Jóhann Jóhannsson has released well over 20 albums over the course of his career. Who knows how much material that could be released posthumously is still gathering dust at this point in time. Kristoffer Cornils and Thaddeus Herrmann regularly review the composer's work-chronologically, album by album. In the 14th episode they discuss "The Theory of Everything" from 2014, the soundtrack to the Stephen Hawking biopic by James Marsh.
A young physicist falls in love with a literature student and, along the way, comes up with one of the ground-breaking theories of the second half of the 20th century. But the body in which this mind is at work is working against him. He survives longer than his doctors had thought, but his marriage breaks up and his health increasingly deteriorates. The story of "The Theory of Everything" was written by life itself and after Jane Hawking wrote it down in her memoirs in 2007, director James Marsh took that as the basis for a film to be scored by Jóhann Jóhannsson. The composer received one of the five OSCAR nominations for it, even though - or perhaps because - it was written in a completely different musical language than his previous soundtracks.Kristoffer: SoHo House is the worst place in Berlin. There, social and financial capital fall into one, people with a coke habit indulge in their juice cleanse until the bar opens. I've been there a few times, checked out the record shop on the ground floor (forget it), had interviews (with whom, I won't say) and even had an accidental job interview (with the same person, even). On 11 November 2014, I was a bit more keen on going there than usual: I was invited to a screening of "The Theory of Everything". My path led me into the basement, along black walls - the nonsensical attempt to give the whole rubbish a simultaneously industrial/edgy and bourgeois/elegant facade, literally speaking. I briefly stopped in the toilet, where cosmic big ambient à la Emeralds was playing.
That alone was absurd enough, but I then proceeded to the cinema, a postmodern anachronism of lush velvet armchairs and lots of gold. Turns out, the film was pretty similar: overproduced and overbudgeted, looking as if it had been shot through an Instagram filter (2014, huh?) and, more importantly, based on the standard narrative of Hollywood kitsch: lots of lovey-dovey stuff, because no one can be expected to be interested in the story of a radical thinker unless a woman serves as the motivation. Ugh. The cinema wasn't exactly crowded, but Jóhann Jóhannsson was among the few guests. After the screening he was talking to a few people in Icelandic and I didn't barge in à la "Hi, you shook my hand last year, remember me?". That was the last time I saw him up close. What I could have said to him, though: "Sorry about that film but the score is fantastic."
In the past two years it has somehow become a meme between the two of us that for some reason we each assumed the other had a completely different opinion about this music. But that's not true: we both love it. Just for different reasons, as we discovered at dinner the other night. What are yours?ol