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Was this conducted to film, or was it just a rerecording?
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Posted: |
Jan 1, 2021 - 9:02 AM
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By: |
.
(Member)
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The Making of "Feature Film"
James Lingwood
"Feature Film had a long genesis: we first talked back in 1993 in Glasgow and the project wasn't realised until 1999.
There were several ideas which we didn't follow through. Once we looked at The Exorcist and The Song of Bernadette overlaid together on tape. Although the idea was interesting and the final realisation, at the 'Munster Sculpture Project', was very powerful, I guess we didn't do that together because when Douglas proposed the idea the work was already in many ways done.
I remember spending a weekend with Douglas in Berlin. He had prepared various CDs of film music which we listened to intently, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Ben Hur, Psycho etc. Douglas was building me up to listen to Vertigo. We listened to the music in its entirety, and then watched the film. There was almost no need for Douglas to explain - which he did very convincingly why the work he needed to make needed to be based on Bernard Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's film, with its themes of doubling and duplicity.
Douglas then cast the conductor. There was discussion at one stage about whether the conductor might be a woman with blonde hair, and we found someone who was very good. However, eventually Douglas cast James Conlon, Director of the Paris Opera, not only because he is a great conductor but also because he looked right - not really like a classical maestro and more like an actor, and because he rarely used a baton. I realised later that there were certain similarities between Conlon and Gordon....
The filming in Paris was set up almost as an equivalent of a live broadcast, because once the musicians had begun to play, there was an imperative to create a full new recording of the entire score within an extremely tight time scale (the overtime payments for the 100 strong orchestra were frightening).
There was a magical moment at the beginning of the first day in Paris. The musicians turned up at the concert hall, Douglas introduced himself and Conlon talked about the score briefly, each of them looked at their part – which they had not seen until that moment, Conlon raised his hand and they started to play. It wasn't approximately what we'd been hoping to hear, it was exactly what we had hoped to hear.
Douglas was directing three cameramen and watching all the material as it was simultaneously relayed to him in a director's box in the concert hall. I was hugely impressed that, at a point of maximum tension for us all, he was composed and concentrated and made absolutely the best of the time and the people that had been brought together - just as James Conlon and the sound team made absolutely the best of the musicians who had been brought together".
From the Artangel site:
https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/feature-film/
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For as long as there's no release of the original tracks that is more complete than the Varese (which may not be possible at all), the Conlon remains the best one out there.
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And on the first day of 2021, no less!