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Interview: Alex Ebert

A MOST VIOLENT YEAR written and directed by J.C. Chandor, with Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, Alessandro Nivola and Albert Brooks. An Elevation Pictures release. 124 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (January 30). For venues and times, see Movies.


Alex Ebert didn’t think he’d ever become a film composer. He’s a rock musician, and for years he’d focused entirely on his band, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. But a call from director J.C. Chandor set him on a new trajectory.

“It was a call out of the dark,” he recalls, “a call that was just too good to be true. The pitch was ‘Do you wanna do a movie with Robert Redford where he’s out at sea and there’s no dialogue?'”

The movie was All Is Lost, and Ebert would go on to win a Golden Globe for his original score. And he was delighted to work with Chandor on the writer/director’s next picture, A Most Violent Year.

“He gives me a lot of room,” Ebert explains, “and I chuck a bunch of ideas his way, and then we start talking, and that’s really how we roll. It’s sort of an amorphous correspondence.”

All Is Lost is a contemporary survival thriller, but A Most Violent Year is a very different film. Set in 1981, it’s a study of corruption as seen through the eyes of an entrepreneur (Oscar Isaac) trying to break into the New York City heating oil market.

“My immediate knee-jerk [response] when I read the script and saw the [unfinished] movie was that I wanted jazz,” Ebert says. “I wanted New York – and not just New York the city, but actually New York movies – to be in there somehow. You know, there’s that era of 70s movies where you have a lot of horns, sorta Quincy Jonesy stuff and then, of course, the era just sort of after, where you have a lot of synth. I tried a bunch of different things and then ended up in this hybrid zone.”

Ebert wanted his score to function as a window into Isaac’s closed-off character, who has “a drive that disassociates him from everyone else’s troubles and the rest of the world. It puts him on his own plane, and we get to go there with him and experience what it’s like to be that driven.”

Is there a difference between writing for the movies and writing for the band? Are different skills required?

“I’m always conscious of the other people who made [the movie],” he says. “J.C. headed up the movie. In the band, we’re all in the same room. I can account for everything. But for this you really are doing a service. At the same time, what I really love is that the score can also be taken away and listened to on its own. This is a piece of music that stands on its own you can go buy it and listen to it. And that’s really cool.”

Interview Clips

Ebert on the consideration J.C. Chandor extends him as a composer.

Ebert on his early understanding of the power of movie soundtracks.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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