Born in 1972 in London, England, Joe Wright learned how to be a director from his father as he explains, “I couldn’t be a cameraman or a designer or an actor. I have to be a director because I learned how to do that from my dad. Generally, I’ve never known quite how to fit in civilian life, but on set, making a film, I know exactly where to go, how to behave and how I fit.” Joe attended the Camberwell College of Arts and trained to be a filmmaker at London’s St. Martins Art School. Twelve years ago he directed his first feature Crocodile Snap, while just two years ago he became the youngest director in history to have a film (Atonement) open the 64^th Venice International Film Festival. Over the years Wright has worked with composers: Simon Fisher-Turner, Rob Lane; but it his momentous collaborations with maestro Dario Marianelli on his last three films that are ground breaking.

It was four years ago when the team of Wright and Marianelli began. “Pride and Prejudice is my first film with a happy ending. Before, I naively thought they were a cop-out, but now I’ve come to believe that happy endings and wish fulfillment are an incredibly important part of our cultural life,” remembers Wright. Pride and Prejudice was a magnificent period piece that has not only begun a great collaboration, but has garnered over forty award nominations, including four Oscar nominations including Best Original Score, two Golden Globes, and won a BAFTA for Joe as best director. It was Wright’s next film Atonement that opened the door to a new dimension when using score and sound together. You can’t forget the memorable opening sounds of the typewriter accompanied by Marianelli’s Oscar winning score that sets the stage for a story of love found and lost caught in the turmoil of a thirteen year old’s (Briony Tallis) distortion, the consequences of a twisted truth that changes the lives of Robbie and Cecilia forever. Wright’s technique continues in The Soloist as we hear the opening sounds of a newspaper’s printing presses, a light switches off, and the films title is exposed. “Film music expresses the intention of the filmmaker rhythmically, pacing is so important. One of the reasons why Dario and I have used the typewriter in Atonement or the printing presses in The Soloist is that they give us the opportunity to use very staccato and driving rhythms that perhaps aren’t necessarily available within classical music,” Joe points out. We hear it in the sound of the freeways, people’s voices inside the mind of Nathaniel Ayers, or a heart pounding away during a rehearsal at the Disney Concert Hall. It’s as if Wright is a composer as well, taking us into the world that he cinematically creates.

At 11:45 in the morning on Friday April 3^rd I talked with Joe, who was in Los Angeles promoting The Soloist. “In fact I was just talking to Dario yesterday about our next collaboration; Indian Summer is currently the working title,” Wright says with optimism, just like a boy who’s found his newest toy. Each time Joe begins to make a new film it’s the adventure of entering the unknown, a journey to another land, and each of his films couldn’t be more different than the next. “Every time I make a film, I feel it gives me the chance to learn something new. I’ve been lucky over the past few years. Things have just happened for me,” he joyfully explains.

This time it’s a journey into a homeless, schizophrenic, Julliard trained musician’s life, who has a dream to play in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a journalist Steve Lopez who tries to make Nathaniel’s dream come true, and the musical inspirations of Ludwig Van Beethoven. “What Beethoven does is that he takes all of these extraordinary morphous, intangible, and in-articulable emotions and experiences and he creates a linear order from them in musical form. It’s that order that Ayers so desperately holds onto and loves,” reveals Joe. It’s this idea, the linear order of classical music fused with score that brings together a fascinating musical fusion. This is the life of a boy genius lost in a world of madness, the opportunity of a lifetime to live a dream and the hope that surrounds it.

How did you discover Dario and why did you hire him to score Pride and Prejudice in 2005?

He was recommended to me by my producer Paul Webster for Pride and Prejudice. Paul had worked on the film The Warrior by writer/director Asif Kapadia. He was very impressed by Dario’s work on that film, so I watched that, met Dario, and went ahead.

 When watching your films I get a sense that the sound effects and the music collide together creating a third element, where does the music fit in?

You can have a shot of skid row and put some kind of lagger (wooden drum) on there or something, it would be a gritty realism bit, but if put a piece of Beethoven (The Soloist) over a shot of skid row suddenly it becomes something else and something hopefully quite sublime. Film music expresses the intention of the filmmaker rhythmically, pacing is so important. One of the reasons why Dario and I have used the typewriter in Atonement or the printing presses in The Soloist is that they give us the opportunity to use very staccato and driving rhythms that perhaps aren’t necessarily available within classical music.

 You talk about film music and sound effects being rhythmic elements. Dario said, “Joe would ask me to write pieces before there’s even a shooting script, just based on ideas, the novel, or a rough draft of the script. I gave this music to him and discovered that he had my pieces playing on the stage as he’s shooting the film, so the actors can walk to the music and get the rhythm from it. When I get to score his film half of the work is done, the music is embedded in the film before I even see a frame of the film, its brilliant.” Is this what you did for The Soloist?    

With all these films Dario has at least composed the main theme before we ever started shooting the film. On Atonement, for instance, he composed the main typewriter theme and when we were filming we were actually shooting with that music playing back at the time, which helped young Saoirse Ronan (Briony) and give her the rhythm of her walk for instance. So when we enter the editing process that means it can actually already be there and is already an integral part of the scene. Obviously with The Soloist, to a large extent, it was rather like making a musical, all the music was there because Jamie had to mime to it. I enjoyed that a lot, it helps me find the mood of a scene while I’m shooting and it also helps me communicate that mood of the scene to the rest of the crew and indeed the cast.

Do you exchange thoughts by explaining to Dario your rhythmical inspirations when thinking of the score?

 Yeah, I do possibly think rhythmically of it while Dario definitely comes from a more melodic place, so I think it’s quite a good meeting of the minds.

 In the filmmaking process when do you start thinking about the music you want for your film?

 It’s actually when I start reading it, very much during the script stage. This is all happening while it’s silent and I imagine it, it starts with rhythms though rather than melodies. I’m not a musical person by any stretch of the imagination in terms of being able to come up with music, I have an appreciation of it, but no talent for creating it, so I’m usually thinking in rhythms. For The Soloist the rhythms were quite romantic really, almost like a waltz because I like the juxtaposition of a romantic and very formal rhythm. It’s quite simple with the kind of chaos of skid row and the chaos of schizophrenia. The music creates an order for Nathaniel, it gives him a melody that shapes the world into something linear and therefore something that he’s able to hold onto and it’s when the music stops that the problems arise.

 What role did the music play in The Soloist and where did you draw the line between the original score and using the classical music of Beethoven?

 I wanted music for a very large part of the film obviously, in fact in one respect it’s all about music. The music really had to be a character in this movie. It was at that point that Dario and I decided together that we should limit ourselves to only Beethoven, even though obviously Neil Diamond is in there as well, so that Beethoven’s character could come out of the film. Dario has basically educated me in music during our collaborations, especially in Beethoven, because he’s a huge fan. It was really an opportunity to learn even more and really look specifically at one symphony in particular, the 3^rd (The Eroica). Within that piece of music I believe there is the full range of human experience, certainly within Beethoven’s entire work there is. It was the idea of juxtaposing that music with life on skid row and showing that perhaps Beethoven understood some things that even now we’re still battling with.

 Where is Dario’s scoring ability the most effective in your film, a part where music and picture come together perfectly?

 The obvious one is what we call The City Symphony, which is when Nathaniel first plays the cello that’s been given to him in the tunnel, and then we rise up and fly across the city. That’s a part that Dario shaped to utter perfection and really conveyed the uplifting quality of Beethoven’s sublime work. He was very clever that Beethoven and indeed so is Dario Marianelli. I think one of the amazing things about Dario in terms of this film in particular, having just won the Oscar, for him then to take on this project with such humility; it was all about him trying to service Beethoven’s music. That humility is something that I find incredibly admirable.

 I agree with you, I had this feeling that this was quite a task and at times difficult for Dario.

 You might be right, yeah, but I think that it was an extraordinarily bold and very wonderful thing for him to have done.

He has to emotionally plug himself into another composer, but try to maintain his own musical identity.    

Absolutely, but at the same time Dario is and I think has been always plugged into Beethoven. If it had been another composer I think maybe it might have been more difficult, but Beethoven has always been Dario’s primary influence. He is a pianist as well as Beethoven. When you go into Dario’s house and are working on the score and he’s thinking, he’d always tinkle around with Beethoven’s melodies on the piano. It’s what just comes out of his fingers without thinking about it. I think he already is somehow strangely joined to Beethoven, his umbilical cord.

What is the most important part of the scoring process that makes the music work for your film? I think it’s the part that happens before I even shoot, the part where I’ve explained to him the kind of atmosphere I want and the kind of overriding themes of the film. This is without any picture, without any real images or even actors in his mind. He simply sat at the piano in his loft playing around with tunes. That’s generally where the genesis is of it all.

Nathaniel is obviously disturbed and has a mental problem, but there’s something deep inside this man when the music plays, no matter what he’s playing. Can you explain that?

No, it’s magical. You’re not able to articulate it. I just can’t articulate that word. It’s an emotion. Funnily enough a friend of mine who’s with me at the moment, we were talking about ballet this morning, and that’s when she quoted Darcey Bussell, the famous prima ballerina. The Royal Ballet Company said that when someone asked her what the ballet she had just seen was about, Darcey Bussell said, ‘If I could articulate it I wouldn’t have needed to dance it.’

I sense with Nathaniel, that when the music happens, it’s the only sense of peace he actually knows.   

You involved the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in The Soloist; tell me about their role and who specifically worked with Jamie Foxx?

The principal cellist Ben Hong was Jamie’s cello instructor and then the L.A. Philharmonic appeared in the film as themselves as well as performing the score. They recorded the score first and then appeared in the film playing it. It was so exciting, Nathaniel Anthony Jr. holds a very special place in a lot of people’s hearts and collectively so in the heart of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, so I think they really wanted to do it for him.

There are a lot of musical elements in The Soloist, but the key is in the drama.

The music is the drama. I hate underscore; I always say to Dario that I never want underscoring. Very, very rarely do I underscore dialog. It’s always the music moments in a film, those are music moments and then there are dialog moments, but we don’t underscore. I like to give the proper space and respect to Dario’s work by allowing the statements of the film to be purely about music.

What do you love about film music?   

I just love films and I love everything to do with films, so I can’t separate what I love about film music from what I love about films. The sound is fifty percent of the film to me. What I love about film is that place where it is unique from every other art form and that is the temporal aspect of it, the meeting of sound and image.

How different is the next film you’re working on musically?

It’s going to be very different musically because it’s all set in India. I imagine that we’ll be collaborating with classical musicians from India. I’ve just started talking about it with him because we’re not shooting it until January, so he’s got a little bit of time. I’ve got a nice long preproduction period on this one.