Screentime With Mario Grigorov – Composer For Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire

Some days being the boss is really a good gig, and sometimes I'm even moved to mention the fact. For those of you following along regularly, you know that it's just me here. That has obvious pros and cons. I will leave to your imagination the varied lists in either direction, but where it turns interesting right at the moment is in the fact that I didn't particularly love Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire . Actually, I really didn't like it much. Even without delving into the theatrical merits of the film, I find that an irritating title.

You can read my review of the film here if you're so inclined.

This becomes interesting (I'll claim... and I mean for me, so it's hard to argue against), because what I did find particularly impressive about the film was the sound/score/music.

Whatever else you might say about the movie, one thing is very clear to me about it - if the sound had been wrong, even a little, it would have been a disaster.

I got the chance to interview the film's composer, Mario Grigorov, recently, and that's where being the boss comes in. For all the junkets, and conference "interviews," and roundtables you see, there's nothing like a simple conversation. Especially when you aren't assigned to do them.

The truth is, I didn't have a lot I wanted to ask him, I really just wanted to get a feel for his ideas. This is the third project he's worked on with director Lee Daniels, so I was pretty sure I knew how things stood on their relationship and how they worked together. Incidentally, they are working together again on the upcoming Miss Saigon - at least that seems to be the story.

Though I didn't talk to him that long, he mentioned his fascination with the juxtaposition inherent in the score several times. He even mentioned A Bronx Tale as being a good example of using the same idea. I was interested particularly in his theory of keeping the score from pushing things too far, and this is where he spent a lot of time focusing on this juxtaposition. Let's face it, there are a lot of moments in Precious that would simply bury you if the music were adding to the harsh drama on screen instead of countering it. A dark, heavy score coming at you at the wrong time, and you wouldn't be able to watch it.

We both mentioned the balance quite a lot, and while some moments of the score are "big," the overall sound and music of the film are very precise. Keeping up my idea on how to keep this balance, I asked if he had to do much playing around with his ideas in order to see what fit best, especially in this regard, and he told me that, "Yes. There were moments that turned out to be too much." At certain times, I gathered, you sense that you want to look for a certain emotion/reaction, but it turns out that you need to go a different direction in order not to drown the audience.

As I said, he came back to the idea of juxtaposition more than once, and it was rather interesting for me to listen to someone in the business of making music give me his ideas on the subject. A big fan of The Beautiful South, I'm no stranger to a fascination with the mode in general. If you aren't familiar, they are well-known for bouncy, happy-sounding songs that are about murder, death, or the general horribleness of life. Mario mentioned the more or less unexplored area this is, and that it was thus an interesting avenue to pursue for him. I wanted him to give me something tangible about making this juxtaposition work, but as you might imagine, that's a difficult road. It's an art, and that's hard to define.

He said, basically, that there's no scientific explanation you can give when it comes to the reactions you're going to get. I believe he was going for the idea that while that's certainly just true in general, in this case you are sort of playing with people a bit more. When scenes in Precious are especially tense and unnerving, giving their other sense something light, almost happy-sounding, can go somewhere you aren't expecting. Playing tense at tense scenes is fairly straight-forward. It might not work out, but you know where you're going with people. But, as Mario said, with this sort of approach, the emotions you trigger can be very personal. It's risky, and he believes that's why it isn't explored more.

As we talked about his effort to bring more life to Precious herself through the music, he mentioned getting to work with Lee Daniels very closely, and the exceptional benefit of working with a director several times came through well.

I also wondered what thoughts he had on working on a smaller budget vs. the many advantages of having a lot more money to put into things, and he called restrictions a blessing in disguise. Whether it might be money limitations, time constraints, or whatever else, he thought that the framework you have available forces you to become creative.

Precious is a rough movie to score in many ways, whether you love it or not, and it was really great to talk with the composer, not only about scoring the particular film, but about the overall creature that a film's score is. Precious in particular, I contend, must have a very solid score in order to work. Moreover, the combination of songs, score, and moments where there is neither, are critical to the thing's abilities, whatever they may be. I brought up the idea that if you had people screen the film with no score at all, you would not only get a different reaction, but I think the movie wouldn't work for a lot of people, and Mario seemed to largely agree.

There is a sense (we worked on this spur of the moment example together) in which the score of a film is something like the set design of the kitchen in which the characters are delivering some important conversation. In some films, or in some scenes, it isn't particularly important what that kitchen looks like. You've got to have some decor to the kitchen, but it doesn't make a lot of difference if it's this kitchen or that kitchen. But, sometimes, the wrong idea would kill the scene, and everything would fall apart around it. We have a movie here where it matters, because however much the story might move you, and to whatever extent it stirred emotion, without the score (I believe without this kind of score) it would have been so emotionally draining that in the end it wouldn't have been able to deliver.

Often unnoticed, often overpowering, the score of a film is a sorely undervalued creature. I challenge you to take another look at the film, and try to get a feel for the truly interesting work Grigorov's score is doing. Whether it is adding to the depth of a character by relaying a perspective behind the outlook of a scene, setting an emotional tone that lays the foundation for what you're seeing, or bringing forward some positive feeling that makes a horrible scene tolerable, it's a complicated web that overlays the final result.

It was a fascinating conversation with someone who really knows what he's doing, and the mere opportunity is the greatest part of why I love doing what I do. I hope some measure of the value I got out of talking to him has come through.

This is the third time that Mario and Lee Daniels have worked together. Mario previously composed the scores for Daniels’ films Shadowboxer and Tennessee. Among his many other film projects, Mario has contributed additional music for the score of Oscar winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side and developed the score for The Third Wave: A Volunteer Story about the tsunami, presented by Sean Penn and executive produced by Morgan Spurlock.
To listen to snippets of Mario's film composition work please visit, http://www.mariogrigorov.com/music.html.

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About Marc Eastman

Marc Eastman is the owner and operator of Are You Screening? and has been writing film reviews for over a decade, and several branches of the internet's film review world have seen his name. His reviews have brought him personal praise from the director of a major motion picture, and have been used as required reading in a course at a major University. These priceless rewards, along with just bags of cash, keep him from straying from freelance writing. He is also a member of The Broadcast Film Critics Association and The Broadcast Television Journalists Association.

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