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Soundtrax: Episode 2013-10 December 8th, 2013

By Randall D. Larson

------Alex Heffes – Scoring the Journey of Nelson Mandela British composer Alex Heffes has written a score full of passion and perseverance for Justin Chadwick’s MANDELA – LONG WALK TO FREEDOM; in this interview he explains how the score came together and what evoked his inspiration.

Composer to Watch: Bartosz Chajdecki – Scoring Modern Films in Poland Best known for his eloquent scoring of the Polish WW2 TV series, TIME OF HONOR, Bartosz describes his approach to scoring and the difference between composing films in Hollywood and Poland.

Soundtrack reviews this month include: John Williams’ elegant THE BOOK THIEF, Henry Jackman’s propulsive CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, Mark Kilian’s fun romcom score EXPECTING, James Gelfand’s cool music for cheesy sci-fi, EXPLODING SUN, Benjamin Wallfisch’s psychological portrait HOURS, Ludek Drizhall’s delineation of disillusionment BADLAND, plus preserved and expanded Italian scores from Cipriani and Morricone, classic 50’s B-movie music from Paul Dunlap, music for animated YOUNG JUSTICE, and the poignant music of THE BUTTERFLY’S DREAM.

R.I.P. Nelson Mandela. Your like may not be seen on this earth again for a long time. British composer Alex Heffes has written a score full of passion and perseverance for Justin Chadwick’s MANDELA – LONG WALK TO FREEDOM; in this interview he explains how the score came together and what evoked his inspiration.

British composer Alex Heffes has written a score full of passion and perseverance for Justin Chadwick’s MANDELA – LONG WALK TO FREEDOM, which opened with a limited engagement on November 29, with its wider opening scheduled for Christmas Day. Largely influenced by the striking performance of Idris Elba (PACIFIC RIM, THOR) in the title role, Heffes wrote over 90 minutes of original music for the movie. Traveling to South Africa, Heffes recorded choir vocals and South African singing legend Caiphus Semenya’s own voice to depict Mandela’s passing into manhood as a young boy and ultimately reprising this theme for his inauguration as South Africa’s first black president. Heffes also recorded driving African percussion to underscore the years of activism and Mandela’s years on the run in the movie. He used South African percussion and vocals for the early years, and then moved into developing more orchestral themes as way of telling the human story. The orchestral score was recorded score at London’s Abbey Road with a 65-piece orchestra that included South African violinist David Juritz. Heffes also performed piano on the film’s score. Heffes’ goal in scoring this film is for the audience to come away having truly felt something – to feel the love of family, to try to convey despair and loss – the darkness and emotional emptiness when home seems lost and ultimately to feel uplifted. His aim was for the music to guide the audience through this emotional journey and come away with a joy for what this story can inspire in us.

Interviewed while he was in Los Angeles on Nov. 25, Heffes described his approach to scoring this film, as well as another recent historical drama, EMPEROR.

Q: When you first got involved with MANDELA, what was your thought process as far as what it needed musically?

Alex Heffes: The love story at the center of the film between Nelson Mandela and his second wife Winnie was very core of the music, which got me to thinking about how I should navigate through the film. Obviously there’s the apartheid and the struggle and the reparation of the country – that’s the backdrop against which the family life and the personal life of the man and the people close to him are played out. The music is quite intimate in places, as I was trying to score that relationship and how the incredible events of the politics swirling around them actually influenced the private life of the people involved. That was my starting point.

Q: How do you plan to integrate the different elements in the score, the African and the orchestral music, to create a truly emotional background for the picture?

Alex Heffes: It took a bit of planning. I had many conversations with a wonderful artist and singer, Caiphus Semenya, in South Africa, and as I was writing the music and I would call him and tell him I wanted to put some percussion and some vocals into some scenes, and asked him to prepare some people in South Africa for that. So when I arrived there we had a whole pool of incredibly talented performers to draw upon. I already had a very clear idea of what I wanted to try, and when he brought the people in we experimented. We recorded South African percussion and Caiphus himself did the vocal on the opening and the end of the film as well. Then I went to Abbey Road after that and did the orchestra. It was a wonderful experience, being in Johannesburg and being able to call in real genuine South African talent and make it a really unique combination of those two approaches.

Q: The film also takes place over a long period of time. How did these historical aspects of Nelson Mandela’s life, from youth to incarceration to becoming the country’s president, affect the thrust of the score and its musical journey?

Alex Heffes: That was something I thought about. The music starts off using tribal instruments and sounding very ethnic and progressive; then the orchestra creeps in and we underscore the love story and the family scenes, and then we begin adding synth as time progresses and then electric guitar and percussion, so by the time you’re up to the 80s and the early 90s the music palette has progressed along with the time frame of the picture, so that the audience feels like they’ve been taken on a musical journey through that.

Q: Something that struck me listening to the score is how you are able to bring out in the music the psychological perspective of Nelson Mandela, enhancing the actor’s performance as he grows and changes through the experiences he has faced.

Alex Heffes: The performances are so astounding, it’s a joy to work with them. I just can’t imagine anyone else doing it now, when you see Idris [Elba] and Naomi Harris and the way they transform over those years, they start off being good and they just get better. It’s a wonderful thing to work with as a springboard, musically, to draw out those emotions.

Q: Did the fact that the film is a true story, as opposed to a fictional adventure, did that affect your Q: Did the fact that the film is a true story, as opposed to a fictional adventure, did that affect your musical approach at all?

Alex Heffes: I think it adds an extra layer of sensitivity that you need to have, in terms of perhaps being restrained in places, and showing respect. At the same time it’s also a movie and it has to work as a movie, so you’re walking a delicate line, always hoping to engage the audience as they’re watching the movie and being respectful of these are real lives playing out. You don’t want to make it into a melodrama or over dramatize things that are already larger than life.

Q: Did you do any research into Nelson Mandela’s life and the times in which this is happening in order to properly enhance what you’re creating, musically?

Alex Heffes: Yeah, I did read a lot about Mandela, and I also talked to a lot of South Africans and musicians while I was there in South Africa. I listened to a lot of source music… A lot of the street music and the protest songs, the music of the struggle, appear on camera and I was sent a lot of that material early on. When I was scoring scenes that needed score in combination with that music, it was important for me to make sure that the two things worked together, so that it becomes an organic whole.

Q: In addition to your primary thematic material, which is centered on this very passionate, sublime, eloquently beautiful music, you’ve also got in contrast this striking tension-building music in cues like “Civil Disobedience,” “Bomb Making,” and “Solitary Confinement.” How did you determine the sound palette for those more suspenseful moments of the score?

Alex Heffes: The astounding thing about the story of Nelson Mandela’s life is that it is full of sublime, transformative emotion, and it’s full of action. He lived an extraordinarily fast-paced life when he was a young man. There is a thriller aspect to this film and to his life. He was on the run, he was a wanted man. I talked with Justin, the director, and the producers about how far they wanted to bring out that thriller aspect, and it’s certainly there in his story, so it’s getting a sense of pace and propulsion in the music in those sequences.

We talked about that being very important to keep the story moving forward. Someone said to me that Mandela’s life has been described like a piece of jazz, constantly moving and riffing and vamping, you know, just having that feel of jazz. Every day was different, every day was exciting, and then he was put on ice for 27 years. It was almost literally as though he was put into a freeze-frame, and then they came out of prison and it started again, bang, bang, bang! It was incredibly fast and before you knew it, within three or four years, he was president of his own country. It’s incredible. And there is this extraordinary propulsion, and energy to his story that I wanted to convey, musically.

Q: You’ve worked with Justin before, on a couple of films, on a TV movie called STOLEN, and on the feature, THE FIRST GRADER. So does your working together now have a kind of shorthand than enables you to work together quite smoothly?

Alex Heffes: It always helps having a relationship with the director, because music is such a difficult thing to discuss in words. When you’ve been through the process once or twice you start to understand one another’s way of communicating. Justin is a very open person and very easy to communicate with, in many ways, so he’s a gem to work with.

Q: What was most challenging for you on scoring this picture?

Alex Heffes: I think walking the line between making it work as a movie and being respectful to the real people portrayed, and giving the audience a sense of satisfaction. My hope is that when they get to the end of the movie, they’ve been taken on a ride, they understand the journey that they have been through, and they feel fulfilled, both dramatically and musically. That was a real challenge and it’s been gratifying to me to have people coming up to me after screenings, as we’ve been doing for the last few weeks, saying exactly that – by the end of the movie they really feel like they’ve been on the journey, and they have arrived at a place. That’s wonderful to me.

Q: Now in addition to the music recorded in South Africa, when you recorded the orchestra at Abbey Road you also brought in South African violinist David Juritz, so you’re adding that same texture that is infused with time and place, with the orchestra material. What did you want David to provide in his soloing during those orchestral sessions?

Alex Heffes: I have worked with David for many years on and off, and it was very important for me to bring him in. I felt as a colleague and a friend, and also as a South African, it was valuable for me to actually talk to him a little bit, about music and the film, and have his perspective. We were lucky to have a few South Africans in the orchestra in London, and actually another colleague of mine who is playing in the strings had actually been imprisoned for some time in South Africa, and I felt it was good to have him there playing on this film, having been through what he had been through. It was sort of a cathartic experience, at least for me, to be able to tell part of his story in music. It was a very moving experience for me and many members of the orchestra were very moved, watching parts of the film and hearing the music. It was quite an extraordinary experience.

Q: An earlier film that also explores a challenging period of time is EMPEROR, which is about the US Army’s occupation of Japan at the end of World War II, and the conflict on how to treat their Emperor Hirohito. How did you approach that film with its shifting political and cultural nuances, while also staying true to the while also staying true to the historicity of the drama?

Alex Heffes: That was an interesting task, and one I enjoyed a lot. I think it’s a film about the meeting of two cultures in a broad sense, which is focused through the primary characters but is much more meeting of two different worlds. My approach was to score the front of the movie, as Gen. MacArthur moves into Japan, in a very strident, victorious way and to take that thematic material and have it gradually become submerged into Japanese culture through the film. Japanese instruments are gradually introduced into the score, and that thematic material which is very self- assured at the beginning of the film, is reworked and made a little darker and a little more complicated, just as the characters do, and as the American forces learn to understand the culture they were coming into. By the end of the film, at the very end of the credits, the opening theme is reprised but in a different form, it’s as though the music is gone through as much a process as the characters have and learned something, and found itself slightly changed.

Q: As a horror thriller, THE RITE is a type of film you haven’t had the opportunity to do very often. How did you face the musical needs of this picture?

Alex Heffes: There were a few things I loved about THE RITE. I loved the way it was shot, I love the way Mikael (Håfström) directs films, and of course Anthony Hopkins is just wonderful, and going back to what I said about how inspiring it is to score someone like Idris and Naomi in MANDELA, scoring Anthony Hopkins in THE RITE was just a treat. You have an actor at the absolute top of his game, and just watching him perform on screen is a jumping off point for me, for music. That was special. My take on the score was that it was less of an overt horror film and more of something psychological that gets under your skin. That probably comes from the main performances. So you try and make that play. I think there’s a sort of religious aspect to it as well which takes the music in a certain direction; it’s set in Italy in the Vatican, so there’s a certain palette that might be associated with that. But the score, I think, does stem from the central performances and trying to treat it as a psychological horror or thriller.

Q: And then you worked with Mikael again in the action film THE ESCAPE PLAN, with Stallone and Swarzenegger. How did you apply music to the needs of this gritty action type of film?

Alex Heffes: Yeah, it was a unique opportunity to score the two great icons of action, and it was huge fun, I must say I really enjoyed it. You could just let your hair down and it was a hugely enjoyable experience. There’s a lot of music in there!

Q: And I guess subtlety is not what you’re looking for in a Stallone/Swarzenegger movie!

Alex Heffes: Yeah, and I love the variety of scoring all these different pictures. Variety is definitely the spice of life!

Thanks to Dan Barry at Chasen & Company for facilitating this interview.