What is the role of music in cinema and why it is such an important part of the storytelling process? How does music increase our capacity for empathy and wonder?
Fabrizio Mancinelli is an Italian-American composer, songwriter, and conductor, best known for his musical contributions to the world of cinema. As a songwriter, he has created original scores for The Land of Dreams,The Snow Queen 3, The Boat, and the upcoming animated drama Mushka, among others. In 2017, he led the orchestral recording for the Academy Award-winning Green Book, and he recently scored the documentary Food 2050, which premiered at the UN Climate Change Conference in 2022.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
The Land of Dreams, it mirrors your own experience in a way as an immigrant to the United States. Tell us a little about your story.
FABRIZIO MANCINELLI
I'm always trying to find my place here because, yes, I'm American. I'm an immigrant. I don't want to talk about the difficulties I face in my coming here, but it was not easy. So when I was writing the song called "Give Up", and it's like a song that I'm singing to myself. Those are things, like there is a lot of personal experience. I was a luxury immigrant on a Fulbright grant on a J-1 Sponsor Visa, you know, with a solid family I could go back to in Italy in case anything went wrong. But at the same time, it was not easy. I want to do my job with a smile on my face, and it brought me to write the lyrics like: "It's my turn. My time is now." It's like something that I'm trying, we all try to get our turn to be our moment, to shine our moment. We're all waiting. We don't know if it will happen, but we need to try at least. We need to grab our life with our hands and make it work one way or another. So that's what I mean in my song "Orlando Dreams."
I always have hope because I've been always on the other side of the world, you know, searching for inspiration, and I've always been like, you know what, I have to recognize there have been special people in my life that have given me their hands at the right moment. There have been also people that slammed the doors. I forgive, I don't forget. But there have been multiple people, way more that have given me their hands and a smile. Like even a compliment from a composer that I admire, you know, those things made a difference in life. A nice inspiration, like, yes, you can do it. It's difficult. I'm not going to say it's easy, but the right attitude can make it easier.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I found the song from Mushka “Grandma Needs Me” is so potent and evocative. Tell what kind of emotion that you were trying to convey?
MANCINELLI
So Mushka, I wrote it that day my grandmother died. And it's a montage of a grandmother passing. And I feel like if our goal is to transmit what we are feeling in that moment, we can do it sometimes in a more subtle way. I don't need to take the head of my audience and say - Look, cry, cry. No, I need to hold the hand of my audience and through the vibration of music...
Everything is a painting and I always talk about colors in music as opposed to colors in vision. And I feel like it's a fitting comparison. But then, of course, the thing is as human beings, we'll always have our influences. Even if we find our artistic voice, we are like a complete sum of everything we've studied, we've appreciated in art, and we've lived.
Everything is a painting there, and when something communicates those colors, I always talk about colors in music as opposed to colors in vision.
We need to talk about storytelling and colors with directors. We don't need to talk about musical instruments with a director who's not a musician because 90% of the time we're going to end up in a direction that's not the one the director really wants. If we talk about emotional storytelling, we're going to find common ground. So the decision comes from the image. The film is calling for something, then I discuss it with the directors.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Tell us about you inspiration from other sources, from nature or even composers of the past.
MANCINELLI
I really love to read books of art because I grew up in a Renaissance Medieval city. It's totally different to go for a walk and look at old buildings. You look inside the windows, and you see frescos and art. Then I have a lot of friends who are artists, and I enjoy seeing their art. That's my fuel. That is my inspiration. And, of course, every music that gets thrown at me is an inspiration in any other way because also there is one thing I admire most and that is what I cannot do. Something that's totally different from me, I get amazed and am in awe because there is always this will to learn. And I hope I will have that until my last day, that I will be able to be amazed until my last day.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's so beautiful that when you can have those true creative dialogues and those dialogues across cultures or across continents. They are like a call and response. I think that all of us listeners, whether we're musicians or artists or not, is try to filter out that the noise, and narrow our beam onto what is beautiful and true. So I wonder what you are like in your silences?
MANCINELLI
And here I have to recall a conversation I had with one of my mentors, Luis Bacalov, who won the Oscar for the movie Il Postino, one of the biggest film composers of the 20th century and a great music arranger. He told me that he always has music in his brain, and I always had music in my brain as well. It's always there in the background. I would be concerned if there was no music for one day or even for one minute. Silence is a different kind of sound for me in the difference when I write music. Silence, a rest, is as important as a note because it prepares us for something else. It's part of the music. There is a difference between relative silence, which I put in the music, and absolute silence, which I fear.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So when you're either conducting or composing and looking for this sense of beauty or wonder, how do you bring that to complicated issues and conflicts, so that beauty and reflection sit side by side?
MANCINELLI
Food 2050 is a documentary about global warming and the food crisis all over the world. Global warming is made worse by the heavy production and consumption of meat, which leaves a heavy carbon footprint on Earth. We need to do better. We can do better. And the documentary is based on how the crisis is coming to the whole world in different ways, and we can figure out how to solve it in different ways all over the world, but to create a better environment, there is going to be a moment in which money will not be enough because the resources will be gone.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Aaron Goldberg with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Aaron Goldberg.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
