When you hear a filmmaker talk about how the music of their film impacted them, the effect is normally felt after the production is long-since over. However, in the case of “Motherless Brooklyn,” actor-writer-director Edward Norton was able to score a brand-new song from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke during the development of the film. And because of that, the song’s impact not only emotionally affected Norton but changed the film in a profound way.
While talking to Rolling Stone, Norton discussed why he approached Yorke about a “melancholy ballad” for his upcoming film “Motherless Brooklyn,” which is set to premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
“I didn’t presume he would do it,” Norton admits. “I wanted Thom to write an old-world melancholy ballad, and I wanted his voice to be the properties for [Norton’s character] Lionel’s voice … But I sort of said to myself, ‘Yeah, you and everybody else in the world.’”
Of course, we now know that Yorke did take Norton up on his offer and turned in a new song, titled “Daily Battles.” And when the actor-turned-filmmaker got a chance to listen to the melancholy ballad, Norton was truly emotional.
“He sent me this track of him on a piano singing it and I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark, crying from listening to this song,” Norton said. “It’s so instantly heartbreaking and evocative of so many of the themes to the movie without being overly specific to them, but so much so, I thought the idea of daily battles that everyone is fighting, that you’re trying to rise up and out of, was so evocative that I went back into the script and put the phrase into a scene.”
The song struck a chord so much that Norton actually did find a way to insert it into his upcoming film. In a scene featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, where she joins Norton’s character at a jazz bar, you can hear a special arrangement of Yorke’s song. The new arrangement was written by Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. A new arrangement was necessary because “Motherless Brooklyn” takes place in the 1950s and Yorke’s version wouldn’t have felt appropriate.
“Wynton, two days later, came back with this arrangement,” said the filmmaker. “And the first time Thom heard it, he kind of put his head between his legs and said ‘Jesus, fuck.’ It was really a wonderful moment, so we did this great weird thing of inserting Thom’s song into the Fifties.”
We’ll get a chance to see if this relationship between music and film worked out for the best when “Motherless Brooklyn” premieres as part of TIFF, which begins September 5.
