Blumberg started working on the score soon after Corbet first handed him the script, and a version of that opening we hear in the film – titled “Overture (Ship)” – was already ready to blast over the set so that Brody and the cinematographers could match their movements to the sound rather than the other way round.
Blumberg has been friends with Corbet for a decade, since a night out in London when they bonded over shared taste in music, film and literature and the director ended up crashed out on Blumberg’s sofa.
There’s an oft-quoted adage that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but Blumberg – once best known as the frontman of indie bands Yuck and Cajun Dance Party – found himself in the novel position of actually having to write music about architecture.
“I recorded the gunshot, recorded the response to the gunshot, then removed the shot and put Evan’s saxophone in.” The result was a way to manipulate the sound of Parker’s saxophone so that it sounds like it's reverberating off the stark slabs of marble we see on film.
In the mesmerising opening sequence of Brady Corbet’s epic Best Picture frontrunner, we see Adrien Brody’s László Tóth fleeing the Holocaust in the dark hold of a ocean liner before he eventually stumbles out into the light, elated but unbalanced, as the Statue of Liberty veers into view upside down.
