Film on the Radio

7 Jan 2020

Under the Skin – Transcript

CARLA: Hello and welcome, I’m Carla Donnelly and this is Film on the Radio – your weekly deep dive into the scores and soundtracks of the films you love. Thanks again to the This Australian Life team for bringing us in with the intimate stories from our community.

Previously on Film on the Radio we’ve covered Reality Bites, Phantom Thread, Home Alone and Boogie Nights. Some of these were determined on when the broadcast was going to happen – Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve dictated I play something appropriate to the festivities. These are now podcasted if you want to add us to your favourite app. The knowledge builds about scoring and music supervision so there’s a lot to learn in the back catalogue.

The summer grid for Joy is 8 weeks long and I wanted to make sure I had female composers at parity as much as possible. This is actually incredibly difficult to do as almost all scores and soundtracks are composed by men. Women are *significantly* in the minority, but they do still exist in this world.

Just to highlight the inequality – for example the Oscars which by no means is the authority on talent in the world but is a good measure of power… in the 84 years the Academy Awards have been awarding a score category only 3 women have won in the best original music category. Two of those women were composers and one was a lyricist who shared the award with her husband. So essentially two female composers have won for an original score in 84 years. The nominees get worse considering there is on average 5 nominees each year. Only 6 individual women have been nominated for a total of 9 times. This is out of a pool of 420 possible nominations.

Women being shut out of classical music still very much exists today. In fact, the modern diversity and inclusion movement owes a debt to orchestras as they pioneered blind auditions in the 1970’s to raise women’s participation. This is from the Guardian:

“Over the past several decades, orchestras have started changing the way they hire musicians. One of these changes was designed to eliminate bias against women.

It would be hard to deny that there was such a bias in the composition of orchestras. As late as 1970, the top five orchestras in the U.S. had fewer than 5% women. It wasn’t until 1980 that any of these top orchestras had 10% female musicians. But by 1997 they were up to 25% and today some of them are well into the 30s. What is the source of this change? Have they added jobs? Have they focused on work that appeals to women?

The size of a major orchestra is quite stable; they all have around 100 musicians. Furthermore, the types of jobs do not change. The increase in the number of women cannot be attributed to a redistribution giving the orchestra fewer bassists — traditionally played by men — and more harpists — where more women are found.

Blind auditions

In the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras began using blind auditions. Candidates are situated on a stage behind a screen to play for a jury that cannot see them. In some orchestras, blind auditions are used just for the preliminary selection while others use it all the way to the end, until a hiring decision is made.

Even when the screen is only used for the preliminary round, it has a powerful impact; researchers have determined that this step alone makes it 50% more likely that a woman will advance to the finals. And the screen has also been demonstrated to be the source of a surge in the number of women being offered positions.”

With an 8-week set I’m able to (almost) get to parity composers. I have covered musical direction by a woman for 2 episodes so it’s at parity, but the next time I do this series I will be a lot more prepared! But for now I’m going to get creative with my choice in the following weeks to highlight female composers working in the screen space.

This week we’re going to go deep on a score that is not only beloved by me but completely, mind-bendingly incredible. It’s Mica Levi’s score to the 2013 film “Under the Skin” by director Jonathan Glazer. A film that is almost entirely dialogue-less. A science fiction film that follows an alien as they take female shape to seduce men, murder them and process their bodies for food – an expensive delicacy on the alien’s home world. You may remember back in the Phantom Thread episode there was the extremely high register viola for the scene where Reynolds hallucinates his dead mother. Well this score is heavy on the high register viola… again used for an eeriness… an alien quality. Let’s play the first couple of tracks of the score “Creation” and “Bedroom”. “Creation” is only 2 minutes long but somehow through layering both organic and digital Mica Levi can get these viola’s to sound like a swarm of bees. “Creation” is the beginning of the movie where the alien comes to our world and inhabits a dead woman’s body…

MUSIC: “Creation” – Mica Levi, “Bedroom” – Mica Levi

CARLA: You’re on Joy 94.9 and this is Film on the Radio. This week we’re discussing the score to the film “Under the Skin”. Those tracks were “Creation” and “Bedroom” – a score that features extremely unconventional usage and digital manipulation of the viola. Which is highly appropriate considering the film tracks an alien arrived on earth to seduce and kill men to process their meat for their home world.

We’ve been discussing women in scoring and how few there are. For an extraordinarily feminist film I’m so glad the director Jonathan Glazer made the effort to commission a female musician. Mica Levi is the composer of this score – she is English, she is queer and is one of only 5 women in history to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score. She was nominated in 2017 for the biopic film “Jackie” and was only 30 years old at the time. I haven’t done all the research, but I would say that she would be the youngest or one of the youngest people nominated in this category.

“Jackie” was her second score after this, the one we are discussing today “Under the Skin”. This is how getting to parity in all things works – Mica Levi is a classically trained composer and accomplished musician – Joy listeners may know her from the band Micachu and the Shapes. However, she had never composed a film score. This is from an interview with Pitchfork:

“Levi joined the project in April of 2012, after Glazer’s music supervisor Peter Raeburn played his director part of Micachu and the Shapes’ 2011 live LP with the London Sinfonietta, Chopped & Screwed. “[Raeburn] played me some [known] film composers, but I thought this film would require a new voice,” says Glazer. “I heard ten seconds of [Chopped & Screwed] and said, ‘Stop the tape, use that.’

“I didn’t expect anything from it, really,” Levi sheepishly says of the opportunity to work on the film. “It felt really far-fetched—I might as well have been auditioning for fucking modelling.” Still, she and Glazer took to each other quickly as creative partners: “His obsession was striking to me. He’s a nice bloke—I certainly didn’t think he was a wanker.”

Keeping in line with the film’s tendency to embrace the vague and unknowable, Levi’s work on Under the Skin began immediately and without much definition: “I was shown into a room and shown the film, and then I started working on it. I didn’t even know I had the job even months in, really.” Along with Raeburn and a group of musicians, including Micachu and the Shapes drummer Marc Pell, Levi worked on the film’s score over a ten-month period, which included a heavy presence in the editing bay as Glazer shaped the final cut of the film to fit the thrilling sounds she was composing.

“The approach that [Glazer] took to making the film meant that everyone was throwing things at it, and the film was either chewing it up or spitting it out,” Levi says. “Honestly, when it was finished, it felt like it was only because somebody in charge said that it had to be.”

Levi applied liberal amounts of her homemade warping process to the music, accentuating its stretched-out, black-hole vibes. “I like the way that it perverts your comfort and your reality,” Levi says of the sound-manipulation process she’s relied on since her and the Shapes’ auspicious debut, 2009’s Matthew Herbert-produced Jewellry. “It’s a different kind of distortion to me—perverting sound into a different field,” she says. The musician got in so deep that she had a tough time shaking the film’s eerie images—bawling babies, desiccated human husks, disfigured faces—from her consciousness: “I dreamed about the film every night while we were working on it and didn’t stop until about six months ago. It was really fucking weird.”

“It felt to me like she was a detective, like she was figuring something out. She’s on the hunt. Ideas of strip-club shit made sense to me, in terms of thinking about sexiness and perversion—so slowing things down and speeding them up seemed right.”

Let’s listen to some more of this remarkable score here is “Lipstick to Void” which features The Alien’s leitmotif… her piercing viola siren song she uses to seduce her prey. You’re on Joy stay with us for this incredible composer Mica Levi.

MUSIC: “Lipstick to Void” – Mica Levi

CARLA: You’re on Joy and this is Film on the Radio. Today we’re discussing Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 masterpiece – “Under the Skin”. A score that I didn’t really realise, until I listened to it separately, a lot of it was music rather than sound design. From Glazer in Pitchfork:

“The sounds featured in the music are indistinguishable from one another—it’s hard to tell where one sound ends and another one begins. Everything’s very woven together. The music is very much the blood of the film, to the point where it’s hard for me to think of the two entities separately.”

From the Fader: (Mica Levi) “I did a few things that aren’t usually considered to be good orchestration. [For example] I doubled up the flutes. Usually we try and spread harmony across the family of instruments, so that you can’t hear that they’re playing together. If you put it in unison, it doesn’t sound very professional. You hear the slight difference in their playing. I really like that slight sound — it creates this imperfection. It sounds quite meaningful, and innocent. Like a school band or something.”

Interestingly this is exactly what Jonny Greenwood the composer of Phantom Thread also said. He loved the warmth of session orchestras because they have never seen or practiced the music they are playing. They read the sheet music for the first time as they are playing it. It boggles my mind that people can be so talented.

I’ve spoken a lot in the past that the best scores seem to be a character in the movie, they’re not just describing what is happening. This is never more true than in this film which has almost no dialogue. Scarlett Johansson is almost unrecognizable as The Alien. Here is the trailer where almost all of the dialogue that is spoken in the film is captured.

CLIP: Under the Skin trailer https://youtu.be/qkowCq5lWbo

CARLA: You’re on Joy 94.9 and this is Film on the Radio. This week we’re diving deep on the score to the 2013 film “Under the Skin”. Each week we build a little more knowledge on the process of these composers and music supervisors. You can listen to our backlog of episodes by searching for Film on the Radio wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Do you have any favourite soundtracks or scores? Please get in touch I love hearing from you. I always need more material to listen to. The shows social media handle is @filmontheradio for Twitter and Facebook. Or you can email us at filmontheradio@joy.org.au.

Let’s listen to a couple more tracks from “Under the Skin” – we’ll notice that the siren song viola of the Alien starts to get slower and sadder as the film progresses. As she learns more slowly of what it is to be human her leitmotif mirrors her journey. This is “Lonely Void” and “Mirror to Vortex”.

MUSIC: “Lonely Void” – Mica Levi, “Mirror to Vortex” – Mica Levi

CARLA: You’re on Joy and this if Film on the Radio. Today we’re discussing the incredible and avant-garde score to the film “Under the Skin”. A score that makes its place with the greats like that of The Shining, Psycho and other Hollywood scoring masterpieces. The difference with this is this score was written by a 22-year-old woman. Mica Levi was shockingly only 22 when she was commissioned to write this score.

It’s deeply important to me as someone who loves film scores and is a feminist that a: women get more opportunities to compose for film and b: this film in particular should have been scored by a woman. It is a shockingly feminist film. One that subverts the male gaze, takes control of the gaze and shows the woman’s perspective.

This film was deeply shocking to me when I first saw it. Not to mention I was the only person in the cinema, it’s a film that’s through the perspective of a female bodied predator. And to get it really creepy Jonathan Glazer the director kitted up this van with cameras in it from every angle and had Scarlett Johansson driving around Glasgow trying to get strange men to get into her van. She succeeded. Many times. I’ll give you a brief synopsis if you haven’t seen it:

Under the Skin presents a radical inversion of the male gaze. Whilst adhering to horror film codes of the “monstrous feminine”, Under the Skin is not a horror film in the traditional sense, it is science fiction. The film, mostly without dialogue, follows the main character “The Alien” (Scarlett Johansson) as she hunts her prey. The Alien cruises the streets, asks strange men for directions and talks them into getting into her van. The ease at which they do so is astounding, she is beautiful – red lips, dark hair and pale skin. The Alien has styled herself as to be most attractive to capture her prey; watching her reptilian, calculating gaze is simultaneously thrilling (projection/narcissism/a fantasy symbolic order) as it is the trauma of the Real (understanding that this is a form of how men prey on women, in reality), “that Glazer’s images of female cruising are so startling is testament to the rarity of images of the active, sexual female gaze in popular cinema.” Although we see The Alien seduce these men to her home where she can process their meat for food, we simultaneously understand the unsettling reality of men’s assault rates of women . We desire to see this fantasy inversion, as it can only exist in relation to its real-world counterpart.

This is where Under the Skin can become a horror film – the male gaze can retreat, having enjoyed gazing at Scarlett Johansson naked body, however, can also ponder a world where they are vulnerable to sex-based violence. The symbolic order is restored at the end of the film as The Alien, after undergoing a sexual, human revolution is sexually attacked by a man in a forest and discovered to not be human. He burns her alive.

The film is a meditation on humanness. Through the course of the film The Alien discovers the pleasures of her new corporeal vehicle – culminating in the most beautiful music of the film. Let’s listen to “Love” by Mica Levi from the Under the Skin score after this. You’re on Joy.

MUSIC: “Love” – Mica Levi

CARLA: Welcome back! You’re listening to Film on the Radio and I’m your host Carla Donnelly. Today we have been discussing women in score composing – or lack thereof and highlighting the incredible work of English composer Mica Levi. Who at age 30 was one of the youngest people ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for her work. She was also the first woman to be nominated for Best Original Score in 16 years. Her score for “Under the Skin” is what we’ve been discussing today. However, you should also check out her scores for Jackie (that’s the one that was nominated) and her latest for the 2019 film “Monos”.

Also Joy listeners would know her from her band Mikachu and the Shapes – a couple of tracks we will play at the end of the show. If you’re just dropping into the conversation and want to hear more, never fear dear listener Film on the Radio is podcasted each week after the show. The file is ready at 9pm on Tuesdays so add us to your favourite podcatcher and catch up on all our other episodes while you’re at it.

It’s coming to the end of the show and keeners out there know I like to end on some trivia about the film in question. There’s no end to happy accidents and amazing items that just end up in films (or are removed).

The most extraordinary thing about this film that really lends to its creepiness is a lot of it was shot in secret. Scarlett Johansson’s Alien luring men into her car… a scene where she goes shopping for clothes in a crowded mall.. another where she goes to a nightclub… all of these were shot with secret cameras. From IMDB:

“A paparazzi still of Scarlett Johansson, in character, falling down became a wildly popular Internet meme in which users would Photoshop Johansson into various situations. As the scene was shot with hidden cameras, it was not until the movie’s release that it was revealed the fall was intentional.”

“The men lured into the van by Scarlett Johansson‘s character were not actors. Jonathan Glazer had hidden cameras installed in the van and only informed the men afterwards that they were in a movie.”

“The film took nearly ten years to be made, and one of the early drafts of the scripts included a Scottish married couple who were revealed to be aliens in disguise. Brad Pitt was, at the time, cast as one half of the couple.”

Truly a labour of love.. for Jonathan Glazer… British director who had made 3 films… but an incredible amount of ads an music clips. This film is a masterpiece and I encourage you all to see it… especially keeping in mind that so much of it was filmed on secret camera. I want to play you “Alien Loop” by Mica Levi and then leave you on a couple of Micachu and the Shapes tracks. Tune in next week for the score to “San Junipero” – Black Mirror’s futuristic lesbian love story. Thanks for listening I hope you’ve enjoyed our time together. After this is Triple Bi-Pass. You’re on Joy 94.9.

MUSIC: “Alien Loop” – Mica Levi