As a boy, Alexandre Desplat gravitated toward the movie soundtracks in his parents’ record collection, never dreaming that one day making film music would become his career.
“If I really go very, very far back, my parents brought back from America, where they were students and met and got married, some soundtracks that were in the house,” Desplat says on a recent video call from Paris. “Like George Duning’s score of ‘Picnic’ or ‘Cowboy,’ these very, very ’50s kind of scores.
“Hearing that at home, and my love of cinema that also grew as I was maybe 12 or 13, I just loved the fact that you could hear in so many movies different types of music,” he says.
“You could hear Nino Rota and Fellini have a strange circus-y kind of orchestra, or sometimes just a very intimate kind of band. Or you could have Maurice Jarre and his huge symphonic scores.
“And then I heard John Williams,” says Desplat, 63, of his encounter at a French cinema with “Star Wars” in the summer of 1977. “That sealed it for good.”
Film composer Alexandre Desplat, seen here conducting at the Krakow Film Music Festival, will make his debut at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday, July 15, 2025 when he conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program of music from Desplat’s scores that includes excerpts from “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The Shape of Water,” for which he won a pair of Oscars, as well as films such as “Godzilla,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” and more. (Photo courtesy of the Krakow Film Music Festival) Alexandre Desplat poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film “Jurassic World Rebirth” on Tuesday, June 17, 2025, in London. The movie is one of three for which Desplat composed scores for this year, with the recent Wes Anderson movie “The Phoenician Scheme” the first, and Guillermo Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” this fall the other. Desplat won his first Oscar for best film score for Anderson’s 2014 movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” He conducts the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in a program of his film music on Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (Photo by Millie Turner/Invision/AP) Alexandre Desplat and Guillermo del Toro pose for photos before a panel on their collaboration as film composer and director at the Cannes Film Festival in France in May 2025. Desplat wrote his third score for Del Toro for the forthcoming movie “Frankenstein.” He won his second Oscar for best film score for his work on Del Toro’s “The Shape of Water.” Desplat conducts the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in a program of his film music on Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images) Film composer Alexandre Desplat, seen here conducting at the Krakow Film Music Festival, will make his debut at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday, July 15, 2025 when he conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program of music from Desplat’s scores that includes excerpts from “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The Shape of Water,” for which he won a pair of Oscars, as well as films such as “Godzilla,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” and more. (Photo courtesy of the Krakow Film Music Festival) Composer Alexandre Desplat, right, with frequent collaborator director Wes Anderson, left, at the Cannes International Film Festival in July 2021. Desplat won his first Oscar for best film score for Anderson’s 2014 movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Desplat conducts the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in a program of his film music on Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda) Film composer Alexandre Desplat, seen here conducting at the Krakow Film Music Festival, will make his debut at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday, July 15, 2025 when he conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program of music from Desplat’s scores that includes excerpts from “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The Shape of Water,” for which he won a pair of Oscars, as well as films such as “Godzilla,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” and more. (Photo courtesy of the Krakow Film Music Festival) Alexandre Desplat accepts his first Oscar win for best original score for “The Grand Budapest Hotel” in Feb. 2015. Desplat conducts the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in a program of his film music on Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images) French composer Alexandre Desplat poses in the press room with the Academy Award for best original score, his second Oscar, for “The Shape of Water” at the 90th Annual Academy Awards in March 2018. (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images) Alexandre Desplat poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film “Jurassic World Rebirth” on Tuesday, June 17, 2025, in London. The movie is one of three for which Desplat composed scores for this year, with the recent Wes Anderson movie “The Phoenician Scheme” the first, and Guillermo Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” this fall the other. Desplat won his first Oscar for best film score for Anderson’s 2014 movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” He conducts the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in a program of his film music on Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (Photo by Millie Turner/Invision/AP) Show Caption1 of 9Film composer Alexandre Desplat, seen here conducting at the Krakow Film Music Festival, will make his debut at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday, July 15, 2025 when he conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program of music from Desplat’s scores that includes excerpts from “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The Shape of Water,” for which he won a pair of Oscars, as well as films such as “Godzilla,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” and more. (Photo courtesy of the Krakow Film Music Festival) ExpandWilliams, 93, is widely acclaimed as the great living composer of film scores. His music, often conducted by him, an annual highlight of most Hollywood Bowl summer seasons, with nights dedicated to themes from movies such as “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Jaws,” and many more.
Now Desplat gets to follow in his hero’s footsteps. On Tuesday, July 15, he will conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl for a night titled The Cinematic Scores of Alexandra Desplat.
The program includes music from “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The Shape of Water,” for which Desplat won Oscars, as well as music from movies such as “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” his first score for an American or British production, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” “Godzilla,” and more.
“It feels like being honored, being happy,” Desplat says of his debut on the Hollywood Bowl stage. “In the late ’80s, early ’90s, I did see some jazz concerts there. And, of course, later I saw John Williams. Who else can you see at the Hollywood Bowl with the laser sabers, laser swords?
“I’m really impressed,” he continues. “It’s a huge venue and it’s a huge honor to be able to be there, especially with the LA Phil.
“So, you know, I need to get ready,” he adds with a laugh.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Desplat talked about the origins of his interest in film music, working the same directors, and why John Williams remains the standard by which all film composers are measured.
Q: Tell me how you selected the scores for the Hollywood Bowl show. Was it to focus on frequent collaborators like Wes Anderson? The Oscar winners?
A: Well the first choice was to present only the Anglo-Saxon scores. Meaning British, American. I’m not playing any French scores at all, or European scores. Anyway, the U.K. is not in Europe anymore.
The second aspect was to find scores that could be symphonic, because we were playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, so we needed to be able to translate to this large ensemble of musicians. So many scores that were too intimate were set aside, or that included too many ethnic instruments like “Argo” or “Syriana.” Great movies and scores that I cherish but we couldn’t play them.
And I had to work on suites that could expand some of the scores. Like for the Wes Andersons [the program includes music from Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and “The French Dispatch”} they’re quite intimate for a huge symphony orchestra so I had to adapt that to a larger amount of musicians.
And then it’s trying to mix some old things, some good things, some bad … some things. [He laughs]
Q: I’m sure there are no bad things in there. Though you say there are surprise performances so who knows what you’ll pull out.
A: I wish I could play some of the latest stuff, but [time] was too short to [include] some of the scores I just recorded. “Jurassic World: Rebirth” or “Frankenstein,” which I recorded last week. [In addition to those two films, moviegoers also heard his work this year in Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme.”]
Q: You mentioned how it was to see “Star Wars” and hear John Williams’ score. Tell me a little bit about how a director and composer work together to enhance the movie experience?
A: Well, first of all, I would say that my passion for music kind of jumped over the 19th century. I loved the Baroque era, the classical era, and then the Romantic era was not my cup of tea. Maybe because my sisters played piano all the time and I heard Schumann and Schubert and Liszt and on and on. And I’m not a pianist.
So all that took me to the 20th century, and in the 20th century you have Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel. You have jazz. And in John Williams’s music, you had all that. Shostakovich . Everything was kind of digested and reformulated. And it could be with Spielberg or Lucas or whoever he was working with, I could hear all that together.
I think that looking at these tandems, I mentioned Nino Rota [and Fellini], Maurice Jarre and David Lean, and François Truffaut and George Delerue. What I learned from these tandems – Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann – is that their style crystalized at the proximity of these directors. And all these composers had a great instinct about how music and picture could live together, which is a very specific job.
I know many, many composers who’ve said through the years, “Oh yeah, I will compose music for films.” But no, you have to love cinema for that. You have to love living with images day and night, and somehow living with the director’s point of view for many weeks.
And accept that you are part of the big machine, bigger than you are, bigger than your ego, bigger than your music, and that your music has to live and dance with this machine. And so the tandems were very inspiring on that because they lasted for long. They still do for John, for JW, which is fantastic.
Q: The loyalty between the director and composer is important to the overall film?
A: When I was hoping that a relationship would last and it would not, I was always a bit sad in my early years of composing for films. I was all very naive, thinking, “I’m going to work with him forever. But I learned my lesson quite early on. A collaboration that might become a duet, unfortunately does not always become a duet.
I was lucky with Stephen Frears, who I did not mention but who I did many movies with, and he was a fantastic friend and marvelous director. But through the years, some of them took another path or chose other composers, and that’s the way it is.
But I admire directors who are faithful to their composers. Actually, very often I’m asked, “Oh, what other direct would you like to with?” I say, “Well, the ones that I’ve fancied, they already have great composers, so I can’t name them.”
Q: You’ve done seven movies with Wes Anderson, the same with Roman Polanski, and almost that many with Stephen Frears, George Clooney. How does that kind of bond benefit the work on a film?
A: The work is as demanding as the first time. You have the same desire to bring to the film something that has not yet appeared, that the music will bring out. You want the director to be as excited as the first time. And you know that he trusts you because he calls you again, which means this loyalty and trust actually gives you more courage to be adventurous. Because you know the director will respond to that.
So you feel freer, and at the same time constrained because you’re still working for the film. But it’s fantastic when the director trusts you, because it means that your art will have more wings.
Some directors, they’re afraid of your wings. That’s the worst experience because they feel that music is a danger or something they can’t really grasp. And that’s very, very difficult for composers. They want to feel the trust, because the more the director trusts you the more you will give to him.
Q: How do you understand what makes one score a favorite of viewers or listeners and another one, which might be just as good, not so much. “The Grand Budapest” and “Shape of Water” both won Oscars, BAFTAs. But you probably think just as highly of films that didn’t get awards.
A: It’s such a complex combination of things, I think, to win an Oscar. So many fantastic composers have never won, or won one, and you go, “What? Didn’t he win 10 times for this 10th marvelous score?”
I think it’s a really combination of the theme of the year, the flavor of the year. How much the music is important to the film. How much you hear it and how much it’s integrated or interwoven to the dramaturgy. And what’s around you at the time? How many other movies that have great scores.
And how the movies are received. Because if the movie is not received, your score can be the most genius score you’ve ever written, but if the movie is not well-received you go back into the queue for next year.
Q: What was it like winning your Oscars?
It’s fabulous, you know, because I’m French and I’ve dreamed of Oscars and American cinema since I am 14 or 15, and suddenly it happens. You don’t really realize that, because you’ve worked hard and boom, you’re on stage and it’s just a joy and happiness. You receive messages from your friends of the time who say to you, “You always said you wanted to be a Hollywood composer.” Did I?
It’s a great moment of success because getting an Oscar, for those who know the history of cinema, it’s a fabulous moment, of course. It means your work is loved by people you that you work with and work for so it’s very moving.
Q: You know John Williams, and this year, with “Jurassic Park: Rebirth,” you worked with themes he created. Tell me about him and what he’s accomplished.
A: To me, he’s always been the maestro. The only other maestro that I cherished was Nino Rota, I mean, at that level, and my two French predecessors, Maurice Jarre and George Delerue. So he’s in that league, except that he is still alive and all the other ones are gone.
Music is in his veins, you know? It just comes out of him, flawlessly. I mean, so many scores he’s written that you go, ‘Wow!” Every bar is so sophisticated, every idea is so perfect, every orchestration is just right and each works with the film and one another.
The magic of John Williams’s legacy is that he writes things that you’ve never heard before and that’s pretty hard. That’s really difficult. So many scores you hear, you know, they sound like Smetana or Dvorak or Tchaikovsky, or something so bad you don’t want to hear it again. [He laughs]
And John, it sounds like John Williams and you want to hear it again and again and learn from it. That’s the best thing I can say, that you learn from every score that John Williams has written. Not only musically, as I said, but also how it works for cinema. He invented something that wasn’t invented before him.
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