An enormous shadow hovers over the characters in “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” and it’s the same one that has been dogging composer Alexandre Desplat ever since he was a teenager in Paris.
That shadow? The music of John Williams.
“He’s such a legend for all of us,” says Desplat, 63, on a Zoom call from London, where he’s been burning the midnight oil on the score for Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming “Frankenstein.” “He’s just the only one to follow.”
Like Williams, Desplat is now a grizzled (though painterly handsome) veteran himself, with hundreds of films to his name. He’s already completed three scores this year alone — for the French-Swedish Palme d’Or nominee “Eagles of the Republic,” Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” and this week’s “Jurassic” heavyweight.
He’s also making his North American conducting debut on July 15 in a grand survey of his film career at the Hollywood Bowl, a fitting, if overdue, coronation of his two-decade reign as an A-list composer in America.
When Desplat began scoring Hollywood films in the early 2000s, his music swept in like a breath of fresh French air — elegant, restrained, melodic, idiosyncratic — and the list of filmmakers who sought him out reads like a sizable section of the Criterion Closet: Terrence Malick, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, Greta Gerwig.
His ride-or-die partner is Anderson, who first employed him on “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in 2007 and who teed up Desplat’s first Oscar win with “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” (He’s been nominated eleven times.) May’s “The Phoenician Scheme” marked their seventh collaboration.
“As I started being a film composer, I had my idols in sight — of course Hitchcock and Herrmann, David Lean and [Maurice] Jarre, [François] Truffaut and Georges Delerue,” Desplat told me in 2014. “All these duets were strong and they showed how important the intimacy between a director and a composer would be for both of them. It’s not only good for the film, it’s good for the composers, because these composers actually developed their own style by doing several movies with the same director.”
In a town too often filled with generic, factory-farmed scores, his were like a gourmet French meal, even though he grew up on the same diet of American movies and their iconic scores. The young Desplat was obsessed with U.S. culture — listening to jazz, watching baseball and the Oscars — and he decided he wanted to score movies after he heard “Star Wars” in 1977. Emblazoned on the cover of that iconic black album were the words “Composed and Conducted by John Williams.”
“That,” Desplat told his friend at the time, “is what I want to do.”
It’s fitting and kind of funny that two decades after charming audiences with a delicate, waltzing score for the 2003 Scarlett Johansson prestige picture “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the composer is now promoting a stomping monster score for a blockbuster behemoth starring Johanssson and a bunch of CGI dinosaurs — and tampering with John Williams’ sacred musical DNA.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” isn’t the first time he’s had to brave the T-rex-sized footprints of his hero: Desplat scored the final two films in the “Harry Potter” series, and he was also the first composer on “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” He left the latter when Tony Gilroy took over the project from original director Gareth Edwards, and before composing any notes.
“I went as far as the change of directors and change of plans,” Desplat explains, “and the weeks passing by, and then I had to move on because I wanted to work with Luc Besson” (on 2017’s “Star Wars”-esque “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”).
Much like his work on “Harry Potter,” Desplat’s odes to Williams in “Rebirth” are more whispers than shouts — though there are a handful of overt declarations of both the iconic anthem and hymn for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dino-masterpiece. More subtle homages arrive in his use of solo piano and ghostly choir, and in the opening three notes of his motif for the team led by Johansson’s character — a tune that almost begins like Williams’ “Jurassic” hymn.
“So there’s a connection,” Desplat says. “I take the baton and I move away from it.”
He composed new leitmotifs for wonder, for adventure, for danger. His score, much like the original, is an amusement park ride full of sudden drops, humor and family-friendly terror, with a few moments of cathartic, introspective relief.
Mostly, Edwards kept pushing him for more hummable motifs.
“When I was tempted to go back to something more abstract — you know, French movie,” Desplat says, winking — “he would just ask me to go back towards John Williams’ inspiration of writing great motifs that you can remember and are catchy.”
Desplat worries this is becoming an extinct art in Hollywood. “I don’t hear much of that in many movies that I watch,” he says. “It’s kind of an ambient texture — which is the easiest thing to create.”
In college, he would listen to the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” score on a loop, and as his own scoring career developed, he was paying keen attention to John Williams’ more intimate chamber scores like “The Accidental Tourist” and “Presumed Innocent” — as well as juggernauts like “Jurassic Park.” Besides the music itself seeping in, he learned that it was important to score every kind of film, no matter how big or small. Williams’ work also taught him “that I could have something elegant, classical, but with some seeds of jazz in the chords or in the way the melody evolves.”
Whenever he hears someone talking dismissively about Williams, Desplat gets defensive. “I want to punch them,” he says, only half kidding.
“He’s the master, what can I say?” Desplat told me in 2010. “He’s the man. He’s the last tycoon of American movie music. So that’s everything said there. He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”
When Desplat received his first Academy Award nomination, for “The Queen” in 2007, the one person who called from Los Angeles to congratulate him was Maurice Jarre, composer of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago.”
Desplat had met the French legend a few times over the years, including an early invitation to a mixing session for the 1990 film, “After Dark, My Sweet.” Desplat was aghast when he saw director James Foley taking away Jarre’s melody and all the various musical elements on the mixing board, save for a simple electronic thump.
The young composer expressed his dismay and Jarre calmly said: “It’s his film. I have to accept that.”
“That’s a lesson that I learned very early on,” Desplat says. “I’ve never forgotten that, because it’s still the same,” he laughs.
He was also warmly received as a young man by Georges Delerue, the great serenader of the French New Wave in films like “Jules and Jim” and “Contempt.” “They were so kind,” Desplat says, “such sweet men, both of them.” (Michel Legrand? Not so much, Desplat says: “He said awful things about me in books.”)
What they all have in common — besides a penchant for composing beautiful music — is the defiant, transatlantic leap from the French film industry where they started to the highest perch in Hollywood. Jarre left Paris in the early 1960s after the enormous success of “Lawrence” and never looked back, forging meaningful partnerships with directors like Peter Weir and Adrian Lyne. Delerue uprooted from Paris to the Hollywood Hills after winning his first Oscar in 1980 and scored a few hits including “Steel Magnolias” and “Beaches.”
Desplat started professionally in France in 1985 and wrote roughly 50 scores before “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the English-language film that put him on Hollywood’s radar. He continues to do French films amid the summer blockbusters and American art house pictures.
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”
He enjoys the freedom of a big-budget project. “To be able to have a studio say, ‘Go, write what you need to write.’ The director, he wants an orchestra, he wants 95 musicians. Great! They don’t even say anything. You just go and you record. They book the studio. They book the musicians.”
Still, the limitations he trained under gave Desplat some of his greatest strengths: creativity, resourcefulness, speed. He had to orchestrate everything himself, which means his music bears a distinctive fingerprint. And composing for small, sometimes unorthodox ensembles gave his music a clean, transparent signature as opposed to the all-too-typical wall of mud.
He can’t say much about his 100-minute score for “Frankenstein,” which he just finished recording with a giant orchestra and choir at both Abbey Road and AIR Studios, and which comes out on Netflix in November. The reason he does so many films, Desplat proposes, is because he’s lazy.
“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy. That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”
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