Words by Charles Steinberg

Will Sharpe knows that he wants to bring a story to theatrical life when he can’t stop thinking about it. The writer, director, and actor has gravitated to the films and shows he has developed on those grounds and when writer Ed Sinclair’s original script for Landscapers came Sharpe’s way, he got on board because it stuck with him. There was more to examine underneath the headlines in the unusual 2014 case of a British married couple convicted of the murders and subsequent theft of their parents.

Intentionally or not, Will Sharpe’s projects have run into the stumbling lives of people understood to be societal outliers. This can be said of his Netflix show Flowers, his recent film The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, and Landscapers, where Sharpe takes an atypically humanist slant on true crime perpetrators. The infamous couple portrayed by Olivia Colman and David Thewlis is painted with a more relatable dimension than the average felon. Sharpe’s camera and pen probe the eccentricities and mental disconnections that can simmer behind the motives of a crime, and not always in a typically condemning fashion.

The director is a strong believer in the role of music in guiding what we think of the protagonists/antagonists in a story. He allows for ambiguity and the interpretation of truth in how we perceive them, and these grey areas are in fact vibrant regions for a composer to fill in, illuminating the roots of motivation and behaviour that are obfuscated. 

In Landscapers, Sharpe implements unconventional designs of production and presentation that invite the compositional exploration of his brother, composer Arthur Sharpe. He slides deftly between scenes were under the interrogative lens of the police, we see the main characters as senseless criminals, and within their imagined settings of golden-era Hollywood, we see them as heroic. In order to give two sides of that dichotomy tangible weight, the music had to flow between those two very distinct territories of scoring.

Will Sharpe appreciates the great value of score to unearth what lies beneath the surfaces.

You have worked with your brother Arthur on all of your shows and films to date. Tell me about how your artistic relationship formed and how it has developed.

We used to play in a band together when we were teenagers. When I started directing, Arthur was writing music, and often, I would wind up using his stuff. My first proper grown-up commission as a writer/director was for a show called Flowers and I asked Arthur to see what he could come up with for the pilot episode. I found that his music really informed the world of what I was trying to make. It opened something up for me. It was playful but also a little dark. It had some cheek to it as well as mystery. 

We began to find a rhythm and a process from there and I’ve never looked back really. I’ve tried someone else for a track here and there and it’s never worked as well. I don’t know whether that’s because we have a language and a shorthand or that we’re happy to spend the time together until we get it right. I’ve always said he’ll be a part of whatever it is that I’m doing.

Apart from the fundamental reasons of familiarity and trust and communication in a relationship, what is it that you feel makes a director become attached to a composer?

I think it’s because score composing is such a dark art. It’s such a mystical language that if you find someone with whom you have successful communication and progress from draft to draft, that’s huge. If you’re able to hear from the composer what their thought process is and can see why they went one way or another, all of that is very precious and valuable. You can lose so much time and faith if the communication is hard.

In the evolution of your work, there seems to exist a thread of downtrodden people. Characters whose lives are seen in a certain context and yet you feel as though they’re somewhat misunderstood.

I’ve noticed that too but I don’t think that’s a conscious thing. Flowers is a series I originated, so I guess I was writing from the heart. In the cases of Landscapers and the film The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, they were both projects that I couldn’t stop thinking about and kind of became obsessed with. It was only on the way to finishing Landscapers that I started to realise how, as you say, about people who are slightly at odds with society and trying to empathise with people who are easily misunderstood. I don’t know if that comes partly from the fact that Arthur and I both grew up in Japan for part of our lives and moved to the UK, and being mixed race, you sort of never feel completely like you belong anywhere. That’s something I don’t have to explain to Arthur. He was immediately curious about the psyches of the main characters in that way. It was just instinctive for him. 

There was one line that explained Landscapers to me. Chris’s stepmother says the couple “Disappeared into their own world because neither of them were built for this one?” When did you discover that there’s more to these people than being cold-hearted criminals and that you wanted to examine their personal histories and not just their crime?

The nature of that journey evolved as we talked about it. One of the big clues was their obsession with old Hollywood films and old westerns and the fact that they had spent thousands of pounds on memorabilia. Stuff like that is sometimes written off in the press as a kind of quirk but in coming up with the final scripts we were wondering why it was such a compulsion for Susan. She has a traumatic backstory and in a way, her obsession with Hollywood is a form of escapism. I started to think that if you had been through [the abuse] she went through as a child then maybe you would feel like a certain amount of freedom had been taken from you long before you had been arrested for anything. 

Throughout the series, there’s a tug between truth and fantasy. That’s absolutely central to how the score functions as well. As you reach the end you’re kind of asking, “Where is the freedom? Is it in confronting your truth or escaping into the fantasy?” We were also being open with the audience about the fact that we are also just storytellers and we have no agency over absolute truth. So everything you see is just a version. We’re doing our best to be accurate and fair and nuanced but the audience has to decide how they feel in the end. In that way, we were putting you, the audience, in the frame.

There are a variety of music styles in Landscapers. Was it always the plan to manoeuvre scoring styles between the troubling reality of the couple’s situation and the fantasy world they were escaping into?

The challenge was to drink in the influences from westerns and thrillers and old psycho dramas but to then forget them and find a sound that was distinctly Landscapers. We knew that in tandem with the visual side of it there would be an ebb and flow [between all of those styles] depending on what we were trying to emphasize and who’s shoes we were trying to put you in. 

One thing that we talked about a lot was wind. The series starts and finishes with wind. Particularly in episode four, which is so consistently from Susan’s point of view, we wondered if we could manifest how it might feel to be in her head. That’s where the cold strings and minimalism of the music in that episode came from – the feeling of the wind inside her head and its eeriness, occasionally flourishing out into something macabre or emotional.

I was also interested in how the voice came to sit in the score. In the beginning, I guess it came from thinking about influences like Morricone but once it was recorded and the real vocals came through, it sounded so human and therefore kind of fragile and vulnerable. There was something about it that started to represent Susan’s fragility – the journey of that fragility and how it becomes an instrument of courage. I don’t know how planned that was but I started to notice how important the voice was in the score.

The music in episode four was fascinating in that it sounded like one long piece of music that shifted as it progressed depending on the level of emotion we are feeling towards the character's fate. The cold windy strings turn a bit sad when in court, Susan says, “I’m not fragile, I’m broken…so you can’t hurt me.” and turn somewhat sweet and hopeful when we flashback to a young Susan running free in the woods as a child. 

Yes because that image of a young Susan running is meant to be an image of freedom that was then taken away from her. Funnily enough, when Susan delivers that line in the courtroom there is no music. The music is what releases the tension at the end of the scene. That’s a key part of composing that Arthur is quite good at. Being strict about not wanting to add music to something that doesn't need it because it’s already so good. 

Through it all, we are trying to examine the idea of being able to empathize with these people as human beings and celebrate their humanity and its complexity, but hopefully, you’re not being encouraged to celebrate the crime or forget the gravity of that crime and its reality.

What do you identify in Arthur as far as his ability to communicate through various styles?

I feel like I’ll ask him for something that sounds like more than one thing and it’s an impossible brief offer. But I’m constantly surprised at what he sends back. He’s an ambitious composer. He’s very good at mischief and has a sense of humour in his writing. What’s interesting is that In our relationship, we don’t talk about our feelings a whole lot and yet his music can be extremely emotional, especially in something like The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. He uses the saw and theremin in that score – quite idiosyncratic and eccentric instruments – in a really emotive way. In a funny way, it’s through the work that we talk about some of the more emotional aspects of life. 

Arthur never settles for something that feels easy. He always wants the music to feel as specific to the world of the film or the show as possible. For me, music is as big a part of world-building and storytelling as the visual side. That’s why we start talking very early in the process. Sometimes I’ll play his music on set, or if I’m stuck in traffic with the DP or designer, I’ll play a demo. Part of my process is to want everybody to be cross-pollinating so that everything feels joined up and we’re creating a cohesive world. Arthur has always played a huge part in the sculpting of that world.