Words by Lillian Crawford

The films of Darren Aronofsky until now have been associated with the music of Clint Mansell.

The director’s last film, mother! (2017), was planned to have a score from the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, but it was decided to soundtrack the film purely through sound effects. For his latest film, The Whale, Aronofsky decided to change musical direction and hire a new hand to pen the score for the film. 

Enter Rob Simonsen, American composer, solo artist, and co-founder of composer collective The Echo Society. His career began working on the independent film Westender (2003) which attracted the attention of Mychael Danna, who invited Simonsen to work with him on scores for (500) Days of Summer (2009), Moneyball (2011), and Life of Pi (2012). Since working with Danna, Simonsen has worked with a plethora of Hollywood directors, including Bennett Miller, Julia Hart, and Jason Reitman. As he has been able to develop his own distinctive and experimental voice, The Whale has provided an opportunity for Simonsen to work in a whole new direction with the film, one he tells us he is grateful for.

The Whale marks your first collaboration with Darren Aronofsky. How did you come to the project? 

I woke up one day with a text from Jason Reitman saying that he had written a love letter about me to Darren Aronofsky. Then later that day, Darren and I Zoomed and he told me the story of the film and said that he wanted to show it to me. He said that if I responded well to it then we should figure out a way to work together on it. I watched it that night and was just rendered a total blubbering mess. I was so moved by it. We talked the next morning and then we were off.

What was it like watching the film without any music?

It was really a beautiful way to experience the film. It works really well on its own. Darren likes to cut without music to ensure it all works. I was able to imagine different musical ideas as I was watching. One of those was the overtone flute. It has an ethereal, otherworldly, hollow, but also very large sound. It feels oceanic. There are a lot of references to Moby Dick in the film and nautical elements in the sound design and in the production design. What I saw was a man lost at sea, on the sea of their own emotions. Sometimes we all feel like we are just a little person being tossed around by this giant force of life, doing our best to stay afloat. I also used an old 1800s pump organ that religious pioneers would take with them as they went to speak across the country. I made some drones with that and blended them with the overtone flute.

How did you create those nautical textures within the notation? Were you looking at nautical epic movie scores or leaning more into traditional sea shanties?

I definitely spent time listening to sea shanties, as well as the earliest known recordings of religious music like Mormon songs and chants. I felt that there was a folk vibe to everything in the film. I was soaking myself in those things, but I was never trying to be too deliberate about it, I just wanted to capture their spirit. The way Mormons go from door to door trying to convince people of a certain ideology, they hook you with music and poetry. The film is really a takedown of how those very staunch religious ideologies can crush people. That's what's so devastating about it. What people can experience when they are not supported, but rather demonised. I emotionally related to the feeling of having emotions we don’t know what to do with, so we reach for something like food or whatever. That was my way in.

You use themes or leitmotifs for those ideas and the different characters, especially contrasting the masculine presence at the centre with the women in the film. 

For sure. There's a bird that often comes to Charlie's window and I think this symbolised his heart and desire for freedom. There's a strong connection between the bird and his daughter, and I deliberately used an oboe and high flutes for the bird. There's a very simple line that comes through as Charlie tries to reach out to his daughter, and then it gets dark and twisted as we see her doing more dark and twisted things. Because she's struggling to cope with her own unresolved traumas and emotions about her relationship with her father. Again it’s this struggle for redemption, but it's quite subtle.

The film is based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter, and often it feels like watching a theatre piece with music. It’s the score that really brings the story to life cinematically, especially in those ethereal and allegorical moments. How did you go about navigating the ebb and flow of the music’s intensity?

There are a lot of scenes where Charlie's by himself in the house. So I was trying to track emotionally the things that he's reacting to and his inner state when he isn’t talking. I haven’t seen or read the play but I assume those moments aren’t in it, they feel like additions to the film. It was an opportunity to paint a pretty bold canvas, but also to feature quiet moments to make that intensity really stand out.

When Charlie is on his own, Brendan Fraser was having his movements choreographed by a dance instructor. Were you mirroring those movements in the music, because it sometimes sounds balletic?

I suppose that's what I was trying to get at. To me, there is a choreographed nature to the film, especially as I watched it more and more and the camera movements and Brendan’s movements did such an incredible job of making it very naturalistic. I tried to just weave in with the camera pushes and physical movements. Those were the main things to score because the setting is so confined, the whole thing takes place in Charlie’s apartment. So I didn’t have the benefit of creating the sounds of lots of different locations. There's an economy to it, but I think that they did a great job of keeping it visually interesting with subtle camera movements and great lighting. The cinematographer Matthew Libatique totally crushed it on this film. I think it's really, really beautiful work.

The music feels a lot more classical than some of your previous scores in terms of instrumentation and the lines that you're creating. Was that something that you've been wanting to move towards?

Yeah! That was one of the first things that Brendan Fraser said to me when I met him in Venice, that he didn't expect the classical vibe of the score. He said it was really beautiful how much it elevated Charlie. You know, the TV is on in the film quite a lot but it’s always Hong Chau's character who’s watching. When Charlie’s alone he's always thumbing through his book. I imagined that he is probably a classical music aficionado. I think that juxtaposition felt really satisfying, between this guy who is very much at risk with his weight in rural America, ordering pizza all the time, but the fact that he is deeply pensive, funny, and bright.

It felt good to not try to localise it with just what we're seeing but to expand it. It is a hybrid score in the sense that there's a lot of processing going on, but what leads most of the music is the sound of strings and the sound of brass. I feel that this music is in me and it felt like a great moment to express that. I always try to have genuine self-expression of something, even if it might be a little bit of a stylistic stretch. I certainly enjoyed going in that direction with this one.

Were there any specific pieces of music or composers that were inspiring for the score? There's a lot of atonalism in the strings and the brass which is really compelling. 

I was listening to Henryk Górecki quite a lot, and also Ralph Vaughan Williams, who is one of my favourites. Vaughan Williams definitely inspired the solo violin moments, while those dense but open-suspended voicings are more Górecki or Samuel Barber. I was trying to blend those different musical ideas so it wasn’t too atonal. The other thing that I think conceptually drove the film was hiring the London Contemporary Orchestra. They have a lot of their own techniques that they've pretty much branded at this point.

I wrote it with them in mind because I know how well they can play static notes with a lot of life and variation. I was always trying to have large sustained swaths of sounds that bloom and disappear the way that things do underwater. The strings are all bending a little bit to create this woozy feeling because that's how I feel when I have emotional overwhelm. Even when the chord might be a very simple major chord, the instruments are bending a bit to provide that tension.

There’s definitely a sense of entrapment and wanting to escape which is strong in the music of Górecki and Vaughan Williams. I assume you were recording during the pandemic, did that impact the music and the recording process with the LCO?

Yes definitely. Darren and I were mostly communicating over text because of the protocols at the time. We recorded remotely, but I knew that I wanted to record at AIR Studios because they have this gorgeous pristine reverb. You can just play one thing and it hangs so beautifully in the air. I wrote with all of that in mind. We were there for just two days with quite a small group. I didn't want it to be too large. I think the orchestra was maybe 25 people, mostly brass and strings. It felt like working with a band.

Liberation comes at the end of the film, it’s a very moving catharsis.

Exactly. But it’s not a surprise ending. You know that this guy is in his last days, so there’s no pussyfooting around that. We’re just invited to embrace it as a ride with this beautiful person who has faced so much darkness. You understand why things have turned out for him this way so you have sympathy and empathy. To me, it was important to strike that balance between seeing rays of light and knowing that you're in a hole. And in the music that was based on my own emotional experiences of life.

'The Whale' is playing is currently playing in cinemas in the US. It will be released in the UK on February 3rd. Rob Simonsen's Original Score for the film can be heard here.