Tina Kakadelis
As much as film is a visual medium, the role of a composer is essential to creating the atmosphere of a movie. Betrayal is a 2023 paranoid thriller about three brothers (Brian Vernel, Daniel Portman, and Calum Ross) who find themselves in the middle of a mystery they don’t understand. After killing their abusive father (Paul Higgins), they return to his grave in a remote forest only to find it empty. Now, the brothers’ loyalty to one another is tested as they try to figure out what happened to their father. Composers Max Aruj and Steffen Thum are integral to adding to Betrayal‘s paranoia and fear. The duo sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to talk about how they started composing, the pros and cons of working as a team, and the importance silence plays in composing a score. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Max, I know we’ve chatted before, but I still wanted to start with both of your musical beginnings. Max, you started as a jazz pianist, and Steffen, you started in post-production, so I was wondering if you guys could each talk a little bit about your different journeys into film composing?
Max Aruj: I started classical and jazz piano as a kid and did that for years. Fast forward into high school. I took some classes about music and really started to fall in love with composition and improvising. That transitioned into writing music for a short film in high school. I loved it. Went to college and applied to study it. Everything just kind of fell into place. At the end of college, I got offered a job to work for Lorne Balfe and Hans Zimmer and that was what started my professional career. It all started with piano and just a love of classical and jazz music.
Steffen Thum: For me, I always wanted to get into filmmaking. That was the first thing I pursued after finishing school. Applied at the film school in Germany, which is where I’m from, and didn’t get in. I did some other things and worked at a local TV station. During that time, I drifted more and more toward music. I played in bands and such, a bit of rock music. That was my main interest, but I also always loved film music. Then I had an opportunity to go study abroad for a year. During that time, I eventually ended up with Lorne and joined the team, together with Max, which is how I eventually ended up working in film music professionally as well.
And what instrument did you first start with, Steffen?
Steffen Thum: Very early on, it was the clarinet. Playing clarinet in concert band and in small ensembles. After a while, it became boring and I wanted to move to guitar and bass. I played in different bands and combos there. Some jazz as well. Eventually it moved into writing and composing.
You don’t hear of very many rock clarinet players.
Steffen Thum: Yeah, that’s a difficult one. Maybe I could have made that happen, but it wasn’t meant for me.
Betrayal is not the first film that you guys have scored together. You also did Crawl, which is one of my favorites. Can you talk a little bit about your first collaboration and how much it has changed in the amount of times you’ve worked together?
Steffen Thum: It’s definitely been a journey for us. I think the first feature film we did together was probably iBoy. Is that right, Max?
Max Aruj: I was actually thinking today. How many projects have we done together? Is it approaching eight or is that too many? Including a couple of the smaller ones.
Steffen Thum: We’ve done a few shorts together also for directors that are friends of ours. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be easily eight or something like that, but it started with iBoy. That was fun. I think even at that point we were already both working for Lorne for a while. We were very familiar with how to work together on projects. It just came quite easy. We had a shorthand already from project to project that we did together that only kind of became more of a thing. We just knew how to very efficiently work through a movie, get started with ideas, go from one scene to the other, and share ideas together.
Max Aruj: Whenever we’re working on something together, it’s such a seamless, smooth process. Whether we’re talking every day or there’s a period where we’re just texting about stuff, we’re able to communicate with so much clarity. It’s really quite easy. We’ve done so many by now, as we were saying. It’s a good time. It’s a lot of fun.
You both score and compose by yourselves and obviously you do it together as well. What do you find that you enjoy alone and what do you not enjoy alone? And vice versa?
Max Aruj: It is great to have someone help with the quantity of work for sure. What happens is once you’re into a project, you get to a point where you think, wow, there’s still quite a lot left. Just having someone to share that with is great. With that comes new ideas that maybe, by yourself, you wouldn’t have come across. Especially later in the process where maybe fatigue starts to set in. To have a partner step in is great. We’re continually coming up with ideas and spinning ideas out, even quite late in the process. I think that’s a wonderful thing.
When you’re working with someone, you always need to keep the other person in communication. So let’s just say you wanted to do a bunch of stuff and then it’s like, wait a minute, Steffen has already done some of that stuff. You think, okay, so we got to get on the phone and we got to figure out how are we going to combine these pieces. How are they going to transition? It’s a little more time communicating. If you know each other then it’s not that much more work really in that way.
Steffen Thum: Yeah, I agree with that. I mean it’s been obviously different since we’ve spent several years door to door from each other. Just a couple steps apart. And now, usually, Max will be in LA and I’m based in Berlin. It’s crazy how easy it is now with technology to, no matter where you are, make it work. We’ve been able to do that. We still sit in our own little workstations and try out ideas. Instead of me coming over to Max’s room and having a listen, I’ll just send it to him. Basically the process is the same. Each of us will try our different ideas and it’s like, oh, I like the sound, let me use that for what I’m working on as well. Or how about those chords for that melody you got going on? And that’s how we kind of weave different things together.
For Betrayal, how did you guys get involved? At what point in the process were you brought on?
Steffen Thum: We started with Betrayal pretty early. We actually had a connection to the director and to producers. We did the short film that kind of preceded Betrayal. The short film was called Take the Shot and was basically a pitch for what the feature version of that story was going to be. The plan was always to make a feature out of it, but, especially with independent productions, it sometimes can just take a while. Then, obviously, Covid also delayed that by a lot. That’s how it happened. Since we already had the sound established from the score of the short, we basically just continued working on where it was. It was easy getting back into the project based on what we already knew about how we wanted to approach it. We already roughly had a sound sonic palette that we knew worked for that story and that world. We basically just picked up where we left off a couple of years earlier.
Did any of the music that you guys scored for the short make it into the feature or did you start kind of from scratch, but based off of what you had already done?
I think we started with a fairly new set of ideas while just keeping the sound and the sonic DNA of it alive, because the score is very textural. Both of us also grew as composers during that time and have different ideas now that we want to try compared to the short film. Also, obviously, a feature has a way longer arc to fill, a longer running time. It’s different if you score something for ten or fifteen minutes versus 90 minutes. It’s a different, I think, overall different approach to how we want to treat the score. How many themes we need, how we want to embed those into the different scenes. In a way, we were starting from scratch, but keeping in mind what we already had done before that worked.
The film relies a lot on silence. It’s important to hear the twig snaps and the forest sounds. It seems like you guys had a hand in deciding when and where the music would come in. Can you talk a little bit about respecting the silence and then also noticing a moment that could use a little score to add to enhance it?
I think doing that initial spotting is important. I think it really just takes experience to know and to feel when the music must stop. When we did the short, it would have taken us longer to find out. Wait, when do we come in? When do we stop? Because you’re absolutely right, that is super crucial. Because of course, it’s going to be tense if they’re walking in the forest alone. Then the conversation becomes when is the next nearest big moment? We’re either going to lead up to that or work back from it. It’s really always a balancing act and the audience doesn’t want to be drenched in music for the whole movie because they’ll just get tired of it.
It’s just having this cocktail of sound effects and rustling of the leaves versus having a piece of music creep in. Maybe over the course of a minute or three minutes. It’s just the trial and error of composing. The director will give feedback saying, no, actually, we don’t want music here. Sometimes, from the very beginning of the process, they say no music here. You might end up just trying it because you think, well, let them reject it. Sometimes they’ll say, oh wow, I didn’t expect that at all. It’s really about having that flexibility and just being willing to try all this different stuff. Maybe you end up cutting a cue in half. Anything can happen.
Steffen Thum: I think it’s also a great way to work with tension and release. Especially in this kind of film, like a cat-and-mouse thriller that has the characters guessing what might be around the corner. What might be lurking in the dark. Sometimes, the longer we keep the score to a bare minimum or almost silent to just hear the full noise, when suddenly something kicks off. They might hear shots and then all of a sudden, an action cue starts. The longer that silence builds up tension, the more powerful for us to come in with the music afterward and make that moment work.
To kind of go along with this idea of balance, you have this beautiful, gentle lullaby and then also the bleakness of the film and the harsh percussion elements. Can you talk a little bit about writing that lullaby and how you wove that through the DNA of the rest of the score?
Steffen Thum: I think it started with a piece that the edit already contained. The directors had placed something at the beginning of the film that had a vocal element to it. I think it was even a choir. Max and I started to gravitate toward a soloistic voice due to the fact that the mother of the three brothers plays such a crucial role. I think it wasn’t really a thing in the short, but she becomes a big character in the feature. She’s really the catalyst of this whole story. She tragically dies early in the film, so we only see her in flashbacks. She’s the motivator for the brothers to seek revenge because we believe the father caused the accident that killed her.
It was that lullaby that we brought in as something that she might have been singing to the brothers when they were younger. Something that could work like an old folk song. The story is set in the Scottish woodlands, so we thought it would be interesting to have Scottish Gaelic vocals with it to make it a bit more mythical and unique.
We had the great fortune to work with Stephanie Healy, who was also very helpful to get the translations right into that language because we’re obviously not fluent in that at all. That was great fun to work on and that served as an emotional counterpoint to the rest of the score which was obviously quite bleak, dark, and intense.
Thank you guys so much for your time. I love the score. It was really, really great.
Max Aruj: Thank you! Thank you for having us.
Steffen Thum: Thank you!
