Written by Austin Weber, an independent musician and film composer.The joy of movie-making is collaboration. Few artistic endeavors require the talents of so many, so precisely. A movie, with its gaffers and electricians, editors, ACs, actors, and producers, has more in common with a transatlantic sailing voyage than a painting; a film requires a crew. Coming from the relatively lonely worlds of songwriting and sculpture, I look forward to movie-making like a dog to the park, doubly so when I get to work with friends. I’m lucky enough to count Jacob Roberts (producer, lead-actor) and Fernando Andres (writer, director) among my best.I began work on Rent Free soon after picture-lock. Fernando and Jacob visited my studio on Mount Washington, a steep-canyoned enclave of green in North-East Los Angeles, where we spent a long weekend listening, watching, trading references and stories, and finding the sound of the movie. The scope of work was large—the full score and an album’s worth of original songs, and we easily fell into the free-flowing collaboration that defines our working relationship. Austin Weber Rent Free is a movie propelled by chaos—scrappy, horny, manic, hilarious chaos. My score's purpose was therefore equally to enhance and to offset this chaos. Like the plot itself, the music arrives in lapses and lurches, alternating and accentuating manic episodes and providing melancholic respite. The melancholic respite came quickly (as it often does—ask any songwriter). Before we finished our first pot of coffee, the birdsong outside my studio began to co-mingle with...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Friday, 13 September, 2024