MISSING: Finding a Score with Julian Scherle
CineConcerts was very fortunate to speak with Julian Scherle about his score to the new film MISSING!
Composer Julian Scherle
CCineConcerts (CC): How did you get into film music? What was the thing that sparked your interest?
Julien Scherle (JS): I was surrounded by music since [before] I could think. My dad is a lute and guitar builder, and we had this little workshop at home. So there was always music when I was growing up. We also had a piano standing in the living room, so my earliest childhood memories are basically just me hammering and abusing that piano.
I must have been around eight or nine when I saw The Fifth Element. I heard Éric Serra’s score for it, and I was absolutely blown away by this fantastic world that he created that was so different from anything that I’d ever heard before in my life. It felt like such a beautiful escape from reality.
I remember I recorded it on a tape recorder, and I went to my piano teacher and said, “I want to do something like this.” It was a bunch of weird percussion and synthesizers and strings. That was the first experience where I realized there was this world with music that you could create yourself. And that was really fascinating to me, to be able to be the person who creates that kind of world.
I went on and studied at a music conservatory – for jazz and guitar – and attended engineering school for audio engineering, and I was—I wouldn't say bored, but at that time, a lot of the film scores were not really that intriguing to me. It just felt like a lot of stuff [was] manipulating the audience in a very obvious way, and that kind of pushed me away from film scoring. I didn't feel like that was something I—you know, there's John Williams, and he's probably never going to be reached in terms of quality. So, there was no reason for me to even try anything in that direction.
I then started working on film again as a sound designer, where I did some short movies. There was also another school with film students that we collaborated [with] for art installations. At some point a director asked me, “Hey, I'm not happy with the music that we have in there. Do you want to do something?” And at that moment I realized that you can create or manipulate the audience in a much more subtle way through sound design, and you can do it in the same way with scoring.
That was kind of my way back to film.
You can guide the audience, confuse the audience, and tell certain story points through sound design. And that was a huge revelation for me because, all of a sudden, I had this connection back. I always loved film. I always loved the psychological aspect of film and the storytelling and, as I said, the building of this entire world. And I had something that creatively was really fulfilling. Fulfilling for me to explore a different field that I didn't even know existed, with a score that was coming from the same design direction.
It was one of those realizations where you're adding to it. I was like, “Wow, this is so freaking amazing.” I think I didn't sleep for like two or three nights just working on the short movie, and it was such a crazy experience. From there, I was really eager to explore that world more and more.
I'm very sensitive to sound in general. I think a lot of my inspiration really comes from just walking through my environment and listening to what's around me. I love sound walks, for instance, like defined areas where you really focus on what you hear. A lot of the stuff that I do is sort of exploring the mind, but I see and remember how that environment makes me feel. And sometimes you might see me standing in a supermarket next to a cooler and just listening to it, but it's this beautiful drone.
I'm originally from Germany. I moved to L.A. about 11 years ago. I was very fortunate to learn from some very experienced and very great composers. And yeah, it's been a long journey. This is my first studio feature on my own.
CC: It must have been really exciting to essentially score something in the way that you wanted, in a way that was similar to Serra’s score to Fifth Element, right?.
JS: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
CC: There appears to be a lot of digital elements to your new film Missing. And in terms of the way people communicate with each other, there's an element of suspense and a thriller type element where you've got this young person not knowing what the hell is going on and trying to figure it out through the medium of technology.
I was reading that you wrote your own code and did some really funky manipulations to the audio. Can you talk a little bit about why you wanted to do such extensive manipulation and where you even started to think about doing it that way?
Film Still from Missing
JS: I mean, that was the very basic baseline concept that we came up with for the question of, “What's the human machine interface, and how does communication change by having this medium of a machine in between?” From there, I tried to come up with whatever that means.
One element that I found was this really interesting study about audio compression and what it does psychologically. The study was basically playing orchestral instruments to people, uncompressed and compressed, and they had to describe how they felt. They were people that didn’t have a specifically trained ear for that. The baseline finding was that the more compression you have, the more anxiety inducing it is. And I thought that was really interesting.
Let me see what happens if I compress something not one time, but thousands of times. Does it get more anxiety inducing? What happens? What is the result of that?
I took all kinds of different sounds – real sounds, synthetic sounds, and different vocal and dialog pieces from the movie. We compressed them many, many times, and tested what that would do. And fair enough. It's very anxiety inducing. I took those elements and created parrots and drones and different kinds of rhythmic pieces. Simply exploring compression and compression artifacts.
I also wanted to explore a little bit of AI and machine learning and see what I could do with that. I found this platform, Alphabet, where you can create an algorithm to re-synthesize sounds just through A.I. It's an open platform. Very simple. The models that they have follow a playful approach. You can take a snippet of dialog or your cat purring and put it in there. And then their module can be, say, a violin. So then it sounds like the cat is playing the violin through whatever that audio signal was. You can create your own modules, as well. So instead of using their preconfigured violin model, for instance, you can train your own algorithms and use that to synthesize.
For the film, I specifically used a bunch of dialog snippets from Storm, from set. I then trained those dialog snippets with just compression artifacts and saw what would happen if I re-synthesize it that way or do it the other way around.
I also really love Bernard Hermann's approach to scoring – he's one of my all-time heroes. So, I also took some of the chord structures that he uses, trained the system, and applied that to the compression artifacts. And so, you see what that does.
It was a time-consuming process, and it's not a very stable platform, either. Sometimes the server crashes, hangs, or some stuff happens. But it was still a lot of fun to work with it.
The last discovery I had was from this microphone that I own that doesn't record audio signals but records electrical interference. Any type of electrical radiation – like your phone radiates your screen – anything around you that has any type of circuit board in it radiates sound. Specifically, the little capacitors that are charging and charging. And so that type of stuff is creating digital noise, and this microphone picks that up.
I went through my studio recording all my different digital devices, different screens, and then I went out into the world to record a bunch of different domains. I drive a Prius, which is a gold mine for these kinds of sounds. A lot of the rhythmic elements that are in the score are basically little parts of circuit boards making sounds.
What comes of it is this really cool effect that also makes this score so claustrophobic because there's literally no air that's moved. You know, it's like it's in your ear. So I used the elements I recorded and applied it to the other two methods that I had described before.
There’s a huge trial and error and exploring all kinds of different things that I could come up with.
CC: When you're thinking about the story, what’s your creative process? You mentioned sound walks. Did you do that for multiple scenes? How did you go from that to what’s in the score?
JS: I got involved very early in the process. I was reading the script and even reading different iterations of the script, so I was very familiar with the big story points. It was definitely in my head for a couple months. I knew that I wanted to create a score that would have a big contrast of very harsh electronic stuff and very exciting juicy score parts versus something that's very organic, very warm, very cozy sounding.
Since piano's my first instrument, pretty much every time I do any kind of thematic material, it always starts on the piano. I always sit at the piano or try different ideas, and the theme – the main theme of the movie, which you hear any time June has a new idea – was one of the first things that I actually did send to the directors.
We did stress tests in all kinds of different directions. Can we try it with different instruments? Can we play at different speeds? And so on. Because I was so familiar with the script, whenever I worked, I was like, “Oh, yeah, this could work for this scene, or maybe also for this scene.” I would send it over to the directors and then they'd be like, “Oh, yeah, this would definitely work here. Or I'm not sure, but maybe on another spot we could try it there.” So, it's a very collaborative process. And there was so much music written or sketched out before they even got into the edit. When they got in to edit, they used my music right away.
CC: That's great because I assume they edited to your music, right? Which is extremely helpful for a composer because then you don't get locked in on temp music.
JS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was a super intense workflow, because the edit changes and the musical elements change. Then it comes back to me, and I always have to polish it and make it more musical. But it really allows for a super close collaboration because the edit and the music are basically growing at the same time.
CC: Is it just you with all the instruments or when you recorded or were polishing the score, did you go to a studio?
JS: Yeah, I do really enjoy recording as much as I can myself. It's one of my favorite parts, playing all the stuff myself. But I'm not a professional string player by any means. As soon as it gets to a point where I'm like, “Okay, I can't do this myself,” I love to work with other artists. And that whole part of collaborating with professional musicians that are really, really good at what they're doing, it's also super rewarding. All the strings were recorded in Budapest, all the different textures. Sometimes I would have some type of digital noise textures, and I would have the orchestra replay those textures but with real strings to see how that sounds.
CC: Did you manipulate that sound from the strings too or was that added into the already manipulated sound design textures that had been previously done?
JS: That was just re added. So yeah, it was nice seeing it afterwards. All the bigger string parts, that’s not me.
CC: So, is film music, in your mind, something that can be very simple, like a tone or a texture, allowing you to experience whatever you're seeing in new ways? And I find that fascinating because film music in general is changing from the golden age of cinema, like the Goldsmith and Williams days?
JS: Right? Yeah. I mean, it can be both. And I don't think it's an either or. I think it absolutely depends on the type of project. For certain projects, certain styles of scoring are appropriate. And for other projects, it wouldn't fit at all.
I think, in general, my philosophy is: What’s the definition of music? At what point is it noise? At what point is it sound? At what point is it music? My first band was a punk band. Is that sound or is that noise? You know? I really evaluate any type of quality of sound by how interesting the sound is and whether this sound evokes any kind of emotion in me. And if it does, yeah, that's music to me.
Film Still from Missing
CC: That’s a much more fun definition of music because it opens the palette up to any creator to use various things to make something unique.
I wanted to ask about the film’s setting, in Colombia. How did you integrate local instruments in your score?
JS: I did my homework. I did some research on traditional Colombian instruments and, well, multiple things.
I'm not the biggest fan of that type of scoring where whenever you go abroad, immediately you hear the drums or something. I strongly disagree [with that] scoring. And oftentimes it's not even culturally accurate. You hear the completely wrong instruments. I think that's very problematic, and I'm trying to stay away from that as much as I can.
But also, for this project, it wouldn't really fit in there, it would have felt really out of place.
One of my approaches includes using real instruments but then recording them and digitally f*cking them up and scrambling them. It still allows me to keep that kind of flavor alive. You can’t really pinpoint, “Is this a pan flute, or what is that instrument?” but you can still get that kind of texture. I did that a lot for the scenes where we switch over to Colombia in order to have a bit of a shift in texture within the score, but it's not too much on the nose.
Another element that I really, really like in general, and specifically also for this, is changing up the rhythm. A lot of the rhythms or music that you experience in South America is more circular in nature. You don't have a static 4x4 division of a bar. Cumbia is a beat that starts out slow and then speeds up towards the end. So it's not a round wheel. It's a little bit of an act. I use that method for a lot of the percussive elements that are in the score.
CC: It sounds like a pulse, like breathing almost.
JS: Right. Like the typical pulse that you would hear. And that's in a lot of electronic music, like house techno. If you think in that way, it's a very static emission off the beat. Whereas, that is more of a circular movement.
CC: It's almost more organic in a way.
JS: Yeah, absolutely.
CC: Any particular sounds that you're obsessed with right now, anything that you're really trying to explore artistically?
JS: At this moment, I'm absolutely fascinated by what looping does. If you take real sounds and you start looping them, you're creating an incredibly weird, unnatural tension of something that doesn’t really exist. I did that to an extent in the score with piano where I have certain rhythmic elements that are recorded looping and bending in pitch, which obviously can’t be done with a real piano. There's this type of tension where you take something that's existent in reality, and you do something with it that’s not possible in the reality. What that does to you, that kind of surprise, I'm very fascinated by that at the moment.
CC: Anything in particular in the score that you want people to listen to when they're going through it?
JS: To me, what sums up the entire score is the second track, “Missing.” It covers all the thematic material that's happening in the score, but it's also produced in a way that's more like a track rather than a score. So, I think that one is just a standalone track. It's just really fun to listen to.
CC: Anything you can talk about that you're working on next?
JS: I'm just wrapping up a TV show for Amazon Prime. Super excited about that one. A very different type of music.
I think that's one of the things that I really love about film scoring. You create concept albums from scratch for every movie, which means you're really reinventing who you are as a musician every single time. It’s super cool, and extremely, incredibly fulfilling. But yeah, that one is late seventies, early eighties, so I tried to make it as authentic as possible, strictly using gear that was available at the time period. It's very funk soul kind of glam rock-ish. Very band driven, different from Missing. It's crazy fun.
CC: And is that coming out later this year?
JS: Yeah. It's going to come out in a couple of months and the soundtrack will be released on Lakeshore.