I’ve just finished a film score : in contrast to the way these things are normally done (at the last moment), it was completed the day before the film started shooting in Mexico. The brief was to write the final movement of an unfinished symphony written by an imaginary composer around 1910, whose completion has been entrusted to an American composer, played by Willem Dafoe. This is not what the film itself is ‘about’, but is an essential element of the sub-plot, which I’ve discussed at length with the director, Daniel Graham. He provided a detailed biography of his invented Norwegian composer Grøndahl, born in 1842. It’s been a fascinating task both to imagine the music that he might have written, and to contrive the links that the American composer has made to pull Grøndahl’s unfinished fragments together. Full details of the film, which started shooting on November 7, can be found here.