Com­pos­er Hanan Town­shend on know­ing Ter­rence Malick

Sto­ries of Ter­rence Malick’s pro­duc­tion meth­ods are the stuff of leg­end: entire per­for­mances axed with­out cast mem­bers know­ing until the pre­mière, whole films re-shaped over years of fine tun­ing. He is, by all accounts, a true enig­ma – a direc­tor who refus­es to do press for his own films and active­ly avoids pub­lic appear­ances, which makes him rather unique at a time when an increas­ing num­ber of name tal­ents rou­tine­ly broad­cast themselves.

One per­son who knows Mal­ick bet­ter than many is com­pos­er Hanan Town­shend, who has worked reg­u­lar­ly with the direc­tor ever since a chance encounter led to him sup­port­ing fel­low com­pos­er Alexan­dre Desplat on The Tree of Life. Their col­lab­o­ra­tion soon devel­oped in to friend­ship, with Mal­ick recruit­ing Town­shend for both To the Won­der and Knight of Cups.

It’s a jour­ney that has seen Town­shend come a long way from hum­ble begin­nings grow­ing up on a New Zealand dairy farm. We sat down with Town­shend recent­ly for a chat, where he talked can­did­ly about the expe­ri­ence of being plucked from obscu­ri­ty by one of the world’s most revered filmmakers.

“I came to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas where I was study­ing music com­po­si­tion, and my pro­fes­sor sent me an email one day from one of the pro­duc­ers who works with Ter­ry, Nico­las Gon­da. The email pret­ty much said, ​‘Hey, we’re look­ing for a young com­pos­er who’s inter­est­ed in work­ing with an acclaimed direc­tor.’ That’s all. I replied to the email and sent some music to the pro­duc­er and lo and behold it the movie was The Tree of Life.”

“Alexan­dre did a won­der­ful job and I real­ly think the score he wrote was beau­ti­ful. Ter­ry has a tonne of ideas and is very exper­i­men­tal in his post-pro­duc­tion process and loves to take the time to explore a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent things. I came on board to help him explore some ideas that maybe he felt Alexan­dre didn’t have time to do, or he was doing the main score him­self and so he was kind of want­i­ng to do oth­er things. There were a lot of solo piano pieces, arrange­ments of a lot of Epis­co­palian hymns and old Amer­i­can songs and stuff. And that kind of start­ed it.”

“I think he likes to have the com­pos­er come in a lit­tle lat­er in the process and that’s just because, par­tic­u­lar­ly with these recent films since The Tree of Life, the script has been more of a guide­line and then the sto­ry has been reshaped around the vision of what the sto­ry is. With Terry’s films, they’re almost like dreams. There’s this flow that is very dif­fer­ent from a con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive-based film, and so usu­al­ly I’ll come on a lit­tle bit lat­er and, at that point, Ter­ry and the edi­tors will have had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to exper­i­ment and try things to see what’s working.”

“Ter­ry will talk about the vision of the music for the film and what it is that he’s real­ly try­ing to cap­ture. Usu­al­ly it’s quite abstract. With Knight of Cups, for exam­ple, the music was more an embod­i­ment of Chris­t­ian Bale’s char­ac­ter, Rick, and this strug­gle that he has try­ing to find pur­pose in this life. So often Ter­ry will use a word like ​‘per­il’– just use a sin­gle word or maybe a metaphor to describe musi­cal­ly what he wants to cap­ture. That can be chal­leng­ing, because as com­posers we don’t always get giv­en things like that.”

“Usu­al­ly I’ll send through tracks to the edi­tors and Ter­ry to review and he’ll call me to talk through what’s work­ing and what’s not work­ing. I’m nev­er work­ing with pic­tures and often Ter­ry will describe it as he’s the builder and I’m giv­ing him the tim­ber and the nails. As a com­pos­er, you can’t just come in and start scream­ing that a piece of music isn’t being used in the scene that you wrote it for. It’s the same thing with the actors. If it doesn’t work for the film, it may very well get cut out. Ter­ry doesn’t mean to offend or hurt anyone’s feel­ings, but at the end of the day, what­ev­er the project needs or what­ev­er direc­tion the project is going, that’s just part of it.”

“He’ll often tell me when I’m record­ing with the orches­tra to hit record 30 sec­onds or a minute before they start play­ing so we have these musi­cal moments where no one’s being told what to do. They might just be rehears­ing or just mess­ing around with some­thing and that could become the base of some­thing real­ly inter­est­ing. And I know he does the same thing with the actors as well, where he will have the cam­era rolling before they’ve even start­ed because he’s look­ing for those moments where they’re tru­ly being real and tru­ly being them­selves or they’re not act­ing. They’re just in the moment and you can just tell. There’s a dif­fer­ent look in their eyes. There’s a dif­fer­ent sense about them. They’re free. I don’t know exact­ly how to describe it.”

“Most of the time I feel like he knows more about music than I do. His frame of ref­er­ence can real­ly vary. With Knight of Cups, he used some music that in the past he might not have used, which is real­ly cool and takes him to a whole dif­fer­ent place. Per­son­al­ly though, he doesn’t tend to give me as much pop­u­lar music – it’s more clas­si­cal com­posers, from a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent back­grounds and a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent time periods.”

“A big part of cre­at­ing the score for his films is embrac­ing the fact that he’s going to use famous com­po­si­tions by com­posers like Grieg, Bach, Kilar… You’ve got to embrace that. So there’s two parts to the score, real­ly. One part is the orig­i­nal mate­r­i­al which I write and then the oth­er part is try­ing to cre­ate some con­ti­nu­ity between these won­der­ful clas­si­cal com­po­si­tions that Ter­ry uses. Often I will do what we call ​‘shad­ows’, which are kind of frag­ment­ed ver­sions of the themes from these famous compositions.”

“I nev­er received a script. I actu­al­ly thought there wasn’t a script. But I didn’t feel chal­lenged by that at all because I don’t remem­ber read­ing the script for To the Won­der either. That’s part of Terry’s thing. He’s always try­ing to look for these moments of authen­tic­i­ty or these moments where it feels like the actors aren’t act­ing. He’s look­ing for raw emo­tion in peo­ple and in char­ac­ters and in the music and the edit and every aspect of the film­mak­ing process. You’ve just got to open your­self up to it and allow it to be part of the experience.”

Knight of Cups is released in cin­e­mas on Fri­day 6 May. Hanan Townshend’s sound­track is avail­able to pur­chase now via Milan Records.