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Known for his range as a composer able to tackle every genre from horror to drama to action to documentary and beyond, it is the emotionality of Alex’s work which sets him apart.\u00a0 He can just as easily and effectively score an action picture like Escape Plan<\/em> with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger as he can a heartwarming Disney film like Queen of Katwe.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>It’s this diversity that makes Alex perfect to score a wildlife documentary like THE ELEPHANT QUEEN.<\/p>\n Directed by the acclaimed wildlife documentarians Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone, and narrated by Chewitel Ejiofor, THE ELEPHANT QUEEN follows the journey of Athena, 50-year old matriarch of an elephant herd in Kenya.\u00a0 Following the journey of Athena and her herd, we see the circle of life unfold over the course of a year as it falls to Athena to lead her herd family, to sense the upcoming dry season, intuitively know when the herd must start its treacherous journey to a water refuge, balance the care of a sick baby elephant with the needs of the herd as a whole, and then eventually make the return trek back to her kingdom.\u00a0 But along with the elephants, we meet the other residents of the kingdom, giving us a full and complete picture of the region’s ecosystem and the interdependency of each species on one another.<\/p>\n Tasked with scoring a story that not only captures the emotionality of Athena’s story, but that of the other creatures of the kingdom, each with their own individual and distinct personalities, the jumping-off point for Alex was learning to speak elephant; connecting with these magnificent creatures and learning their body language and translating that into music.<\/p>\n I spoke at length in this exclusive interview with Alex about the uniqueness of scoring this film; about creating musical motifs not only for a particular species but for individual creatures so that the music captures their personality, such as with Stephen the baby Egyptian Goose (“Stephen’s Adventures”) or Wei Wei, a rascally little one-year old elephant (“Wei Wei and the Tribe”), or a very determined little dung beetle (“Dung Beetle on a Mission”, “Ride of the Dung Beetle”); about finding the heartbeat of Athena and her kingdom; finding hope in the circle of life when dealing with death; and the importance of instrumentation in the design of the score and melding that with actual night sounds Alex captured while spending time in Kenya.<\/p>\n This is a very emotional, very layered, and very textured score that speaks from the heart, the heartbeat of Athena, filling one with awe and wonder, laughter and tears, as ALEX HEFFES speaks elephant through music.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alex, your score for THE ELEPHANT QUEEN is a lovely change for my brain.\u00a0 This score is so wonderful. I love it. The music is almost anthropomorphic with the elephants, with all the other creatures, with the bullfrog, with Steven the goose.\u00a0 You bring such personality and whimsy to each animal and the film overall while also addressing the somber notes of a year in the life of an elephant and the elephant’s journey.\u00a0 The section with Mimi, it wasn’t mourning music.\u00a0 It wasn’t a funeral dirge, but it was respectful and there was some hope in it.\u00a0 Because your music is so in tune with the animals themselves, I have to ask, do you speak elephant? Do you speak bullfrog or foam frog or terrapin turtle?\u00a0 Because your music just captures them so perfectly.<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, thank you.\u00a0 That’s very nice of you to say.\u00a0 Actually, it’s funny, but I do say that you’ve got to learn to speak elephant. It’s true. The filmmakers would say to me, “No, the music’s all wrong here. Why have you done it like that?” And they’d say, “Look. Look at that elephant. She’s wrinkling her trunk at that other elephant. She’s clearly not happy with him.” And I’d go, “Oh, okay.” They really taught me over a long period of time to tune into what I was looking at and try and find what the music equivalent is.\u00a0 But it’s sort of hard. It’s not like actors who are reading a line and you get what they’re trying to say.\u00a0 Animal behavior is a whole different thing, so I’m glad you felt like it communicated that because it’s a bit of a thing.<\/p>\n An important part of your compositions and the various motifs that you have, and I know every time Steven the goose pops up, his little motif comes in and it just makes me smile…<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, that’s good. I really wanted the music to make people smile and feel engaged and feel like they love the characters because that’s the way into people’s hearts about conservation as well as just falling in love with something. That’s what I wanted the music to convey so I’m glad you’re thinking that.<\/p>\n . . .but so much of the compositions are actually your orchestration and most particularly, your instrumentation.\u00a0 That’s something that really struck me – your use of instrumentation in conveying emotion and character personality identification.\u00a0 With the opening of the film, there’s a flute or a piccolo and we get a mystical sound and then some strings slowly come in, and then your whole tempo sets in moving slowly like the lumbering elephant.\u00a0 There’s a little bit of melancholy, but then the score stops, the thunderstorm starts, and then the next morning everybody’s up.\u00a0 “We’re waking up!\u00a0 We’re waking up!”\u00a0 \u00a0Then your music slowly starts coming in and the personalities start emerging as we meet them, as we see them playing in the muddy watering hole, as we meet the bullfrog, the turtle, and of course, our little baby elephants, Mimi and WeiWei.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>But it’s the instrumentation that really speaks specificity.\u00a0 Having heard so many of your scores, Hope Gap <\/em>which is fabulous, Last King of Scotland,<\/em> Escape Plan – <\/em>Come on, Alex! You write for Stallone and Schwarzenegger in an action film and here you are enchanting me with a score for elephants! <\/strong><\/p>\n You can’t put me in a box, I guess!\u00a0 [laughing]<\/p>\n So, I’m curious.\u00a0 As you’re composing, are you thinking of the instrumentation, or does that come in later to help solidify what you’re bringing to life?<\/strong><\/p>\n Oh, that’s an interesting question. I think a lot of the time I do hear the instrument as a character and so I sort of go from there.\u00a0 Sometimes you write a tune and you find, “Well, what it would be like on that instrument or this instrument?”\u00a0 But actually, a lot of the time, I do hear the instrument first because I’m always looking for a character.\u00a0 You’re right though.\u00a0 Something like The Elephant Queen, there’s so many different characters that I think I was just always thinking about, “Well, what color could we have here for the chameleon? What color would be funny for a really slow-moving tortoise or for the dung beetle?\u00a0 What color would be funny for this silly little thing pushing its dung ball around?”\u00a0\u00a0I probably am thinking of the instruments, and I have a lot of instruments lying around.\u00a0 I’ve got all the percussion instruments.\u00a0 For the dung beetle, I’ve got this fun little thumb piano made out of a sardine can that I think I bought in South Africa which has a twangy little sound to it, which I used on that.\u00a0 Sometimes, just having something lying around and giving it a hit or a twang and saying, “Oh, does that say dung beetle to me?”<\/p>\n With the dung beetle,\u00a0 I actually made a note and put a question mark because is it almost has a twang like an electric guitar.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, there’s electric guitar there.\u00a0 And there’s a thing called – I’ve got it sitting right here, actually.\u00a0 It’s actually an Indian instrument and it’s got one string and you can squeeze it and make that funny sort of noise that goes in and out, and I used that a little bit on the dung beetle.\u00a0 They’re so up there on a different plane from the other animals, I wanted to find some sounds that were just different.\u00a0 I had an old Mac Pro that doesn’t work in my studio, one of the cheese grater ones, and I played it like a snare drum on the front because it’s got a rather nice sort of cheese grater front.\u00a0 For the dung beetle, for the percussion tracks, I just played the front of the computer with some brushes and they sounded sort of fun so that ended up on the movies. Sometimes, I just like to give something a go and see where it takes you.<\/p>\n Going beyond the instruments themselves, in the composition, in the orchestration, I love the way a lot of this breaks out where we just start with a simple single-note piano and it grows slowly from there.\u00a0 Like the chameleon trying not to get eaten.\u00a0 We’ve got some single notes in there that come right after the time-lapse of the flower blooming and it picks up from there.<\/strong><\/p>\n You’ve studied this!\u00a0 I’m very impressed.\u00a0 You were really on it!<\/p>\n I am obsessed with music and film. My master’s thesis was actually on the Hollywood movie musical.\u00a0\u00a0 I love scoring in film and I love how instruments can bring a character or an emotion to life going beyond the score itself. And then you break out the orchestration.\u00a0 I was very lucky.\u00a0 A very dear friend of mine for many years was Joe Gershenson, who was the head orchestrator and composer for Universal for many, many years and was at Fox before that.\u00a0 Joe actually took me into the scoring areas and showed me how he orchestrateds with full orchestra.\u00a0 It gave me such appreciation for what composers do on the scale of a film.<\/strong><\/p>\n Oh wow!\u00a0 That’s amazing.\u00a0 I mean, we were very lucky on THE ELEPHANT QUEEN because the producers were able to give us a big orchestra for a couple of days to record in London which is, for a documentary, sort of unusual, but the filmmakers really had this vision.\u00a0 They didn’t know what the music was going to be, but they had this vision that they wanted it to be a huge character in the film and they wanted it to have all these colors and bring the characters to life.\u00a0 That’s, I think, why they came to me and asked me to do it.\u00a0 It was a chance to have a really big palette and, as you say, have all these different characters and find all these different colors in different characters through the orchestra and the different instruments. It’s a sort of a unique opportunity on a film like this to really, really do it properly.<\/p>\n You have great diversity with the percussion in this film as well. We get tribal notes, we get other notes in here, and I love the way you make use of percussion, almost as if it’s a beating heart.<\/strong><\/p>\n Right!\u00a0 Well, I’m not a percussionist, but I really like playing percussion and I program a lot of it on the computer or I play it live.\u00a0 Of course, we have real percussionists come in and play it, but I like to sort of get a feel first for it.\u00a0 I like to hit something and feel like I can actually feel it in my hands first to get a feel for how it might be and then I’ll get an amazing percussionist or an African drummer or something to come and do some things based on that and then, of course, they do their own thing.\u00a0 I’m glad you liked the percussion because it’s a big part of THE ELEPHANT QUEEN.<\/p>\n It really is. And you have that motif and that percussion throughout the film, but then you also complement that when you bring in some vocals, some chorale, in certain moments, and that adds another whole layer with the music itself.\u00a0 I just think it’s beautiful.<\/strong><\/p>\n Oh, thank you. Elephants are tricky to score, in a way, because they’re very hard to read.\u00a0 As I said, they don’t give much away.\u00a0 Their facial expressions don’t change at all.\u00a0 It all comes from the trunk, actually.\u00a0 If you can read the trunk, you can get their emotion.\u00a0 But if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s sort of hard.\u00a0\u00a0I was looking for a way of trying to get the audience under their skin in a way to try and get inside their head and voice.\u00a0 The human voice does that because we all connect to a voice but obviously, with elephants we couldn’t have words so I wanted to have a wordless voice, something that can convey what Athena the matriarch elephant might be thinking at some of the more intense, emotional moments.\u00a0 That’s why we tried that wordless voice, to try and just connect the audience on an emotional level because at the end of the day, you have to feel something for these animals or the movie is not going to work.\u00a0 You’ve got to feel fun and hope and despair and joy altogether, and then you realize you’re watching a movie about a family. It’s not just about elephants, but it’s like a family story, really.<\/p>\n Oh definitely, Alex.\u00a0 Definitely.\u00a0 There is not a moment watching this that the elephants do not feel like a family and similarly, the other creatures as well, even though Steven likes to leave his family and be the last one and get lost and they don’t realize he’s not there.<\/strong><\/p>\n Constantly!\u00a0 [laughing]\u00a0 It’s amazing.\u00a0 You couldn’t make this stuff up, but it’s real.\u00a0 It creates such an incredible opportunity for music because there’s so much color and so much life going on that, for a composer, that’s just like going into a candy store.\u00a0 For me, it’s just like, “Wow, they got all this to work with. Yeah, let’s go for it.”<\/p>\n At the hour 13 mark or so with the drought; they’re starving.\u00a0 We’ve got the visuals of dead zebras all over the Savannah and Athena has to move on, but timing is key to head back to the kingdom. The orchestration there is incredible.\u00a0 You bring in the orchestra, but you do it very subtly.\u00a0 It’s not overpowering, but you can feel the power of the whole orchestra and it’s very strong.\u00a0 You feel Athena’s strength in that moment through the whole orchestra coming together at that point in the score.<\/strong><\/p>\n I’m glad you think that because it’s quite a difficult area of the movie to do, actually, and we actually did that over a couple of times.\u00a0 I think the key to it was not coming in all guns blazing with everything at once, as you say, but building it up so that you have an element and then it builds and it builds and then you suddenly feel this well of emotion.\u00a0 But sometimes, you need to approach it from one side or an angle in order to build up to it, if you know what I mean. Otherwise, the audience feel manipulated too easily, too soon.<\/p>\n And of course, that comes just a few minutes after we have the triumphant music where everybody is at the new watering hole at the refuge.\u00a0 That’s so fun.\u00a0 I have to ask,\u00a0 Alex, did you have to integrate the score with the visual edit, or did the visual edit integrate with your score?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, that’s a good question.\u00a0 It was both, actually, because the movie was still quite unfinished when I started working on it.\u00a0 They would send me sequences five minutes or 10 minutes at a time and I would work on them.\u00a0 As I sent stuff back to the filmmakers, I think that would slightly influence how they might cut other sequences together and then they would say, “Oh, well, that’s interesting. That works really well so we’re going to try doing this here.”\u00a0 There was a bit of ping-pong backward and forth trying to sort of bounce ideas off each other, which is unusual, actually. That’s more of a documentary style, but they had so much material that their real problem was not the quality of the material because everything was fantastic, but how to shape it into the best sort of logical arc.\u00a0 Because there’s so many characters, there’s so much going on, as you say, the music is sort of like a through-line that helps you through that and feel like you’re on that one journey. It’s almost like a road trip when they go off into the desert and they’re on this big trip.\u00a0 When they get back home again, as you say, you’ve got to feel the sense of what goes around, comes around and you feel like you’re back.<\/p>\n It’s that whole circle of life concept.<\/strong><\/p>\n For sure. For sure. It’s true.<\/p>\n Because of all the sounds that we have – and there are several moments, such as with our favorite dung beetle\u00a0 – where you’ve got Valhalla overture in there and a mix with helicopter sounds and your score is also coming in, your dung beetle motif in there, so I’m curious, did you also work with the sound people with all the animal sounds that are inserted?\u00a0 Because some of them become part of your score.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah.\u00a0 I was incredibly lucky that I went out to Kenya to where they filmed the movie and I stayed in the filmmakers camp, a little camp of tents in the middle of nowhere and in the nature reserve, and spent a few days there, which is an incredible experience.\u00a0 But it really gave me a sense of what it sounds like there, which is very, very quiet, but also you can hear the tiniest of sounds that actually are really far away because there’s no trees or mountains or anything so sound travels a long way.\u00a0 It really gave me a sense of just the environment that’s out there so when we were back mixing the film, I was able to work a little bit and spend a little bit of time with the sound designers, just mixing in the music and dropping little bits of music here or there, or integrating things to try and make it all sit together.<\/p>\n We hear that with the big bullfrogs and the little frogs, the birds, but then nighttime is where we really pick up a lot of the animal sounds with just an undercurrent of the music added. I just think that’s so beautifully put together.<\/strong><\/p>\n Thank you.\u00a0 It’s an unusual opportunity to be able to do all of those things, but this is a film that has so much music as well.\u00a0 What’s on the album isn’t everything that’s in the film because we sort of couldn’t fit it on there.\u00a0 There’s definitely 70 or 80 minutes of music.\u00a0 With that much music, it’s got to be integrated well into the movie otherwise, it becomes too much and overwhelming. I was very keen to make sure that it sits right in the film.<\/p>\n With this much music in the film, Alex, is there ever a point where you have to quote-unquote, like a writer does, kill your darlings?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah.\u00a0 \u00a0There are a few places I was actually really strongly in favor of dropping music here and there.\u00a0 Actually, the filmmakers, they were loving the music and what it was doing for the film so much, I really sort of had to struggle to clear some space in there too sometimes, which is usually opposite of what composers are doing.\u00a0 Just finding these little pockets where you could just do without or thin it out.\u00a0\u00a0When you look at the final score and the music session, the music is really like an animation. It runs all the way through the movie like you do have in an animated movie; just defining the shapes where you can go down to something very small so it’s not all big all the time is sort of important as well.<\/p>\n Besides learning how to speak elephant, what would you say was the most challenging aspect of scoring THE ELEPHANT QUEEN?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, like I said, the really hard side of nature where young elephants are maybe dying or getting very sick is really tough because I didn’t want people to go to this movie and not enjoy it. I wanted them to really enjoy on an emotional level, but you can’t shy away from the truth of how hard things are as well. Musically, trying to treat that little Mimi the baby when she gets sick, it was really hard to make it emotional but not emotive or overwrought.\u00a0 Just pitching that at the right level was very tough.\u00a0\u00a0But I’ve seen the movie quite a few times with an audience in theaters, and the great thing is that they are really moved and you see people wiping their eyes. But what happens afterward with that circle of life thing, which originally, the filmmakers hadn’t expected, after the Mimi sequence.\u00a0 They thought we would have this very tragic sort of section afterward, which would be sort of very heavy and emotional.\u00a0 When I gave him the music, it was totally the opposite. Actually, there’s a sequence where the geese fly off and they start migrating.\u00a0 To me, it really felt like you needed to pick people up after they’ve had this really bad experience.\u00a0 You need to be picked up off the floor and say, “That was hard, but it’s okay because there’s more to life. Things are going to regrow, regenerate.”\u00a0\u00a0When they first heard the music for the geese flying off, they were like, “Wow! We never thought we would have something hopeful after that.”\u00a0 It’s actually, I think, their favorite piece, one of my favorite sections in the film as well because I’m an optimist and I like to bring some hope and a ray of light to even the darkest moments. It was unexpected, but a nice turn, I think.<\/p>\n It’s very hopeful. The way it turns after Mimi is very, very hopeful.\u00a0 Even as we’re seeing poor WeiWei, that naughty little boy, mourning the loss of his friend.\u00a0 And Alex, I love the motif you came up with for him, too.<\/strong><\/p>\n That was really fun, and they weren’t expecting that either. I spent some time in South Africa when we were making Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom<\/em> and I love that style of music, sort of South African jazz.\u00a0 I really felt like he needed something fun with a bit electric guitar, just having something with a bit of a groove to it just felt really right for WeiWei.\u00a0 First of all, when they heard it, they’re like, “Oh, we weren’t expecting that but yeah, we’re good with it.\u00a0 Like it.”<\/p>\n Alex, it sounds like you surprise them every step of the way with this.<\/strong><\/p>\n As you know, writing music for movies is very collaborative and it’s really important to give filmmakers what they want, but it’s also really important that you give them what you think is right and surprise people as well because people want to be delighted and surprised as well.\u00a0 Hopefully, the music in this film will delight people and slightly surprise them in a way.\u00a0 I wanted it to be more than what you would expect from just a regular documentary.<\/p>\n At the end of the day for you, what would you say is your most favorite piece in this film?<\/strong><\/p>\n That’s an interesting question. Actually, it’s very obscure, but one of my favorite moments is a tiny, tiny moment which is in that drought section you’re talking about where they leave the watering hole and they leave the safety and they go back into this terrible drought because the water’s dried up.\u00a0 There’s this big dust storm and it’s all very dramatic.\u00a0 But then what happens just for about 30 seconds is the camera goes underground and you go beneath this terrible inferno of dust storm.\u00a0 You see this incredible shot of the sleeping hibernating frog underneath the ground, and the frog knows nothing about the apocalypse which is going on above it. It’s just sleeping there. We just brought back that theme of the geese flying just to the very gentle little arrangement with voiceless sound and choir.\u00a0\u00a0For me, it’s just such a beautiful moment because you’re taken into suddenly a different universe where this frog is totally happy.\u00a0 It’s got not a care in the world and for me, it was just a beautiful escape from the harshness of what’s going on.\u00a0 I really liked that moment, even though it’s probably unremarkable in the big sweep of the whole story.<\/p>\n That moment stood out for me as well because of Chiwetel’s narration.\u00a0 He describes the animals who are burrowed or trapped underground as being “trapped in suspended animation.”<\/strong><\/p>\n Exactly. He’s got a great voice and he really brought a lovely character to it.\u00a0 He came in very late so I didn’t have any of his narration when I was writing the music.\u00a0 It’s really nice to hear it finally all sort of pieced together.<\/p>\n And Chiwetel has a great lyricism when he speaks.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah he does, and he has a really great way of always keeping it light.\u00a0 Even when he brings some gravitas to it, it doesn’t get overly pretentious.\u00a0 It’s always got a lilt to it, which is lovely. Very musical.<\/p>\n I am so thrilled I got to talk to you today about THE ELEPHANT QUEEN, Alex.\u00a0 I love the film.\u00a0 I love the film.\u00a0 And fingers crossed for Emmy.<\/strong><\/p>\n Thank you.\u00a0 I’m glad that you love it. An Emmy would be nice, but I’m just thrilled that you love it because it just means a lot that someone’s connected with it. I love that.<\/p>\n Any man that can write for elephants and Stallone and Schwarzenegger is a talented man.<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, I always say music is music. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Schwarzenegger or Stallone or elephants. It still speaks to everyone.\u00a0 it cuts deeper than words.\u00a0 It goes to some deeper place in people’s psyche and so it should work universally.<\/p>\n by debbie elias, exclusive interview 06\/30\/2020<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/behindthelensonline.net\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/Alex-Heffes-1--768x1024.jpg\")
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