BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE VIA LEVEL AND GAIN
Nathan Halpern’s two latest projects have one thing in common: they’re dark. The film Swallow is a psychological horror in which the lead character consumes dangerous objects such as glass and metal. And the documentary In the Same Breath is about the devastation of the global pandemic.
But to the New York City film composer, who just scored both screen projects, “engaging with dark subject matter in dark times feels like a positive act”.
This interview explores Nathan’s composition process, which took place during COVID-19. His music unites these films in an usual way: it encourages us to reconnect with our sense of empathy.
Nathan, you’ve had two very heavy and very contrasting projects on the go: the documentary In the Same Breath, and the film Swallow. What’s it been like to immerse yourself in such dark projects during the pandemic? How have you kept balance through this process — professionally and personally?
While it is true that each of these films engage with dark subject matter, I believe that their respective motivations are deeply humanist and empathetic, each with an emphasis on redemptive power of finding and facing the truth.
Scoring In the Same Breath — Nanfu Wang’s new HBO film on the COVID-19 pandemic — was a deeply cathartic experience. Nanfu confronts that personal tragedy and horrific institutional failure head-on in her film — and getting to musically engage with that sorrow and anger in the composition of the score was very meaningful to me personally, as I think it has been for its first audiences at Sundance.
In the case of Swallow, director Carlo Mirabella-Davis created a film that employs heightened and stylised cinematic aesthetics to access very personal and human truths. The creative process of developing the score was lively, inspiring, and an extremely enjoyable process.
One of the great blessings of working in the arts is the opportunity it provides to channel and sublimate painful emotions into something positive. To me, engaging with dark subject matter in dark times feels like a positive act.
Let’s talk about Swallow, which you worked on first. With regards to the subject matter, it’s a psychological horror film about a woman who wants to eat glass and metal. When you first heard what this film was about, how did you react and why did you think it’d be an interesting project to take on?
When I first read the script to Swallow, I was immediately riveted by this provocative and utterly unique vision.
The film tells the story of Hunter, played by Haley Bennett — a newly married young housewife who seems to be living an idealised American Dream. But when she becomes pregnant, she develops a condition called pica, the drive to consume dangerous objects. Her experience of this disorder is dark, but it is also a part of an essential reckoning that she must have with the darker sides of her married life, her controlling in-laws, and her past. So it’s a dark and heightened film, yet at its centre is a heartfelt and humanist message.
Not only was I moved by the film’s message, but I was intrigued by the mandate of creating a score that would help to take the audience into the subjectivity of an experience and compulsion that might, at first blush, seem terrifying and unrelatable. The score could play a part in taking the audience into her point of view. And because of the highly stylised and cinematic nature of the filmmaking, there would be the exciting opportunity to be bold and provocative in the musical score.
Tell us more about the music. You have chosen to produce a score that’s a throwback to mid-century thrillers. How would you describe the cinematic ‘sound’ of horror and suspense, and why did you want to use these old-fashioned influences?
From my first conversations with writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis and producers Mollye Asher and Mynette Louie, we discussed the idea that the score would be connected to the filmic styles of mid-century Hollywood, evocative of what Carlo called a ‘Douglas Sirk-ian kind of callback to the Hitchcock style of filmmaking’.
The score would need to occupy the same mid-century aesthetic world as the rest of the film from the elegant cinematography (director of photography Kate Arizmendi) to Hunter’s retro-chic outfits (costume designer Liene Dobraja), to the stylised production design (Erin Magill). So for the early score cues in the film, I used a classicist palette to dovetail with this mid-century feel — delicate piano, harp, lush strings, and woodwinds. For the musical cue that introduces Hunter’s pregnancy, I introduced a theme to signal a feeling of what Carlo termed ‘disquiet’. The music needed to be dark and discordant, but still with some surface elegance. So I composed a twisting, Hitchcockian theme for violins that is performed rather delicately, yet rumbling beneath it is a low dark undercurrent of celli and bass tones.
Your score is strategic. You took into consideration the structure of the narrative as well as the film’s scenes. How’d this play out for you?
As the objects that Hunter is drawn to swallow grow increasingly dangerous, the filmmaking employs some of the cinematic techniques of the classic psychological thrillers – Hitchcock and DePalma – to guide the viewer into Hunter’s compulsion and obsession. And Carlo and I discussed the idea that the score would stay in dialogue with this style.
In a pivotal scene in the film, when Hunter finds herself drawn to swallow a thumbtack, the score helps to draw us into her emotional point-of-view, helping the audience feel the sense of allure that this object has for her. Carlo told me that he and Haley often discussed this sequence as being the film’s first ‘love scene’, and he felt that the music should be imbued with a feeling of ‘dark romance’. So the ensuing cues — ‘Siren Call’ and ‘Temptation’ — contrast dark minor chords with lushly romantic string melodies, delicate piano, and fluttering harps that convey an undercurrent of sensuality.
Let’s look at In the Same Breath. This documentary is produced while the world is still struggling with the pandemic. And you certainly haven’t shied away from composing the seriousness and the anxieties surrounding COVID-19. How did you even begin to conceptualise a soundtrack for a new virus?
Director Nanfu Wang is a brilliant filmmaker, and she began making this film from the very first moments of the pandemic.
When I watched the rough cut, we discussed the idea that the score could be used to evoke the relentlessness of the virus itself. This would serve as a truth-telling, aural contrast to the constant denial of the looming pandemic by authorities of all stripes in both China and the United States.
I employed chilly electronics, brittle processed cellos, icy synths, and analogue heartbeat-like pulses to evoke the horror wrought by the virus.
In the film’s first scene, when the balloons are being released into the air, Nanfu and co-editor Michael Shade talked about the idea that the balloons could also be seen as a visual analogue to COVID-19 droplets spreading out. So with this in mind, I also created these distorted fluttering harp-like sounds evoking the bubbling bits of virus fluttering out into the world.
This was the first cue that I composed for the film, and we then worked together to find other spots in the film to develop this motif throughout the arc of the movie.
There are so many aspects that must have influenced your composition. While in Swallow, you portray the experience of a lead character, In the Same Breath sees you set to music the experiences of millions — from COVID-19 sufferers to the healthcare workers who care for them.
In this film, Nanfu Wang explores not only the horrors of the virus and its enabling institutions, but also the deeply tragic nature of the loss and suffering that ensued, the latter often told through deeply intimate interviews.
It was in this context that I developed a second pillar of the score that spoke to this dimension of profound human loss and sacrifice. Here, I employed more organic instrumentation, using spare piano and delicate, elegiac strings performed by Robert Pycior.
So while the film absolutely shows the large scope of the tragedy, the attendant score plays from an intimate, personal place.
How have you personally been affected by COVID-19?
I have been extremely lucky: my immediate family and loved ones have stayed healthy and safe. And creatively, it’s been a busy and productive time for me as well, for which I am fortunate.
But I am of course deeply concerned for our most vulnerable populations, as well as for so many of my peers in the creative community. This has been a brutal and existentially perilous period for so many communities, and one such community is that of musicians and performing artists. I believe it is imperative that our society support and sustain their culturally vital work, and ensure that promising young careers are not cut short.
In the Same Breath has seen you work with Nanfu Wang for the fourth time. But in the past, you’ve also worked on a wide number of projects that confront highly controversial social and political issues. As a composer, what do you feel is the power of a score?
As you mention, this is the fourth film score we’ve collaborated on — the previous film One Child Nation won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2018 — and I consider In the Same Breath to be yet another milestone in the evolution of her signature style.
To your question about political issues, it’s interesting because political activism is something that I was brought up in, going back to my grandparents who were activists in the Civil Rights and Labor movements. I studied Political Theory, and I worked with and for human and labor rights organisations professionally for years.
But as a composer and artist my motivation doesn’t come from any ideology other than truth, beauty, emotional connection and — in the case of a film scoring commission — the creation of an aesthetic experience with the film’s director.
To your question about the power of the score, I think that there are two essential aspects that I tend to focus on: one is to take you into the point of view of your protagonist or protagonists, to connect with a subjectivity other than your own. The other is to help to define the tone and nature of the aesthetic experience of the film itself, to bring out the thematic essence of the journey the audience is embarking on.
In light of these types of projects, how do you think music — and film — can help create a more empathetic world?
In terms of music, this is one of the direct and primal ways that we as humans can make a connection.
I once spent a year performing songs in New York City mental institutions, singing old jazz standards with an acoustic guitar. For so many of the clients in these populations, the development of connection through mere verbal conversation could be incredibly difficult and often impossible. But through music — if you were authentic and sincere in your performance and song selection — you could make a true and profound emotional impact.
With film the audience can be given the opportunity to see and experience the world through someone else’s eyes; to empathise with an experience other than their own. And I think that both of the films that we’ve been discussing today are very much in dialogue with the goal of a more empathetic world.
Swallow director Carlo Mirabella-Davis speaks often of the potential of cinema to ‘increase empathy’ and to fight prejudice. And I see so much of Nanfu Wang’s work — this film included — as being marked by a deep commitment to understanding and inhabiting different experiences and points of view.
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