We interview Academy Award-winning composer Anne Dudley on her role as guest conductor at the inaugural London Soundtrack Festival.
The inaugural edition of the London Soundtrack Festival takes place in venues across the city from 19th – 26th March. One of the main events is Great Movie Songs, a night of favourite songs from the movies performed by an array of guest voices, including Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant and Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters. For a taste of what’s to come, we interview guest conductor Anne Dudley. Beginning her professional music career as a founder-member of pop avant-garde troupe Art of Noise, Dudley earned acclaim as a writer and producer before segueing into film scores. Her career has seen her work with major directors, including Paul Verhoeven, Paul Schrader and Tony Kaye. She won an Academy Award for her score to the feelgood British hit The Full Monty.
The London Soundtrack Festival is intended as a showcase for the many musicians, artists, studios and facilities that make London a hub for the craft of composition for broadcast media. The guest of honour this year is Howard Shore, renowned composer of the scores for The Lord of the Rings, plus works for David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, and his frequent collaborator David Cronenberg. Among the festival highlights are a public conversation between Cronenberg and Shore, a gala concert of Shore’s repertoire, and a screening of The Silence of the Lambs with Shore’s score performed live. Hildur Guðnadóttir will present screenings of films featuring her work, including Tár and Joker. Composers Paul Farrer and Natalie Holt will give masterclasses on scoring for television, and Harry Gregson-Williams will lead a masterclass and introduce a screening of Gladiator II, which features his score.
We met with Anne Dudley ahead of the festival to get some insight on the event, her process and how the world of composing is evolving. Read the interview below!
Great Movie Songs at the London Soundtrack Festival
Apart from one or two notable names, scores and the composers behind them tend to be behind the curtain of filmmaking. What do you hope the London Soundtrack Festival can do to bring more soundtrack makers to people?
Anne Dudley: There’s an increasing interest in doing film music in a concert setting. I’ve certainly had a lot more inquiries over the past two or three years for suites from various films that I’ve done. To have this gala concert where Tommy [Pearson, festival artistic director] is presenting Howard Shore with a lifetime achievement award, and to have a repertoire of entire film music, will really sort of show people that film music has a life outside of the movie and is a worthy presence in the concert hall.
What makes a great movie song?
A.D.: To me, it’s when you can’t imagine the film without hearing the song that’s associated with it. Now, it might be the other way around; you hear the song and it reminds you of the film, but the important thing is that it’s very memorable, and immediately takes people back to where they were and how they felt when they saw it.
The setlist for the Great Movie Songs event certainly fits that bill. How did you get involved with the London Soundtrack Festival, and this event in particular?
A.D.: I’ve known Tommy Pearson for a very long time, and I know that he’s had this idea of having a soundtrack festival based in London for a very long time. When it finally came together sometime last year, he was very excited to tell me all about all the workshops and concerts he’s doing. He’s programming a couple of my pieces anyway in the other concerts, and he asked “Would you like to MD [music director] and lead a concert of movie songs?” I thought about it, and I said, “What would we do? What would we do in this concert?” As you do, I looked up ‘100 best movie songs’ on the internet, and so many great songs came up. I thought, “Yeah, we could do that one. Oh, we must do that one! We have to do that one!” I ended up with such a long list of songs, all of which are great, which has changed a bit from what’s on the website. I called Tommy back a couple of days later, said, “Yes, I’ll take it on. Let’s try and cover songs from six or seven decades, and see what we can come up with.”
You’ve got some great singers lined up as well to bring the songs to life. How did you decide on who would actually get to perform the songs?
A.D.: We had a wish list, and very high on our list was Neil Tennant, who I know quite well. I’ve worked with Pet Shop Boys on a number of occasions, and I did an arrangement for Neil and Jake Shears of ‘Rent’ a couple of years ago for ‘The Piano Room’ for the BBC. They were so magical together, and this arrangement of ‘Rent’ is so fantastically over the top. I thought, “Can we include it?” Tommy said, “Yes, of course you can, because it was in Saltburn.” Neil was very happy to do ‘Rent’, and he also suggested a couple of other songs. I suggested to him that he sings one of my very favorite movie songs, which is ‘Everybody’s Talkin’, the beautiful Harry Nilsson song from Midnight Cowboy. We’re doing that in quite an unusual arrangement.
Jake Shears is just a fantastic singer, and such a nice bloke. I thought he could do a couple of the real bangers, which he’s happy to do. He also had some really interesting ideas for some choices. To be honest, I didn’t know one of them! It’s ‘Face to Face’ from Batman Returns. It’s by Siouxsie and the Banshees and Danny Elfman, and it’s got this great sort of Gothic quality to it, so I’ve done a new arrangement of that. There’s also an arrangement of ‘Sycamore Trees’, which is a from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me; Jake was also very keen on doing that. It’s a very unusual song, but I think we can do a great version of that.
Tommy brought on Monica Mancini, who is the daughter of Henry Mancini. That’s film royalty, so we had to get her! She’s got a fantastic voice, and of course, she’ll be singing some classics from her father’s work.
Anne Dudley on her successful and varied career
In your own career, from the days of Art of Noise, right up to your work as a film composer, a conductor, which role do you think defines you primarily? How would you describe yourself?
Anne Dudley: I call myself a musician, that’s all. I’ve never liked to be put in one particular category. I like to do interesting things, and I think I’ve been extremely lucky to have had such a varied career. I’m just delighted to have been able to make a living as a musician, because I didn’t know how you did that when I first started, when I was a kid. I’m not from a family of musicians, so I didn’t really know the world. I look back on the things that I’ve done, and in my twenties, I said yes to everything, which you have to do when you’re starting off. I found myself doing quite a lot of things that I hadn’t really anticipated doing, but I enjoyed, and I realized I could be quite good at this. You know, I never even knew there were musical arrangers, but somebody said, “Can you do a string arrangement for this track?”, and I thought, “I’ll have a go!” I think I’m still learning, quite frankly.
Your work transcends genres, and you’ve worked with some major directors. When it comes to a score for a film, does your approach change from project to project, or does it start in the same place each time?
A.D.: It starts in the same place, in as much as I’m trying to find a sound for the film. Obviously, each movie is going to demand a different sound, but you sometimes have to work hard to find out what the sound is. I often think the notes on the score are a way of getting to the sound that you want.
I’ve always been interested in how different composers get a different sound out of an orchestra. Composers do different things in terms of the actual scoring, and how they voice instruments and all that sort of thing. I’m always trying to find something that might be unique to any particular film. The process starts with quite a lot of thinking, if you’ve got enough time to be lucky to do that. You mull over the essence of the film. What’s it going to do? What’s it about? Then you ask, “How can you add music to it to enhance and underline what it’s about, and not take anything away?” This is a roundabout way of saying how I do it, but everyone has their process.
Your varied career even took you into comedy. What did you think when Bill Bailey approached you to conduct his Remarkable Guide to The Orchestra?
A.D.: Bill’s great. He’s a fantastic musician. I saw his latest show a couple of weeks ago and met him afterwards. He’s learned to play a whole other raft of instruments for this show. I mean, talking about multi-talented! Honestly, Bill puts all of us to shame. He played the bagpipes at one stage. He’s probably learning to play the trombone next; it wouldn’t surprise me!
Anne Dudley on composers and conductors in film
There have been a number of high profile films centered on composers and conductors recently (Tár, Maestro). Do you think that they make the industry more accessible, or is there a risk that can make it seem too aloof?
Well, I disliked Tár very much, actually, because I’ve never met anybody in our industry who would behave like that. Another film that I objected to hugely was Whiplash, about the drum teacher, which was also completely over the top. A number of my musician friends also thought this was not a reflection of how music education works. I did like Maestro because Leonard Bernstein is such an interesting character, and Bradley Cooper played him very, very well. He’s not a nice character, but his musicianship is so brilliantly portrayed in that film. I thought the scene where Bradley Cooper conducts [in a recreation of Bernstein conducting Mahler’s 2nd Symphony in Ely Cathedral] was very convincing. He’d obviously done a lot of work on it.
I think any film that delves into the nuts and bolts of how music actually gets made is to be applauded. A lot of people always mention that fantastic scene in Amadeus where Mozart is on his deathbed and he’s dictating the Requiem to Salieri. He says the trombones will be playing B flat, and Salieri is writing it down and you hear these layers coming in on the music.
It’s actually something we tried to do in Bill Bailey’s show, to deconstruct the orchestra and make people really listen with a great deal of care. They start to think, “Yes, that flute reminds me of Titanic”, and that the oboe has a pastoral quality. Although it was all done with a lot of fun, I think it is genuinely quite educational, because we tear things apart and put them back together again. A film that can do that successfully, and can educate as well as inform, is to be applauded.
Besides Amadeus, is there any other film you would recommend to anybody to get a grasp of how composing works?
In what you might call ‘the old days’, in films like The Music Lovers [Ken Russell’s biopic of Tchaikovsky], composers’ lives were portrayed in a rather over the top romantic fashion, and nobody was interested in how they actually wrote the music. There’s room for more films on composing, but some of the great composers were not very nice people, and they just worked very hard. Is it that interesting for a film? What are you going to illustrate?
Even Amadeus doesn’t illustrate how Mozart actually worked. His output was so massive in such a short time. I never seem to see in any of these biopics where they found the time for writing. We see Mozart was putting on concerts, teaching, and gambling, but music takes quite a long time, and he did it all before dying at 35!
I know somebody’s trying to get a biopic on Handel together, because he’s a great composer. He had quite an interesting life, and he’s not very well known as a character, because comparatively little is known about his life. I think it gives a filmmaker quite a lot of scope to fill in the gaps, whether what they’re going to put in is going to be remotely true. I think it might be quite illustrative of the period. He moved to London, became a very successful opera composer, wrote the ‘Messiah’ in a frantic period of about 48 hours. He donated the score to the Foundling Hospital, which was for orphaned children, and for hundreds of years, I think his legacy is used to fund the organisation.
Anne Dudley on the future of composing for film and television
Are there any new contemporary composers that you admire?
Anne Dudley: I like what Dan Pemberton does, as he’s always doing different things. They’re always interesting and challenging, and always well thought out. I admire him tremendously. In fact, we’re doing one of the songs he wrote for The Trial of the Chicago 7, which I’m really pleased about. Anna Meredith is another person that I really admire. Natalie Holt, too. Anthony Willis’ music for Promising Young Woman was a brilliant idea for a score, very well executed.
I still listen avidly to what’s going on on TV and film, and if I find something particularly interesting or something that I’m really jealous of, I think “I never thought of that!” I always want to know who did it.
You’re a relatively rare example of a female composer rising to the top of the industry. Do you think film and music have become more inclusive in the face of increased scrutiny and efforts to diversify?
A.D.: Yes, very much so. When I first started going into colleges and doing seminars about 25 years ago, the numbers of students were roughly 50/50, but the industry didn’t reflect this in any way. Over the past 10 years, there have been a lot of efforts to be much more inclusive, and it’s paying off. I don’t think it’s at all unusual now to see a woman scoring film and TV.
What projects are you working on next?
A.D.: I have to sign non-disclosure agreements nowadays, so a couple of things I can’t speak about. I have taken a slight diversion into producing. Last year, my husband and I helped a friend of ours, Joseph Millson, to produce a film. We actually invested money in the film and got heavily involved in the post-production. It’s an independent British film, called Signs of Life, and we’ve just been accepted to some film festivals. It was quite interesting to get involved in more of the production of the film, to see through the post production and the sound mix, and now to be involved in the promotion of a film. It’s all very educational and very enjoyable.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
The inaugural London Soundtrack Festival will take place in venues across the city on 19-26 March, 2025.
Header credits: Headshot of Anne Dudley (© Sheila Rock) / Still from the London Soundtrack Festival Launch at BFI Southbank (© Julie Edwards)
