Best known for her Independent Spirit Award winning documentary about Amish teens, Devil's Playground (2002), Lucy Walker has more recently been scrambling up the sides of a mountain to make films. Blindsight is a doc in which she follows six blind Tibetan teenagers as they climb the 23,000-foot Lhakpa Ri peak on the north side of Mount Everest. Walker recently took a few minutes to chat with us about the music she used in Blindsight, including the "outrageously charming" moment (above) that she captured for the film's credits sequence.
Boombox Serenade: First off, can you describe your overall approach to the soundtrack for Blindsight and the role that music has in the film?
Lucy Walker: I love music, grew up obsessed with it, buying vinyl and passing around mix tapes and CDs, became a DJ when I lived in NYC, and performed everywhere from SoundLab to the Limelight, and always want my films to have the best possible music. Obviously music and film are wonderful collaborators. Music can make or break your film.
Boombox Serenade: How did you choose the composer Nitin Sawhney to compose the music for the film and what was it like working with them?
Lucy Walker: I have always loved Nitin's work. We both grew up in London, and I used to watch him live in the 90's whenever he played in NYC. We have lots of mutual friends from the music scene, and I fought hard to have him be the composer. Actually I listened to him non-stop when I was driving around Amish country making Devil's Playground. I remember driving from Indiana to Florida listening to Prophecy and Beyond Skin the whole way... I'm a huge fan and I knew he'd be perfect for this movie. It's sometimes tough when you fall in love with your temp tracks, as you invariably do, even when your temp tracks are by the exact same composer, but I am very grateful for his beautiful contribution to the movie.
Boombox Serenade: Can you just run down some of the other music/artists you used in Blindsight?
Lucy Walker: I listened to as many Tibetan artists and tracks as I could, as well as all the Silk Road
ensemble work, and picked our favourites for each scene, very organic. I always like to license tracks in addition to having a composer. Maybe it's the DJ in me but I sometimes prefer cutting existing music to picture than starting over. My friend Richard Blair-Oliphant contributed one track to the movie, which plays all throughout the climactic Ice Palace scene, and that's probably my favourite track in the movie. He wanted to be considered to compose the movie and wanted to demonstrate he could work with traditional Tibetan instrumentation, which was my idea for the music for the movie, and so I showed him a couple of scenes and he went off and came up with one demo track, and that track blew my mind it was so lyrical and beautiful. In the end we wound up going with a more famous and more Asian-rooted composer in Nitin, but I put Richard's demo track right in the movie, it's the perfect frosting on the cake of our soundtrack, if you forgive the awful metaphor (i've just gotten off a long plane ride...!)
Boombox Serenade: During the trek, one of the teenagers starts singing "Happy Together" by the 1960's American band, The Turtles. Can you describe that moment and why you chose to include it in the film?
Lucy Walker: All Tibetans love music and love singing. It's fantastic to behold, everywhere you go in Tibet you can see people singing in all sorts of circumstances, but mostly the Tibetan traditional ballads, occasionally the couple of new young Tibetan rock bands. And of course learning and singing songs is a terrific language tool, and also a particularly enjoyable activity for blind people, so at Braille Without Borders there is a lot of learning and singing Tibetan, English, Chinese, and German songs. "Happy Together" was one of many songs that the kids knew and sang on the mountain, and so is included in those scenes up Everest. And one student at the school named Kyumi was an especially talented and keen singer, and I heard him sing it one day at the school and instantly knew we had a credit sequence, as he is so outrageously charming, for me it was a no-brainer that he'd bring the house down if we finished the movie with him. I grabbed the camera and shot it myself on the spot, straight through three times with three different lens lengths, and voila, there it is in the movie.
Boombox Serenade: I have to say, when I saw that credits sequence, I immediately wanted to own a copy of the film, so that I could keep it around and play that scene whenever I'm feeling depressed.
Lucy Walker: It's on MySpace! Pass it around! And we donate a penny to Braille Without Borders every time it gets played, so there's another reason to keep on listening!
Boombox Serenade: How easy or difficult was it to clear that moment with the publisher and the label?
Lucy Walker: The manager was very helpful and I am very grateful for that. It helps when you have a group of such inspiring people doing such incredible work as we have in this film - people are so moved that they want to contribute.
Boombox Serenade: Finally, have Sabriye (the school founder) and her students experienced the film yet and if so, were there any observations by them about the music in it?
Lucy Walker: They absolutely love it, which makes me very happy. Kyumi is now a music scholar and I have high hopes for his music career as well.
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