We are not sure the word “awesome” is enough to describe how excited we are about freaky experimental musician Dan Deacon scoring Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming gothic thriller “Twixt Now and Sunrise.”
“At first, I didn’t know if it was real,” Deacon told Pitchfork about first receiving an e-mail from the Academy Award-winning director of the “Godfather” films. But when Coppola invited him to hang out at his Napa Valley estate to watch movies, talk about music, drink wine and of course, watch “Apocalypse Now,” Deacon had every reason to flip out as his plane landed in California. “I started thinking, ‘What if this is one of those insane kidnapping scams?! What if this is just the new ‘You inherited a million dollars!’?’ But the driver that picked me up wasn’t an insane kidnapping person.” A few months after his visit, Coppola sent him a script and told him to start thinking about the music.
So how did these two peas in a pod pair up in the first place? It’s important to remember that Coppola definitely has the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident. After all, he did find Al Pacino. “Early last year, he heard me on NPR (National Public Radio) talking about the importance of a unique live performance experience – how I arrange my performances and re-contextualize the space, the audience-participation aspect, yadda yadda yadda – and he wanted to talk to me about it,” Deacon said. “I was fascinated with his intelligence, and also with his sense of adventure,“ Coppola told The Baltimore Sun.
One thing is for sure: we’re grateful that a legend like Coppola is willing to take a leap into the beauty of the unknown with the soundtrack of his new film. Needless to say that this type of attitude is absolutely welcome and definitely helps shed a light onto artists with a different approach to their art. Deacon elaborates further on what may have attracted Coppola to his music: “I think he was most interested in my approach to music. We touched on the state of the music industry, and I talked about how it’s easy for musicians to work outside the mainstream network because of the DIY infrastructure that has been laid down the past 25 years. A lot of other art forms don’t really have that and they’re sort of playing catch-up. I think he was interested in finding out more about that because he’s been self-producing his own films for a while.”
While Deacon may be this generation’s Jean-Michel Jarre and a master at mixing special melodies, he warns us to not expect “’The Godfather’ with distorted rapid-fire arpeggios” when going to see Coppola’s newest enigmatic picture show. In fact, he adds, “A lot of the stuff I worked on in college was really atonal, noisy chamber music, and that’s what I’m going to focus on here.” Deacon and Coppola will reconvene next month to continue working together and the film is being prepped for a Halloween release, though it’s unknown just yet if it will be released through Coppola’s American Zoetrope shingle or by another company.
Although this is Deacon’s first score, we are hoping that this fascinating and unusual collaboration opens the door to more film opportunities. For a preview of his composition talents, Dan Deacon’s Electronic Bus will be performing at the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony in Ontario, Canada on February 3rd and 4th 2011. –Laura-Alexandra Vrabie