Silent River Interview with director Chris Chan Lee includes discussion about Brian's score...
/Silent River director Chris Chan Lee had a great conversation / interview with artist/actor Jacqueline (Jae) Kim about Silent River right after our world premiere at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. In an excerpt from the “Angry Asian Man” blog they talk about the film’s music. (See except below).
https://blog.angryasianman.com/2022/03/silent-river-speaks-getting-into.html
Jae: And finally, well I wanted to talk about color, but music, I wrote this. "It's bold and risking being too much all the time, but somehow it defined a space for us, a vocabulary. In the first third of the film, I thought of Japanese cinema in the era of (Teshigahara's) Woman In The Dunes, to be specific. It became a character in the film that wasn't going to leave. It gave the space weight. It filled Elliot's emptiness while emphasizing it at the same time. Was this intended with the music or was it brought in largely through the composer's influence?
CCL: Brian Ralston, our composer, brought so much to the film. He even did a lot of counterpoint that wasn't necessarily following exactly what was happening, you know, in the proceedings and -- and he helped to illustrate the kind of supernatural aspect of the scenario -- at the Purgatory World. So it was a huge. It was kind of like another character. Absolutely.
Jae: It was bold.
Chris: And he was also extremely strategic because, you know, we're a low budget movie, right? So we can't hire an orchestra and all that stuff. But he knew he was able to enlist a few performers to play live instrumentation, you know, like a cello and viola and stuff, to add that human touch so it did not feel like an electronic score.