In honor of Alex Ross Perry’s first movie in six years, how about an unpublished interview from the archive, huh?
Perry’s latest, Pavements— described as a “meta documentary” about the legendary 90s alt band Pavement—premiered to glowing reviews at Venice Film Festival and just found a distribution home at Utopia. While I haven’t had the chance to see Pavements yet, nor have I spoken to Mr. Ross Perry about that project, I do happen to have a five-year-old interview with him about his amazing last film, Her Smell.
I hope that’s cool.
Her Smell explores the harrowing and tragic arc of fictional 90’s era punk star Becky Something (Elizabeth Moss) in a Shakespearean five-act epic. Becky, the leading woman of the likewise fictional Something She, is an accumulation of many a tragic grunge-pop star—a little Axl Rose, a little Courtney Love, but, at the same time, original in-and-of herself.
Similarly, the musical soundscape in Her Smell is an amazing medley of pop punk, 80’s power ballads, original music, and an anxiety-ridden score.
Below, we chat with Perry about crafting the different stages of Her Smell‘s soundscape—writing in carefully selected cover’s as early as the first draft, working with Bully’s Alicia Bognanno to create lived in original music, and using unconventional methods to create the perfect synchronized score.
Editor’s note: the following quotes from Alex Ross Perry are edited for length and clarity.
Alex Ross Perry on Some Key Music Choices in ‘Her Smell’
Her Smell
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“Another Girl, Another Planet” (The Only Ones)
“For me, with several drafts [of Her Smell], the opening song was never there. I kept changing it, and then at some point in the writing I re-listened to “Another Girl, Another Planet”. You know, a song I learned as a Replacement’s cover.
It always felt right. And then when I re-listened to that song, the first line: “I always flirt with death.” I thought, well, maybe there’s this weird leap of logic where the entire movie is just an encore, and it’s just one song. And it’s a cover song. But I have to commit to the side of this movie for the onscreen spoken line by Becky where the prologue is:
“I always flirt with death.”
From that second I just thought, yea this is the song. And also, this is a song this band would cover.”
“Heaven” (Bryan Adams)
“Heaven” was always there. In its broadest conception, I always felt like this was written into the script and into the outline. Act three of this movie is hell. It’s fiery red hell. Underground, in this red basement. And Act four is heaven, and that was always what I wrote. It was meant to guide people into shaping those two sequences.
The important thing about using “Heaven” is that it’s a corny 80’s power ballad—and a beautiful song. But the use of “Heaven” there is so deeply unpretentious. I think it speaks to the overall kind of mission statement of the movie—which is, you know, slow it down in act four with some beautiful folk ballad, or some song that most people already accept as haunting and emotional. Or you could take an unpretentious 80’s power ballad, turn it into a show stopping moment of raw emotion, and do it without alluding to any sense of pretension.
There’s nothing pretentious about punk, there’s nothing pretentious about grunge. All that stuff was such a rejection of pretension.”
On working with Alicia Bognanno of Bully to craft original Music for Something She
“We got to [Alicia Bognanno] through Keegan Dewitt, Her Smell’s composer. He suggested she would be exactly the right songwriter for the original songs that Becky would write within the narrative of the movie. We sent her the script and talked to her for a little while about what’s happening in each scene.
Her music in Bully is so amazing, and so completely appropriate for the era—she’s so clearly inspired by that. It gives a lot of respect to the music of the 80s and 90s that she clearly is in the tradition of. She just got it. And her demos for those Something She songs were basically perfect right away. We were just lucky to have her.
Keegan felt that we had to find the right female songwriters to create these original songs. It shouldn’t come from me, it should come from women who really are this, in their own work.
For the final song, “Breathe”, I said to Alicia, this really ought to not only be the finale of the movie, but the finale period—this ought to be a song that has some sort of narrative. So that you can feel this song predates the events of this movie and is really their first big hit. It tells the story of wanting to go back to this simpler time.
It had to feel slightly more derivative and familiar than what Alicia is going for when she makes her next album. Because people need to hear this and think this song already exists.”
Working With Keegan Dewitt on That Score
Her Smell
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“I’ve made so many movies with him at this point that his involvement in the process starts as early as it could ever start for a composer—which is reading a script a year before we shoot. He’s creating demos off of the dailies—starting that early. We edit the movie with the rhythms of his demos. Then, generally, that’s kind of it. We cut around his score, and then he fine tunes it.
This time we went a step further and we cut around his score, and then we sent him back the final edit and said rescore this, so that the score isn’t little chopped up bits and pieces of 20 different demos that Keegan sent, but a 20-minute long sweep that is conformed in its entirety in complete sync to the picture as we’ve cut it.
It’s like putting the cart before the horse, but then putting another cart behind it with another horse on that other cart. It’s this big loop where every time we trimmed a shot he had to trim a little bit of the music and make sure it’s all perfectly one with itself.
A composer is often told here is the final edit of the movie, this is what we use for a test score, please come in and do something. Some people would say here’s a cut of the movie with no music, what do you think?
I like to take it even further and say, here’s the script, creatively what does this sound like?”
How to Tether Directorial Intention With Sound Design
Her Smell
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“I told [Keegan] all along that I wanted the score to feel like a panic attack.
If I was screening 15 minutes of Her Smell, I would show the last five minutes of Act three and the first 10 minutes of Act four. Because that progression, that 180, that shift after 85 minutes of basically the same kind of tone and attitude… that is Her Smell.
If we can go from handheld camera on a 120mm lens, shaky as hell, bright red lights, sweat everywhere, a police siren, feedback wailing full volume while Becky is in handcuffs covered in blood, and then five minutes later we can have a series of two minute long static shots that culminates in a four-and-a-half minute piano performance of a Bryan Adam’s song… that progression between two points—which ordinarily would be nothing greater than the first and last scene of the movie… If we can do that in 10 minutes, 100 minutes into the movie—that’s the movie.
And it was just about bringing a different filmmaking style to each one of the acts. Which, you know, are filmed entirely in-and-of themselves. When we shot an Act we shot the whole thing in order for three straight days. It was just bringing a different camera style, and a different acting style. In the edit room,
Act three was weirdly the hardest to cut because we had the most chaos in the camera and there was the greatest number of options for every edit. For Act four we had an assembly of it in one day, because it’s just these perfectly composed, eloquently balanced, long master shots.
That’s the conceit. It’s just the confidence to know that Act three is going to be the craziest thing I’ve ever done, and Act four is going to be as withdrawn, and restrained as anything I’ve ever done.”
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