Matthew Herbert on a Good Film Score, No Spanish Music in ‘Hot Milk’

British musician and DJ Matthew Herbert has pretty much done it all. After making a name for himself in electronic music (his 2003 manifesto “Personal Contract for the Composition of Music” famously emphasizes “no drum machines”) and launching his label Accidental Records, he ended up remixing such iconic artists as Quincy Jones, Ennio Morricone, Serge Gainsbourg, and classical composer Gustav Mahler.

His production work has seen him work with the likes of The Zone of Interest composer Mica Levi, Róisín Murphy (one half of the pop duo Moloko), and frequent collaborator and Icelandic songstress Björk. Best known for turning ordinary or so-called found sound into electronic music, he has also become a go-to partner for film and TV creators looking for a score. Cases in point are such films as A Fantastic Woman and Starve Acre, as well as such TV series as The Responder and Noughts and Crosses.

Most recently, Herbert served as the composer on Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s feature directing debut Hot Milk, starring Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps, and Vincent Perez, which world premieres in the Berlin Film Festival‘s competition lineup. The movie sees Rose (Shaw) and her daughter Sofia (Mackey) travel to a seaside town in Spain to consult an enigmatic healer (Perez), who may hold the key to Rose’s mysterious illness that has left her confined to a wheelchair. But in the sun-drenched town. Sofia is drawn to free-spirited traveler Ingrid (Krieps). “Sofia’s increased freedom becomes too much for her controlling mother, and as the hot sun beats down, their relationship simmers with pent-up resentments and bitterness,” according to a synopsis.

Herbert talked to THR‘s Georg Szalai about how he ended up moving into film and TV work, its key challenges, his score for Hot Milk, and his music PhD.

How did you start creating music for film and TV?

I studied drama at university. I didn’t study music, and I started doing music to pictures at university, just for friends and things. And then, my first big opportunity was a film called Human Traffic, which came out in 1999. My friend Rob Mello, who I met because I bought 12-inch vinyl from him, house records. His sister was working on this (Justin Kerrigan-directed coming-of-age) film Human Traffic, and he asked me if I wanted to do it with him, which was very sweet and very kind. So that was my first little proper film. And then I did quite a few, maybe eight or 10. But then I had quite a difficult experience on a film called Life in a Day and I took a break for a few years.

How did you get back into it?

I got a call out of the blue from Sebastián Lelio about A Fantastic Woman. He listened to my electronic music in the ‘90s, so he asked me to do that. And then that won the Oscar for best (international) film. And I’ve just been busy ever since.

How is it different to create sound and music for film and TV versus something like a record or a live performance?

It’s much easier because the idea is already there. So you’re immediately in service of another idea. You don’t have to do all the thinking yourself in terms of what it is about.

But it is also harder because it’s not your idea and you’re part of a team and have to serve the story and the vision of the director and the wider team. Music is the last thing to go on a film, unless it’s a musical. So it’s the last part of the process. So if there have been mistakes made in the production or a central performance or it doesn’t quite work, suddenly everybody wants the music to solve everything.

It’s like joining a company or an organization as an employee or a colleague or something. When it works and everybody is pulling together, it’s really beautiful. That’s the mess of democracy, right? We have to interact. We have to make compromises, but in doing that, you create better things together.

Your word in politicians’ ears! What makes a good score?

A bad score, or a lazy score, is doing the same thing as the picture. It’s if you see somebody being sad, and it’s sad music. It’s just telling the audience be sad, be sad, be sad. That can be patronizing and frustrating.

A good score is like a new character. It’s a separate character. It gives the director another tool. You think about what kind of character this score wants to be. For example, is it a character that’s like a narrator and comes to the front of the film and says, “Come with us, we’re going to tell you an amazing story. Just you wait, something’s coming!” Or does the music sit back with the audience and experience the story at the same speed as the characters? Does it travel at the same speed? For example, if you imagine a scene with two people kissing, if the music is beautiful and lovely, we’re at roughly the same place where they are. But if the score is dark, the music is telling you this isn’t going to last. Or if the music’s pleasurable on one character, but on the other character, there’s some dissonance, it’s (signaling) that this character is not into it anyway. So with a score you have a huge amount of power to direct the audience’s attention, so you have to use it very carefully. Otherwise, you can destroy the story, you can destroy the surprises.

I did a film called The Wonder with Florence Pugh, also by Sebastián Lelio. It’s a very, very dark and difficult and heavy story. Sebastián was very clear that he wanted the music to very light and very airy to keep things afloat somehow, because otherwise the music would just sink it. It would have just felt like trauma upon trauma. So, instead, in that film, the music comes to represent something like the divine spirit or these spirits that occupy the film in a way. If you rewatch that one, you will be seeing how the music is always going up, lifting everything up, whereas the story is pulling everything down.

What was the goal or function of the score for A Fantastic Woman?

It’s the story of a trans woman who’s under all these different pressures, so we gave her a very big and most Hollywood theme song at the very beginning with a full orchestra. That was a very conscious decision to (signal): Take this woman seriously! We wanted to give her dignity and respect and love. She deserves your attention.

What kind of input do you usually look for or get from the filmmakers?

it’s different on every film. On A Fantastic Woman, for example, I met Sébastian for the first time, and then three and a half weeks later I had to be finished. I had to write the demos, record it, orchestrate it, sign it off. That was very, very quick.

On Hot Milk, I was involved when it was still a script, and I spent a lot of time with Rebecca (Lenkiewicz), the writer and director, talking about ideas. I made a piece of music that’s about 10-15 minutes long that tries to capture the feeling of film. She listened to it and had some feedback. That piece of music fitted, both Rebecca and I were happy with it as it seemed to really capture something about the film. But almost none of it ended up in it. We took only little parts of it for the final film. It was more useful as a tool.

Who tends to influence the most what music ends in the final cut?

A lot of it is shaped by the editors. They often use music to help create shape in the film. Producers want to see an early cut. If you don’t have any music for that, it can feel quite bare and exposed. So they often put in music quite early. So what I try to do is give maybe 10 pieces of music to the editor, so your music starts to populate it. Normally, by the time I properly get to work, they roughly know where the music is going to be. Of course, they can change it or adapt. Often, they make you write too much music, and at the very end, they take some of it out. It can be a very careful negotiation in this process between the director, the editor and the composer, and sometimes a music editor. So there’s other people around, but it’s, yeah, it’s everything is a negotiation.

What tend to be the biggest challenges for creating a score?

It wasn’t a huge challenge on Hot Milk, but the budget can be a big challenge if, say, you can only afford one or two musicians and you want to do confident, eloquent, modern scoring without it sounding cheap or small. You can’t just dream. And this is particularly true for TV shows, because sometimes if you’ve got six episodes, you can only have two recording sessions – you can’t have six. There isn’t enough time or enough money, so you’re having to try and write music that might be able to be used later.

But with Hot Milk, it was really about trying to find something unique, a unique world

Hot Milk takes place in Spain. So should audiences expect to hear Spanish music in your score?

The film is set in Spain, but Rebecca didn’t want any Spanish music. We didn’t want to locate it. Both the book and the script are really, really hallucinogenic, really dreamy. It’s quite a small story in a way, which is a daughter goes on holiday with her mother who has got health issues. But the surrounding world has a kind of hazy, shimmery, hallucinogenic quality that ties in with the main character’s age and a transitional period in her life. She’s in her late 20s, she’s unhappy and she’s sort of tired of her mum. She wants to be free, but she doesn’t know what she wants to do and not grounded. So with the music, what you want to do is difficult. You don’t want the music to be ungrounded, because the music is there to help the audience understand and also create sympathy for the characters that. So you don’t want to create an unsettled score, because then it will start to feel like something bad is going to happen. So you’re always trying to strike a balance and try to occupy a state of ambiguity. It’s very delicate trying to modulate ambiguity.

You want to (express) that there’s something strange here. The character is having a nice time, and she’s experiencing a new kind of freedom. But she’s also tied to her mother, so it’s like push and pull, the good and the bad, the young, the old. There is also the hot weather and stickiness, sleeplessness, and it’s quite noisy. She’s thinking, “I’ve got my whole life before me but I’m a loser. I’m not a loser, but I’m nervous that I’m not fulfilling my potential.” So this is in a very ambiguous state in an ambiguous country, and her mother’s illness is ambiguous. Also, she falls in love with somebody, but does that person love her back? It’s all about how you do ambiguity in music without sounding like she is in danger.

Vicky Krieps, who is in Hot Milk, sang at the Toronto Film Festival. Did you have any of the cast ever do any musical stuff for Hot Milk?

She sang in this film but they cut that scene. We had her sing Dido’s Lament (the closing aria from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas) very quietly and that was really nice.

Something that I do a lot, and I did it on Hot Milk and do it on almost every project I do, is I go through the whole soundtrack of the film, and I take lots of little noises from it – little vocal snippet or a chair moving, or the table, or a car going past, and then I make instruments out of it. That’s the way that I used to do electronic music.

So you’re already using sounds from the film as the fabric of the film. And they have meanings or narrative functions. So for example, in Hot Milk, there’s a big question about whether the mother can walk or not. So if I’m using the sound of somebody walking really means something. If I used somebody with a drum kit, it wouldn’t mean anything. It would just be symbolic or impressionistic whereas if I use sound of somebody walking, I have to be really careful that I’m using it in the right place at the right time. I can use such sound to sow doubt in the audience. “Wait, did I just hear footsteps? But I didn’t see anybody. What does this mean?” Or why are the footsteps really slow or slowing down? So you’re trying to build whole complex ecosystems around the story and around the characters that can support and amplify what’s there.

I read that you got a doctorate, a PhD. What did your research focus on?

Yes, I did it during lockdown, and I got to use a lot of my work research. It’s about ethics. On Sept. 11, I was in Manhattan (where he played at The Knitting Factory) and thought I was going to die, so I recorded lots of sounds and things that day and didn’t do anything with it. But because of sampling technology and computers, you could turn that into music. But what are the ethical implications? It’s basically the sound of all these people dying. I was recording on a roof, and one of the buildings collapsed whilst I was recording, and you’ve got that sound. If you turn it into music, if you turn that into a rhythm and people start dancing to it, that feels disrespectful. It’s a debate that has been had in documentary filmmaking and all around the image but one that we have never had in music. So it’s about the ethics of turning any sound into music.