Words by Sean Wilson

Composer Howard Shore embodies the majesty and diversity of the film score medium. In a career spanning over 40 years, three Oscars, three Golden Globes, and four Grammys, Shore has carved out singular relationships with leading directors such as David Cronenberg, David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Jackson, transitioning from horror to comedy and sweeping fantasy with enviable ease.

Yet, at the same time, there’s a palpably consistent musical voice threading these disparate projects together. One might compare the bass sonorities of the chilling The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en with the monstrous Isengard music in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The eccentrically humorous tone of Ed Wood, for director Tim Burton, anticipated Shore’s lighter side in the melodiously lovely Hugo, for Scorsese.

Shore has also diversified into opera with great success. In 2008, he adapted his brooding score for David Cronenberg’s The Fly, premiering the work at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. He’s also responsible for Fanfare for the Wanamaker Organ and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a short overture for the Swiss 21st Century Symphony Orchestra.

Now, Shore returns with Funny Boy, a score he has composed for Indo-Canadian director Deepa Mehta. She is the celebrated filmmaker behind the acclaimed Elements trilogy, which explored personal identity amidst the shifting sub-strata of the Indian subcontinent. With Funny Boy, Mehta delivers something a tad gentler and more intimate, but no less incisive for all that.

The film is adapted from author Shyam Selvadurai’s novel and is set in the build-up towards the Sri Lankan Civil War. At the centre of the narrative is young Tamil kid Arjie Chelvaratnam whose sexual awakening dovetails with the simmering anger between the Tamil and Sinhalese people.

The personal and political meet head-on in this dreamily filmed tale of queer romance, as the teenage Arjie (played with warmth by Brandon Ingram), discovers an attraction to his classmate Shehan (a likable and charming Rehan Mudannayake). Mehta’s tactile direction invites us to breathe in the air and the faded colonial grandeur of Sri Lanka, all the while as background tensions reach boiling point. And the key to the movie’s wistful atmosphere is Shore’s music.

“She’s a fantastic director and has made several movies that I really like,” Shore says of Mehta. “Her spotting was so elegant throughout the movie. It’s deeply personal to her. We just had a great collaboration. I thought her ideas were great. We mainly focused on the Arjie character, the main character, and that built the whole score around his theme. The conflict then came a little later, but it was added step by step. Spotting is always really important to me. How music is used in the film, why it’s there, and the point of view.

The instrumental choices of Funny Boy may come as a surprise to listeners. Prominent throughout is an instrument that approximates the sound of an accordion. Shore explains that this was, in fact, a harmonium, an instrument from Western culture that unexpectedly found a foothold in the Indian subcontinent. It lends the entire score a distinctly nostalgic and lilting tone.

“It’s a major instrument used in traditional Indian music,” Shore says. “It was one of the sounds that I brought into the score. It was actually recorded in Mumbai. We had a brilliant instrumentalist named Ashutosh Sohoni. We did solo recordings for Funny Boy in private studios in Mumbai, London, New York, and a small village in Switzerland as well.”

The score was recorded in the midst of coronavirus lockdown, deploying instrumentalists Greg Knowles (santoor, or Indian dulcimer), Ljova Zhurbin (viola), and Sandro Friedrich (bansuri, essentially a side-blown Indian bamboo flute). It was mixed by Grammy-winning Abbey Road engineer Sam Okell in Cornwall and eventually mastered by Abbey Road’s Simon Gibson. Shore says that “we were able to record very well”. He adds: “It just happened to be thousands of miles away. It’s taken a while for things to work that well on the internet.”

When asked about the process of working with instrumentalists versus a symphony orchestra, Shore elaborates: “The principle is the same. I orchestrate all my scores in pencil on four to six-line sketches. In the case of Funny Boy, we weren’t really using a symphony orchestra or even a large orchestra. It was very intimate. The musicians could work directly off my pencil sketches, so it was a very direct way to communicate.”

The score may only reach 20 minutes as a standalone album experience, but Shore’s veteran experience means that every single one of those minutes counts. The music attains its gentle power from the contradictions inherent in the story. It possesses both a cultural specification and also a universality of tone, conveying the turbulent narrative of contemporary Sri Lanka while also suggesting that Arjie’s destiny is one shared by millions of young people the world over. 

“That’s very accurate, actually,” says Shore. “I was inspired by Italian films like De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Cinema Paradiso, and films like that.

When asked about the principles of communication between composer and director, Shore says he values a filmmaker’s “experience” with music.

“The better the ears are, the more fun it is,” he adds. “Deepa had a great sense of music, a lot of joy. I had a lot of joy too, working with her on it. We were connected right from the beginning. Other directors I’ve worked with have also had a great sensibility regarding music. François Girard, with whom I worked on Song of Names. The films I’ve done with Martin Scorsese – he’s fantastic with music. He likes to use other music, so it can be challenging to work around that but also very rewarding. 

“The audience isn’t necessarily aware going in what is the source music and what is the score music. They just want to be swept into the world of the film. I like to feel that it’s seamless between all aspects of music in the film. I like to be involved in all the music. To know what it is and be able to write around it. It’s fun to work with directors when you have this musical cornerstone or bedrock.”

One of the pleasures of Funny Boy is the way in which sound and music interweave to create a gentle hybrid of sound. As the wind rustles the trees above Arjie’s home, interrupted by the baleful sounds of the warring Tamil and Sinhalese factions, the score emerges gently from the aural mixture to gently augment feelings of melancholic nostalgia or pensive unease. 

Shore says that this symbiotic relationship between objective sound and the subjective score has been critical throughout his distinguished career. “When I was writing the score for Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, the sound designers were matching the whistle of the trains to the key of the score. I like those collaborative relationships. If I can work with the other filmmakers and create something interesting, then I’m all for that.

“Even on Silence of the Lambs, [sound designer] Skip Lievsay, who’s a great mixer, collaborated with me quite often before the dub. We had pre-mixed the music and the electronics and the effects, so we got a good handle on it before we even went into the dub. I recommend good collaboration on films. You can achieve a lot if you work across the boundaries on different tasks.”

Returning to Funny Boy, Shore says it was a deeply personal project for both him and Deepa Mehta, particularly since his home country of Canada is positioned as the land of salvation for Arjie’s family in the wake of the Sri Lankan conflict.

“I like the relationship,” Shore says of the film’s synergy with Canada. “It also spoke to Deepa’s sensibilities. The welcoming of immigrants to this northern country. I’m very proud of my Canadian roots. It’s very important.”

While Funny Boy may appear to be narratively and thematically distinct from a lot of Shore’s previous work, he says that there are shared connections. 

“Film music is very much about point of view,” he muses. “It could be Lecter and Starling in Silence of the Lambs or the boys in Funny Boy. You’re approaching it on the basis of human interaction.”