BY JESSIE WANG, LEAD WRITER (COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL AWARENESS)
Every year in April, Autism Acceptance Month (previously Autism Awareness Month) is celebrated across the world. And this year’s theme is Celebrate Differences – to recognise autism, promote acceptance, and be more inclusive in everyday life.
It’s why we’re so proud to have been able to chat with Nainita Desai this month. Nainita has recently composed the music for The Reason I Jump, a film capturing the cinematic experiences of non-speaking people with autism across the world.
Not only is this film based on a book written by Naoki Higashida — a person with autism — rather than from the perspective of those without autism. But Nainita’s entire compositional process also involved London Philharmonic Orchestra cellist Elisabeth Wiklander, a musician with autism working as a consultant. To have people with autism represented both on- and off-screen is a starting step towards autism acceptance, and The Reason I Jump brings us even closer.
The Reason I Jump has won a Sundance Award, and has been nominated as the Best Score by the British Independent Film Awards and the Cinema Eye Honours.
Hi Nainita! Thanks for your time, and congratulations on yet another award-winning film composed by you! To start off, tell us how you got involved with The Reason I Jump.
I met director Jerry Rothwell at a film festival a few years earlier and exchanged details, but I got a call out of the blue from him two years later asking me whether I had any experience of working with found sound. I started my career as a sound designer, so I have a background and awareness of using sound as part of narrative storytelling.
We had a lot of discussions about how we would approach the music and sound conceptually. Jerry and I came up with various ideas. Overall, I was involved in the film for around 15 months. I started work during the shoot, before the edit, and wrote a lot of musical ideas and experiments based on the key ideas in the book. I’m very visually inspired, so when I see images, I instantly know what to write because it informs me in a certain way.
I also really enjoy being a part of the early DNA of films. With this film, I didn’t get to see any visuals, which was actually a very liberating process as I could write freely from the constraints of seeing images.
So having written lots of music, the director and editor temped the edit with my musical experiments. I brought in musicians at various stages, and held semi-improvised recording sessions, which also helped inform the music writing process further, taking me off into new musical directions. I was delving into the unknown on this one.
The writing process evolved in a much more organic and improvisational way, but also involved writing within boundaries we had set ourselves.
You’ve composed soundtracks for other films before, including For Sama, that blurred the distinction between music and sound design. How does this film interweave the two?
Where the sound design is a more abstract representation of [The Reason I Jump writer] Naoki Higashida’s writings, the music had to represent the emotional state of being. Every aspect of the score has some connection to the way the characters experience the world. And because their senses are very heightened to the environment in their multi-sensory world, we really blurred the lines between music and the natural sounds of the world.
I took sound effects from the film and incorporated them into the music. Because the characters are non-speaking, I wanted to give them a musical voice and represent their internal voices. So I took key phrases from the original book, translated them back into Japanese, and then broke them down singing consonants, vowels, syllables in a fragmented way.
The Reason I Jump follows the journeys of multiple individuals with autism. How does the music represent the various characters in the film?
Each of the characters perceives the world in their own unique way. So, we wanted to have a distinction between the musical worlds of the characters by giving them their own unique sound and instrument.
The sound palette consists of manipulating found sound taken from the film’s location sound, human voice, strings, and other organic and treated elements. Jestina’s sound is the playful handpan, the cello resonated with Joss, and Ben and Emma share the double bass and guitar between them which introduces an element of humour and fun that reflects their relationship.
A lot of material stemmed from the cello and violin recording sessions. There is layered improvised cellos and violins. Daniel Pioro – Jonny Greenwood’s violinist – played on key moments. I also wanted authenticity towards autism and neurodiversity; Elisabeth Wiklander, cellist with the LPO, is autistic and a cultural ambassador for the National Autistic Society. Elisabeth made a touching contribution that had great sensitivity.
I incorporated aspects of cyclical motion into the score by utilising Ben Vince’s experimental saxophone playing and circular breathing techniques.
Amrit paints her daily life and is a very fine artist. She responds to oscillations, and repetition evokes a cathartic comforting release and calm for her. She rocks back and forth to the movement of ceiling and table fans. The sounds of the fans, and other percussive found sound elements from the location, create a rhythmic foundation, out of which grew a musical piece to evoke the sense of cathartic release.
I worked with found sound elements to create these repetitive and circular oscillations in the score. For example, the opening lighthouse sequence and Amrit’s introduction with the circular fans and pulsing polyrhythms fused with the sound design.
The documentary aims to portray the experiences of non-speaking people with autism living in different parts of the world. How does the music capture the characteristic of being non-verbal? Can you give us some examples of where this appears in the score?
I wanted to give the characters a musical voice, so I utilised treated vocals that represented the non-verbal world of the characters.
To achieve this, I took some key phrases from the book, and translated them back into Japanese. I then broke these down into smaller elements and recorded the broken-up phrases, deconstructing and then reconstructing them with various treatments and layering. For example, you can hear phrases such as ‘we are outside the flow of time’ or ‘beautiful circle’. These phrases are broken up into their vowels and consonants, and sung in an abstract fractured way to mirror this internal world of the characters as the boy journeys through a remote landscape. The effect is really subliminal, but consistently fused throughout the score.
Some of the characters also use a letterboard to communicate, so I occasionally used vocals to emulate the words that they were typing, which you can hear sung in the specific scenes. The vocals signify the fractured way in which the contributors communicate.
The characters are very hypersensitive to the environment around them, so I experimented with found sound elements from the location sound. Sounds such as a ceiling fan, a pottery wheel, rickshaw wheels, and electrical hums were all manipulated into rhythms and blended into the pieces.
There is one particularly effective moment where Joss has the ability to hear the sounds of an electrical generator from a huge distance, and to him it sounds like music. In the book, it is likened to sounding like a choir of angels, so I recorded around 40 takes of vocals in different notes and vowel sounds that grew as the scene evolved, using my mouth as a filter.
The film is based on the book written by Naoki Higashida when he was just 13 years old. How did the book influence your composition of the soundtrack?
We devised various parameters and concepts so that every element of the score mirrored Naoki’s descriptions of being autistic.
How did you familiarise yourself with the characters in the film despite not having autism?
Our starting point was Naoki’s description of particular distracting details, and how for him, sound, memory, and image can become conflated. But we also knew that each of our contributors has their own sensory experiences, which might or might not mirror Naoki’s experience, and so wanted to build on the specifics of the locations we filmed in.
We wanted the score and sounds to be authentic to the situations and subjects of the film. [Elisabeth’s] contribution to the score was very sensitive and brought authenticity.
However, we can’t truly speak for or emulate the experience of the character. So ultimately, all we can do is to try to translate our impression of it in the most honest way.
In the film’s trailer, there is a character who says: “I think we can change the conversation around autism by being a part of it.” How do you think music can play a part in this cultural overhaul?
We were very careful to not make the music overly emotional, as we didn’t want the audience to feel sorry for the characters or sympathise with them. However, there is a theme in the film which occurs three times. It’s when we are experiencing the beauty of the world as seen through the eyes of our characters – for example, when we are appreciating Amrit’s artwork. Those are the few moments we allowed ourselves to have emotional beautiful music, and it formed a spine to the musical narrative of the film.
Naoki gave incredible insight into how he sees the world; Jerry described how he would repeatedly go to the window when interviewed, before returning to complete his answer. When asked what it was that drew him to the window, he typed: ‘I am watching car tires rotating… they are like galaxies flowing.’ I found this to be so perceptive, beautiful and transcendental.
And musically, I wanted to do justice to this unique insight into his world. Music has the ability to transcend all barriers.
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