Scoring A WAR WITHIN - Part 1: Introduction

In 2018, I wrote the score for the Danish/German/Czech feature film A WAR WITHIN. 

The movie is set during World War I times and deals with a rather specific detail of Danish/German history. As you will know, Demark and Germany are neighboring countries. However, during the times of WWI, the southern Part of today's Denmark was German territory as a result of war between both countries a few decades earlier. However the people living there mainly identified as Danish. During WWI however, many of them were forced to fight in the German army. Consequentially, many soldiers from these places deserted and tried to escape to Denmark.

This is the historic setting of the movie. The story follows Esben, a young man who has to leave his family behind to fight in the war. After a self-induced injury he is being sent home to his family only to learn that he is about to be sent back to war shortly after.  He escapes and hides in the attic of the mill that he and his wife are working on. After even trying to stage his death for the authorities, he also learns that his wife has a more intimate relationship with his German officer. Eventually he decides to sacrifice his life so that his family can escape.

So overall, it is a rather complex story. It is a fictional story that is playing in a historically true setting. You can see the trailer for the movie above to get an idea of the movie.

I came to this project in late 2017, before the principal shooting which took place in fall/winter 2017/18. European film funding often works in a way that national agencies fund the production of these movies. These are subsidized by the governments. In Germany there are several such agencies either on state or on federal levels. So if you're trying to raise money for a movie that you're trying to shoot, you're applying to these agencies with your idea and after a long period of examination you migt geht some funding from different agencies. 

The production of this movie went to several countries to apply for funding which also as a consequence means that you need to get other production companies from the countries in which you're applying in on board as funding is obviously only granted to business from the countries that you're applying in. To make things even more complicated, you need to spend the money that you're getting in the country or sometimes even state that you got it from. If your movie after release generates a certain revenue, you need to pay the funding back. 

So this mainly Danish production got funding from three different countries with the requirement to spend the individual amounts they got in these countries. So they needed to spend some of the budget in Denmark, Germany and Czechia. Of course this makes things considerably complicated, balancing the production in a way that all money is correctly spent in the right country. With this movie gathering a budget that was one of the highest for a Danish production ever, these things got really complicated. Eventually with all the budgets being spread out, they needed a composer from Germany.

This is where I got into the game. The producer of the movie asked an American composer that he know and whom I have worked with before whether he knew someone from Germany who he would recommend which lead to me being attached to this project. 

Of course, I personally am not really happy to be picked because I happen to live in the right country and not mainly because of my work but unfortunately, this is the way how the European movie system works quite often.

There however was a pitch going on. The production contacted a handful composers, sending out the script to them with the task to come up with a main theme idea based on the script and some rough references. So I came up with a few theme ideas that I felt worked with the images that I had in my mind when reading the script and sent it over. After a few weeks  they came back to me and said that they narrowed it down to two composers, once again asking to extend one of the themes further and after a few more weeks they told me that they picked me to be their composer.

Part of the reason why they chose me also was that they wanted a rather large orchestral score (which in itself is rather uncommon for Scandinavian productions). The director named the genre that they were going for "Epic Realism". So the idea was clearly to go for rather opulent and grand scale visuals to attract a more international audience for the movie and the music needed to go along with that concept.

After the principal shooting and first rough edits, as expected, the theme that I wrote based on the script didn't fit at all anymore as the visuals turned out way darker and more gloomy than anticipated. The first theme attempt and the references I got were more uplifting. One of the references was the Forrest Gump theme, so you get the idea how far off that first stab was from what the visuals imply.

Working on this score also had the difficulty of a sharing of creative responsibility between director and producer. I always try to make a clear request to give the responsibility about the music and greenlighting it to just one person as anything else will always create unnecessary extra work. In this case it was however non negotiatable as both had written the script and felt similiarly responsible for creative decisions.

As expected during the work process this developed into a problem as at one point I had scored almost 2/3 of the movie while the producer was busy and couldn't listen/give feedback but I got feedback from the director and worked with him on edits until he was happy. However once the producer heard it, he requested changes on almost half the cues only a few weeks before recording which of course was not the nicest situation to be in.

The movie was temp tracked with a lot with music from THE REVENANT and other similar scores, in general diverting quite heavily from the sweet and sentimental approach that was originally envisioned into a more gritty, rather dark musical territory. There was also quite a bit of hybrid music in the temp track which worked quite well on the images.

After the editing was almost complete, I flew to Copenhagen to have a spotting session. Unfortunately, the production had scheduled only one afternoon for the spotting of a 2+hr movie so we ended up rather watching it and only stopping on climactic moments and in general speaking more broadly about the music than actually going too much into detail. In many cases, the direction of the music however was pretty clear and a lot of the score needed to create atmosphere, rather than carrying the story. In a way, the visuals were already quite "complete" without music.

During the spotting session the editor, producer and director ended up in a bit of a discussion as the temp track very often was "lonely piano, lots of reverb". The editor was strongly against using this device too often as it was too clichéd and I really did agree with him (I generally find the "solo piano" approach too overused) but producer and director were very much in love with solo piano. So eventually, I tried to used it as sparsely as possible but as often as necessary to satisfy the customers.

So the first step after I got back home was to write a new principal theme and actually attach it to a relevant story point. It was always communicated that it should be a love theme but I found it more fitting to be the theme for "home and family" as this would make more sense to focus the theme more on the thing that this movie is actually about. It's not about the love between the main character and his wife but rather the longing for home and family and the will to sacrifice everything for it.

Besides the main theme, there was a need for a few side themes and motifs that would connect a few story arcs between supporting actors and actresses.

One decision that was also set already was that we needed to record the score in Prague, which we did in late Summer 2018. As you might remember the movie got funding from Czechia so it needed to spend money there as well, which kind of dictated already where to record. However, having a lot of experience of recording there I was happy with that decision.

In fact, knowing exactly where we would be recording directly influenced the conceptual approach of the score as I came up with a concept that would work with the studio space. 

In the coming parts I will talk about the music concept and thematic material and my working process . I will also be sharing some scores/recordings and multitracks.