey.

I spoke to Weston over the phone last month about his approach to scoring the film, working with Wang, and curating the soundtrack. Read the interview below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: How did you become involved with the project?

Alex Weston: It was kind of a traditional pathway for something like this. They were looking at a lot of composers, and the music supervisor was giving Lulu Wang, the director, a bunch of options. Someone suggested me, and I met with Lulu to talk about the project and wrote a couple of scenes sort of as a little tryout. She decided to go with me.

SILY: Was she aware of your work before the recommendation?

AW: No, she wasn’t. It was just that someone who was familiar with my work had her listen to some samples, and she was intrigued enough by the samples to want to see what I’d do.

SILY: Do you know what specifically you had done that led to the recommendation?

AW: No, I don’t know.

SILY: Had you seen the film without any music before scoring those couple scenes?

AW: I had seen the movie with the temp track on. All pre-existing music.

SILY: How did you approach the two scenes you tested the waters with? Was it your normal approach to scoring?

AW: Yeah, I don’t think I approached it differently--capture the energy and the emotion. Ultimately, Lulu had in mind for the movie a very particular kind of sound and tone. Even though I got the job off of scoring those two scenes, what we ended up having in those two scenes was not at all related to what I had written [for the tryout].

SILY: How would you characterize what she had in mind?

AW: As we were starting, we had a lot of conversations about tone. We were trying to find this particular balance of emotion. The story itself is very small. Every family has experienced this--not exactly with the whole lying and fake wedding thing, but every family has experienced loss or grief and has lost a grandparent. So the stakes are incredibly small. It’s a grandparent dying, which is what grandparents do. But for [the family in the film], the stakes are so high, the added tension of the fact that they’re maintaining this lie. So we wanted it to feel more dramatic and heavier to play against that. Two things we wanted to incorporate to accomplish that were using classical music--capital “c” classical music--and for it to be very vocal-heavy. A big, dramatic choir that would play against what’s happening on screen. So she was originally planning on just hiring an arranger to do vocal arrangements of Vivaldi and stuff, and that would be the score. Ultimately, we decided to make something that was unique for the film that we could build and expand on rather than try to shoehorn in something pre-existing.

SILY: On the soundtrack, there are three tracks credited to someone else. Can you tell me a little about each?

AW: The first one on there is a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Come Healing”. Lulu had the idea to use that song in the movie from the get-go. But it did feel kind of ridiculous for this female-centric movie to suddenly have gravely Leonard Cohen. It didn’t fit; it was jarring. We wanted a cover that was more vocal-heavy and string-heavy to fit with the score, and a female vocalist. We ended up finding this cover by Elayna Boynton, who is a phenomenal gospel singer based out of L.A. She has a bunch of really great albums on her own. She’s written songs for movies before; she has a credits song in Django Unchained. Lulu actually found her by just watching covers of “Come Healing” on YouTube, and there was a video of Elayna doing it at church. In terms of the arrangement for that, I produced the recording with Elayna and did a version that matched the rest of our score.

The second song, “Caro Mio Ben”, is a pretty famous aria. There’s a scene in the wedding where family members are going up and singing songs, and there’s karaoke at the wedding. One woman sings “Caro Mio Ben” ,and it’s juxtaposed with a slow motion montage of other things happening at the wedding: the family playing drinking games, the groom getting wasted and breaking down into tears, stuff like that. It’s a very funny juxtaposition over the anarchy of what’s going on. We recorded it with a wonderful opera singer and her accompanist, but Lulu wanted something different with the accompaniment. She used to play piano, so she ended up going to the studio and recording the piano part herself. I think it’s kind of cool she ended up performing on the soundtrack itself.

The last one was added after my involvement. That plays during the credits. Similarly, because of the sense of community that the voices provide, and the karaoke, it starts with an Italian cover of Harry Nilsson[’s “Without You”] and breaks down into a full karaoke version of it, which I think Lulu and 10-15 other people recorded after a shot or two of tequila. One of the music supervisors took a big passenger van up to Woodstock, where the recording studio was, and they passed out shots and sang it.

SILY: How do you go about naming the tracks?

AW: The tracks were named afterwards, of course. When I was working on them, they were more functionally named: “M1″, “M2″, “M3″, that kind of think. Before the album, me and Lulu just had a phone call debating what would work, what would flow nicely.

SILY: Sometimes, it’s something thematic, sometimes, it’s “this piece of music takes place during this specific scene where this happens.”

AW: There was a fair amount of that. The first track, “The Lie”, is the first scene where they decide they’re going to lie to their grandma. “Family” is slow-motion the whole family walking together. Most of the time, it was fairly literal.

SILY: To what extent does this score function as a separate piece from the film?

AW: There are a couple cues on the soundtrack that are variations of what appear in the film, but it didn’t make sense to have two 45-second things on an album that were practically identical. So I kind of combined them and worked out a transition between the two to make a piece that someone could listen to. An example of that would be track 3, “Changchung”, where there are two distinct halves but similar material. We spent a lot of time working on the sequencing, making sure it felt like an album, not standalone tracks. I think there’s even one cue on there that ended up getting cut from the movie, but we liked the music, so we put it back on the album!

SILY: What other projects do you have coming up?

AW: I have a few films that are starting now. I’m working on another solo instrumental record. But at this point, I just hope people decide to go out and see The Farewell!

[theliterateape]

The Thrill of Cannons and My American Male Lizard Brain

By David Himmel

I like guns. They meet two necessities required for dopamine to course through my American male lizard brain: they’re loud and they break stuff.

When I was a kid, my dad would set up empty Dr. Pepper cans full of water on the railing of the clubhouse he built my brothers and I in our backyard. We’d take turns shooting at the cans with his Red Ryder bb gun. While one of us shot, the others stared through binoculars at the cans and erupted with celebration when a bb hit and water slowly poured out from the hole. When I went away to summer camp, I took riflery and learned to respect the weapon and how to carry, load and fire it safely. The pops from the barrel and the puffs of dirt from the bullets burying themselves in the backstop hill after piercing the paper target gave me a thrilling sense of accomplishment.

I used to hunt with my grandfather in Arkansas. He and Gramma owned beautiful land in the Ozarks and we’d hunt squirrel. Using a .22 rifle or, when I was younger and less skilled, a .410 shotgun, I nabbed a few. Grampa taught me to clean them and Gramma taught me to cook them. Once, while biting into a fired leg of squirrel that had been leaping from one tree to another when I turned it into meat, I spit out a single piece of buckshot. How very hillbilly and how very real.

Grampa had a lot of guns for all sorts of various hunting and sporting needs. If it wasn’t hunting season or we just wanted to make some noise and break some things, we’d head out to the back of their property near the RV they never used and would shoot cans and bottles and milk cartons and watermelons with pistols, shotguns, rifles, muzzle loaders… BANG! BOOM! POP! SPLASH! SQUOOSH! Lizard brain.

When I would go walking on their property, down the bluff, over the creek, through the trees, I would always bring the .22 wheel gun with me. Strapped to my hip, it was for defense against snakes. I never had to use it. If it was hunting season, I’d bring a rifle, too. One afternoon, which is not prime hunting time, I took a walk with one of the dogs, Billie. Six-shooter on my hip, .22 rifle on my shoulder and Billie at my feet, I headed off into the woods. An hour or so into our hike, Billie treed a squirrel. She was on one side of the tree barking up at the rodent that had moved to the other side—my side—thinking it was safe. I felt bad. This wasn’t really our plan. I took aim and squeezed the trigger.

The squirrel dropped into the fallen leaves. I heard it roll a bit down the hill. Billie went after it. I followed. We couldn’t find it. I began to panic. I didn’t want to kill in cold blood. Not that my family needed that squirrel meat to live but that squirrel was going to be my dinner. Its gutted insides would feed the crows. If we didn’t find that squirrel we would have broken a link in the food chain. I was not OK with this. I didn’t know I was crying until I tasted the tears that were streaming down my face. Billie stopped scouring through the leaves and dirt, and looked at me with a tilted head and concerned eyes.

“We have to find it,” I said to her. And she dove right back down.

It was getting dark. We would have to head back. I couldn’t head back without that squirrel. And just as I was about to call it quits, just as the top of the orange sun dipped below the tree line, I found it. Billie found it at the same time. It had rolled quite a ways down from where it fell and was resting against a rock. We both darted for it. She got their first, scooped it up in her mouth and presented it to me.

“No girl, you can carry it home.”

A few weeks ago, I was visiting my in-laws down in central Illinois. My sister-in-law’s husband was home after serving nine months in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army. It was good to have the family all together. The last time we had been together was only a few weeks before that and under depressing circumstances—Grandmother had died. Sunday morning, we went shooting. My father-in-law and brother-in-law both hunt and have a few shotguns along with clay pigeons for practicing. Lester, the military officer, had brought his guns as well: .22 pistol, 9mm pistol, Baretta pistol, 12-guage shotgun and an AR-15.

We drove out to the edge of some woods and parked the trucks (yep, trucks) between the woods and someone’s house, just beyond their driveway. We set up the target thrower and the clay pigeons, loaded the shot guns and took turns shooting the whizzing targets. My brother-in-law Ben is a crack shot. My father-in-law isn’t bad either, though not as good as he used to be due to his aging eyesight. Sister-in-law Donna gave a good showing, too. Lester, the officer fired away like a trained professional. I was out of practice and didn’t do so well with the pigeons but it was still fun.

Then we turned our attention to some paper targets we’d posted on trees and a few old oil bottles we’d filled with water. Donna was taking aim with the Baretta when a white truck pulled up to us. A burly, older man stepped out.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“Nah, we’re good,” my father-in-law said.

I didn’t know what was about to happen but I was sure that this guy was the owner of the property and had heard and seen our arsenal, so he likely had one of his own, probably riding shotgun in that truck. What the hell were we doing there? This was a lot different than hunting squirrel and shooting bbs at Dr. Pepper cans.

“Oh, I didn’t know you all were coming out today,” the man said, apparently recognizing us.

The property was my father-in-law’s uncle. That’s how things are done in central Illinois. If you’re not in church, you’re at your uncle’s shooting at trees. And so we continued.

I had shot the weapons or some version of the weapons before with Grampa. But not the AR-15. The infamous AR-15. The thing our soldiers carry into battle. The thing that defends our freedom. The thing that can mow down our children in an elementary school. It’s a fun gun to shoot. Fast, light, accurate. It’s a pretty solid killing machine as far as killing machines go. I’m glad Lester brought it.

Had he not have brought it, I would have had just as much fun. The bangs and pops and targets coming apart and leaking oil bottles… Pure lizard brain, pure dopamine.

Las weekend, my wife Katie and I went to All Season’s Orchard in Woodstock, Illinois. Visiting an orchard is a tradition on her birthday weekend. We’d never been to this one and I was most excited to give the apple cannons a go. Apple cannons are, well, cannons connected to compressed air that shoot apples.

Ten bucks bought us 15 average-size apples. One loads in from the side. Pull back the chamber and it drops down. Take aim down range at the big metal cut outs of a bat, spider, jack-o-lantern and ghost, and a frontier wagon. Squeeze the trigger. SWOOSH! The apple is launched. It goes soaring over the range toward your intended target. Accuracy is a problem because depending on the angle of your cannon’s barrel determined by where your target is located, the shape of the apple and how it rests against the pressure chamber, your apple can go low, high, left or right of the target. But if you hit those metal cut outs… CLANG! SQUOOSH! Apple innards everywhere. A splatter mark of white fruit guts on the black metal. If you miss, it’s still a kick because the cannon lets out each blast with a roaring WHOOSH! Lizard brain.

I could have blasted apples out of that thing all day long. But there were pig races to be seen.

I’m a child of the ‘80s. I grew up during the Cold War in the warm embrace of America’s beautifully violent and heroic narrative. Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, He-Man… I used to think that Batman was a pussy because he wore kevlar. Rambo essentially rewrote history by winning the Vietnam War shirtless. And he blew up a helicopter gun ship with a bow and arrow. But I always knew this was bullshit. Hollywood. I may have fantasized about saving my school or my family or an office building from terrorists with weapons but I always knew that actually doing so was pure imagination.

Yeah, I like gun. Real guns. Pellet and bb guns. Apple cannons. NERF guns. If I never shoot another AR-15 again, I’d still be OK because I could get my fill of thrill from all the other weapons available to me. If I never shoot another Baretta or shotgun again, I’d still be OK because I could get my fill of thrill from the remaining weapons. If I never shoot another bb gun, I’d still be OK because I could get my fill of thrill from the apple cannons in Woodstock, Illinois.

And when I’m not in Woodstock and it’s not orchard season, I’ll always have my NERF guns. Sure, NERF guns aren’t as loud as the other weapons, even bb and pellet guns. And they can’t pierce a paper target or an aluminum can filled with water. But they can be played with indoors and make a great noise when you hit an empty plastic water bottle.

Lizard brain. It’s not that hard to please.