Composer Max Richter Talks The "Haunted" Music Of 'Waltz With Bashir'

Composer Max Richter wrote one of our favorite film scores in 2008 for the deeply haunting Israeli film, “Waltz With Bashir.” The Ari Folman-directed documentary, which uses animation to discuss its dream-like subjects is about the 1983 Beirut massacre. Why animation to depict a well-known atrocity? The film is told and “remembered” through the hazy and submerged recollections of Folman’s first hand memories as a member of the Israeli army. The film is the frontrunner in the Best Foreign Film race and is poised to win the Oscar this weekend. We caught up with Richter to see how he provided the powerful soundtrack to one man’s remembered nightmare.

How did you get involved in this project?

In the usual way for me – an email out of the blue. Ari had been listening to my record The Blue Notebooks while writing the film – apparently he wrote it in a week while the CD was on repeat – so he thought since i’d already in a way scored the script, he might as well ask me to do the film. In the case of ‘Bashir,’ the minute I saw the short trailer Ari sent me I knew I had to do it – it was a bit like being struck by lightning.

Did you consciously use themes from known-classical music piece? There’s a few parts of the score that sounded really familiar, Were you writing nods/homages to existing works?
Although the bulk of the score is all original work there are two “found objects” that inhabit a couple of cues. They are both piano pieces: the slow movement of Schubert D.959 and the well known “funeral march” from the Chopin Op.35. I used these fragments in the film after discussing with Ari his reasons for including the Schubert in the original trailer – turns out his mother was a pianist and that these pieces meant something to him personally. So it made perfect sense to refer to this material in a couple of scenes.

What was your goal for the emotional through line of the film?
I felt like the entire film should have this “haunted” quality, so the music is like a hallucination – actually this is pretty natural territory for me. The main “haunted ocean” music is all about that – a sort of unresolved, weightless, lost melancholia is the general tone I was looking for.

What was the musical direction like?

Ari had temp-tracked some scene with some very good music – bits and pieces of Sigur Ros, Brian Eno etc. So I had a good sense of one possible way through the material, but I decided to put the temps aside and just write a first set of sketches off the script instead. I started to chase down that feeling I got from the material and wrote “The Haunted Ocean” straight onto the paper. It was a one cup of coffee moment. Once I had that down, everything else just fell into place. Ari is very into music himself so he was really an ideal director to collaborate with. It was just a great experience batting material back and forth every few weeks between us, so the images and score could evolve in parallel.

You worked with Future Sounds Of London in the past, any prospects of doing electronic music again?

I try not to think of categories in music and I shuffle between both “classical” music and more “experimental” and “post rock” traditions…so I feel like i’m dipping into all these different cultures all the time. It’s a question of finding the right mix of elements for each situation – like a kid in the chemistry lab I just keep pouring stuff into the test tube until it goes BOOM.

Who would you like to work with in the future?

There are so many interesting film makers out there. Again in no particular order, some of the ones who are using music in really creative ways. Alexander Sokhurov, Gus Van Sant, Sally Potter, Andrei Zvyagintsev, Bill Viola, Tran Anh Hung, Godard (!), Ang Lee, Wes Anderson….so many others.

BTW, “Waltz With Bashir” is now coming out in graphic novel form. Very cool.