Case Study: Alex Heffes

Alex Heffes has become one of the UK's foremost young composers. After graduating from Oxford, he worked as an assistant to renowned composer Simon Boswell and found international acclaim with his work on Kevin Macdonald's documentary One Day In September (1999). He's subsequently scored a string of critical and commercial hits, including The Parole Officer and Late Night Shopping (both 2001), Touching The Void (2003), Imagine Me & You (2006). His most recent success saw him reunite with Macdonald for a third time, on The Last King Of Scotland (2007).

First interest in film composing...

"As a child I was always really enthralled with film and film music, although I never thought of it as a career option because it's not something that you would go down to the careers office and ask about. But it sat at the back of my mind and a few years after I graduated - I did a music degree at Oxford - I got involved in doing some student films.

"I didn't train to be a film composer and when I was at university there wasn't such a thing as a film course. It's something that's happened subsequently but back then there was no particular training. I still recommend to most people that training specifically as a film composer isn't necessarily what will secure you a job at the end of your course. It's really much more to do with meeting people and making contacts and working on developing as a composer yourself."

Starting on shorts...

"I started off working with some film workshops and film courses. I never attended film school but I did lots of student films at the Royal College of Art and various film schools in London. I must have done 20 or 30 shorts; I cut my teeth on them. You're rarely paid when you're doing shorts but it's a great way of learning your craft and being able to make mistakes with your peers who are at the same level as you. You can experiment a lot with what you're into and what you like, and it's a wonderful way of getting a foot in the door. I did everything from one-minute films to 25-minute films. Of course, nearly all of them were made with almost no money so you had to develop a cunning way of scoring them on very low budgets, which turned out to be a very useful trick when coming on to projects later where you do have a bit of budget but you'd still have to make it stretch a long way."

Transition from shorts...

"I found composing for features very similar to composing for shorts. On the shorts I always tried to make the music more than just a series of little bits. I'd give it an arc and a story and join it up to try and match the shape of the film. I was very lucky. I started doing TV but then I had a crossover period when I started working as composer's assistant to Simon Boswell, who was doing feature films [Shallow Grave, Hackers]. I worked with him for a number of years and got to work on 20 or 30 features - here and in the States - ghostwriting and orchestrating and doing all sorts of things. It was a wonderful, old-fashioned apprenticeship. Not an awful lot of people get to do that these days. As well as letting me write a lot of music for films and arranging and conducting and orchestrating, it also allowed me to watch how a composer interacts in real life with studios, producers and directors. A lot of what a composer does is about having to deal with people."

On the composing process...

"It's often after the film's been shot and edited that there's a last minute panic to try and find a composer! In a way there's a logic to that because until you can see a film finished it's quite hard for a composer to really get a grip on exactly how the music is going to go. A lot of the time I'll get hired on a film when it's in the editing stage, if not close to being finished, and I will sit down with the director and he or she will talk to me. What I like them to do is not talk to me about music, but just talk to me about the drama, about the emotions in the scenes. Really, it's how they would talk to an actor - the music is going to be one of the actors in the film."

Working with directors...

"You can find yourself battling directors but I think the more work you have under your belt the more you get hired because you have a certain sound and people know where you're coming from. More importantly, in a way, it's quite often not so much you who's having a battle; quite often the director, the producers and the studio can be having a battle about what the music should be like and you can be caught in the crossfire. I did a film once that had 11 producers. I had a meeting with them and they all brought in their own CD collections and they all had different ideas about what they wanted the music to be like. That was a tricky situation! Often it's things like that, which are more difficult than working with a director where you're having a constructive one-on-one discussion.

"I've done quite a few films where I've been the second composer hired because the first score was thrown out. You're walking into a situation where there's already been a lot of battles. It really comes back to the job of the composer, though - to listen to what people are saying and drawing out what the director wants to do with their film in terms of the drama. Hopefully you're the right sort of musical character to interpret that. It really does require reading between the lines very carefully. You can only really learn this by experience. It's trial and error... or trial by fire sometimes!"

Favourite part of the process...

"Often the most enjoyable part for me is when you come to record the music with the orchestra, because by that point the hard work is done and you can enjoy that moment of having it all come together. Certain films have specific pressures to them. On The Last King Of Scotland I had to go out to Uganda and record quite a lot of music over there with choirs and singers. That was a particular highlight - going out and meeting people and doing something I wouldn't normally do. That's what I love about the job: there's a great deal of variety, you're doing something different everyday."

Advice for budding composers...

"The only way you can learn to write music is by doing it - even if it's taping a film off the TV or watching a DVD and turning the volume down and writing your own music to that film. If you can, get other people to play it for you or listen to it and get their feedback. One of the main differences between a film composer and someone who writes other types of music is that writing for the screen is a highly collaborative process. You've got a director and you may have many producers giving you input into the music you've written. You have to be able to take on board that element of collaboration. I see quite a few young composers struggling with that because they never realised that they might have to change their music to suit someone else's needs or requirements. It's a balance we all have to find but you need to be accommodating. Which is not to say that you have to sell yourself out artistically - there's always a way of giving the director what they want and feeling satisfied yourself with what you've done. You just need to get that balance right."

Jamie Russell | Published 19 Apr 07