Sometimes less really is more. Such is the case with Darren Morze‘s sublime scoring work in Mass. The film follows two sets of parents who meet for the first time, years after an unimaginable tragedy entwined their lives. The action takes place almost entirely in one room with tension so palpable the audience can feel every flinch and devastating revelation as if they were watching confrontation unfold live.
Morze was worried that having an omnipresent score would distract from the performances, and worked closely with writer and director Fran Kranz, to create an ambient score that uses subtle sound work to enhance the raw nature of the film.
Here, Morze explains how he blended sound design and composition to create his score for Mass, and the power of silence on screen.
Awards Daily: Talk me through some of your initial conversations with director Fran Kranz and how that evolved into the score and what we ultimately hear in the film.
Darren Morze: Ironically, I was on tour, like I am right now, with a band called Dr. Dog. Fran and I had worked on projects together before, but never in a director-composer capacity. I’d scored films that he had acted in. I happened to be in L.A., and he was like, ‘I’m working on this film. I was wondering what you think of it.”
I watched it and said, “What do you need from me? It’s done; it doesn’t need any music. And Fran agreed, but producers and test audiences thought it’d be great if it had some music to move scenes along. I sat down with Fran and said, “I think you’re going to basically hire me to prove to you that this needs as little score as possible.” And that’s how we decided on the direction.
There was an Ingmar Bergman film that Fran was inspired by where the score was sort of like single piano notes. He was into doing little sound design-y things here and there. We tried all kinds of different things. I would sample children’s hand-bells, toy pianos, or wind chimes. There are instances where we sampled playground equipment and veered more and more toward sound design or score ideas that are kind of creeping into your subconscious, rather than overt music.
Gradually, I started stripping it away because the more we put it in, the more we realized that the movie is best when it’s just the acting—when you feel like you’re in the room with the actors.
AD: How did you decide where to place those sounds? Were there specific moments that you wanted to emphasize? Or scenes you didn’t want to disrupt?
Morze: One situation where I felt like something needed to be added, which made it into the final cut, was the scene where the lawyer and the church manager are prepping the room for the two families to arrive and kind of making it as inoffensive as possible.
And there’s this moment where they look at the little stained-glass things in the window that the children have made. That’s where we use the little sampled hand-bells, I believe. It’s just these little tickling notes in the background. That’s probably the only instance, besides the end credits, where I knew I had to add something. And Fran agreed.
There were other parts where I tried to do things, and we lived with it for a while, and we liked it. But, in the end, ultimately, we just decided not to add anything. Like when, Jason Isaacs, who plays Jay, freaks out and says that no one understands, no one remembers what really happened. And he has a meltdown. I spent months working on that, trying all kinds of different drones and trying things that sort of creep behind your ears and make the room feel denser, and like the air is getting sucked out, eventually, his performance and the way it was edited was just so strong that in order to really make it raw and feel like you’re there at the table with them, we just decided to put nothing.
AD: That’s interesting, are there other moments in Mass where you ended up changing your mind about how the score should operate?
Morze: Yeah, I tried a lot for the moment when Jay and Gail [Martha Plimpton] are sitting in the car, and she’s like, oh, I don’t know if I can do this, take a drive around the block. And they end up driving through these windy fields. You know, I tried a lot of different wind sounds. Not sound effects, things that mimic the sound of wind— like long, drawn-out, cello notes. I’d sustain a note, as long as I could, and then I would take it, stretch it, and try to make it into a mangled version of itself, without drawing too much attention to it.
For me, when you hear music in a movie, it makes your brain realize you’re watching a movie. But if we stick to sounds that occur in nature, then hopefully, it makes you forget that you’re watching a bunch of actors portraying a story.
But, instead, you’re just in the room with them, feeling the uncomfortableness, hearing the air conditioner, hearing someone’s foot scrape across the ground, I tried really hard to preserve as much of that as possible. I didn’t want to get in the way of the movie because it just didn’t need help.
Another thing was the ending. To me, the sound of the choir rehearsing, there’s nothing more beautiful than an open choir, but also sad, and uplifting all at the same time as just hearing that choir down the hall, you know?
There were all kinds of discussions and I tried all kinds of passes and ideas for the ending. At the beginning of the movie, you hear the piano lesson, and then at the end, you hear the choir.
There’s something great about the only recognizable music in a film being the music that’s actually occurring in the action, instead of just score coming in and taking you out of the movie.
One of my favorite moments, and one that we spent a while working on, is this moment right before Martha Plimpton walks into the church for the first time. She stops right at the doorway of the church, takes a look around, and it has this crucifix, she just sort of feels some kind of energy. It’s a really, really nice moment. We tried a lot of things like putting these moaning tones in the background. But again, it just works so much better silent. The cool thing about a movie like this is when you leave so much silence in it. I feel like the viewers start to hear their own things in there, which aren’t really there. That was one of my big personal directives in the film.
So, the idea was that if we put these little sounds here and there, these sounds that you barely notice, the idea is throughout the movie, you might think that there’s more there than there is, — it’s actually your brain that’s creating it. It’s a trick that I like to play on people with various other projects that I do.
I feel like, for Mass, it worked out really well.
AD: You mentioned that Fran Kranz sent you a cut of Mass to watch while on tour. What was your first impression of the film?
Morze: Mass was like a one-in-a-hundred situation. What I saw initially was not the final cut. When they gave it to me, they still had some things to edit and change. But as far as I was concerned, when I saw it on my tour bus before that meeting with Fran, I thought, “This can go in the theaters now.” I was bawling. I was a mess. But there was a cathartic feeling that came over me too.
Mass was an interesting project to work on because normally, when people come to me to work on something, they’re like, “Please, please help us, either enhance it or save it.”
But here, my initial thinking was almost like a little bit of panic. Like, “God, don’t ruin this. It’s perfect.” And luckily, we only just made it better. I’m really proud of what I was able to do.
AD: And what are you working on now?
Morze: I have two things that I’m super excited about. One is a Neo-Western starring Ali Larter, Ron Perlman, and Ralph Ineson called, The Last Victim. My work on that is like the 180-degree polar opposite of my involvement with Mass. My score is like a character in the film. A deconstructed, broken, and put back together, sort of a perversion of a classic Morricone spaghetti western score.
I also recently released my first ambient solo record, Never Ever, which is a 60-minute journey of sounds for you to listen to while you go for a walk, do your taxes, or go about daily life.
Mass is available to watch through Video-On-Demand.
