The Devil Made Me Do It: Scoring Ray Gibraltar's 'Wanted: Border'

It’s the trickiest thing to score a film. For one thing, your director might have an idea or two, regardless of whether he can articulate them well (or — as even some established directors are wont to do — by conjuring up weird voices and other noises possibly dredged up from either their esophagus or buried subconscious traumas for your reference), ideas that the musical director or composer of the film score must then try to achieve with the instruments at their disposal. (But of course, when your director has no ideas at all, this might be the best situation because it might mean you’re working on a movie that’s pretentious, ponderous “indie” drivel or artistically bereft mainstream crap, like Carlo J. Caparas’s stuff that requires little more than elbow-played synths. On the other hand, if it turns out to be a good movie, then getting no input from your director may be the worst position to be in, because you don’t want to be the one that ruins it all.) In my experience, though, doing a good score for a good movie with a good director is more a question of what not to do than what to put in. Just as a bad movie cannot be saved even by the likes of Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, Bernard Herrmann, John Williams or Lorrie Illustre, even artists such as those just mentioned can ruin a film. In fact, it’s terribly easy to do that.

During his recent trip to Manila, filmmaker Paul Schrader said that he’s never used the same approach to each of the adaptations he’s done (i.e. Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, his own Affliction) and this more or less applies to everything in movies. (That is, if you actually care about what you’re doing.) For scores, this just becomes even more the case because you’re working on somebody else’s work. Usually you come in last or at the very least after post-production, which roughly means after all the footage has been shot and the actors and on-set crew go on with their lives. A lot of times the scorer will be required to help the film especially if certain effects were not achieved while filming. So when two wooden planks profess their undying love for each other it just might fall on the music to actually communicate that, yes, there is indeed something between these two inanimate objects. That’s easy enough, to be honest. Just look at the roster of this coming Metro Manila Film Festival and witness it for yourself.

Now, to the heart of this informal piece on scoring movies: Ray Gibraltar’s new film Wanted: Border presented the musical director and scorer of the film not just a challenge but a real threat to themselves. The film stars Rosanna Roces in perhaps her most terrifying screen persona yet — a true martyr maybe, but a helluva basket case in the most Biblical sense. In fact not a single sane character appears in this film, which wouldn’t be so remarkable if it not were for the fact that Gibraltar’s script and direction remains ambiguous and never pat in its depictions. We know these people are wrong but we’re never really sure just why. It’s not shown so much as it is felt. These ambiguities create problems for the scorer. Viewing the film several times, it becomes apparent that there is always something there (whether in the elliptical cutting of its editor, Tara Illenberger, or just the unbounded id that seems to inform all the actions of the characters) that upends any security in what exactly is going on. To write film scores one must know where to plant the notes, where to root the music. Trying to do that in Wanted: Border led those who tried to do it into depression and a bit of derangement.

I should know. I was one of them.

So this is not a review; it can’t be. But for the record I’ll say that Wanted: Border is a beautiful film, not to be missed and should be seen by anyone who doesn’t accept that Carlo Caparas is a National Artist. It’s perhaps the best film I’ve ever had the privilege of working on so far (and I’m really not looking to work on any other, in this capacity at least). But I have to say that I think working on this film damaged my health (and possibly my collaborator Malek Lopez). Not that it’s entirely the film’s fault — I should confess that I am prone to depression and am still reeling from certain events that’s happened recently that I won’t care to repeat here. Just as a misanthrope or paranoid will channel just about anything going on into what’s on their minds, I think we put much of ourselves into the movie — more than was actually there, maybe. But to be honest, I don’t think so. This film had bad things and we just fed whatever darkness was already there.

What about the score? It’s ugly. And I think it serves the film well and we did a good job. (I think.) But I’m writing the director to ask that he try screening it without the score as well. It might be better. Whatever, when you see the film what we did will be heard probably and, admittedly, we wanted you to feel bad. Apart from the blasphemous deployment and evisceration of a particular Bach fugue (which we just used a MIDI file to play) I think we did much that was wrong — and that was the only way we could do it.

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Thanks to the people who made the film — such as the director, his line producer Chits Jimenez and cinematographer Ogi Sugatan — for giving me the opportunity to contribute to your wonderful project. May heaven forgive us all. (Alexis, intercede for me, especially.)

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Wanted: Border is premiering tonight at Gateway Cinemas, 9:20 p.m. as part of the CinemaOne Film Festival.