Words by Ann Lee

When Bryce Dessner and his twin brother Aaron were approached to score a musical based on Edmond Rostand’s famous play Cyrano de Bergerac, they weren’t very keen. In fact, they thought it was a terrible idea. The siblings were busy with their band, The National, and working on various solo projects. “We didn't want to write a musical,” says Bryce. “We were like: ‘Why would we do that?’“

But writer Erica Schmidt soon won them over. She put on a reading with her husband, actor Peter Dinklage, in the lead role as the gifted poet and swashbuckling soldier who is desperately in love with his old friend Roxanne but too insecure to make a move. She in turn has her heart set on dashing new recruit Christian so Cyrano selflessly decides to help out his love rival by writing his love letters to her. 

But the new version had one important twist - instead of our hero feeling unworthy because of his large nose, this time it was down to worries over his height. The Game of Thrones star was born with achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism. “It was really moving,” says Dessner. “With the original play, you have a handsome actor putting a nose on his face but then the day after, he goes back to being an actor. With Peter, it's a very different play.” 

Atonement director Joe Wright was in the audience for one of the shows after it premiered in 2018 in Connecticut with Haley Bennett playing Roxanne. He was so captivated by the production that he got in touch with Schmidt afterwards to talk about turning it into a film. Wright was so determined to make it that he didn’t even let the coronavirus pandemic put him off. Instead, the cast and crew formed its own bubble in Noto, Sicily, for the shoot with the same 120 extras re-used throughout the film.

After the grinding isolation and despair of the pandemic, Bryce Dessner, 45, was more than ready to embrace something as sweet and uncynical as Wright’s vision for Cyrano. “He would call it a love letter to love. It's very sincere. It wears its heart on its sleeve. The National are famously guarded and jaded, our songs are so sort of dark and twisted. To make songs that are not like that, that's what was interesting to us.”

But surely The National, indie kings of the gloomy love song, were the perfect choice for this tale of anguished yearning and unrequited love? “You're right. I think probably that's what Erica thought. It's not like getting a big successful Broadway team to score your musical. So it's a surprising choice on some level because our songs are kind of understated.”

The theatre version of Cyrano featured twice as many songs as the film adaptation. The Dessner brothers, both multi-instrumentalists, reworked several tracks, cut a lot more and composed some new ones. Bryce spent several weeks on set working with Wright on the music before shooting had even begun. The director was insistent that the songs had to be completed as early as possible as they played such an important part in the unfolding narrative with the lyrics included as part of the script.

The director would spend the day rehearsing with the actors, talking to various departments and checking site locations. Then he would visit Dessner in his room at 10pm so they could discuss the score. “Joe is a very intentional director. He storyboards every shot. He knows what he's going to do. Because this is a music film, he really wanted to hear it. Usually, a film composer comes in quite late. This is the opposite because we were involved in the primary materials, really. So he couldn't shoot the film until we really revised the songs.”

Working together on the track, Every Letter, “he would be like: ‘Well, what's it going to sound like?’ I'm like: ‘It sounds like this. Can we work on the orchestration after you finish the film?’ He was like: ‘No, we need to know now.’ Even the percussion underneath that song, he was sitting there with me tapping the rhythm.”

While the original play featured lengthy monologues, these have been replaced by songs with the characters channelling their raw passion and smouldering desire into each tortured note. “I would call it the meeting place between folk music and Baroque,” says Dessner. “It has the raw simplicity and emotional quality and grit of folk music, which was important for these intimate songs. But then the other side is this Baroque period drama set in the 1600s. So there's classical piano and a large orchestra - woodwind, brass, percussion and all of these things. It has a kind of fugle counterpoint to it. It's more complex, just like the complexity of the characters. 

“There are the simple emotions of love. They're trying to reach each other but they’re hiding behind masks. These three people are falling in love with each other but never really managing to be honest. So the music has layers. That was really interesting to play with. All of that fell into this river that we were able to kind of float down. Because the music really began before the filmmaking, it was a very interesting and deeper process.”

Wright insisted on the actors singing live while filming, something that Dessner was initially sceptical of. As a seasoned musician who has been part of The National for over 20 years, he’s used to recording live on shows like Later… with Jools Holland, Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. But usually his reaction afterwards would be: “It never sounds very good. The image is forgiving but [when] you listen to that stuff on headphones, you're like: ‘Oh my God, we sound terrible.’ Compared to an album, where you can really get the right tone. So we wanted the control.” 

There was what he calls a “friendly” argument. “If something goes wrong on the day, if it's raining or whatever, it's so expensive to shoot these scenes. Also, you can't have an actor sing 40 times in a row so usually you have to record something ahead of time.” But the live singing went ahead. “And it really works. I think Joe likes the imperfection. He really responds to moments that almost feel improvised or raw. It's not a music video, you hear the sound, that's why the songs really feel like part of the scene. I think especially for Peter’s performance, it was really important for him to find how he was going to sing those songs, and not be put on the spot to deliver beforehand.”

The National’s lead singer Matt Berninger and his wife Carin Besser were drafted in to update the lyrics working with Schmidt, who stayed on as the film’s screenwriter. Dessner recorded the score over Zoom with Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson and the London Contemporary Orchestra playing at Abbey Road studio.

Most of the music was written while Bryce was in Paris, where he lives with his wife, French singer Mina Tindle. He was constantly in touch with Aaron, who is based in New York, although the pandemic meant this was the first time in their lives they had been apart for so long. “A band after 20 years, you're like five people in a room, it can get a little stale. It's pretty interesting to be thrown into the deep water of this cinematic universe and that was fun for us.” 

The siblings would work on songs together, sending them back and forth, each tackling a different aspect of the score. “When we're working like that we're quite effective because we do different things. We're not the same person, we don't double each other, we have different areas of expertise. When that's going well, we can be more like a two-headed monster.” But there are downsides too. “The day is twice as long,” he sighs. “Because of the time difference, we were working 20 hours a day instead of 10.”

The brothers also scored C’mon C’mon, Mike Mills’ intimate family drama starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gaby Hoffmann, which was released at the end of last year and has also been generating lots of Oscar buzz. They worked with Taylor Swift on her recent albums folklore and evermore. Bryce, who released a classical album called Impermanence/Disintegration in 2020, created the score for Two Popes and provided additional music for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant. 

Throughout the years, being able to take time off from The National to work on their own projects, find their own space in the world, has been a vital part of the band’s longevity. In an interview in 2019 with The Independent, Berninger even claimed they had broken up briefly but nobody had noticed. Was that true? Did they really split and get back together?

“The band's like a family, so [with] families, there's a sort of unconditional love, but when things hurt, they can hurt worse than other types of relationships,” says Dessner. “Some bands are very insular and always focused on themselves. Very early on, that wasn't the feeling we had. It was much more, you have to open the window. Sometimes that means someone going off and making music with someone else. Right now, there's a feeling that we have to bring the family back together. It's like Thanksgiving or Christmas. So if there was a breakup, it's over.”

The band have been busy working on a new album. They’ve already been in the studio a few times and have “a lot” of new songs. After two years where they were unable to tour, living in the shadow of the pandemic has given their music a newfound ferocity. “It kind of harkens back to classic era National, I would say. It has a real intense energy like it’s bursting out of the doors post-Covid. It’s just nice to play in a band.” 

The pandemic submerged them in an existential crisis, he reveals, The National’s future suddenly in danger. “Like will it survive? Will it go on? Something that we kind of took for granted all those years. All of a sudden, it's one of the things that may not survive the Covid era. So there's an urgency and a kind of intensity. Also, the narratives have shifted. The music sounds different. The lyrics sound different. In a good way. So yeah, [the album's] close. But it's not done. It’s finding if we can get it together to finish it and find a way to tour it so we'll see. But there could be new music from the band in the next year.”