“My music is very French, that’s why it seduced the Americans”
Paris, 6e district, we pass in front of the Hôtel de la Louisiane, we continue another hundred meters, on the right we are there. Alexandre Desplat receives us in a recording studio, on the occasion of the releases of the film Skirmishers in the room and Pinocchio on Netflixwhose music he signed. A place with “restricted but very warm spaces, with lots of woodwork”in which “He spent nights and nights”.
The 61-year-old film music composer talks about his childhood spent in Paris with a Rabelaisian father who collected jazz records and a mother of Greek origin who reads a lot and teaches yoga, listening to Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, fado or Indian music. He confides his rituals around Japanese tea, his passion for the flute, his discovery of the Russian ballets, of Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev, his taste for foreign countries and Italian cinema, his admiration for John Williams, his detestation for the XIXe bourgeois century, his long years of apprenticeship by collaborating on the TV show “Nowhere else”, his decisive encounter with Jacques Audiard and the central role of the director…
For four seasons, producer Géraldine Sarratia has questioned the construction and intricacies of a personality’s taste. Whether they are creators, artists, cooks or intellectuals, they all call upon their childhood memories, all evoke the social and cultural dimension of the construction of a corpus of tastes, of a set of values.
A podcast produced and presented by Géraldine Sarratia (Ideal Genre)
prepared with the help of Diane Lisarelli and Imène Benlachtar
Directed by: Emmanuel Baux
Music: Gotan Project
