articles / Pop Culture
How Alexandre Desplat Composed in the Shape of Water
Composer Alexandre Desplat | Photo by Alex Bailey
Hit play below to listen to our Arts Alive feature with composer Alexandre Desplat.
Hit play below to listen to an extended interview with composer Alexandre Desplat.
The latest auteur to crave Desplat’s elegant, neoclassical sound is Guillermo del Toro, the gothic Mexican director of Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. Del Toro gave Desplat an interesting challenge: how would you score an adult fairy tale / Cold War noir thriller / erotic creature movie? That’s exactly what The Shape of Water is: an allegorical film, set in the 1950s but really set in the imagination of del Toro’s cinema-crowded mind, about a mute woman who works as a cleaner in a mysterious military lab… who falls in love with an exotic fish-like creature. It’s even stranger than it sounds, and, at least according to the Venice Film Festival who awarded it the Golden Lion—it’s a modern masterpiece.
A pair of Oscars kept company with the KUSC mug | Photo by Alexandre Desplat
