Maxance Vincent
Composer Volker Bertelmann is having quite the busy fall, as the two projects he worked on, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite (Joey’s rave review is here) and Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player (Joey’s positive review is here), not only premiered simultaneously at numerous film festivals, but were also released by Netflix at around the same time, either in cinemas or on the streaming service
Speaking to Awards Radar on Zoom, the Oscar-winning composer states that this experience has been extremely rewarding for him, especially in recent memory:
“There was a period where that just never happened, because I had one film, and then after that, there was a long silence. In a way, that has changed, and I’m very lucky about that. What I personally love about working on two films at the same time is that I can switch and distance myself from one on a given day. It’s a little bit like working on a techno record and on a classical string record. It’s always nice to shift between the left and right sides.
Edward Berger, whom I have now worked with plenty of times and had the biggest success of my career, is a person who demands a little bit, not only for himself, but also for me, that we don’t repeat ourselves. Even though I like that attitude of not repeating with him, there are things in a musical career that are where you’ve developed elements over time and want to use them multiple times, because they work in different contexts.”
In working with Kathryn Bigelow to develop the score of A House of Dynamite, Bertelmann explains that “the nice thing about Kathryn is that she’s not like a person that creates a conversation about her idea on the music, where I suddenly feel like I’m in a cage. She has general thoughts on what the film needs and where she wants to put emphasis on where the tension is needed. After that, she unleashes me.
One thing that can happen is that you have a conversation and you feel there’s a certain expectation of what the score should be, which can put you in a corner. That didn’t happen with Catherine. I went to New York to watch a few assemblies. We went through them and she explained to me what she imagined would happen in her film. I already saw that her film has a documentary style, and you don’t want to destroy that with overwhelmingly weird music. You want to make sure you fit into the context of the film.”
With the movie being divided into three segments, each repeating the same story through different perspectives, Bertelmenn agrees that it does bring parameters to the score into place that he had to acknowledge while working on the music:
“The first is that you don’t want to disconnect the three chapters because they are talking about the same situation. You have films that are episodic, and they have different chapters in different places, which can mean you have different types of music. That was not the case here. I wanted to stay in the same musical world, but at the same time, there is a dynamic development in getting more and more information from the characters. In the very last segment, it could be the loudest, because that is where everything comes together. In the middle of that section, however, we decided to actually go back into silence and give the President on the helicopter music that is very touching and much more intimate. We take the tension out of the thriller and make it more emotional. However, that was a very late decision, and in general, I love structure. I love mathematics, and finding solutions for that.”
In our full conversation below, there was so much more to talk about, including his approach to establishing and building intense tension, how the music responds to Kathryn Bigelow’s documentary style, and how he wanted to compose the film’s divisive ending.
Check out my interview with Volker below and stream A House of Dynamite on Netflix today:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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