Music David Bridie + John Phillips

Co-composers David Bridie and John Phillips:

Co-composers Bridie and Phillips would later go on to work with David Caesar on his first feature Greenkeeping.

Bridie and Phillips were founding members of the band Not Drowning, Waving, and there is an interview with Bridie here, WM here, which includes this introduction to this aspect of Bridie’s career:

By 1991, Bridie and co. had nailed the score for Jocelyn Moorhouse’s award-winning drama Proof starring Hugo Weaving, Geneviève Picot and Russell Crowe. The following year Bridie and Phillips scored David Caesar’s Greenkeeping. Then came What I Have Written, as well as the Judy Davis and Billy Connolly comedy The Man Who Sued God and… well the list goes on. All the while, the clips they were having made for their album tracks were being produced by filmmakers rather than those known for music videos, and all of them “were approached more as short films than band promotion film clips,” says Bridie.

Bridie had this to say about composing for the screen:

“They are both very different process wise and it would depend on which day of the week I was asked as to what preference I would give. I like the team aspects of working on film. There is often a hundred people employed on a feature or in a series and everyone is working towards making it the best it can be. This special relationship only works obviously if everybody buys in, but when it does, it’s a great feeling. The primary relationship for the composer is with the director, the editor and the creative producers and fortunately they have mostly been positive ones in the projects I have worked on, though, like all composers, I’ve got stories. Creatively you are clearly in the director’s house and it’s at its worst when it feels like jingle writing with some Reality-TV-loving exec paying the bills. But at its best there are those projects with a heart or an edge that you believe in and a creative director and artistic DOP allowing for creative hours in the studio creating. I see myself as a songwriter/recording and performing artist before I see myself as a screen composer. It makes me feel in control of my destiny. But I need score work constantly to fund the Wantok Musik Foundation, which I have a big responsibility towards and [which] I don’t draw a wage from. There’s also an interview with Phillips and Brodie here, WM here.

Not Drowning, Waving have a reasonably detailed wiki here, which provides references to other content on the internet, and a link to Bridie’s wiki here.

(Below: John Phillips and David Brodie, and below that Phillips and Brodie in single stills) (Below: while this film was a side project for Brodie and Phillips, here’s Not Drowning, Waving, with its core players, and below that, with other contributors).