Composer thrilled with Oscar nod
Torontonian Owen Pallett collaborated with Arcade Fire’s Will Butler on Her music
The morning Owen Pallett woke up to find out he was an Academy Award nominee, he felt thousands of kilometres away from the rigorous glamour of Hollywood’s biggest night.
In one sense, it was literal — the Toronto native was in New Zealand on tour with Arcade Fire, whose Will Butler earned the nomination alongside Pallett for their work on the score to Spike Jonze’s Her. But also — after an evening of drinks with the band — Pallett didn’t feel spotlight-ready.
“I kind of woke up with a touch of a hangover,” he said with a laugh during a phone interview.
“So I wound up just lying in bed Facebook chatting everybody.”
Pallett says the honour feels “really good” — and, surprisingly for the eloquent composer, he struggles to go much further than that. It’s a “complicated feeling,” he says.
Perhaps that’s because he wasn’t supposed to work on the score initially. Pallett says Arcade Fire — the Montreal Grammy winners whose string arrangements Pallett has handled since their first record, Funeral — had been labouring over a score for about a year without his involvement.
Jonze’s film is a fable about a man in the near future who rebounds from a divorce by falling for an operating system oriented to meet his emotional needs. Arcade Fire, Pallett says, had been working on a highly electronic-leaning score to match the film’s smooth-edged esthetic, but it wasn’t satisfying the movie’s exacting director.
“It seemed that Spike was not feeling the sort of futuristic approach to the score and wanted something that was a little bit more emotional,” Pallett said.
That’s where he came in, “to close the deal, so to speak.”
His exclusion had been simply situational — he was in Toronto while the rest of the band was in Montreal. So when he came to Quebec to help the band craft its fourth album, Reflektor, he got involved in the music for Her as well.
He prepared string arrangements and helped add piano to deepen the music’s emotional impact, contributing only a couple months’ work after the score’s “yearlong gestation period.”
The Polaris Music Prize winner — who will release his fourth solo album, In Conflict, in May — now turns his attention to the Academy Awards, which he’ll attend Sunday.