(Photo by Kaye Song)
In a Hollywood always asking for a score that sounds like nothing else ever created before, Jerskin Fendrix’s music for “Poor Things” is the genuine first-on-earth laboratory experiment come to wonderfully bizarre life. Stepping forth from a brain transplant alchemy of warped tinkertoy sounds, sweetly unhinged melody and beyond high-pitched voices, movie debuting English composer Jerskin Fendrix embodies the mad science child-to-woman pilgrim’s progress of the irresistible Bella Baxter as his own alt. Henry Higgins. Except these musical lessons in sexual and philosophical morays are taught with a sound akin to a one-man band where everything deliberately gets played wrong. It’s a perfect match for the confrontational style of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, a master of the confrontational feel bad film in such films as “Dogtooth,” “The Killing of the Sacred Deer” and the slightly more acceptable “The Favourite.” Bringing normalcy or empathy has never been his off-putting style, let alone bringing any sort of melodic convention to his soundtracks. But his reteaming with “Favourite” actress Emma Stone here has also brought something unique to his approach – namely getting likeability and emotion into a picture, let alone a score that can be listened to a second time, and many more beyond that. But that doesn’t mean anything remotely “normal” in any department of this delightfully warped #metoo spin on Mary Shelley’s creation given a notable sex change.
So, leave it to Lanthimos to discover Fendrix, an alt. musician best known for his work surrounding Brixton’s music scene and his album “Winterreise.” He comes to task with all the rule-breaking enthusiasm of someone who’s never done this thing before. And like Bella, Fendrix engages in the act with slyly enthusiastic passion. For a film set in some surreal steampunk Victoriana that will likely make Terry Gilliam smile with envy, Fendrix’s mainly stripped down, ironic sound conjures Scottish bagpipes, horror movie theremins angelic cooing and the grand organs of England. And better yet it’s melodic in its own way, conjuring the Europe-hopping adventures of magical Candide-meets-Frankenstein as well as the darkness of a male-dominated world that just can’t handle a truth-telling libertine. It’s a score that announces as unique a boundary-pushing voice in scoring that’s been heard in a revolution of alt. musicians turned composers. And given the Oscar bestowed to the striking batshit likes of Ryan Lott’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” there’s quite a good chance for this already acclaimed film and performance to sweep up Fendrix in its enticingly strange and sensuous spell.
Photo by Yorgos Lanthimos
This is kind of insanely unique score that will have people asking, “What planet did this guy come from?” What’s your answer to that?
I love that question. I happen to hail from a remote farming county in England called Shropshire, which is in the midlands and borders Wales. It’s a great place. It’s where I grew up and learned how to write music. I learned most things there I suppose, so I do think the landscape had a great influence on me. It was a place where literally nothing happened. It was just fields and most of my friends lived on farms. We’d just hang out and listen to music from the internet on Bluetooth speakers. I was very much removed from any “scene” or any cultural landscape that you get from growing up near or in a city. That might go somewhere to explaining my music because I also I came from a very academic family. They were really interested in literature, music and theology. General humanities stuff is very much in my blood.
How did you begin your mad experiments for “Poor Things?”
Yorgos listened to an album I’d made with pop songs called “Winterreise” and got in touch and asked me to score the film. The opportunity basically pinged out of the sky for me. I began writing the score six months before they started shooting. I got the script and all of the art and production design and spent a while just researching in a very Empirical way. I went to a medical library in London that has a lot of documents from the Victorian era. I also tried to research in a more abstract way by thinking of how you could convey your emotions developing if they were accelerated from a juvenile state to hyper mature state. So none of my preparation for the “Poor Things” score came from any music. Yorgos didn’t want any references or any temp music track. I was really only thinking about very specific and unusual non-musical things, so I think it was inevitable that the score ended up sounding reasonably of its own breeding. The bareness and sparseness of it were quite striking by design. As a director, Yorgos lets you come to your own conclusions without driving you to them. I could get as infinitely weird as I wanted to, and it was a pretty seamless process with him. He said “yes” or “no,” and it was in the film, or not.
Did it strike you that “Poor Things” is basically a Frankenstein story. In its way, it reminded me of a feminist version of the 1973 TV movie “Frankenstein: The True Story” in how the character starts off very childlike, and then matures to intelligence – but here far less tragically.
The Frankenstein thing takes such a visual and stereotypical place in our cultural imagination. But actually, at the core of the original Frankenstein story is this really original and complex philosophical and sociological tale about how you can control things, what things become and what free will means. People have applied the concept to political and religious things which can make it super interesting. But with this movie it’s a complete aneurysm-inducing surreal beautiful film with dream-like graphics. Yet I didn’t want to just fall into to “come up with stuff that was weird and odd just for the sake of it.” I’ve seen stuff like that happen and I don’t like it. So I had to remember that at the heart of this aesthetically unusual film is a really amazingly communicated set of emotions and an amazingly developed series of characters who convey some really important emotional information. Part of the score’s sparseness was trying to think about the psychological interior of these characters. What does it feel like to literally be a kid and to suddenly fall in love with a person? To experience horror in the world for the first time? It’s not a polished or elegant thing with big orchestral sweeping stuff. It’s quite raw and unpleasant. And even the positive things can be quite unpleasant in how overwhelming they are. That’s why I decided for the score to have this unsettling presence.
For me the most telling shot is where you see a musician on the ship handling every instrument. In that respect, the whole score seems to be played a deranged one-man band in the best possible way.
That’s basically who I am, so that makes sense.
The film also has a steampunk fairy tale aspect that made me think of the work of Terry Gilliam.
One thing I liked were the early Disney animated films, where at the end you’d have this very quick overture of all the different themes and songs. In that way I wanted the end of “Poor Things” to sound like that kind of “happy ending.” But earlier on, less so. Some of the cuter noises I just put in because I found the story and characters very cute. I think that Max and Bella’s relationship is adorable and bestowed upon it the cutest piece of music in the film that I feel very attached to. It’s not a place that a lot of music goes to in a movie of this kind. I think Norm McDonald made a very important point about comedians, especially a contemporary breed of “shock” comedian. He said that any comedian can make someone burst out laughing. But it takes a real comedian to make someone smile. I thought that was a really interesting point. So there are a lot of places in the film where the score could have gone someplace that was shocking and unpleasant. But letting the music be really sweet and adorable in a shameless way was really important to me.
How did you want the music to chart Bella’s emotional progression?
The progression is really weird as well because she never becomes “normal” at any point. She starts off as being childish and adolescent, then something just somehow clicks, and she becomes kind of superhuman and she surpasses all of the other “normal” characters. The score becomes wider in its spectrum along with her. There’s more depth to the orchestration. The harmonies start to become more complex. It’s not just like the music is only being sad, happy or alarming. There’s mixed feelings which have all the complexities of adult emotion. But it still has to retain a naivete, rawness and honesty that’s central to Bella’s character. So I didn’t want the score to gradually seep into being the same themes your heard at the start but played now with a very elegant orchestra. The music still needed to have that rawness it starts out with.
How did you put together such a unique ensemble?
The instrumentation was a really early thing I was trying to think about before I did too much work. I wanted a solid idea of what materials I’d wanted to be sculpting with. The idea of breath was really important to me. I played with the difference that comes from wind instruments that come from a human breath like a flute and instruments that have mechanized breath, like a pipe organ or accordion. A trumpet sounds like how people talk with a range of pitches. But with instruments that are mechanically breathing like an accordion, I needed to make it bend like a human voice to give it that impression of re-animation. That makes some of the music sound quite disturbing in a way because it gives you an idea of a body not doing what it should be, which is sort of what Bella is. There are also a lot of things that sound like human voices that aren’t human voices.
How did you want to reference “horror” scores as it were, especially with music that sounds like an organ and a Theremin here?
Anything that sounds like a Theremin is probably me singing, which goes to the idea of processing human breath. I wasn’t thinking about other films to be honest, but I’m sure there are overlaps.
Nothing is ever played perfectly in the score. It makes the score quite funny in a good, ironic way.
You could find it hilarious in a bad way if you’d like! It’s totally up to you. I really like jokes and humor. I think one of the reasons Yorgos hired me is that we see humor and art in a very similar way. It’s something that is actually covertly extremely powerful and aggressive. It can get a point across in a far more incisive way than something a bit more sober. Jokes in instrumental music are hard to define because jokes need words. Some of the really dark scenes here are expressed through what I would call “joke format” I guess.
How did you create Bella’s theme?
One of the conceits of the film is that every person who comes across Bella seems to really fall for her and realize there’s something special about her. When she’s having sex with Toinette at the Paris brothel it’s one of the rawest pieces where you could feel that this is someone you’re falling for. It’s full of romantic emotion, kind of Hollywood-y in a way.
I’ve found Yorgos to have an exceptionally nasty streak through his films, but you could say that “Poor Things” is his first picture to have a literally real, likeable heart to it.
I’m generally quite a sensitive person, and I like nice emotions. Like I said, I think there’s something subversive about giving in to cuteness and having a heart. It feels like an almost untrendy thing to achieve for a film with a high artistic pedigree.
What do you think that audiences used to “normal” film scores will think of this?
Hard to know. I’m so far past the horizon of objectivity that I can’t tell you what people will think about it. I do realize that the score is quite prominent, and a lot of times it’s the only thing happening on the soundtrack.! I’ve noticed that some people refer to bits of it as being “atonal,” which I think they use when they’re trying to describe music as being grating or uncomfortable. Because musically it really isn’t atonal. So I’m aware that the score could have been more friendly, but I think the music poses harder questions than it needed to, and I’m really glad it did.
Given that the Academy has shown an appreciate for tonally unique scores like “The Social Network,” what would you think if you got a nomination among the many this film is sure to get?
I’m not sure. It’s not a thing I tend to think about particularly. Before I worked in film, I was keenly aware that some of my favorite scores ever won Oscars like “The Lion King.” And I was aware that some of my favorite scores ever didn’t even get shortlisted like the ones you’d hear in Akira Kurosawa films. The whole thing is kind of fun and I really admire the enjoyment and spectacle of it. But I think that any serious artist, whilst being flattered by that sort of thing, would hopefully not see it as a reflection of the quality of their work. So much stuff in history arguably should get that sort of attention, and stuff that shouldn’t be has. It’s the same with all kinds of awards things. I really like them, but I hope they wouldn’t alter my perception of my own work.
Do you think you could do something “normal?”
I think that would actually be the most controversial thing I could do! I think I could come up with something orthodox. I’d love at some point to do the songs and score of a Disney musical. That’s been my dream for so long, so I hope they’re listening!
See “Poor Things” in theaters, with Jerskin Fendriz’s score available on Milan Records HERE.
Special thanks to Jamie Bertel at Sony Music