Red Stewart chats with Piers Burbook de Vere about Little Monsters….
Piers Burbook de Vere is an Australian composer who has been working in the film and television industries since the mid-2000s. He is best known for his compositions for projects like I Rock, Down Under, and the Sundance film Little Monsters, which Flickering Myth had the chance to interview him about, and I in turn had the honor to conduct:
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. I know how busy you’ve become these days, so thank you for finding time.
No worries.
What’s the composing industry like in Australia? Is it something that’s still burgeoning?
I think Australia has a number of really talented composers. Often, those guys and girls tend to go off-shore, like many of our talented actors do to seek more opportunities. There’s definitely a community of extremely talented composers in Australia, and Sydney in particular.
Music is of course a huge part of Australia. In terms of worldwide recognition, do you think these composers are still finding their way into the public eye?
That’s a good question for someone who can speak to how the industry has changed. I believe that there’s a great heritage of Australian filmmakers and composers throughout the last few decades.
Absolutely, and I definitely hope we get more talent, especially in the US, because film is a worldwide medium- having more international folks makes things ultimately better.
Right, I agree with that.
Before Down Under, you were doing primarily shorts. Given the inherently small narrative space of a short movie, is it easier or harder to find an emotional connection with the project, and subsequently translate that fervor to a score?
Working on a short film is definitely a unique challenge because you don’t have the time and space to develop themes and ideas, whereas with a film there’s a lot more opportunity to actually create and reuse themes and evolve them as the story develops.
So yeah, short films are challenging like that.
I kind of figured that. You have shorter post-production period too. Now you’ve begun a frequent collaboration with Abe Forsythe, having done five projects together. What’s the experience like collaborating multiple times with the same director versus having a good experience working once with a director?
I think that composers and directors tend to work together for stretches of films, whether short or long projects, because there’s a language that you develop and build upon, as well as a process of discovery that is exciting, and can lead you into new and unexpected places creatively. But it can also present challenges, repeating collaboration with a director. For example, one of the biggest challenges that we had working on Little Monsters was the necessity to actually go through a process of un-learning techniques that we had developed together on previous projects, because they weren’t applicable to this new film. So we had to kind of abandon what we’d learned through working together and create a new language to explore these projects.
That’s fascinating to learn about. I always figured that composers and directors, once they figure out that rhythm, build upon that feeling with subsequent projects. So it’s fascinating to hear that it’s sort of like re-learning to work together again.
Yeah, and part of that meant taking a step back. Like comedy presents a very unique challenge to begin with, and Abe and I share certain sensibilities when it comes to the types of comedy scores that we tend to gravitate towards. For instance, over the years, we discovered an initial appreciation for the mastery of Carter Burwell and his ability to score moments of comedy with a sincerity that not only provides all this space for the performances to shine, but almost becomes a character of its own within the world of the movie.
We both love that, and we had developed a storytelling language like that over the five or so short films and his last feature film that we worked on together. But, as I said, the bigger challenges were, half-way through it, it became clear that we needed to unlearn that language because it just wasn’t the type of score that this film was asking for- we had to develop a new process from the beginning, which was kind of terrifying, and part of that meant that Abe needed to help me learn how to listen to the film, and not just try to impart something on the story that I already knew how to do based on my preconception of what type of score I had thought it should be because it was an Abe Forsythe film.
Learning that from Abe has made me a better musician. That’s something that I’m really grateful for taking on this project. If I could keep doing projects like that where I have such a profound learning experience, I’d be happy forever. What else can you really ask for? [laughs]
If I could write one thing on the wall of my studio, or tattoo it on my hand so that I can see it when I’m playing keyboard, it would be “get out of the way.” Learning to get out of your own way, once you do that, allows the story to illuminate for you exactly what it wants and what it needs, and suddenly it becomes so obvious and so easy.
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