Pétur Jónsson tónskáld ræðir um vinnuaðferðir sínar og tónlistina í þáttaröðinni Réttur 3, við vefinn Eurodrama.
Viðtalið er afar ítarlegt og birtist hluti þess að neðan en restina má lesa hér.
Pétur Jónsson’s soundtrack for Case is a haunting and absorbing recording underpinning a harrowing screen drama. Contemplative and moody cues unfurl and follow the gradual reveal of the series.
Standing alone from the show, a soundtrack album released by Anthemico Records is a satisfyingly dramatic listen filled with dark ambience and chillingly effective flits from melancholy to brooding tension. The subtle and potent soundscape paints a mood picture that matches the series’ tone and works on its own as an arresting album.
Composer Pétur Jónsson studied filmmaking in Italy and returned to Iceland where he set up his own production company and directed hundreds of commercials. He has studied music since the age of 10 and was playing professionally in bands at 17. Returning to his creative roots, he set up the music production company Medialux and now composes music for TV series, film trailers, and commercials.
Pétur Jónsson’s recording studio is situated in the old fish-packing district of Reykjavik. An impressive array of vintage guitars hang on the wall and a ZX Spectrum sits on top of a valve amplifier. A remarkable selection of cutting-edge studio technology that would make audio nerds tremble with excitement is housed in the studio. From his studio window, Pétur is able to gaze upon the beauty of Reykjavik’s coastline.
In this hub of sonic creativity Pétur talked about writing the soundtrack for Case, contributions composers make to the art of storytelling, and how he has reminded the industry of a long-forgotten approach to scoring drama.
*Spoiler warning*
Normally composers are employed quite late in the production process. From a producer’s perspective, music is usually an afterthought. With you, it was the reverse. You were one of the first to be engaged in this production? You composed your score before a single scene had been shot. Is this how you always work?
‘I haven’t been doing soundtracks for a very long time because I was a filmmaker. This comes from me being a filmmaker as well, I think that music should be an integral part of the storytelling of the weave of the series from the beginning. I wasn’t the first one to do it here because Ólafur Arnalds had done it before with Baldvin on Life in a Fishbowl. I saw an interview with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross because of their Oscar-winning soundtrack for The Social Network. They described their method of working. They would get a script and compose lots and lots of music and hand it over to the production. At the end of the day when they finished everything, they had already composed maybe 70 or 80 per-cent of the soundtrack. This helps everyone during the process. I know as a filmmaker that working on the music that you are going to be using, instead of using temp music and then giving it to a composer… We have this problem in soundtracking which is that the demo of the temp music that the director or the producer start really loving and you have to do a version of that to make the edit work. That’s not always what you in mind for that scene or it doesn’t relate properly to the sound world you had imagined for the score. I know this because I’ve been doing advertising music for so long. Usually what happens there is somebody comes in, “we want the feeling of this song but it can’t be that song”, so you have to compose something. It’s a tiresome approach. We’re emotion builders. That’s what we do. The emotion if you read it from the script correctly and of course I worked with closely Baldvin right at the start… The story is that he comes to me and says “I have this great script and I want you to write music for the series.” I hadn’t been doing a lot of soundtrack work but we had talked about it. I was going to move into it. What we wound up doing is I composed a five-minute piece that contained lots of emotions that I knew were going to be relevant to what we were going to be doing in the series. A five-minute thing that included a lot of stuff that we would later use for a presentation for the producers. He would make a mood board with images and how he would shoot it and then they would play the music to it and everybody was just sold on that mood. We got a green light to start work.’
‘For me, the philosophical or work side of this is very important. Everybody pays lip service to how important music is to film but when it comes to having the time to doing it properly or the budget, and so on, it’s usually, like you say, an afterthought. You’re rushed because everything else is running late so you have limited time to give to the series. I just felt that this was the wrong way, at least for me, to work and apart from wanting to be one of the guys helping out telling the story. Music is a great part of the storytelling in any good film.’
‘It played out really well because what happened is Baldvin would have cues that he would let the actors listen to on set before they were shooting the scene. They were setting the mood for what it is going to be and then they shoot that scene. They edit the scene on the music. Everything just fits. It saves a lot of trouble. I would compose scenes for the main characters. I have a distinguished theme for every one of them and then I mix them together. We played a little game as well, if you see the lawyer he has a very specific sound. He has a deep piano. That is his thing. We would incorporate that in scenes where you didn’t know who did it. We would plant it there, of course, more for ourselves than the listener. I doubt there are many people who would react to it. As part of the storytelling, you could think OK it might be him. It’s just one subliminal thing that might make you think he did something that he maybe didn’t do. We played a lot with these things. There is a structure of how we spot the whole thing, that it’s not just to spot the scene but also to play a little bit with this. This is another thing that I got inspired to do after I saw my friend Ólafur Arnalds do that on Broadchurch, the first series. We’re a little bit like this, if you see someone doing a smart thing you want to do it yourself.’
‘Instead of being stressful and demanding, before I went on vacation on that year when they shooting I had composed what wound up to be around eighty per cent of the soundtrack in big themes. Of course, it means there’s a lot of work spotting the episodes because you really have to make everything fit. We wrote new music to some cues. I was getting dailies and edited scenes every day. There were a couple of scenes where I looked at them and said OK, we have to do a specific cue for that and I would just write it and send it. They would have the time while shooting to say OK, this is a perfect fit or could we do a little more like this and so on. We could bounce these things between us while shooting and editing. The editor, who used to work with me when I was doing filmmaking, and the mixing engineer were all good friends so there’s an understanding there and a certain trust. I would actually send the editor stems of the music so he would have percussion on a separate track and so on. If a cue was too big or he didn’t need the percussion he would just mute that and I would get that back and if I agreed to it I would say that’s a good call. He had the liberty to play with the tracks. They loved editing on the score. It was very unusual for them as well. I suspect that anyone involved, including the production because they never had to wait a single moment for a cue or for music, it made total sense to everybody involved.’
Sjá restina af viðtalinu hér: CASE: Pétur Jónsson Interviewed – Euro But Not Trash
