Eternal Recurrence: The Music of Cloud Atlas

Eternal Recurrence: The Music of Cloud Atlas
Tom Tykwer, Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek musically glue together the
complicated story threads of the mind­bending new film.
By Jim Lochner
A young American notary saves the life of a stowaway Moriori slave. A feeble old
composer steals inspiration from his penniless young amanuensis. A feisty
journalist unearths a nuclear physicist’s dangerous secret. A vanity publisher is
confined to a nursing home against his will. A tribesman from the future learns the
truth of his past. And a genetically engineered fabricant becomes the voice of a
revolution. These are the stories at the heart of Cloud Atlas, the new film written
and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy) and Tom Tykwer
(Run Lola Run).
Based on David Mitchell’s “unfilmable” 2004 novel, the film intertwines these six
stories in a stunning display of editing, moving back and forth in time to form a
mind-bending fabric of regeneration and rebirth. From 19th century South Pacific to
a post-apocalyptic future, the principal actors inhabit different roles in the various
stories. With such complicated interlocked storylines, composers Tykwer, Reinhold
Heil and Johnny Klimek had to piece together the multiple threads with a cohesive
musical fabric.
The three composers, best known for their pulsating electronic score for Run Lola
Run and the aromatic orchestral scents of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, met in
Berlin. Heil had made name for himself as a producer and the keyboardist for the
Nina Hagen Band, while Klimek was part of the underground electronic scene that
formed in the late 1980s and early ’90s following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though
they had known each other for years, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the two
began working together. “I was in a sort of semi-retired state at this point, a little bit
directionless,” Heil said in our interview. “Johnny contacted me and kind of
pestered me to do something. So we got together and worked, and found out that this
was really pleasant. There was none of this elbowing or competing, none of the silly
Spinal Tap-like [behavior] that we both knew from the bands we had been in. It
was a much more pleasant, truly collaborative atmosphere.”
Enter Tykwer, who, in the summer of 1996, was directing his second feature, Winter
Sleepers, and looking for a studio where he could record the trailer music for the
film. Klimek had a home studio in the back corner of a Berlin courtyard (“it was
right at the period where you could start producing your own records at home,” he
said) and served as Tykwer’s engineer on the recording. “Johnny played him the
music he and I had done the year before,” said Heil. “Tom really liked it and was
enthusiastic about the fact that I was a part of it, because he had been an old fan of
the Nina Hagen Band as a teenager.” Winter Sleepers was the beginning of a
collaboration that continued with later successes such as the worldwide hit Run
Lola Run, Perfume and The International.
All three composers bring unique talents to the collaboration, though each of them
admitted in our separate interviews that as they continue to work together, the lines
of who does what become blurrier. “I’m very strong in the first creation period,” said
Tykwer. “Because I’ve been writing so long on the script, I can give the first push
into the material and into the atmosphere of the movie. I can describe it probably
best because obviously I’ve been working on it so long. Usually, through the writing
of the script I have already come up with a few themes that are developed on the
piano. So I can seduce them into the musical world.”
“I’m more responsible for harmonic progressions,” said Heil. “For instance,
anything that sounds a bit more classical will have more of me in it, as I went to
music academy and the other two didn’t. I have a knack for structure and harmony
and arrangement that surely helps. But I like to program some grooves and do
interesting electronic soundscapes.”
“I made most of the tea,” quipped Klimek. “Actually, I’m usually better at generating
a lot of material very quickly. Being able to take elements and come up with
something from those elements within a day. I will often do that, do a day for each
cue and pound them out so we have a lot of material. I’m definitely stronger on the
electronic front within that team.”
“I think we’re a real truthful, deep collaboration,” said Tykwer. “We have this
particular set of skills individually that combine together beautifully and that flows
so well into each other. Johnny is just fantastic in finding particular sound qualities
and interesting instrumentations and also, of course, comes in with the most
original electronic reinventions of the material. Reinhold ultimately, I think, brings
it all together, all the stuff, all my shitload of ideas, Johnny’s shitload of electronics
turning things upside down. And then Johnny puts it all together until it makes
sense as a real musical, orchestral, substantial composition.”
Triple Threat: Filmmakers Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski.
On Cloud Atlas, like earlier collaborations, Tykwer also directs and writes the
script. Working with the Wachowskis this time around, the three directors split
their duties—the Wachowskis took on the bookending (at least time-wise) stories
set in the 19th century and the future, while Tykwer handled the intervening stories.
Work on the script took up most of 2009. The first meetings and discussions about
how to approach the music occurred on several occasions in 2010. During that time,
the trio composed the score for the German film Three (Drei), while financing
issues were worked out on Cloud Atlas. While the team was working on Three, “we
were actually developing a lot of ideas for Cloud Atlas,” said Tykwer. “And then
when [the film] seemed to have a chance to happen, we went for another
substantial, condensed version of the screenplay—Lana, Andy and I—in early 2011.
From April until July, those four months, we were full on in music.”
Though Heil and Klimek often collaborate on their own—for films such as One
Hour Photo and Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, and television series like Without a
Trace and Deadwood—collaborating with Tykwer as the director and screenwriter
“makes it easier, a lot easier actually,” said Heil. “He’s a real musician. He’s not one
of those directors who just wants another credit. When you collaborate in a group of
three, everybody gets to have his ideas and throw them around. You can get into a
situation that is a little bit ‘band-like,’ but democracy doesn’t really work. I can
really contribute and get a lot of my musical desires, but it is really good that Tom
has the final say. It just avoids unnecessary, lengthy discussions. Sometimes we
give him a piece of outlines or give him our opinion, and sometimes we campaign
for certain things, sometimes it takes a little longer to persuade him, but at some
point you just need to move on. The movie-making process has gazillions of
decisions that need to be made, so it’s just best that someone can say, ‘Okay, this is
how we do it,’ and then we move on.”
The process of composition begins with meeting and “filling up a whole bunch of
themes with Tom,” said Klimek. “Then Reinhold and I will come back to L.A. and
start doing huge remixes—Reinhold in his studio and I’ll do a bunch at my place, so
that Tom will end up with a few hours of music sitting on the editing table when he
starts editing.” With the numerous storylines, the composers knew they were going
to have to put all the themes on top of each other. “I’ll take different elements from
various pieces and put it in the audio window and see what comes out of it,” said
Klimek. “I actually enjoy that process, taking orchestral elements and messing them
up and electronically treating them and adding the real orchestra on top. So we just
sort of throw things at each other then we go sit with Tom for three or four months
as he’s going through the editing process.”
As he had done on earlier films, Tykwer wanted the score written and recorded prior
to a single frame of film being shot. “We’re like a band,” said Tykwer, “that really
loves preparing and understanding the material by not being under time pressure,
not having anybody waiting for delivery in some editing room. We don’t think that
helps the movie at all. We also have a strong belief in the philosophy that the movie
unbelievably profits from the fact that there will already be pre-existing music
previously recorded and well-conceived once the cameras start rolling and the
editing starts going, because the editor can then re-use our music and never have to
go for a moment with temp music.”
“Music is a character in the film,” Tykwer continued. “It’s a real central character,
more in this film than in many other films that we’ve made. We know that it’s the
fabric of the movie in a way that you would never be able to develop if it you had two
months at the end of the editing process just before mixing starts. There are so many
thoughts going backwards and forwards, and people relating to musical moments
in the film that you can only do in this way if you start that early.”
Nearly three hours of music was pre-recorded prior to filming. In this way, “the
score is much more intertwined with the actual development of the film itself,” said
Tykwer, “and with the exploration of the movie itself by the filmmakers and all the
other artists—the actors, the production designer, the cinematographer and, of
course, for the directors. We can play music and we can hear music to complete our
imagination about what we want to do in the movie. When we did the big readthrough with all the actors right before filming started, they all came to Berlin and
we all sat together for a long day. We read the script and discussed it and all the way
along we were hearing the music.”
Work on the score began at Tykwer’s house in Berlin where the trio set up a
provisionary studio “and we put our ideas together, listened to music and tried to get
inspired and find all kinds of ideas for the various aspects of this score,” said Heil.
Though the daunting task of “Cloud Atlas Sextet” was looming, “we actually had lots
of wonderful ideas—some that made it into the movie, some that didn’t make it into
the movie—that didn’t result in the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet.’ So actually the sextet was
only written three months later when we came together for the second time.”
Tykwer describes the “Cloud Atlas Sextet” as “the centerpiece of the film.” “It was the
obvious thing that needed to be done but wasn’t done as the first thing because we
were really struggling with it,” said Heil. “It has such a pivotal role in the novel and
it is part of the narrative, so it’s a piece that needed to be ready before the film was
shot. In this particular case, anybody would have had to do it this way. Any
filmmaker who did Cloud Atlas would have had to take care of writing it or had the
‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’ written before the film was even in production.”
One of the challenges surrounding the composition of the sextet was David
Mitchell’s description of the music in the book as avant garde, early 20th century
chamber music. “That wouldn’t necessarily have been a beautiful piece the way it
then shows up in the other stories of Cloud Atlas,” said Heil, “where everybody is so
fascinated by it that it becomes this theme that everybody whistles in 2012 and then
some sort of almost religious piece of music for the science fiction story in 2144. So
we were thinking, ‘Okay, if we take the piece as it’s described by David Mitchell, it’ll
never be credible that this is a melody that everybody knows.’ At the end of the day,
we just caved in, so to speak, upon the challenge of reconciling these two things
that David nonchalantly put in his novel, and just tried to write a beautiful piece of
music as good as we can.”
The sextet began life as a simple melody that was then turned into a four-minute
piano piece. The piece was subsequently arranged in numerous ways—for choir, a
cappella, string orchestra, full orchestra. The piece was also arranged for a proper
chamber ensemble of the six instruments Mitchell described in the book, though
that version didn’t make it into the final film. The sextet weaves through the film,
from Frobisher’s composition in the 1930s to the recording Luisa Rey hears 50 years
later in the record shop, and as Muzak in the nursing home. “That melody has all
these shapes and incarnations in a kind of industrialization of music,” said Tykwer.
“Ultimately, it becomes the death song of the clones, of the fabricants, the
waitresses from Papa Song, who think they’re going to heaven but instead they’re
going to their execution. This theme, even though it’s their death song, is their
requiem, which closes the circle because it was initially written by Frobisher himself
as his own requiem.”
The theme that the aging composer (Jim Broadbent) hears in his mind was also
inspired by a description in Mitchell’s book as Der Todtenvogel. Lana Wachowski
instead coined the term “eternal recurrence,” “which has to do with this whole
rebirth,” said Heil, “the traveling of the soul through different characters through
time, and evolving or not evolving, as the essential theme of the movie. Whenever
fate happens or any big events in everybody’s lives happens in the movie, this is the
theme that drives them. It has sort of a motoric character in its bass riff. It’s a really
driving thing that still has very emotional components as well.”
Another main theme, the “Cloud Atlas March,” has what Heil calls “a very simple
melody.” The original arrangement of the theme was 10 minutes long, in which
every round of the theme went higher and higher, while the arrangements became
more complex, until the sequence ended on a triumphant orchestral ending. “That
piece happens several times in the movie in very reduced versions,” Heil said,
“because the movie just didn’t provide the 10 minutes to play that thing out.”
Even with three composers, the team still had to employ orchestrators. “None of us
is a particularly great orchestrator,” Heil explained. “In film scoring the
orchestrator gets a credit even if the composer says exactly ‘I want the flute to play
this, I want the oboe to play this, the bassoon to play this, the strings voiced exactly
like this,’ the orchestrator who puts this on the page gets the orchestration credit. In
terms of classical composition, the definition of orchestration is exactly what I just
said—the composer orchestrates his piece when he makes those decisions, when he
says, ‘I want this passage to be the three flutes, I want this to be the string sections,
and the harps are supposed to play this.’ So in some ways you could say the
composer actually does orchestrate. And we do orchestrate a lot, but we don’t do the
technicality of the orchestration. So we actually give the music to orchestrators
sometimes in this way that we say precisely what we want and where we want it and
how we want it orchestrated. In that way, we are all orchestrators as well but we
don’t get the credit for it. It’s really an iffy thing how the term orchestration is being
used in this industry.”
The composers like to work with orchestrators “who are creative,” said Heil. For
Cloud Atlas, the trio turned once again to Gene Pritsker, an avant garde, New Yorkbased composer who had worked with the team on Perfume and The International.
“Gene is the type of orchestrator where we can use electronic soundscapes and weird
sounds and say, ‘Orchestrate that! Good luck!,’” said Klimek. “Occasionally he’ll
come up with totally unexpected things that we would never think about. That
pushes us again to be more creative and head in different directions. He’s part of the
jigsaw puzzle as well when it comes to experimenting with the orchestra.”
Once the recording was done, the composers had what Heil called “a whole
‘catalogue’ of music” that was then remixed and used by the editors as a temp track
to assemble the film. Naturally, other challenges popped up during editing where
certain sequences needed new music written. For instance, in one of the early
sequences where Frobisher travels from Cambridge to Edinburgh, “it looks like a
very typical English period movie,” said Heil, “so we sat down and whipped up an
arrangement [of the march] in that way.” For the source music during the party
scene in 1973 San Francisco, “we could have just licensed music from somewhere
but instead we did a version of the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’ using that same melody, but
kind of resembled this vintage rock classic called ‘In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,’ a piece
from 1969 that was huge when I was a teenager. So the piece kind of sounds like
that. It’s not a piece of licensed music, it’s a piece of rock and roll which if you listen
very closely, the bass riff is taken from the sextet. So as much love and attention to
detail as the filmmakers put in there, certainly is also in the score.”
“We finally managed to have a very rich score that comes only out of a few core
elements,” Heil summed up. “If we compare it to Perfume, we’d have to reduce it to a
semi-tone motif and there are eight or nine different themes. [Cloud Atlas] is sort of
the opposite, like Lawrence of Arabia, where you have that one melody that comes
back in the movie all the time. I’ve been kind of preaching to everybody that I think
the Lawrence of Arabia method is better than the Perfume method. As cool as the
Perfume score is and as rich as it is, it would be nicer to just have a theme
happening more often and gluing together the movie. In this case, we have six
stories and we are the ones who have to glue them together. So we definitely worked
hard on this melodic material and very consistently applied them. For the first time
we wrote a really classic film score with just a few themes and then worked them in
as many ways as you could possibly imagine.”
Cloud Atlas is nothing if not ambitious. From its complicated structure to its
surprising emotional resonance, the film's "eternal recurrence" is an aural and
visual feast. Though Klimek jokes, “I don’t think we need visuals. It should have just
been a black screen and our names up at the top for two and a half hours. That’s
how you get an Oscar nomination!”
—FSMO