From No Such Thing, but not used on the “album.” A collaboration with Andy Russ from sometime in 1999.

Hal Hartley

01. Lookout (1:02)
02. Opening (1:50)
03. Rush Hour (1:25)
04. Dear Jim (1:50)
05. Night Flight (1:58)
06. Boat Song (2:32)
07. North (1:57)
08. Girl At Sea (1:46)
09. Worst News Possible (2:26)
10. Sacrifice (2:33)
11. Rock (0:54)
12. Scared Of You (1:52)
13. No Such Thing (As Monsters) (6:57)
14. Listen to this song at our website.
15. Communiqué (3:30)

*

Composed and performed by Hal Hartley

Thanks to Jeffrey Taylor for additional arrangements on Attack, and to Andy Russ for general rhythm, programming, and tech advice.

*

It’s about ten years now since the film No Such Thing was shot and I returned to New York from Iceland to edit and compose. While we were making the movie it was called Monster. But a certain (to remained unnamed) global entertainment conglomerate threatened to sue me if I released a movie of that title. No Such Thing, however, was also a title I liked as it had always implied the unsaid “as monsters“.

I’ve come back to this music several times over the years, hoping to rearrange a selection of the movie’s cues as songs in themselves or as suites because I felt I made a big leap in my music with this project and it led to everything else I did musically for the next ten years; that being the music for the films The Girl From Monday and Fay Grim, as well as the second, US, production of my play, Soon.

It was nothing gigantic, just a confidence equal, at last, to my ambition and curiosity. And this, I think, resulted from my collaboration in 1999 with Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Working with him on our short film, The New Math(s), I spent much more time listening closely to – and discussing – twentieth century orchestral music; everything from Stravinsky to Varese, Messiaen and Schoenberg to Shostakovich, all the way along to Steve Reich and Andriessen himself.

Simply put: music as far as can be from what I myself did.

Still, I was fascinated by what I learned about how “real” composers worked. And I was encouraged to try and make some music as music. It sounds funny to say it that way, but I had always made music I could play myself. I am not a great player, so my music stayed relatively simple, which is not a problem for me; I like simple music and there is, in fact, some very simple music in No Such Thing As Monsters. But I was anxious to try my hand at what I had heard called “pure music” and for the first time in my life, I sat down with pencil and paper and wrote four measures of something like a canon for four voices. I just sort of enjoyed the architecture of the music I was writing on the page.

My tech assistant at the time, Andy Russ, programed these four lines into the Yamaha QY70, a tiny portable digital workstation I was taking with me to Iceland. The result, when I heard it a week later, was a jagged, angular chord progression with a melody kind of punching and clawing its way to the surface. I was very excited. But it was only months later that I saw this little canon had become the quarry out of which most of the score’s motifs were drawn; almost everything I used was in that original collision of notes.

Anyway, one result of all this was that I had to learn to play better. Or get better musicians to play what I was composing. By that time (the early months of 2001) I was making music on the Roland XP80, the industry standard digital music workstation. So this meant becoming a better piano player or programer. I progressed from bad to only fairly bad as a pianist. But I became a competent programer. Finally, I invited my friend Jeff Taylor to work with me for a weekend on arranging what I thought at the time was going to be the opening credit music – the fullest, most orchestrated variation on the canon in the film. Specifically, I needed help with it’s middle “break”. My canon tended to help create “Piano Attacks”, brash uncompromising walls of sound that made me think of boulders and stones raining down on skinny bicycles; fun for a while, but it had to let up occasionally. I needed a tense, quiet interlude in the middle. My “big musical idea” during those weeks was what Jeff pointed out as “seconds” or “thirteenths” – a harmony of two consecutive notes but played an octave away from one another. This can have a wrenching, dissonant, squealing effect and was, within reason, what I was after – ascending chords that twisted and stretched forward, sometimes screaming with the effort. Jeff worked with me to refine the intervals, then suggested starting the ascending progression on the second beat of the measure, so the string arrangement seemed to be pursuing its own course while the rest of the song sawed its way through it.

Nothing, of course, that Bernard Herman hadn’t done fifty years before. But it was a watershed two days for me.

It’s now called “Attack” and was not used in the film. But Opening, which became the credit sequence cue, is a variation on the arrangement we did that weekend. And so is Lookout.

Then, there’s the simple music…

North and Girl At Sea were exercises I gave myself, remembering the Anglo-Irish folk songs I heard as a kid sung unaccompanied at various kitchen tables by my Uncle Leo and – much earlier – by my mother and her sisters. Simple, plaintive melodies sung without rushing. I had never started a song by creating its melody. I had always made chords and then poked around for a melody which suited them. This was just the opposite.

Boat Song is the first song I made for No Such Thing, mostly by banging around and pushing buttons on the XP80 to see what the machine could do. Days later it began to sound like a song and I followed on from where I left off with my melody exercises the year before.

Some of these tunes, like Rush Hour, Sacrifice, and Dear Jim, were begun in 1996 when I was making the score for Henry Fool.

Scared Of You and Night Flight are the same composition simply assigned to different sounds on the machine. It was made as a guitar piece as you hear it in Scared Of You on the little QY70 in the apartment in Rekjavik where Miho and I were living during the film’s production. As an experiment, I switched the sound patch and was met with this weird gasping, hyperventilating, wall of synthetic strings. When we returned to New York, I added flute, light percussion, and this strange sample called “Tape Echo” which is some sort of reversed orchestral noise. (I use it often in these pieces.) I left Scared Of You as it was, with its occasional, impossibly low notes – as if played on a guitar with an extra, lower, string below E.

No Such Thing (As Monsters) is a suite of the secondary musical themes. Worst News Possible is also a recurring theme in the film associated with the character of the Boss and her hi-jinx in the New York scenes.

In the end it’s just some movie music. But it is the most confident music I had made up till then. I’m glad I finally got the best of it organized and presentable.

Hal Hartley, March 2010

Dear Mr. Hartley,

As I said, No Such Thing is the centerpiece of my seminar, Myth Made Visible.  I asked the students to formulate questions for you and I tried to make them comprehensible and useful without compromising their integrity. It was important that they each formulate one essential question. The film was universally acclaimed – they didn’t know your work (but they generally see only mainstream stuff – almost no European films, etc.) – and they really all thought it was fabulous. And that’s a good thing. Thanks for the film!

Best, Nancy Goldring

Q: What does “corporate” mean to you as a filmmaker and how do you balance commentary and art?

As a filmmaker, “corporate” means to me much the same thing it means to me as a person; very specific regulations on an individual’s freedom of decision. There is always some degree of corporate procedure in even the smallest company and the smallest film production. It’s necessary to some degree. In the bigger corporate environments I’ve witnessed (and, admittedly, they were particularly unhealthy) it tends to become an outright restriction of a person’s right to think for him or her self. For me, art – in my case, specifically, fiction – has always been the best way to relate commentary. I almost never start from having something I want to say, but from something I want to ask. The joy of creating characters is that they can disagree. And then one can – if one makes the effort to appreciate the two opposing positions – let the characters relate the commentary by way of their argument; sort of a demonstration of how an issue exists in the world.

Q: At the end of the movie, what is the relationship between good and evil. Is it the same at the beginning and the end? Why did the film end so abruptly? Did you have other ideas about how to end the movie?

If good and evil are treated in this film at all, I’d have to say it’s as being beside the point in the bigger scheme of things. I tried to tell the story from the Monster’s point of view. The monster, not being human, doesn’t share human notions of good and evil. Even one set of humans – say, the villagers – have a totally different conception of right and wrong from other communities – the city folk, for instance. No, I had no other ideas about ending the film. I realized how it would end while writing in the early stages. Once I came upon the idea that the monster’s friend, Doctor Artaud, would suggest that the monster might just be a figment of the collective imagination – a myth – which, having become so real it might exist more surely than we ourselves do… Following that train of thought, I knew the film would have to end as if the world were ending with it… as if the world of the story was the dream of the Monster… so, if he is eliminated, would the world around him be eliminated as well?

Q: Why was the monster not explained to the viewer; his existence or non-existence after he is destroyed?

Because the Monster himself doesn’t know what he is. He doesn’t know why he exists or how he came in to being. Some people, like Dr. Artaud, have suggestions. But no one knows for sure. For me the important thing is that none of us knows how we got here or why – but we have to continue.

Q: Why did you have Beatrice succumb to corruption after having overcome so may obstacles and remains so strong?

This is a very telling question and one I have had to answer a lot – in America – since making the film. I can only respond to this question by posing another: what is so corrupt about a young woman who has been through all that pain and suffering taking some time off to party and have sex? Personally, I think she deserved a little fun. But my personal feelings don’t have much to do with the decision to illustrate her relaxation. As a storyteller I suspected we would like her more, empathize more with her, if we witnessed all aspects of her – and a healthy young woman wanting to make love is just as important as her spiritual certainty. I didn’t want her to be a nun.

Q: What is the role of media in relation to myth in our times or can it possibly be a contemporary mode of transmission?

I think the media is the primary generator and conveyance of popular mythology now. Which is probably no different than in ancient times, except media was word-of-mouth then. But speed is important. And what we call media now is specifically characterized by speed of transmission.

Q: What role if any did the painful surgery Beatrice undergoes have in the way she reacted to her meeting with the monster?

It seemed important that the heroine endure some sort of rite of passage. This, I’m sure, is a regular part of any so called coming-of-age myth or myth of spiritual attainment. You all might know more about that than me, seeing as how you’re discussing these things in class. But it seemed required. On a more basic level, I thought she needed to be strong and fearless by virtue of having already endured intense suffering, both physical (the operation) and emotional (the panic she must have witnessed in the plane as it crashed into the ocean). And I imagined that this would make her a very different kind of person. Different in such a way that people who saw her on the street would know that she had been to places (again, physically and emotionally) where most people haven’t been. This was the meaning of the townspeople trying to touch her as she leaves the hospital – a really old kind of hero/saint transformation. As if her very presence had healing powers, etc.

Q: Could another mythical character have been as effective as the monster? Was the monster based on a person (such as Norman Mailer)?

Norman Mailer? No. Wow, interesting, though. No, the Monster was based on no one in particular. But I drew on the book Grendel, by John Gardner.  Grendel is popularly referred to as Beowulf told from the monster’s point of view, and it has always been an important book for me. There is a lot of James Cagney’s gangster characters in there too.

Q: What most inspired you to make this movie – was it related to 9/11?

The movie was shot a year before 9/11 and, in fact, it’s release was delayed because the studio felt it would be too troublesome to distribute after the attack. I drew on contemporary news items relating different kinds of terrorist attacks for Beatrice’s arduous journey to the airport – the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995, the first attempt on the Twin Towers in 1993, Timothy McViegh’s bombing in Oklahoma City, etc…

Q: Is this based on any specific pre-existing myths?

No. I thought I might be able to make a perfectly contemporary monster movie – a sort of relevant fairytale of modernity. But The Wizard of Oz was helpful – Sarah Polley’s hair is done just like Dorothy’s. Murnau’s Nosferatu – it is Nosferatu and the novel Dracula that dwell on the sadness of eternal life. And the Mothra and Godzilla movies made in Japan in the fifties and early sixties were helpful – there is always a journalist trying to unearth some well-kept government secret or the niece of a famous scientist looking for her uncle.

On June 27 in Munich, on behalf of the Munich International Film Festival, Hal presented actress Julie Christie with the festival’s CineMerit Award, recognizing her excellent and on-going achievements in cinema. Christie first met Hartley when she performed in his film, No Such Thing (2001), which is where she also met the brilliant Sarah Polley who directed the actress in Away From Her (2006), for which Christie received an Oscar nomination.

Hal Hartley’s award presentation speech,
June 27, 2008, Munich

Good evening. Thank you.

I’m very happy to have been asked to say a few words upon the occasion of the Munich Film Festival’s presentation of its CineMerit Award to Julie Christie.

I was not asked to do so because I am some sort of expert on her career. I am not. We worked together once and very briefly and we became friends.

And, although key points in my own development as a filmmaker coincided with the discovery of certain films Julie had decided to be in – for instance: Don’t Look Now, by Nicolas Roeg, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, by Robert Altman, The Gold Diggers, by Sally Potter – the few words I have to say tonight are in fact a cleaned up version of what I told my wife, Miho, when she wanted to know more about our fascinating new friend from England.

My impression of Julie Christie was never very unusual, I think; as with many people, to me, she seemed important and encouraging simply for existing in the motion picture business – she seemed to belong there, in some sense to define it at its best, but also to appear as though she were just passing through. She telegraphed a healthy disregard for the supposedly awesome significance of “The Movies.” She continues to provide an example of integrity, imagination, commonsense, and (critically) a sense of humor, about herself and the entertainment industry.

Through the roles she has played, she has allowed herself to be glamorous, vulgar, mysterious, funny, charming, argumentative, sexy, helpless, strict, and even unapproachable. And she always does this on her own terms.

And this really does make – and has always made – Julie Christie “Not Just Another Beautiful Actress.”

Even a random selection of her films will show she is a committed and imaginative actor. But she also continues to display a certain attitude to the world which is not only genuinely attractive but consistent over such a wide variety of roles. If I may say so, this is evidence of a skillful and intuitive command of everything about herself – her critical intelligence, creative instinct, curiosity, even her prejudices, her fears, her insecurities – they all come to bear on these obviously special performances which never seem forced, arbitrary, or by-the-book.

The course of her career has been determined by the things that interest her and not by the passing trends and preoccupations of an industry geared to the requirements of mass culture. However – and this is important – she has penetrated that mass culture. She has become a representative personality, an inspiration towards a certain ideal of self-possession and relevant engagement with the issues of our time.

As things go, this is a rare and important thing.

So, Julie, thank you for allowing us to thank you for your efforts.

Personally, but not unrelated, I’m glad to know you. Your friendship and conversation demands attention, challenges easy assumptions, and is often just downright hilarious. It’s a kind of inheritance I am quite protective of; and one I hope to be able to pass on, in some manner, following your example, to another generation.

Thanks.

There is a Monster who lives at the northern-most edge of the world. He is a foul-mouthed and bad tempered bastard with claws. He doesn’t remember when he came into existence and he’s been driven to insomnia and heavy drinking by humanity’s evolution into the information age. His pain increases in direct proportion to humanity’s ability to talk incessantly. What will become of him? As far as he can tell, he’ll live forever. He wants to die, but can’t. He’s indestructible. It’s not his fault.

Before long, he meets Beatrice, a 22-year-old junior assistant girl Friday at a sensationalistic TV news program. The world finds it easy to accept a Monster who eats people and is impervious even to nuclear radiation? as long as he stays entertaining. But a person as straightforward, honest, and unselfish as Beatrice is a miracle of an entirely different order.