Composer David Lang talks about working with Paolo Sorrentino on ‘Youth’ [Exclusive Interview]

Composer David Lang is better known for his work in the classical music field and even won a Pulitzer Prize in Music for his 2008 piece, The Little Match Girl Passion. But his latest work is the score for Youth, the new film from Italian director Paolo Sorrentino.

Although this is the first time Lang has worked with Sorrentino on a film from the very beginning, his work has already appeared in one of the director’s films. Sorrentino used music written by Lang in The Great Beauty, which won the Oscar for 2013’s Best Foreign Language Film. The director got in contact with Lang after that film was completed and revealed that he planned to make his next film about a composer. Lang agreed to compose an original score for that project, which turned out to be Youth.

“When you write music for a film, all of these other layers of things have to work. The music has to be cooperating with all of those things,” Lang said of writing music for film. “So, I can’t be selfish and inscrutable. I have to be a team player.”

I spoke with Lang at the Savannah Film Festival, presented by the Savannah College of Art and Design on Oct. 26 before a screening of Youth. The film stars Michael Caine as a retired composer and Harvey Keitel as a filmmaker trying to make his last masterpiece. It opens on Dec. 4.

TheCelebrityCafe.com: Some of your music is in The Great Beauty, but you didn’t actually score that. How did you know that Sorrentino was using your music? Did he approach you before making that film?

David Lang: Basically, most composers are dead. The publishers are used to taking care of your catalogs without you. So, [Sorrentino] had licensed the music from my publisher, so I had no idea.

TCC: Wow.

DL: I forget who played him my music first, but I found out about it because by coincidence, the director of the women’s choir [in The Great Beauty] is a friend of mine. He called me from the set and said, “Oh, we are filming your piece now!” And I said, “What piece is that?” “We are filming your piece in the new Paolo Sorrentino film!” “What?” So, it was completely a shock to me.

TCC: Did you know about Sorrentino’s prior work?

DL: I knew he was, yes. So, I was very, very excited. I was excited about another very personal reason, which is that the opening of The Great Beauty is this beautiful fountain overlooking the city of Rome. And what Paolo couldn’t have known is that I lived in Italy for a year, in Rome, one block from that fountain!

TCC: So, it’s all these coincidences that linked you two.

DL: I met my wife in Italy and we used to stand on that overlook probably every day for a year, just thinking about how beautiful Rome was and how lucky we are. So, when I went to see The Great Beauty, I was, first of all, very flattered that he had found my music and he had done something so beautiful. Second of all, I just was so amazed that it was already such a part of my life.

TCC: Was there any pressure to, not necessarily repeat the music that was in The Great Beauty, but to recapture the feeling of the music in that film with Youth?

DL: It really didn’t come up because, the interesting thing is, I met Paolo, [after] when I actually saw The Great Beauty for the first time, because Paolo had this idea to make a movie about a composer. So he said, “Oh, come up to the Toronto Film Festival. We’re screening The Great Beauty and I want to actually tell you about this other movie.”

All these things happened at once. I met him, I saw the movie. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was and how sensitive to the music it was, not just my music but everyone’s music. And then we had this discussion about the life of a composer, not just the life of the composer that is in this movie Youth, but the life of a composer in general. He really wanted it to feel like it was accurate.

TCC: Do you think any of your life got into the character that Michael Caine plays?

DL: Well, I don’t know that it got into the character, but I think it got into the music. Because... the entire movie builds up to his song. [Sorrentino] basically embedded how meaningful the song is into the entire course of the movie. So, the way I tried to solve that problem is by putting little scraps from the song in the soundtrack that goes through the entire way. And the extra music that’s added to it relates to it somehow. So by the time you finally get the song, you realize it’s been part of [Caine’s] character’s life... the entire time we’ve seen him in this movie.

TCC: Was it harder to write the score knowing that the character in the movie was a composer? That you are sort of writing for another person in the movie?

DL: The hardest part of writing it was knowing that [pause] you could do a bad job, actually! Film music is really interesting because it has to work. The world I am normally in is classical music and we can be as odd or inscrutable as we want. My Pulitzer Prize piece is very emotional, but it’s all on an emotional level that I can control.

When you write music for a film, all of these other layers of things have to work. The music has to be cooperating with all of those things. So, I can’t be selfish and inscrutable. I have to be a team player.

TCC: Was there any film music that inspired your work in Youth or did you try to not pay attention to previous film scores?

DL: I wasn’t really trying to think about film music. I was trying to think about my own emotional life. I know that sounds very selfish, but the beauty of this song at the end and, the reason why Paolo wants it there is because it is a really great way to measure the distance [Caine’s character] has traveled in his life. He wrote it when he was very young for his wife so it’s about youthfulness, love and simplicity, this very optimistic way of looking at his emotional life and, of course, as an old man, his life has changed. The song has to encapsulate everything, both end points of his life and everything inbetween.

For me, the really strange thing about it was that I ended up ... projecting myself into the character. I could only understand how to solve the problem if I could imagine the emotional journey for myself. So, I wasn’t really thinking about other music. I was just thinking about the character. If I had that journey, if that was my life, if that was my relationship to my wife, how would I feel? How would I try to express that musically? God forbid!

TCC: Do you feel connected to the story itself?

DL: I feel connected because it’s a composer and that made it really meaningful to me. I’ve done four or five other [movies] and they’ve all been sort of on the periphery, so this is probably the most high visibility thing I’ve done. I did the arrangements for Requiem for a Dream, which was an amazing film score by Clint Mansell.

TCC: Would you ever do a film without a composer as the main character?

DL: I’d love to have the chance to try!