6/24/16 7:31 AM
Film Music at Tribeca 2016, Part 2
The Film Festival celebrates its 15th Anniversary, April 13-24. By Kyle Renick
Continued from Part 1… The subject of many Tribeca Film Festival offerings, both features and documentaries, can be characterized as institutional lunacy. For sheer jawdropping disbelief, it is impossible to top the international premiere of John Dower’s U.K. documentary My Scientology Movie, in which BBC documentarian and journalist Louis Theroux effectively plays “straight man” to deranged Scientology practitioners—lapsed and current, robotically passive or pathologically aggressive, recreating scenes with actors where necessary, as every single claim for demented behavior made in the film is dismissed by the self-identified religion as fiction. The brilliant score is the work of composer Dan Jones, whose extensive credits for film, theatre, television, and art installations include Max, Shadow of the Vampire and Any Human Heart. As the story of My Scientology Movie seems to flow on an hour-by-hour basis, I asked Jones about the music’s evolution. “Editor Paul Carlin, whom I’ve worked with since the late 1990s, invited me to look at the film in London,” he said. “At early stages, it’s as much about helping your editor find the film’s language, and worth pointing out that being a documentary, we really had no idea what was going to come in from the shoot. My strategy, as is often the case when involved pre-lock, is to create an eclectic library of ideas, so we can make comparisons about which styles and approaches are going to work best. That can free things up for the editor to cut in a certain rhythm or style, more so in a documentary where you might not want music in the edit at all. I have quite a ‘high shooting ratio,’ so I really don’t mind that lots of it ends up on the floor. What I was less prepared for, although http://www.filmscoremonthly.com/fsmonline/story.cfm?maID=5639&issueID=138&printer=1
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