It’s a pretty rare occasion when the director of a superhero movie sits down with the composer to talk about music and neither of them ever uses the word “action” or even “superhero.”
Instead, “Black Widow” director Cate Shortland and composer Lorne Balfe talked about the backstory of Natasha Romanoff and her sister, Yelena Belova. “Every conversation we had, right from the beginning, was about Natasha’s and Yelena’s heritage,” Balfe tells Variety.
“I wanted to write the music that Natasha and Yelena listened to when they were children. Russian folk music was their original soundtrack — what their parents would have sung to them, what they would have absorbed as children.”
So, in what may be the year’s most ambitious film score to date, Balfe enlisted a 118-piece London orchestra and a 60-voice choir singing Russian lyrics. And not just any made-up Russian words: Balfe adapted the...
Instead, “Black Widow” director Cate Shortland and composer Lorne Balfe talked about the backstory of Natasha Romanoff and her sister, Yelena Belova. “Every conversation we had, right from the beginning, was about Natasha’s and Yelena’s heritage,” Balfe tells Variety.
“I wanted to write the music that Natasha and Yelena listened to when they were children. Russian folk music was their original soundtrack — what their parents would have sung to them, what they would have absorbed as children.”
So, in what may be the year’s most ambitious film score to date, Balfe enlisted a 118-piece London orchestra and a 60-voice choir singing Russian lyrics. And not just any made-up Russian words: Balfe adapted the...
- 7/15/2021
- by Jon Burlingame
- Variety Film + TV
Sergei Paradjanov made some of the most beautiful films ever seen, writes Elif Batuman. His reward was to be sent to the gulag for 'surrealist tendencies'
Between his abandonment of socialist realism in 1964 and his death from lung cancer in 1990, Sergei Paradjanov made four of the weirdest and most beautiful movies ever seen. An ethnic Armenian, Paradjanov was born in Soviet Georgia in 1924. His mother was "very artistic": she "used to adorn herself with Christmas tree decorations and curtains and join her friends on the roof to enact legends". In 1947, Paradjanov spent a brief stint in a Georgian prison for committing "homosexual acts" (which were illegal under Soviet law) – with, of all people, a Kgb officer. He later disavowed the seven films he shot in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1962, he saw Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and completely changed his artistic method, which had previously been quite normal.
The...
Between his abandonment of socialist realism in 1964 and his death from lung cancer in 1990, Sergei Paradjanov made four of the weirdest and most beautiful movies ever seen. An ethnic Armenian, Paradjanov was born in Soviet Georgia in 1924. His mother was "very artistic": she "used to adorn herself with Christmas tree decorations and curtains and join her friends on the roof to enact legends". In 1947, Paradjanov spent a brief stint in a Georgian prison for committing "homosexual acts" (which were illegal under Soviet law) – with, of all people, a Kgb officer. He later disavowed the seven films he shot in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1962, he saw Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and completely changed his artistic method, which had previously been quite normal.
The...
- 3/13/2010
- The Guardian - Film News
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