In a movie year where discourses between very smart people have become the sexy bomb, there’s no more thrilling mind rush than “Freud’s Last Session.” As written and directed by Matt Brown, “Freud” marks his second feature after 2015’s “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” which detailed the real-life friendship between Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and English professor G.H. Hardy. Now Brown tackles the even more evocative, imagined discourse of God vs. Reality between “Chronicles of Narnia” writer C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) and Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins – who’d not-so coincidentally played Lewis before in 1993’s “Shadowlands”). “Session” is set in an England on the cusp of WW2, a land where the Jewish Freud is now a refugee from the distinctly unthinking Nazis who’ve taken over his beloved Vienna. The clock runs compellingly on this frenemy duel of wits and ideas, as given mesmerizing musical voice by the filmmaker’s composing brother Coby Brown.
With a songwriting background that has seen his tunes appear on such shows as “One Tree Hill,” “Invasion” and “Everwood,” Brown made his composing debut alongside Brown’s cinematic one with “The Man Who Knew Infinity.” With scoring credits since including “Guns for Hire” and the miniseries “Blue Sky Metropolis” and “Disconnected” alongside music supervision on the upcoming “Downtown Owl,” Brown has now returned to his brother’s fold with utmost elegance. Using chamber-like orchestration to evoke both Lewis’ trauma on the WW1 battlefield and a tooth-plagued Freud’s tormented relationship with his beyond dutiful daughter Anna, Brown introduces surreal electronics to the score, conveying a far bigger musical picture beyond the couch trip, along with the intellectual titans’ illuminating flashbacks and bomb raid warning trips outside the office.
It’s a score that’s all about the interior between unwavering belief and jolly cynicism, casting an eccentric spell that’s at once well suited for a costume drama and the enduring battle of ideas beyond it. Coby’s “Session” makes for a soundtrack of captivating, welcoming intellectualism for one of last year’s most unsung and smart films – one whose music and words are well worth awards attention and most importantly of all, thought.
Tell us about your musical background and what got you into composing?
I got into composing from the song writing world. I grew up playing guitar and did a short stint at Berklee in Boston, but pretty quickly realized I was more into songwriting than anything else. I moved to NY after a semester and change and started putting bands together. I had a big health time out in 2006, and after that I got into composing, learning on whatever jobs I could get. It’s kept me growing as a musician because it left me help tell a story that was someone else’s. After years and years of having to wear every hat and do everything that goes into being a performer and promoting my own story, it’s been nice to just be responsible for the music for someone else’s story.
Talk about your time writing songs for such series as “One Tree Hill,” “Everwood,” “Men in Trees” and “Shameless.”
Those are licenses where a music supervisor will use a song in an episode of a show. They’re total crap shoots; you never know where and how it’s going to end up, but they are always nice to get! I had the opportunity to work with director Rod Lurie on the end credits song for his film “Nothing but The Truth” and that was amazing. He wrote the lyrics and I wrote the music and performed it for the soundtrack. It was an amazing opportunity to get to be a part of one of his films.
Your very first score for Matt Brown’s 2015 film “The Man Who Knew Infinity” dealt with very heady stuff straight off the bat in its true-life tale of the friendship between an Indian mathematician and an English professor. What was that experience like, and do you think it set the course for Matt’s even more iconic tale of intellectual camaraderie with “Freud’s Last Session?”
I did a couple other things before “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” so I’d had a chance to get my feet wet. Still, that collaboration was intense. Matt’s my brother, so I watched him try to get that movie made for literally years. Once he was able to bring me on, I just wanted to make sure I delivered for him. It was a steep learning curve – a lot of music to write, both orchestral and Indian – but I had a chance to really assemble a team of collaborators, Paul Koch doing some writing and helping produce the score, Justin Stanley mixing and Stephen Coleman orchestrating, and we also had a budget to record an orchestra and a group of Indian musicians which was a miracle. I worked remotely with an incredible Indian engineer and producer, Sai Shravanam, and we recorded the orchestra in Prague. I learned so much both about what to do and what not to do and I’m extremely grateful for that experience. It was where I really learned what goes into making music for film.
As for Matt, I don’t know if “Infinity” led him to “Freud,” but it certainly showed him to be able to take on intellectual period dramas. Matt’s an incredible writer and has this ability to breathe life into characters and stories that is just staggering. He’s been drawn to heady, intellectual stories, but I think that’s only a fraction of what he can do.
Matt and Coby Brown at the premiere of “The Man Who Knew Infinity”
Was “Freud” the same kind of collaboration between you both?
“Freud” was different from “Infinity” in that I had time to write some music based on the script. Most of the film takes place in one room between two people so we talked about having it be a much smaller band than “Infinity.” I’d send him ideas and he’d earmark things he liked and then he and his editor, Paul Tothill, began dropping them into the edit.
When you get a film like this, do you do a deep dive into the lives and work of the people you’ll be scoring, namely Freud and C.S. Lewis? If so, what did you find most enlightening about them that translated to your score? Did you have any musical inspirations as well?
I tried to stick to what was in front of me. My Dad’s a psychiatrist so I’ve probably given Freud more thought than I wanted to over the years. I think in the end, I felt like there was so much already on the page to use as musical inspiration, but getting to write for a smaller band was really fun for me. There’s nothing to hide behind and you have to make really clear musical choices, not that you normally don’t, but it was exciting to sort of bare it all and see if it could stand on its own. In song world I guess the comparison is the acoustic guitar test. If you can’t pull an idea off with just an acoustic guitar, then it’s usually back to the drawing board.
How did you want to musically differentiate CS and Freud, particularly given that CS, like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, is haunted and inspired by their WW1 experiences, while Freud has just escaped the oncoming Nazi threat?
I wrote for them in terms of their belief in God or lack thereof, in the case of Freud. Freuds at the end of this great big life where he’s literally invented a new field of medical science but there’s also this niggling uncertainty as the clock closes in on him. There’s a real darkness below his impish exterior that I tried to get to with the chord changes underneath him.
With regard to Lewis, his belief is his drug of choice. There’s a yearning in him for God’s love to solve for all the bits of his life that he can’t deal with or doesn’t understand, so I was looking for something that felt atmospheric and hopeful for him.
How did you want to evoke the film’s setting in England while also conveying Vienna’s most famous analyst living there?
I don’t know how much I did, but I think it may be most evident in the scenes at the beginning when we’re walking with Lewis to the train station and then entering into Freud’s home. I tried to keep the music organized and polite for lack of better words, which I guess for me meant subtle bits of woodwinds and string ostinatos and then particularly with the piano as Lewis enters Freud’s front gate.
What’s the challenge of scoring a film that’s mainly driven by words and ideas as opposed to action – particularly where the “battle” is waged between two different trains of thought, that being God vs. “reality.”
We were all very conscious of the fact that less is more. We had Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode going toe to toe on the big questions of existence and none of us wanted to step on their toes. I think most of the music occurs during the flashbacks and the scenes where we’re outside. The challenge was coming up with music that worked to underpin the basic emotion of surrendered belief and staunch atheism. Once we’d sorted out these two worlds sonically, we were mostly off to the races.
“Freud” is anything but a staid film in terms of its interest and even excitement. How do you think the film and score subvert the idea of the drawing room psychoanalysis picture one might think of at first?
I think the flashbacks were great counter ballast to all the heady discussion in the Freud’s study. I thought Matt did a fantastic job of keeping this film moving and engaging. I’m a sucker for period sets and I loved seeing where we went each time the film took us outside of his study. Musically, we just tried to tell the story that was on the screen already, which was so evocative that it made it feel very natural and easy to do. As I mentioned earlier there were some polite bits of music, but I there were lots of places where I got to dig in on the strings or bathe things in reverbs to create a dreamy sort of haze which was a blast. So, for instance when Lewis is shipped away from home there are these dry sul pont cellos that then give way to this idea we called “blurred spaces”, which was cellos in reverse played almost free time and set way back in the mix, all in an effort to draw you into this dream world Lewis’s brother created for him in the wake of their mother’s death.
Anthony Hopkins gives a particularly fun performance here. How did you want to capture that sly aspect that he brings to Freud?
Freud may have been wearing tweed three-piece suits, but over the course of his life we all know he’d seen it all – he followed his patients’ minds to every dark corner they could reach. He was maybe the first person to give society permission to have dark and weird thoughts. So, to me, that seemed to be the source of his impishness and his genius. It felt like he had extra voltage running through him, so I felt like those cello arpeggios were a pronouncement of that extra “genius” energy of his, but who knows..
The film also powerfully details the tormented bond between Freud and his daughter Anna, with the plot’s drive about when she will finally get to her father’s residence. How did you want to capture that fraught father-daughter-patient relationship?
That music is shared between them. Not only are they both analysts, but they’re father and daughter and he can’t seem to figure out seeing her as anything beyond an extension of himself. It’s Freud at his most Freudian, analyzing his own daughter, which is abhorrent and would get your medical license suspended today, but he’s Freud, so he does it anyway because he’s just as human as any of us and makes all kinds of egregious mistakes. So that music felt very appropriate there.
How did you want to keep things vibrant, but not instrumentally anachronistic in the way you combined the “classical” use of orchestra and chamber instruments alongside electronics here.
That was something Matt had wanted from the get-go, and it was a great call. I think the ether dream sequence is the most obvious “electronic” cue, and I think it worked because there was this dream like quality running through the film. So, for those cues that needed that kind of atmospheric, sound design-y vibe. It didn’t matter if it was orchestral or synths, it was just about achieving that intention of creating a dreamy soundscape.
Your next film also deals with a real subject in “Fight Like a Girl,” which is about a Congolese woman who escapes oppression to become a boxer. Tell us about the project and its score.
“Fight Like a Girl” is a collaboration with director Matt Leutwyler. We’ve been friends for a long time, and I’ve made several videos with him for songs of mine over the years. We also worked together on a web series he created during covid called “Disconnected” that shot on four continents during lockdown. He spends a lot of time in Rwanda and came across this true story of a boxing coach in Congo who trains young female boxers in Kigali. Matt shot all over Rwanda and Congo and got some incredible performances and along with absolutely stunning footage. I worked in Los Angeles and then Matt connected me with some African based musicians, Radek Bond Bednarz and Sinaubi Zawose, to sweeten the score up before Paul Koch mixed. The film will hopefully come out later this year, but it’s been playing at festivals in Africa and India and the score won an African Movie Academy Award this past October which was an incredible honor.
It’s rare now that you have a film where very smart people can rationally talk about differences without hating each other, or coming to blows. Which argument in the end do you “buy?” C.S.’ or Freud’s?
Haha, yikes… I’m not religious, but I’m also not an atheist. I think energy has to go somewhere, so when you die, I’d like to think there’s something else, not God, but maybe some kind of divine intelligence you fold back into. Or maybe it is all just a video game, I don’t know, but I sure hope not. I suppose it’s really whatever gets you through the night. I think the bigger thing I’m taking away from “Freud’s Last Session” is that you can disagree and still be civil. The world needs a whole lot more of that right now.
See “Freud’s Last Session” in theaters, with Coby Brown’s score available on Filmtrax HERE
Visit Coby Brown’s website HERE
Special thanks to Jim Barne