New Zealand International Film Festival guest Neil Brand returns with his renowed accompaniment, scoring pre-sound classics The Gold Rush, Spies, The Cat and the Canary and The Black Pirate. The silent pianist speaks to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.


NEIL BRAND is an unlikely auteur in this time of globalised cinema. The English composer has made a name for himself as a silent film scorer, adding his own imprint onto the pre-sound classics. At this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival, Brand is accompanying a variety of films – in Auckland it was Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Fritz Lang’s Spies. In Wellington, Brand is playing the Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler The Black Pirate, and the haunted house classic The Cat and the Canary. Accompanying this appearance, Brand also delivers his acclaimed solo show, The Silent Pianist Speaks, an interactive comedy/music/film show which was designed for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Brand says that “I always had the gift of being able to play the piano by ear. I was very lucky. What I could hear normally I could reproduce.” He found this skill complemented his love of film. “In my formative ears, I actually grew up in a reasonably bland housing estate out in the east of London where there wasn’t a great deal of exoticism, yet the pictures at that time were such big screen epics. Mostly everything you saw was huge. Very colourful, phenomenal sound. I can remember the effect, even then, that the films were having on me when I left. The music would still be in my head. I associated this really heightened music with a really exciting life.” He trained as an actor at university, and was both a musician and an actor in his early years. But he was drawn to film and music. His début film was the British movie Shooting Stars, and he composed for television, short films, and eventually silent films.

Music is traditionally seen as an accompaniment to film (if taking a too conservative approach), and I ask how Brand manages to mix his creative impulses with audience expectations of the purpose of film music. “That’s a tough one. My impression has always been when I’m scoring a movie for a modern audience, I always have to have them at the top of my mind. I think the music can actually provide a bridge between the age of the film and its attitudes and mores. Particularly when its attitudes are out of date and hackneyed. The music can either smooth them over and maybe translate them in a way that’s more understandable to a modern audience. I always start from the point of view that I have experienced seventy-five years of sound in film and so have most of the people sitting around the auditorium, so I draw on film music as a way of making silent movies work. It means that audiences are hearing music in a way they’re more used to. I wouldn’t use contemporary music for the film anyway because a) it’s not that interesting and b) I think more importantly, if you’re not careful, what you end up doing is mummifying the film, so it just is a museum piece so it doesn’t speak to now.” This involves Brand searching for timeless aspects in the films – such as characters, subplots, or moments. Brand also says he needs to be wary that “you shouldn’t be dictating. There’s no point just playing what you see on screen. You’ve got to know in your own mind what you feel about what’s going on, and what’s going on in the subtext of the scene.”

And with silent films, Brand admits he has a pretty big canvas. “I always used to get in trouble with telly, because my music was too big. I didn’t understand because I tend to write quite theatrical music, because I have a theatrical background, and I love big sounds and big emotions and all the rest. That’s absolutely not a problem with film. If anything, that’s what you want.” And he notes a huge difference between scoring for silent films, and people who now score the big Hollywood films. “A lot of film music now is big in terms of its sound, but it’s not big in terms of what it’s saying. I’m sure that’s the way film scoring is done now – composers are not asked to do something original. They’re being asked to do music which sounds like somebody else’s music – ‘I want a Lord of the Rings sound here’, or ‘I want an American Beauty sound here’ or whatever. There’s always this feeling that the music is a bit second hand, even before the film has hit the screen. I’m sure it’s because ultimately, the final arbiters are always the execs, not the composers. The composers in order to keep their jobs have to do what they’re told.”

Brand is heavily influenced by film scorers – and more so than classical composers. He mentions figures like Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, and Alfred Newman in particular. He was also drawn to the scores in noir films. “This might be a bit dime store philosophy but the beauty about noir was not only the look of the genre. It tended to deal with moral issues and grey areas. That kind of focus on a complex issue where no-one’s right, no-one’s wrong, no-one’s good, no-one’s bad, a bit of all that. And musically, that tends to come out in the music as well. I tend to find in a really interesting way, you can overlay major chords and minor chords to create these beautiful thick textures. It’s the sort of thing Miklós Rózsa thrives on. I remember hearing these chords thinking ‘wow, that’s amazing – how did he do that?’ It’s an ordinary chord but it has got a note that should be in there.” He highlights Rózsa’s score for The Lost Weekend, as a score which he found particularly memorable in establishing an “off-kilter taken on moral behaviour.”

Brand is in effect, an auteur within auteur films – he worked with a seventy-piece orchestra on a score for Hitchcock’s silent version of Blackmail which he said “was astonishing. It was the time that I thought I was absolutely the right age to do this, this job could not have come along at a better time. I felt like I was a Hollywood composer scoring for the best director in town with a Hollywood orchestra. I would have never of thought I’d end up doing having just started playing piano for silent films.” But he also says working on these great films is “an enormous privilege. There is a sense of responsibility, because I know how destructive music can be. I’ve seen comedies absolutely steamrolled, with all the laughs steamrolled out by scores that just don’t work.” He uses Laurel and Hardy in his show to illustrate how to score comedy, and he draws a comparison with Buster Keaton. “The best of Buster Keaton’s comedies are actually when his life is in danger. Unless musically you really push that his life is in danger, it’s not as half as funny. If the music is just saying ‘ooh this funny’, you’re losing it, and not in touch with the form.”

Brand suggests that the auteur theory for directors is the best way to prepare for his job. “Playing a Fritz Lang, you do have to give yourself up to – I know it’s an odd word for Fritz Lang – this austere vision. The thing about Lang is that he takes what does very seriously, no matter how ludicrous it may be. Spies is utterly ludicrous from start to finish, but it takes itself terribly seriously. You have to surrender yourself up to him as a director and his vision to what he’s doing. Certainly ditto Von Stroheim. Ditto Griffiths. Ditto Hitchcock. The auteur theory works for me in spades as far as silent films go. Ultimately your only guide is what the director wanted you to do. Hitchcock did talk about music for silent films, only really in the pejorative – only what he didn’t like. He doesn’t actually tell you what he did like. Fairly obviously, he considered it a necessary evil. He must have had to sit, as they all must have done, through scores for their own films that they didn’t like. It behoves on me, I certainly think on anybody who takes this job, to aspire as far as possible and lose yourself in the filmmaker’s style, and get to know what they did.”

This means there are some filmmakers that Brand isn’t particularly keen on composing for, such as Lon Chaney and Cecil B. DeMille. However, his ‘holy grails’ were particularly illuminating in describing his approach to the art. He mentions G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box and Carl Dreyer The Passion of Joan of Arc. The latter doesn’t even need sound, visually it’s that incredible. “In fact, there are those who say ‘you shouldn’t score it’. True enough. Again I think it depends on what you intend to bring to the film. I think that utter silence can be self-defeating, because you’ll never get utter silence in a cinema. You’ll always get shifting and coughing, some sound or whatever. Some people are lucky in that if they’re watching a film in silence, they’ve got their own internal soundtrack. Film needs something. There is something deeply alienating and strange about watching a film in complete silence. The way I’ve always taken on Joan of Arc, the music is not there by any means to warm the scene, nor is it there to explain anything, because it’s all self-explanatory. All it’s there to do, is just purely play subtext when it’s needed. There are a few times where it doesn’t hurt to amplify what is going on. I’m thinking particularly – there’s a fabulous moment when the Bishop, or someone or rather, is pretending to be on her side to lead her through this horrible process. She’s been answering questions, and she’d look across at him, and he’d nod, and she’d answer. There’s a really big question, something along the lines of ‘do you believe that God led you to do this’ and she looks across, and his face doesn’t move. In fact he looks away. Which is like a smack in the face, it’s the most fabulous tiny movement you can imagine. You just know that on that kind of emotional and political basis, that is a huge turning point in the film. That is a point in which I do allow the music to erupt out like a geyser, and then slam it back down. You could have got that point anyway, but by my amplifying it in that way, I’d like to think that it still allows the audience to make their minds up about what they’re watching, but to take on board vividly what’s happening on the screen. Of all the silents, [Joan of Arc] must be the toughest.”

The Silent Pianist Speaks came about after Brand decided that he had been “doing this show for twenty five years and I thought I do want to talk about it now. People do come up and say ‘is this a score that already exists’, ‘are you memorising’?” Having trained as an actor (and toured with comedian Paul Merton), he says the show deals with “the actor in me, getting laughs off your own back, telling stories”. He suggests that “it’s a bit of an introduction for people who don’t know silent films, but I’d like to think it is for anybody who does as well. It’s a bit about me, it’s a bit about the movie, a bit about the music.” He also scoring the early colour film, The Black Pirate in Wellington. “I try to make the music dance with the action. Obviously because Fairbanks is not taking it at all seriously, he’s got a big smile on his face even when he’s in the greatest jeopardy, he’s doing backwards somersaults. It’s so daft, and so much fun. I love that for today’s audience, there’s a nice irony to it – it’s taking the piss out of itself a bit. It takes some of the curse out of silent films being ‘terribly po-faced, and of their time’. It’s also got a really nice gay subtext, which plays a treat these days. The whole thing is so much fun to do. And musically it really pounds along.” These shows, and his well-loved previous New Zealand appearances, continue to show that Brand’s renowned reputation for eclectic re-contextualising the old silent classics is a vital audio accompaniment to any festival.