By Robert Barry
Tilda Swinton, in a sharp black suit, hair and face with that just-washed look she so often sports for her rare public appearances, is talking about how she and director Luca Guadagnino managed to secure for their film, I am love, the music of John Adams, one of the most celebrated living composers, the "post-stylist" who became the hero of Alex Ross's monumental book on the music of the twentieth century, The Rest is Noise. Adams, insists Guadagnino, did not write the music for the film, "we worked on his repertoire."
Some years ago, around the time he first found the location for the house in the film and still in the very early days of the film's development, Guadagnino was given some of John Adams's music on CD by a friend and immediately felt it was the right music for the story. He played it to Swinton and she knew he was right, "This is such an edited world, this milieu that we show in the film," she says, "and the landscape of his music is so un-edited, so grand, and so florid, so vernacular and so modern and its completely shameless. It felt like a very human basket to put this rather inhuman content in."
As they developed the story, writing and re-writing the script, scouting locations, always it was with this music of John Adams in mind, getting increasingly, "deep inside the music" as Guadignino puts it. So, when they came to shoot, again they would play Adams' music on set, move the camera dolly in time to its frantic rhythms. Then came "a very strange moment" when they realised that, all this time, they had never thought to enquite into the rights and licensing of this music. What would they do if they weren't allowed to use it?
Through friends of friends, Swinton was able to invite Adams to see the film in a little screening room near Covent Garden. He was one of the first people, outside the cast and crew to see a cut, and, of course, his music was already all over it without a word of permission. When the film came to an end, Adams leant forward, bowed his head and slowly shook it from side to side. "We were just destroyed," reveals Swinton, but then he lifted his head and told them he thought the film was a masterpiece and that he'd be happy for them to use his music.
"I always had very disappointing experiences any time I went to work with a composer for a soundtrack," Guadagnino claims, "probably because of my great resistance to work on a composed soundtrack. I don't believe it takes three weeks to make a piece of music. If you think of Harmonielehre, which is the last piece of music used in the film, it took John Adams three years or maybe more, to conceive and compose this piece of music." And even in the most harmonious relationship between a composer and a director - Herrman and Hitchcock, say, or Morricone and Leone - no-one ever spent three years on a film score.