Chords for Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury on composing for new film 'Ex Machina' (Part 1)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
I'm Ben Salisbury _ and I'm Jeff Barrow and we are the
_ composers of the music for X Machina
Alex Collins you feel
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ We _ _
_ _ _ _ Play for an old man's football team soccer team in Bristol
We have done for kind of 20 years or so.
I think well not maybe 18 15 years.
Yeah, and we're called Brian Munich _
_ after the great German team, but obviously with Brian instead of buying and
_ _ we we didn't know when we first started playing together, we didn't know that we did music and
_ and eventually we could start chatting in the bar afterwards and that's how we got going and
_ _ projects have kind of come and
_ We've said oh we've got to work together and eventually
Projects I come in that we decided to work on and and this is our kind of second or third project.
We've worked together
Yeah, I mean drock
Was it was an album that came before this film which originally was music that was in Alex's previous film
Which was dread it which which didn't last the course
But we came out of the film with that music and a very good working relationship with Alex
And so he [E] said, you know the next thing I get off the ground
Will you two would you to be interested and we were like, yeah, of course and then _ _
Jeff met Alex in an airport in Norway.
Yeah, I bumped into Alex in Norway.
I was touring with Porter said and he was doing _
location scouting and
_ Recognized some of the guys he was where he was with and we were sat in opposite tables in the cafe in the airport
And that's how we kind of got back on it, right? _ _
[N] _ How did how did the process then start from there did?
was it the sort of thing where you kind of got [C#] concepts and you started working on music together or _ _
Did you have to wait until you saw some actual content from the film?
Well, we got the script
So we basically were sort of in on the film before it was even shot
_ And we got the script and you know
If you've got a musical if you work in music for film, you know
As soon as you read a script you should your brain starts ticking over
So we did have sort of ideas ticking over and then as soon as they got in the cutting room
I suppose a week into putting the first rough cut together Alex got us in the edit suite and and
_ And we dived in basically _
_ You know
There was a very very specific thing that Alex wanted us to sort of start with because he knew it'd be absolutely crucial and that
was sort of a verse
_ theme
The very sort of childlike innocent thing he knew that
_ [G#] Yeah
_ [E]
He knew it was crucial that the audience fell for Ava in the same way that Caleb does _ _ _
[C#] and
That it had to have absolute this this the musical element had to have absolutely no edge to it.
It just needed to be this almost
_ _ _ confrontationally beautiful _
_ Simple, you know naive innocent thing and that was the first thing we did which gave us a sort of foothold in the film
And then we we always knew that there was this this sort of horror and [G#] tension element
That was going to come in [N] as well.
And so that was going along in the background as well
And yes, we worked on the film for a very long time, which is unusual
But very satisfying
Yeah, it was a it was a it's a it's kind of a process that had to it was about pacing
_ You know when to give certain
_ _ Information away through the music.
I mean obviously there's things going on
_ You know in the script that is doing just the same thing, but you can have a conversation _
between kind of like Caleb and Ava or _
_ _ _ Oscar and _ _
Nathan And _ _ _ _
You only have to make it, you know
Slightly a minor chord or put some kind of noise in it and all of a sudden
There's some kind of sense of something's not quite right there.
I mean there's as a film _
Actually, there is an awful lot of music in it
There's a lot of underscore which we were really nervous about because it seems like there's tons
_ so we had to work really hard for it not to be intrusive and not to give too much away and
And to do the things at the right moment and that was something that Alex got very involved with you know _
And so he didn't get he didn't necessarily tell us how what musical language to use but with you know, he was very
Specific on what he needed the music to be doing in terms of its narrative or emotional or structural role
Because it wasn't like just you know, like scene to scene.
Oh that that becomes more hard.
It was it's an ongoing
_ _ Massively twisted thing that keeps on changing, you know that
_ And because of that it wasn't like you could just say well that seems stops and that's because I mean
it's a couple like that, but genuinely the
_ Most of it was really so _ _
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