Quotes from Alexandre Desplat

I've never been into monster movies, not my cup of tea.

It was quite frightening to be asked to write the music of a Western because there are so many things that you can refer to that can be cliche, and that could really poison your mind, from Morricone, to Bernstein, to Neil Young. So much music has been written for Westerns, that you wonder how you're going to find a new or different idea.

I've loved Japanese culture for a long, long time, from doing martial arts, to the block prints, to the music. It's a country that I love, and a culture that I love.

There are some moments in your life and in your career when you meet a movie and the director that suddenly just turns you to another dimension.

In my early teens, I started collecting soundtrack albums.

I always try to develop a good relationship with the director on any film and make sure that we want the same things and we're talking about the same ideas, and that gives me great protection.

I played the piccolo in the 'Ides of March' and 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox' score.

My education as a film composer, you can't not - if you like the orchestra like I do, if you are a symphonist like I am - you can't not listen to John Williams' work.

I'm a flutist so I know what they can deliver in terms of texture and sound and blurriness and softness. It's a very soft instrument.

Composing is to think. It is to have your mind trying to find what is the best sound that the movie is going for: the best melody, the best texture, the best structure and dramaturgic arc for the film. Then you discuss that with the director. He's the leader. He's the one showing you the path to follow to find the soul of the film.

The first thing is, you can't write movie music if you don't know how to write quickly.

When a theme is beautiful, it's a pleasure to rearrange it or to interweave it with your own music.

I remember my sisters, they loved a movie called 'The Naked Island.' And the flute was actually playing the main theme. A Japanese movie. A beautiful movie from 1961. I remember hearing this music with a flute many, many times a day at home.

Music for films allow a great deal of diversity and the more you widen your skills, the better you become.

I lived in the Caribbean when I was a teenager, so I learned about Salsa and Cha-Cha and all these Latin Afro-Cuban music like Gillespie and Duke Ellington, also bridged with Jazz. But my mother is Greek, and so I've also listened a lot to Greek music. And through the years to Balcanic music to Arabic music because my father loved music from Egypt.

My training in music has been very eclectic - as first a flute player from classical chamber music to jazz, Greek, Brazilian and African music to contemporary concert music.

Every director has his own syntax, his own grammar, his own words.

Francois Truffaut's 'The Soft Skin' starts with a very mundane scene of a family and a man driving to the airport. Yet the music is like a thriller, and you don't understand why. It's not until later that you learn it's because the movie is a thriller.

I guess the passion I have for cinema is as strong as the one that I have for music. And I've always tried to be a character in the film, not just a composer that throws his music to the film. That's the main element that connects me with directors.

Even when he transposes Roald Dahl's 'Fantastic Mr. Fox,' he injects so much of his own personality and his own world that it becomes a Wes Anderson story, and you forget that Roald Dahl is behind the story. That's the proof of great directors to be able to digest and recreate sometimes a classic.

I usually like to introduce the film and the music with the opening titles. It's a great help for a composer to bring the audience into the work that we're going into.

I have no favorite museum, but it could be the National Gallery in London; it could be the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Every city has a great museum.

The main difference I'd say is that European cinema has always used less music than American cinema for historical reasons.

I just work 18 hours a day, every day. And I don't go on holidays. And so, I guess I will die young.