Is Alexandre Desplat the hardest-working man in Hollywood? If they were going to give an Oscar for that this weekend, he’d certainly be a contender, though as it is he’s nominated instead in the real category of Best Score, for “Philomena.” In the last three years alone he has worked on that film, “The Monuments Men” (where he also had a small role), “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Rise of the Guardians,” “Rust and Bone,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” “Argo,” “The Ides of March,” “Carnage,” “The King’s Speech,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” and more. And he shows no sign of slowing down, with scores in the pipeline for “Godzilla,” Angelina Jolie‘s “Unbroken” and now also for “D,” Roman Polanski‘s new project.
Desplat is Polanski’s go-to music guy at present, having done “Carnage,” “The Ghost Writer” and even the documentary “Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir.” “D,” scripted by novelist Robert Harris, on whose novel Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” was based, is about the notorious Dreyfus affair (about which Harris has also just written a novel, “An Officer and a Spy”). The Dreyfus affair centered on a Jewish officer in the French army whose (blatantly fixed) conviction in 1894 for selling military secrets to Germany triggered years of political and cultural conflict in France and essentially drew the battle-lines along which the French left and right fought for most of the 20th century.