Tina Kakadelis
The average person can hold their breath underwater for 60 to 90 seconds. In 2012, a group of divers, Chris Lemons, Duncan Allcock, and David Yuasa, were making repairs 100 meters underwater in the North Sea. The dynamic positioning system on their support vessel failed, causing the vessel to drift. Lemons’ umbilical tether snapped which cut off his oxygen, communication, and power. He was left alone with five minutes of oxygen. What followed was a dire, white-knuckle rescue mission against a ticking clock. This story was told in documentary format in 2019, but has now been given the Hollywood treatment. Several members of the documentary crew returned for Last Breath, the narrative feature. One of those return crew members is composer Paul Leonard-Morgan.
Ahead of the film’s theatrical release on February 28, Paul Leonard-Morgan sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to discuss his lifelong love of music, scoring the documentary and narrative version of the same story, and how he turned the sound of a dripping faucet into the backbone of the main theme. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Film Obsessive: I saw on your website that you describe yourself as a “conservatory-trained composer with a punk rock heart.” I love that you are the third composer I’ve interviewed recently who has punk rock roots. What is it about punk rock that keeps leading you guys into the film composing world?
Paul Leonard-Morgan: Bad luck. Good luck, I don’t know. Also, I still have a website? I must speak to my team (laughs). I studied at the Conservatoire in Scotland. At the same time, I started producing bands, doing string arrangements for bands, and stuff like that. I’ve always written music. My mum’s a music teacher, so I’ve always been involved in music, but I never knew what I wanted to do.
I just knew that I loved writing music, and my teacher had said when I was 17 or 18, what do you want to study? I was like, I don’t know, I just love doing music. They told me, here’s this cool place, the Conservatoire, and they just got a new film music course. I always loved music for film, but knew jack shit about it, you know?
So I went up there. Teacher buggered off after a term to Hollywood to go try and make it. Like, what the fuck am I supposed to do now?! While I was there, there was a studio in Glasgow that was popular. Loads of bands record there like Mogwai, Snow Patrol, and Isobel Campbell from Belle and Sebastian. I just started working with them. I was known as the classical dude and I just loved it. I learned so much about the studio experience.
It’s weird, the things that form us as composers or as artists, producers or whatever you are. You think everybody has that same knowledge, so you get frustrated. Not frustrated, but it’s like, why do you do drums like that? That doesn’t make any sense. I had a classical background, but then I was working with bands and it just became this natural progression to kind of fuse them together. Obviously, that just has, as anything does, an impact on where you go.
I started getting a couple of short films. This director, who’s now Oscar nominated, but he was like, I like the fact that you work with bands, come help with this film I’m doing. That always seems to be the case. The film guys like the fact that you work with bands, and the bands like the fact that you work with film.
How did you get involved with the documentary team for Last Breath the first time around? And then how did you get roped back in?
It’s a good question. For the documentary, there was a producer, Angus Lamont, who’s in Glasgow. The three deep sea divers were from Scotland, up north in Aberdeen. Angus got in touch and said, hey, I know you’re in LA and I’d love you to meet these filmmakers. We’ve got this fantastic story. He sent me the doc and the story’s just completely bonkers. And it’s true!
I’m going to try and not say any spoilers in this interview, but during that documentary, the way that Alex Parkinson, the director, had shot it was not like any documentary I’d ever done before. I work with Errol Morris a lot and everyone has their own styles, but Alex shot the documentary kind of like a feature, but also a doc. You don’t quite know what you’re watching. I scored it like a film. I didn’t score like a documentary. There’s a big difference because in documentaries, you’re trying to leave room for voice-overs a lot of the time, and so that can sometimes mean you lose some of the emotion.
Whereas scoring a film, you’re subtle, you’re riding, you bring out those emotions. It’s funny, but a lot of people said that if you were to watch the documentary without music, they’re not sure it would be the same kind of film. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s different. The music leads you and it feels like a film. Every character’s got their own styles and so on. It was just wonderful.
It was one of those slow burns because loads of people started seeing it on plane journeys, bizarrely enough, and they go, hey, I’ve just watched the documentary. You’re on a flight and got nothing else to do, why not watch a documentary about someone running out of oxygen?
That’s a terrible plane movie (laughs).
You might go for rom coms, Tina, some people go for survival documentaries (laughs). The documentary was absolutely wonderful. I just loved every second of it. Then Alex, the director, got in touch about four years later and said, oh, it’s being turned into a movie. I said, how do you differentiate between the two? I think one of the things that made the documentary so wonderful was that it was so close-up to the story of these divers.
If you don’t know, the documentary is about an underwater diver whose oxygen tank is cut. He’s two miles underwater and he’s only supposed to be able to last for about six minutes without breathing. He’s left alone, and then the people go to try to find him underwater. It’s absolutely insane. There is a danger, in my head anyway, that you then over-Hollywoodize it. The thing that you got from the documentary was that you were so close to these divers and the silence that you get when you’re under that water two miles down.
That was always the thing I said to Alex. Like, look, if you want me to do it, let’s not make it this totally cheesy Hollywood thing. Let’s actually keep the authenticity of it. It’s about those characters, that claustrophobia, how they must feel when you’re underwater that far down in the pitch black, left alone to die like this.
I did have a question about the difference between scoring a documentary and a narrative feature. You kind of answered it already, but if you scored the documentary not like you would traditionally score a documentary, you’re essentially scoring a narrative film twice. What was that experience like for telling the same story but having to find different styles of presenting it?
As far as between the doc and the feature? The two are completely separate. I didn’t take the themes from one and put it in the other. They are different scores.
I just feel like it would be hard to do that twice. To have similar material, similar starting points, and to produce two entirely different scores.
It’s a really good point. I suffer from facial blindness. When I see people at a bar or at a coffee shop, they will come up, recognize me, and it’ll take me some time to figure out who they are. I have a similar thing when I’m scoring a movie. If you watch it too many times, you become immune to what you’re watching. When I start scoring a movie, I like watching it twice and then just switching off. I work off the thematic material or what the emotional reaction is to something.
I think what made it even easier to differentiate between the film and the documentary is that the two characters themselves are in it the whole time. In the documentary, you’re cutting from the story to people being interviewed to other things too. In the feature, you are very much following the story of the diver. Straight off, you got the three three main divers Finn [Cole], Simu [Liu], and Woody [Harrelson], and you’re automatically caught up in that story.
Then the film shows the two main locations with the submersible that’s connected to the ship right above on the water. It’s almost like you’re introducing different themes. You got one for the main ship up above, this huge beast. You got the sound of the engines, you got all of that. Then it’s a very different vibe because you’re down in this teeny tiny, tiny submersible. Those divers are underwater for a month. I would struggle with my own company for a day. Let alone two other people for a month (laughs).
You’re in the submersible, you’ve got the squeaks, the pressure of the cabin going in. It’s a big difference compared to the massive boat. The waves, the storm to then underneath and then to even less with this one lonely diver on the seafloor. It makes it quite easy then from a film point of view, because you’re really reacting and identifying with those three main characters. Whereas I feel that the documentary, although you identify the three main characters, is as much about the story itself.
You use a lot of low brass in the film score, which I love. I played sousaphone in high school so I always love a low brass sound. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose to highlight it?
First off, I feel we need to discuss. Why did you choose the sousaphone?
My sister actually still plays music. She’s been in a bunch of bands and plays percussion. I didn’t have the musical gene, but I was also forced into percussion. I got sick of helping to unload all of the marching band drums off of the bus, so I switched to the biggest brass instrument I could find for some reason.
Great idea (laughs). You could have just been a vocalist and got a microphone in a band. Next time, soprano sax, much lighter.
I went for low brass because there’s something ominous about it. The score has three threads. It has the big orchestra which was great. We got a couple of days with the big orchestra, and that’s for the heroic moments. We have the electric cello, which was very much kind of edgy, and there’s lots of delay on it. The way I always described it to Alex was like the sound of a whale in the distance, which was utterly ridiculous. The movie has nothing to do with whales and there are no whales there. It’s just like, if you’re underwater, what are the creepy effects that you would have? I’ve done a bit of diving, nothing like these guys, but you do hear weird things in the distance. You’re not quite sure what it is. So I said, let’s make a scared version of that. It’s kind of really ominous. It really gets you on the edge of your seat and you’re not sure why.
The low brass for me was like, well, what sound can I put in? It’s more chordal than tune, to be honest. In the brass, it’s more the crescendo and decrescendo in. There are so many effects in this film as far as underwater noises and the actual breathing itself. You don’t want to interfere with that because it’s so effective. When the music suddenly cuts out, you just get the breath and it’s cool.
You can either have top-end stuff, hi-hats, or for me, I sampled hitting metal off the boat for a rhythm like a ticking clock. You’re running out of time. When that disappears, what are you going to have sonically underneath? I wanted it to be real instruments for that part. What cuts really well is just this low, ominous brass that comes out of nowhere.
I’ve got a synth every time that comes with it and then it covers up the intros. You don’t hear the brass coming in. It’s something that really gets you in the pit of your stomach. It’s scary. You’re trying to think about how you use sounds to create themes. Themes can be a tune, they can be a motif. Themes can be just something that peppers throughout where you recognize it coming in. I like when you have themes that you can identify.
Again, it’s more the feel of this deep, droning sound. It does change chords, but if you were to have strings playing that, it’s too nice, right? I love my strings for the heroic stuff, that’s all fine. But when you’ve got that kind of ominousness, I really like that low brass coming underneath.
I read that you sampled a dripping tap that was somehow processed through a vocoder synth. For people who don’t understand music, what does that mean? Why did you decide to build the main theme around that?
Well, first off, do you call it a tap in the states, or do you call it a faucet? I’m trying to change my kind of language so that people understand.
I think we call it both. I use both interchangeably.
The whole faucet thing, I will never learn, but I’m trying to call it that because Alex is British. The directors were chatting away and I’m speaking to the producers. They’re going, what the hell is a tap?
When you try to come up with the sound of a theme, you want it somehow to bring it all together. So drums date themselves really quickly. Electronic drums in particular, it can kind of keep you in the Beverly Hills Cop ’80s world. There are certain sounds that are synonymous to a certain era. I try to steer away from that as much as possible.
I went down and recorded a sample on the boat. Just like whacking some stuff against the side of it. Once you record it, you can then play it on your keyboard with different pitches. What’s cooler is you take that sound, the boat, and then you can then turn it into a drum machine yourself. That’s all fine, but thematically, going back to that whole strings versus brass thing, and you got electric cello, which is the sound of the main tune for the opening of the whole film.
Bizarrely enough, this is the way all of us composers work, our brains just go off a tangent. I was down at the boat and I was hitting things. There was a kind of repercussion of this little repercussion, a kind of ding ding ding ding ding. Like a delay.
One of the times I hit the boat, I hit a load of water on the back of the boat. It’s not this massive cruise ship, it’s just a 35-foot small boat. When I hit it, there was a drip that came off it. It was obviously a bit of water or condensation or something that then hit the sea next to it. I was like, oh, that was quite cool. Did it again, but I’m not an audio engineer and the recording was pretty shit. When I came back to the studio, I literally just went into the tap in there and made it drip. I thought, well that’s nice, but it sounds a bit kind of like a kid’s show. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s all about the process. So it’s like, okay, well, let’s try processing that in the same way you’re processing an electric cello through distortion effects and delays or whatever else.
I started putting that through a keyboard with a vocoder. You take that sound, you process through it, and so all of a sudden it doesn’t sound like a drip. It took about two days to do. It was actually insane. Combining that with the sound on an old keyboard as well, you layer the two against each other and suddenly it’s not a drip. Not that people know that, and you don’t really do it for that reason.
It’s not that. I hate the word authentic. It’s not about making something authentic, but, as a composer, you always start out with a story. It’s like, well, what am I going to do with this? How can I make this not a traditional soundtrack, but something specific to this score? Suddenly, in my head every time I hear it, whether people notice it or not, I’m like, dude, yeah, it’s not just an electronic keyboard, it’s actually got some sort of sound, which is real.
I think sometimes electronica can be so warm. It could be so wonderful. It could be so disgusting and distorted. You can do so many things with it. I love it when you combine the orchestra up with the brass, with the electric cello, with the electronica, the synths, and the beats and all of that. Those things come together to create something which takes people on a ride in the same way the film itself takes people on the ride.
I think it’s not about being taken out of the moment as a viewer. It’s the opposite. It’s about trying to take people in. I don’t want them to notice that I’ve introduced all these things, but you want them to feel that somehow there’s an electric cello that’s got them on the edge. There’s a kind of dripping tap combined with the sound, which I don’t know why, but it makes me feel watery. There’s got to be something that makes you feel a certain way.
Yeah, that’s so cool. I’ve never had an explanation like that. That was incredible.
Yeah. Then you got to hear it and go, oh, he really shouldn’t bother (laughs).
Thank you so much, Paul. This was so fun (laughs).
You are more than welcome. And I want video proof of when you ditch the sousaphone for a saxophone.
