Lost in translation

As the days grow cold and colder here in beautifully decaying Firenze, nestled into a particulate-laden Tuscan valley with the romantic Arno flowing just outside our window, I sit shivering at the dining room table, editing together the latest footage on my laptop and its elfin screen. With a squint and my magnifying glass I can see that it looks pretty good, thanks once again to Heath Orchard, my brilliant director of photography, and the acting skills of Hadleigh and Nikola and Bradley. 

We're getting close to some of the biggest and most difficult scenes: the discovery of the creature on the beach and the funeral of April's parents, the arrival by plane at Altar Barbus, the party, the impregnation by the coruscating alien penis.  Speaking of, when I hired Lola Miller for the April part, she pointed to that moment in the text (He climbs it and kneels between her legs and inserts his penis into her vagina) and asked "so how are you going to film that?"  Um cough I squawked, I don't know, maybe puppets, maybe a ball of light, TBD.

We are well past the 50% point, which gives me a certain perspective over the whole process.  The book is one thing, the opera already a strange translation.  When I wrote Daphnes Garten, Katharina Tiwald thought some of the sections were so odd, so different than what she had in mind - why is this part so happy? she asked.  We composers have total power to change mood and everything, sometimes I suppose subverting the author's original idea, however advertently or inadvertently.  But Robert has in general been happy with the music.  At one point he did say more Bernard Herrman so I did give him some.  

And then there is the film version of the opera which twists it all some more, which in that case isn't so much the difference between me and my intentions, but just the fact that, with film, there are a kabillion variables outside your control.  When you imagine music and write a score and have people play it, it's 95+%, but when you imagine a film - at least at my micro-budget level - it's more like 20%, or sometimes even 0%.  Even if the outcome is beautiful, wonderful, so much is improvised and in-the-moment, even more than with The Theater.

To wit, we had a big idea in the scene just above.  Heath was going to haze up the place like crazy and do some giant noir-ish shafts of light cutting through the space.  However, in filming the scene downstairs, the intense hazing set off the fire alarms, and the fire department came and wagged their fingers at us and said don't do that again or you will face the consequences of your actions - those consequences being at the least monetary and at the most - well, I don't want to imagine it. Probably being passed around the station house for boxing practice.  So Heath had to completely redo his whole idea, which - as often happens when one is faced with the pressure of disaster to come up with something else - ended up looking fantastic and allowed for the oddly unsettling reflections on the left of the screen. It was something like I imagined in my initial look-book, the imposing Mussolini-like space defining Sonja's power, but was it exactly like I imagined?  No, not at all.  The performance of a notated flute part is one thing; the realization of a stage direction in a screenplay is quite another.