my project Photo Bri Hammond
hear my eyes
in the first place would realise they didn’t like them anymore.” It was easier, he decided, to choose the films himself – varying between documentary, narrative and animation – then approach a band and say, “Here’s the project, the venue and the festival. Would you like to do it – yes or no?”
HAYDN GREEN PAIRS LIVE MUSIC WITH FILM SCREENINGS FOR THIS MELBOURNE-BASED PROJECT.
So far, virtually everyone has said yes, including Mick Turner from Dirty Three, who played live over the Chilean documentary The Pearl Button, and electronic band Black Cat, who were paired with Japanese sci-fi film Akira. Pairing the musicians and films is the fun part, Haydn says. “My goal isn’t to make something subversive. I don’t want to match a melodrama with a death metal band – that’s not the angle I’m coming from.” Instead, he tries to choose a band that has a similar style to the film’s original score, “so their interpretation is an evolution of the original”.
Words Leta Keens
Haydn Green used to just go to the movies like the rest of us. But then he took cinema studies at uni, and started analysing films more closely, “learning to see each one as a unique window into a time and place and culture”. For the past three years, he’s been unpacking films sonically via his project, Hear My Eyes, staging movie screenings where the original soundtracks are replaced with new scores, played live.
Once the musicians are on board, he works closely with them, coaching them through the score writing. “Obviously, they know how to write,” he says. “It’s more about choosing when and how much to play. If you play too much, it gets exhausting.”
It all started in Berlin, where Haydn caught a spooky, silent German sci-fi film, Metropolis, with a live score – “a blend of industrial techno, mainstream pop and modern classical music”. He’d seen the movie a fair few times before, but found it bizarre and slightly uncomfortable to watch it in this new light. Haydn had always felt a strong pull to get involved in the film scene, but wanted to do it in a fresh, new way – this idea, he reckoned, fit the bill, and he couldn’t wait to get home to Melbourne and give it a go.
To allow for the new soundtrack, the film’s original score has to be removed, which is not always an easy task. For the French film Fantastic Planet, for instance (which was featured at the Melbourne International Film Festival), stripping the score for the prog-rock-jazz fusion act Krakatau meant wiping out the dialogue altogether. Anyone else would have picked another film, but “we really wanted to make it work, so we hired two French voice actors to act it out,” Haydn says. “It was one of those hurdles we just had to jump.”
As well as watching and reviewing movies for various film festivals around his city, it helped that he was already pretty plugged into the local music scene. In the beginning, Haydn – whose day job is running CULT Cinema & Bar in Brunswick with his partner Niama Wessely – was democratic in his approach. He’d pick the musicians he wanted involved and allow them to choose the movie they worked on, but that turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. “They’d reel off heaps of films, but some of the band wouldn’t have seen them. Then when they’d all watch them, the ones who’d made the suggestions
While Haydn can’t see himself doing more than four projects a year – “I think they’d lose their freshness” – he has loads of films he’d love to screen. “There are some obscure arthouse ones like Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, and it would be really quirky and interesting to do a Wes Anderson film.” As for dream musos, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are high on his wish list. “If we’re being less realistic, though, definitely Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. But that’s a pretty wild dream.”
126