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Peter Golub and Leo Heiblum hold the master class "Music for Cinema" at the 16th FICM

Marco Mejía @MiqkelMejia

As part of the activities of the Morelia / Sundance Story Lab, during the sixteenth edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM, the master class “Music for cinema” was held by the score composer Peter Golub and the composer and producer Leo Heiblum, in the Aula Mater of the Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo.

Peter Golub greeted the audience, mostly musical composition students, and expressed gratitude to Bertha Navarro, screenwriter, producer and coordinator of the Writing Laboratory in collaboration with the Sundance Institute. "She is our colleague and had already worked on this directing and screenwriting program for years when she told us that she wanted to establish a composers lab. Since then, we've been operating with this artists' meeting."

To formally kickstart the conversation, the composer emphasized the importance of valuing music in the cinema more and minding the relationship between directors and composers to achieve good results in the seventh art: "It is not only about writing music, the composer's work has to do with other things, such as the narrative and the characters, having a direct collaboration with the director and reaching an agreement. There is a moment in which the composer must integrate into the story and have a very strong knowledge of it all. That's why it's important for the director and the composer to be on the same page ".

Based on this point of view, Leo Heiblum assures that the trust between filmmaker and composer is the basis of the success of any film project: "There are times when the director seeks for the viewer to enter the minds of the characters through music, and that will be part of your success, you have to have confidence in what you are doing because as a composer you have the freedom to do what the director wants ".

Leo, who studied recording engineering in Florida and worked in Philip Glass's studio, highlighted the importance of silences and the mix of everyday sounds, and used some scenes from various films as example like E.T. (1982, dir. Steven Spielberg), Punch-Drunk Love (2002, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson), True Grit (1969, dir. Henry Hathaway) and the documentary In the Pit (2006, dir. Juan Carlos Rulfo), in which he participated with his musical creativity. "In the Pit invited me to experiment because the story is about how a fast track is built in Mexico City, the challenge was to record the sounds of construction and with them create a score, we did not know how it would work but we realized that it would be something incredible from the beginning", he concluded.

Andrés Sánchez, musician and former member of the Mexican band Titan, was also present and participated in the master class for a few minutes.

We appreciate the invaluable support of Montblanc for the realization of the Morelia / Sundance Story Lab.