“Spiritually inspiring” might be a good way to describe Lebanese-born composer Gabriel Yared’s film music, which can quite ably express a character’s soul and a story’s essence. Yared, who lived in France for many years, has worked with an enviable list of filmmakers that includes Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Altman, and formed enduring relationships with Jean-Jacques Annaud, for whom he scored “The Lover” (1991) and “Wings of Courage” (1994), and Anthony Minghella, for whom he scored “The English Patient” (1996), “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999), and “Cold Mountain” (2003). Yared’s music for Minghella’s films have enjoyed both popular and critical success: His “The English Patient” score won an Academy Award for Best Score, and his “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Cold Mountain” scores received Oscar nominations. His scores for the tragic love stories of “City of Angels” (1998) and “Message in a Bottle” (1999) and the cold journey of “Map of the Human Heart” (1992) are further testament to his wide-reaching abilities and musical passion. Would you talk about your discovery of music while growing up in Lebanon, and how it eventually brought you to write music for films? I was born into a family with no musical or artistic traditions and a very strict attitude toward education. I was sent at the tender age of four to a Jesuit boarding school. My family felt it was an important place to get a respectable education. So I was thrown very early into great solitude. I did not have a musical role model, so I don’t know where it comes from actually. I believe that I have an angel watching over me all the time. I think I was born with music; I didn’t discover it. In my non-musical family, I was considered a black sheep. Nobody understood my interests. My first approach to music was with a teacher at the Jesuit school who used to play the organ in the church. He would give me a half-hour a week. The first thing I realized that that I most enjoyed reading it. I was not interested in being a virtuoso of Chopin or whomever. I just wanted to learn how to read it. I continued to do this until the age of fourteen, when my teacher died. It is sad, because he used to feel that I would never be a musician or do anything in my life in music. I felt surrounded by enemies. When my teacher died, I still had the key to the organ. So I used to go there to read and play all the works I could of Bach and Handel or any music I could find. At the time, I was not influenced by Arabic music, which I did not like, although I used to hear it coming from a radio outside the walls of the boarding school. After boarding school, I discovered that I was attracted to some pop music, like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and The Beatles. At the same time I was discovering Schumann, Beethoven, and Mozart. This all went together for me. I have never made any difference between pop and the classics and world music. For me, any music is interesting as long as it brings you into consciousness, into discovering that you are a holder of a diamond and you have something beautiful to deliver. My influences have been very diverse. Very early, like at the age of seventeen, I was interesting in what people today call “world music”, because I thought of myself as a son of the world. I’m not really born Lebanese or born whatever. I’m just a born composer and musician. I was attracted to almost all music. Bulgarian singing, pygmies, Bali’s music – all of those things were influences when I was young. How did this lead to film music? I went to France, where I ended up staying until two years ago. I became an orchestrator for French pop singers. Among them was Francoise Hardy, an icon in France from the sixties until now. She was married to Jacques Dutronc, a very famous French actor who worked with Jean-Luc Godard. As I was producing his wife’s work, he was very interested in my music composition and orchestration, and when Jean-Luc asked him if he knew somebody who could adapt some work from Ponchielli, a nineteenth-century Italian composer, he said, “Yes, Gabriel Yared.” This is how I stepped into film music. Before stepping into Jean-Luc’s project, I had no interest in going to the theater or going to see a movie. When I was very young, I would see “Spartacus” and “Ben-Hur” and the other big films then. And I saw the Hitchcock and Bergman films, but I didn’t have any culture in films because I was much more interested in internal images versus external images. This is because all of my inspiration comes from being silent and completely focused inside. I always felt that the images outside were less interesting. They don’t appeal to my imagination. And this specific lack of interest in external images kept me from imagining that I might become a film composer one day. It’s not that I don’t have an interest in films, because I think there are great artists who have directed great films. It was that all of my money went to buy records and music scores by Bach, Schumann, Stravinsky, Barók, et cetera. It’s not because I dislike images, but I have devoted much more of myself to music and only music. I don’t see myself looking at a moving picture and being inspired to composer music. I am inspired by looking into a painting or a sculpture or at Mother Nature. A fictional picture doesn’t speak to me in a direct enough way to be inspiring. Jean-Luc came to me and, by a great coincidence, he said, “I don’t want to show you any picture. I just want to tell you the story for which I want themes. Just read the script and, then, let’s talk.” So my first approach to film music was through a man who didn’t even want or didn’t care to show me the picture. He just told me the story. We talked about music. We talked about the main characters. Then I dived into my work – my first film music. I have a very special approach to film-composing, and I don’t specifically see myself as a film composer. I’m just a composer, and I approach all my work – whether a film or a ballet score or even a ten-second jingle – with an equal sense of conscience. I feel that the cinema audiences are as worthy of hearing high-quality music as the concert-hall audiences. Music should not be written for less-sophisticated audiences. Music for different media or different functions should be quite simply music – different music, maybe, but still music. I don’t see myself as a good film composer because I don’t have all these methods for scoring a battle or a fight… I don’t know how to do that. I know there are methods to that, but I don’t want those methods. I don’t want to go through the Hollywood vocabulary of film music as it has been established through the past sixty years. I would like to escape from that vocabulary. You say that images aren’t all that important to you, but I find that your work produces so much imagery in the way that, for example, Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia captures an image of the land. It does, because the internal images that are within you are expressed as internal images. So the idea is to close your eyes and listen to your heart, not to look at the picture and say, “I will do this music from here to there.” Listen to all the things in your memory – the script, your conversations, going to the shooting stage, your meeting with the actors – and try to express the main feeling that you get from that and not look to a specific scene. It has to do with grasping the emotional things inside the film. We should seek to capture the very sense of the narrative within the music. As a film composer, how have you changed through the years? I have a very special technique. For me, the music fits the spirit of the first film and the details are second. I think composers should be involved from the very beginning of the project. There is no way you can help a film if you just devote three months to it. We should be involved in the preparation of the film and propose some themes, for example, during the shooting process. I think this is the only way to produce good music, which is there to serve the picture. I can tell you how this worked with one of my most well-known works in France, “Betty Blue”, a 1985 film by Jean-Jacques Beineix. This music was written eight months before the shooting. I talked with the director and we read the script together, exchanging ideas. I had also met the two actors. I wanted to know what their skills were in playing the piano, because they had to play a piano piece in this film. All this work that was done before the shooting made me discover the music, which helped the film as it was shot. The cinematographer would act like a choreographer – listening to the music and shooting at the same time. Being on the picture very early in the process brings to the film and the director many ideas of how to shoot and direct and just many things. So, for many of the films that I did in France, I wrote the music before the shooting. Then I adapted the themes to fit the picture before delivering the actual score. What I find most beautiful in your composition is the flow throughout the album, telling its own story, which allows the listener to experience your creativity on its own, while having the marriage to the picture at the same time. Yeah, but at the same time, I’m helping the picture. I’m really serving the picture. I want to say, “Yes, you can produce real music built with a beautiful sense of respect for music and also help the picture.” That’s all. I would like people to listen to my music and say, “This is music! Also, this music was for a film, and has really matched the film.” If I achieve only one thing, it is that I may be able to elevate an audience and say to them, “You are watching something beautiful, but you are also listening to something beautiful, and you can also take this opportunity to elevate your souls.” The more time I can spend on a film, the happier I am, because I can search. This is difficult in this industry. I spent eight months on “The English Patient”. On “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, I spent almost a year. This is what you need, really. I mean, I don’t think that any composer, unless he’s a genius like Mozart, could write an opera in fifteen days. We need to spend a little more time. We need to forget about our habits. We need to unite in a collaborative effort. Unfortunately, a lot of directors have no background in music. The film schools and universities teach a lot about the focus, how to direct an actor, how to direct a set, and all those things, but there is no education in music. If there is, it is education in film music, which is just a small part of music. There is a proverb: “One hand alone cannot applaud; you need two hands.” I wish directors would become more educated in music in order to be more demanding of composers. Not to direct them, telling them to do this and that, but to have the ability to go further, to go beyond your habits, to try several different musical approaches on each scene, experiment, et cetera… “What could we do to go beyond that?” I respect my colleagues and I love their work, but I don’t think that film music is really experiencing a harmony between director and composer. I would like to do my best to create great music that serves a picture, but composers cannot really do the job by themselves. We need directors around us who know about music and who could be involved in the music process and not just ask us to cover the film safely. I hope that directors will read this. I hope this makes a difference for them. Christian, I hope that the universities will make a move in this direction. Where film is taught, there are teachers who should give strong music courses – not just film-music courses, but also the history of music. The director should know the difference between Bach’s and Mozart’s work and what an oboe and a French horn are. So, when he comes to the studio, he is not naïve. Instead, he has the ability to establish a relationship with a composer and to discuss music. He can talk to the cinematographer, to an actor, to a director of special effects. He should be able to talk to a composer. Certain directors and producers seem to desire the same sound of music, again and again. So, I often sense that a score written to serve a picture could be used for numerous films. It means that the directors are not awake inside to analyze the music and to say, “I’ve heard it before. Please serve me something else.” It’s like a dog biting his tail. Music is repeating. An example of the perfect collaboration with a director is my work with Anthony Minghella. He is, in addition to being my soul mate, an educated, refined person. He’s a musician. He plays piano. He reads and loves music, and he pushes me beyond the ordinary. He asks me to renew myself each time. We talk about his film as soon as he has finished writing his script. I am among the first people to read the script. All his scripts have literal comments about music here and there. We meet and discuss the music. Then I start composing, even though he has not started shooting. And now we are in the process of starting the score, with my themes set to the picture and very efficiently commented on and experimented with by Walter Murch. We know where we’re going by this point. We can only improve. I don’t even have to think about the themes. I like all the colors that I’ve established, and now I just have to paint. Is this what has kept you more in the European productions versus getting involved with Hollywood, so to speak? I have said this to the Hollywood filmmakers many times: “Hire me for one year and pay me for only three months. Don’t change your contract.” They’re not opposed to that, but they’ve never heard of it. I know that now my colleagues are starting to consider my point of view, and many of them are saying that they would like to work before the shooting or before the end of the editing process. When you get married, you just don’t decide to get married in two weeks. You need to be engaged. My point is that you need to be engaged with the director, and then you get married during the scoring. This is a real relationship. And sometimes this kind of relationship will last beyond films. Then, you can slowly open the early of your director to new music. Listen to music other than film music. Go to concerts. Start a relationship that is based on art because it’s an artistic relationship that becomes a human relationship. You’ve done a wide range of films but might be pigeonholed for a master of heavily emotional romantic dramas. I know. It’s very ironic. “The English Patient” is a drama where the characters die in the end. Immediately after that, I composed “City of Angels”, “Message in a Bottle”, and then “Autumn in New York”. The characters die at the end of all these movies. I told my agent, “Stop it! It’s becoming ridiculous.” I’m not specialized in this kind of music. I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I’ve done some comedies in France. I’ve done many different things. I’m now doing “Troy”, which is a period epic film. I’m very open to different projects. The only films I’m not interested in are violent films. I hate violence. One of the reasons I don’t go to the cinema is because you don’t know when violence will hit you. I’m very sensitive to that. Your music is heartfelt, and it is obvious why you were chosen for these pictures. Yeah, but at the same time if you listen to my score for “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, I could go in very different places. I don’t want to be stuck to romantic, dramatic, lyrical films. I’d like to do something else and people should listen to what I’ve done in the ballet field, which reflects much more of the things that inhabit me. It doesn’t mean that I am excellent at everything. I like to laugh, I like to eat, I like to drink, I like to smoke, whatever. I’m not stuck to only one style because the more you ask me to do this, the more I become reluctant and disgusted by myself. “Autumn in New York” really touched me. It is a unique score with romantic themes, but it also has ethnic sounds and beautiful vocals. This is a work that I feel is richly authentic to your technique. I love to bring into the music something that is ethnic and that is so beautiful or ancient that it really shines. But I’m interested in that only if there is a purpose for it, not just to make a hit or to be looked at as a new sound. I thought that “Autumn in New York”, since it was in New York City, should have something like a little color of ethnicity. Before that I’ve used the ethnic sound in “A Map of the Human Heart”, which is a score that I like very much because it’s very simple – it’s only synths and samples. I was able to study Eskimo music, which makes the score to “Map of the Human Heart” more interesting. It’s so real. In “The English Patient”, we used this Bulgarian-Turkish-Hungarian song in the beginning of the film, which was a real traditional folk song. Let’s talk about “The English Patient” a little bit more. Your score won an Oscar. How did that affect your career? When I got the Oscar, I was very happy. The Oscar has been very good to me. Of course I enjoyed it. But it also brought about a misunderstanding, because people thought that if I did “The English Patient”, I’m only capable of doing “The English Patient” and nothing else. I was hired on so many similar films, as I mentioned before, because of “The English Patient”. All the things I did for three years were kind of similar: “City of Angels”, “Message in a Bottle”, “Autumn in New York”, “Possession”, and “The Next Best Thing”. But if you’ll listen to each score, they are very different from one to the other. I don’t think I have really repeated myself, although they do have the same lyrical feeling. After that, I was very lucky because I was nominated for an Oscar for “The Talented Mr. Ripley”. I thought that maybe people would understand me differently after listening to “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, which is very different from “The English Patient”. If “Cold Mountain” is a huge success, maybe people will listen to me as an Americana composer, because “Cold Mountain” takes place during the American Civil War. I must say that my music is very far from “The English Patient” on this one. So I look forward to not being pigeonholed again. The thing is, Christian, if you really live with music every second of your life, you don’t mind any opportunity people give you to write music. It’s fantastic for your soul and for your skills and for everything. So I shouldn’t even be complaining that I have been pigeonholed because I produce music and I have no regrets and no resentment about all that as long as I write. You score movies that need to be absorbed and thought about if one is to understand their stories. Do you consciously choose such projects? I am very sensitive, as you may notice when you listen to my music. I don’t socialize a lot. I never go out. I live almost like a monk. But I’m very attached to people. If I meet someone, I really want to know him or her. And it takes me time to know somebody. It takes me time to deliver myself, to become really who I am. I am not interested in simple relationships or stories or people. I find it really interesting when you have to go deeper and deeper to understand something. I like situations, people, music, a work of art in which you can endlessly discover new things. Which of your scores is most dear to you? Actually, I never listen back to my scores. I look sometimes at the scores themselves, at the sheet music. You always love the one that has been the most painful, that made you really suffer. I don’t know why that is. The one that really made me work a lot, and search a lot and be perfect is “Camille Claudel”. This is, for me, the one that seems like me. It represents me the most. You also write for ballet. I write for ballet because I like choreography. One of the most beautiful and the most modern is The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. You can be completely bold when writing for a ballet. You can take all the risks you want, and it’s all so rhythmical. What all the people who have pigeonholed me don’t understand is that I’m a very rhythmic person. I don’t only like beautiful strings with melodies and beautiful, lyrical, and romantic things, I also like rhythm. I am very happy to use my rhythmic skills in ballet. I make people dance to my music in ballet. My music is really a dance. So how does writing a film score differ from writing a ballet? There is not a difference to me. It’s just the crafting that changes a little. We know how to craft a stone into a beautiful diamond. You just cut it, and then you put around it the things that you want. This is crafting. But finding the stone, this is more important. And whether we have found the stone for ballet or film music, it’s just some elements that change. Your music has affected my life profoundly. How does it feel to know that your music touches people or reaches their souls on many different levels? Wow. That’s very tough. Listen, I’m just a man of great passion who sees music as a gift he has received that he must not betray or destroy. My musical ideas come to me as if they’re given to me from somewhere outside of myself. As a result of that, I feel myself to be less the author of my own work than a channel for it. I see everything that I do as an opportunity to deliver my inspiration received from above and to elevate an audience to the highest understanding of our world in this universe and, also, to make the picture and the music shine. I’m not responsible for the things I’m doing; I’m just a good translator. And to be the best translator, you must never stop digging and searching. So, at the end of the day, if my music hits you, I’m very happy for this angel who inspires all my music. So thank you to my angel. The music will always come to me as long as I respect her and as long as I worship her.