How Was the Original Score Conceived for “Only Lovers Left Alive”?
Jim Jarmusch, the writer and director of Only Lovers Left Alive (OLLA), said he drew much inspiration for the film’s score from Josef van Wissem’s lute music. Like Jarmusch’s other films, the music is crucial to the film’s story. Van Wissem’s approach, explained Jarmusch, has a kind of minimalism to it that is very strong and not intended to show off technique, but to employ the technique for result. This minimalist quality is aligned with vampire Adam’s character and his approach to music. Although Adam is capable of virtuosity, he has partially abandoned it. When the film begins, Adam is living in modern-day Detroit in a dilapidated classic Victorian house. He has eschewed traditional classical music and instead only plays avant-rock drone music.
The film score also drew inspiration from both Jarmusch’s and Wissem’s approach to their own lives and interests. Jarmusch explains ”[W]e love old things, new things, we don’t have a hierarchy, whether it’s William Byrd or My Bloody Valentine. And that’s very important for the film and for Adam and Eve and for how I wanted them to be perceived as not having a sense of hierarchical culture. In other words, they’ll listen to Charlie Feathers rockabilly but they’ll talk about Franz Schubert or he’ll play Paganini or she’ll read classical literature and modern things as well. It was a kind of key to everything. Jozef’s playing was both an inspirational element of the film, and an essential element for construction of the film as well.”
Van Wissem himself said that the instrumentation they used and the score that they were composing had to have a timeless quality that complemented the near-immortality of the film’s vampires. “You dream about space and ultimately timelessness, and I think that goes well with the story and what it became.”