(Antonio) Sanchez first supplied Iñárritu with a much more traditional percussion score in which each character had a motif, whereupon the director reportedly told him that that was everything he exactly didn’t want. Instead, Sanchez improvised riffs and beats while Iñárritu read through/acted out Riggan’s journey through the script. Using that directive as the basis, he went back to further muddy up the instrumentation —replacing the clean, crisp sounds of his original instrumentation with a scuzzier, seedier feel achieved by using vintage drum heads and a detuned kit. And for certain sequences, like the Time Square scene, the composer and director took to the streets, recording the drums live, complete with ambient noise and outdoor sounds, the better to achieve that you-are-here immediacy. Like everything else in “Birdman,” the rip-it-up-and-start-again approach to scoring is extraordinarily risky and could well have ended up just hollow hubris, but Iñárritu’s breathtaking confidence and Sanchez’s neophyte’s enthusiasm and inventiveness pay off. The score doesn’t just fly —it soars and swoops and occasionally tumbles to earth with a clatter, and it’s impossible to believe that “Birdman” would be half the film it is with any other music.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 01:55:59 +0000
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