Soundtrack and Music

We always used location sound recorded at the time of filming.  Very few scenes have additional ambience sound, and in those cases we recorded the sound in the same location.

The ambience sounds in the scenes with photographs and archive material in 8mm are repeated, creating bridges and connections.  The criterion was economy. Thus for example the  low and indistinct sound in the initial sequence with images from the seventies and eighties (recorded inside a moving American car) is the same as in the images in Cuba.  The sea waves in the Porto de Barcas sequence  are the same as in the photos in the Azores and in the 8mm childhood film on the beach (recorded at Santa Maria in the Azores.)  The voices of children in that 8mm beach scene and are the ones (though modified) in the photos of Copacabana.

In the quotations from voices we used selected discussions by virologists (namely declarations by Dr Karla Kirkegaard, professor and director of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine), an excerpt from an interview with Pasolini in 1966 (from the series Cinéma de Notre Temps, by Janine Bazin and André S. Labarthe), extracts from a conversation between Serge Daney and Marguerite Duras (Microfilms, April 1987), and a collection of interventions by researchers at CROI 2011 and 2012 (Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections).

The musical choice was governed by the disks that we were hearing during the year of clinical tests and which were unavoidably captured by location sound. The music was not previously selected for the film. It is the result of the old habit of choosing every morning the disks we will listen to during the day. So, “The Plot” by  WhoMadeWho  that was playing in the car on the morning of the departure to Madrid became the musical themes  of the film’s opening titles and of the sequences in Madrid (in remixed versions); the  Jacques Ibert piece  I was listening to in the office with Rufus became the music for the sequence in which I climb the stairs to Nuno’s bedroom; the Max Reger piece that accompanied Nuno while he painted the animation clip continues in the countershot over my eyes; and the Carl Maria von Weber piece played by Emil Gilels which we hear in the final rainy car sequence turn s out to unify the film’s epilogue.

Two notes relating to the music. We sincerely thank WhoMadeWho and Jasper Majdall, GOMMA and SONY  ATV who were all interested in the project and collaborated in the granting of all rights. A little by chance, during the shooting process we got to know the work of Jacques Ibert better – a French composer who was a friend of Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud and occasionally wrote music for the cinema (Don Quixote – 1933, by Georg Wilhelm Pabst; Golgotha – 1935, by Julien Duvivier; Macbeth – 1948, by Orson Welles; Invitation to the Dance – 1956, by Gene Kelly; Jabberwocky – 1977, by Terry Gilliam.)  We couldn’t have imagined that some of his more intimate works (chamber music and instrumental solos) would be fully integrated into the film.

The editing and pre-mix of the sound were made by us in Pro Tools. We had the luck to send a working copy of Olivier Do Huu who was finishing the most recent Tavernier. He liked our film and agreed to mix its 2 hours and 44 minutes in only 3 days. He worked over our pre-mix, incorporating our ideas for the sound with daring and experience. In many cases he has “radicalized” our concepts, transforming soft passages into abrupt cuts and emphazising discontinuities. Thank you, Olivier.

WhoMadeWho (official site)

WhoMadeWho (MySpace)

Jacques Ibert (Wikipedia)

Olivier Dô Hùu (IMDB)