Top 105 Quotes & Sayings by Alexandre Desplat
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French composer Alexandre Desplat.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
I have no favorite museum, but it could be the National Gallery in London; it could be the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Every city has a great museum.
Composing is to think. It is to have your mind trying to find what is the best sound that the movie is going for: the best melody, the best texture, the best structure and dramaturgic arc for the film. Then you discuss that with the director. He's the leader. He's the one showing you the path to follow to find the soul of the film.
In 'Secret Life of Pets,' it's a huge orchestra - really, really big.
A film is a film and it has to be good to be inspired. That's number one. It can be Italian, French, German, American. It's moving images in front of you and with a strong director who injects his point of view and artistry.
I wanted to be a film composer because I heard scores that could stand alone, from 'Vertigo' to 'Star Wars' to 'La Dolce Vita,' because this music has so much history. They're weighed with the history of music. They come from somewhere, they have a past.
French horn can be very epic, and at the same time, very dark and moving.
I've been very lucky early on to be surrounded when I was a child by music from various countries. My parents would listen to a lot of music coming from other universes.
Well I think usually I would do six or even 10 scores a year. Some are big films and some are not.
Music is never inherently funny!
As a child brought up in Paris, I dreamed of America, that lost world my parents had left behind - it was in my genes. Plus, American music has always been close to my own aesthetic, because of the mix of symphonic music with jazz.
Some films that I love, I love them also because of the music. 'Vertigo,' for example, is a movie where the music is doing 70 percent of the job.
I started piano like my sisters. After one year or two, I didn't like it anymore. Then, because I like trumpet, I played the cornet. When you are 7, you can't play trumpet - you play cornet. And something didn't go well. The teacher was too hard. Too rough. Suddenly, there was this instrument, the flute, that I could immediately play.
When you work on animation, the music has a great task: to create a sound and melodies and mood and atmosphere and energy dedicated to these extraordinary characters.
I lived in the Caribbean when I was a teenager, so I learned about Salsa and Cha-Cha and all these Latin Afro-Cuban music like Gillespie and Duke Ellington, also bridged with Jazz. But my mother is Greek, and so I've also listened a lot to Greek music. And through the years to Balcanic music to Arabic music because my father loved music from Egypt.
I'm being offered great movies by great directors and that's what I love, that's what I've dreamed to do, and that's what I do all day long. So I have to do it.
In my early teens, I started collecting soundtrack albums.
Music has to deal with silence. Music has to deal with time.
For me, comic scores always have to have some melancholy in the background.
It was quite frightening to be asked to write the music of a Western because there are so many things that you can refer to that can be cliche, and that could really poison your mind, from Morricone, to Bernstein, to Neil Young. So much music has been written for Westerns, that you wonder how you're going to find a new or different idea.
In a time when directors did not fear composers with a strong voice, Morricone wrote scores like operas or symphonies, with passion, scope, bravura and intelligence.
You need to be in danger; otherwise, you get old.
Well, I consider myself as much as a filmmaker as a moviegoer.
Yea, there is no way you can get away from critics. It's all over the net. Sometimes it's useful to read things, good or bad. Sometimes it's painful. Sometimes it stupid because they say stupid things.
I've been pretty lucky to work with directors who were quite influenced by European cinema.
I just write from dawn to dusk.
Every director has his own syntax, his own grammar, his own words.
I've always been a film lover - that's why I've always wanted to write music for films.
It's not unusual to have only three weeks to score a picture. And that's three weeks from signing on to finishing the last recording session. That's how I did 'The Queen' and, more recently, it's how I did 'The Imitation Game.'
The first thing is, you can't write movie music if you don't know how to write quickly.
I knew how incredibly rich 'Valerian' was visually and the adventures the heroes go through. They are one of a kind. They have nothing that you can compare with DC or Marvel. They're not superheroes they're just heroes but they're also human beings. And there was also something there that I always liked. In these novels, there was a lot of humor.
I always tend to think that composing is not playing an instrument, composing is having something in your head that's steaming and it has to go out. It has to become sounds and be written. It's an emotion that you can't repress.
When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.
That's the main lesson I've learned from working in the theater: respect the dramaturgy. I don't want to overwhelm everything with music.
Godzilla' took two months because it required a two-hour-plus score. 'Imitation Game' was three weeks.
We will always hear the vibrations of Ennio's music and feel it in our hearts.
If you're a director and you pay homage to Japan, you're definitely going to remember what you've learned from watching the Japanese masters' films.
Because I work so much, people think that I have a team writing for me, but that's not why I chose to write music for films. I chose to write music because I like to write music. So every single note that comes out of my studio is written by me, and I wouldn't be able to do two movies at the same time.
I saw the finished version of 'The French Dispatch' quite a while ago, and it's just amazing. It's so incredibly strong and different... the way that Wes is expanding his talents to another dimension with each film is just wow.
The goal is to make the music really a part of the skin of the film, and not be detached.
Even when he transposes Roald Dahl's 'Fantastic Mr. Fox,' he injects so much of his own personality and his own world that it becomes a Wes Anderson story, and you forget that Roald Dahl is behind the story. That's the proof of great directors to be able to digest and recreate sometimes a classic.
Certainly 'Zero Dark Thirty' is not for children!
I know 'Valerian' didn't do very well in America, but I think it's because of the lack of knowledge of these graphic novels which came out in the mid-60s.
When Wes has a new a project, you know that it's going to be something as different as the previous was from the previous one. Each time, he tries to take you to a country, or a land that is unknown for you and for him, and reinvent this land. That's what he did with 'Darjeeling,' with 'Mr. Fox,' with 'Moonrise Kingdom.'
Musicals are made of several climaxes that keep growing and growing; when you think it's over, it still continues growing up in plateaus.
On 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' I must insist that the sounds of the instrumentation are crucial to reflect what the movie should convey in terms of energy and emotion. It's not just the melody or the tune.
If I wanted an open space, I could do a documentary about fishes. Then I would have an open space to play my music. That's not how I visualize the work I'm doing.
The main difference I'd say is that European cinema has always used less music than American cinema for historical reasons.
I played the piccolo in the 'Ides of March' and 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox' score.
Some directors can become concerned when it comes to music, because it's the end of the process and they're tired. They're worried that the music will intrude or waste something, that a composer will overwhelm the story.
I've loved Japanese culture for a long, long time, from doing martial arts, to the block prints, to the music. It's a country that I love, and a culture that I love.
I've never been into monster movies, not my cup of tea.
I liked 'The Darjeeling Limited' very much. There was a melancholy about that film that I liked.
I don't think I would deliver the best work if I would do several projects at the same time. So it's one at a time, but I work a lot. I work nonstop actually, but that's what I like.
The great directors, I've learned, have a great sense of rhythm.
Every film is a human encounter. It's people trying to collaborate and create something together.
I'm there to tailor something very precisely and something very subtly to dialogue and the actor's energy. I'm there to bring out something that isn't spoken. 'King's Speech' is the perfect film to do it.
There's a quality to the sound of a trumpet that you can really twist for any kind of sound and mood that you want to create.
I don't know if I would write an opera, maybe because of the words. But yes, I would be really excited to do it. I would certainly write a ballet or... I've done a lot of stage before.
When synthesizers appeared everyone was a composer suddenly.
Well I never play back my music, just so you know, it's there sitting in my drawers and what I remember is that, what I can say is that there are steps, you know, moments in my life where I know that one score was a new chapter. I can say that 'Read My Lips,' by Jacques Audiard, 'Sur Mes Levres' was a chapter.
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