SUNDANCE ‘23: Composer Dabney Morris Discusses ‘Sometimes I Think About Dying’
FilmSpeak talks to composer Dabney Morris about crafting the score of Rachel Lambert's Sometimes I Think About Dying.
According to composer Dabney Morris, Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying is a difficult film to describe. On paper, the movie focuses on Fran (Daisy Ridley), who has escapist fantasies about what it would be like to be dead. They’re never in the sense of being suicidal or anything. She simply wonders, “how do I escape my life?”. Throughout the film, she opens up through interactions she has with a new office worker and her own observations of the world around her.
It’s a beautiful study about this quiet person to who we can all relate. It is hard to give a full synopsis of the film because it feels like watching almost a photo book of her journey through the period in which this film takes place.”
Morris and director Rachel Lambert started “having conversations about the film before they even started doing pre-production. Rachel was out doing a lot of pre-production location scouting in Astoria, and she had a little window between when they would start shooting and when she came to LA. While out there, I listened to a lot of Hawaiian music. The story is like a beach town, but not in the sense that you would imagine a vacation, sort of tongue-in-cheek wine music playing, or even old ‘50s Hawaiian crooner music.
We started kicking around ideas of old lounge and exotica like Martin Denny, Les Baxter, and Nelson Riddle. That started spawning these ideas about what it would sound if some of these images we see on screen feel somewhat like they're playing against this sweeping, almost romantic, and fantastical orchestral music. It started very early in a lot of conversations. I'd sent her a lot of music, and it's a fun process getting from we've been. I might start sending her ideas for the script pages, she might start sending me ideas. Regarding references, it's almost not what we ended up with later on. But it’s an incredible journey because I think we both find a bunch of music we've never listened to before.”
On finding the right emotion for the score, Morris explained that “it’s very easy for music to turn into a sort of patronizing thing where it's telling you how to feel, but when you are working with folks who are so adept at their craft, from the performances, the directing to the cinematography and editing, it loses something if you're scoring the emotion that's on the screen. I like to think of music as a fourth dimension of the film. What do we want to say about this world where these characters live, or specifically where Fran lives, be it internal or external? What don’t we see on the screen that we almost want to comment on? Do we want to give the audience a sense of being in without prescribing a specific emotion to how you should feel in a moment?”
On adding choirs and voices to music, Morris stated that what he loves the most about doing so is that it “adds humanity to it. It makes you feel a connection to the characters, especially in a film like this, which is a film about just being a person. Having voices there singing this melody which the film opens, you know straight away in which direction the heart of the film is. And these voices definitely convey a sense of humanity. With a film like this, it would be very easy to think that the subject matter is bleak and empty. But it’s a deeply human film. Having those in certain places also contributes to the classical nature of the score.”
While the movie has not currently been released, Morris hopes that when the film eventually makes its way to audiences, they come out of the movie thinking about living a little more. “There was a beautiful moment that happened during the Q&A. An audience member specifically asked about Fran’s psychological state. Rachel is so good at not trying to prescribe what a character is to people necessarily but hopes that audiences and people who watch the film will connect to something personal with the character. The guy at the Q&A introduced himself as a psychiatrist and was interested to know if Fran had some disorder. Rachel’s response to that question was, “what do you think?” I think that it's fascinating to talk to people who have connected to it and so many different ways. Being lonely is weirdly ubiquitous but also a very personal thing. Everyone feels lonely in a different way. Everyone feels otherness in another way. I hope that people walk away from this film realizing that we can connect to the world around us, but there's the sentiment that Rachel gave at the end of that question was that fantasizing about dying isn’t necessarily thinking about being dead, but it's being afraid to live, and being afraid to step out into the world and risking connecting to the world around you and your own life. At some point, somebody in the audience blurts out, “sometimes I think about living.”. And that’s what I hope. I want people to walk away from the film thinking about what it is like to live.”