"Jacques Audiard's cinema is marked by a search for the uncluttered. A kind of asceticism which, logically, influences my work. Every musical intervention must be reasoned. If I need compose, it is to create something else, an auxiliary state. For Jacques is a secretive, reserved man: for him, to behold on screen some form emotion would be tantamount to rape. It is up to me to inject lyricism into his films, if possible with both elegance and restraint."

Alexandre Desplat

BIOGRAPHY

In 1994, the signature of a young thirty three-year-old composer, Alexandre Desplat, stands out in the credits of See How They Fall, Jacques Audiard's first feature film. Together, they will develop a singular and demanding relationship spanning four films and exploring the theme of initiation. As his experiments progress, Desplat's music ventures out into the lands of abstraction, seeks to reveal the inner life of the characters, and make us sense the light which inhabits Emmanuelle Devos in Read My Lips or Roman Duris in The Beat That My Heart Skipped. For its 4th Music MasterClass, the Festival de Cannes has invited a composer/filmmaker duo who, film after film, have created one of the most spellbinding worlds in all of European cinema.

FILMOGRAPHY WITH JACQUES AUDIARD

See How They Fall (1994)
A Self-Made Hero (1996)
Read My Lips (2002)
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)

Alexandre Desplat has equally scored:

Love etc. by Marion Vernoux (1996)
Death in Therapy by Francis Girod (1996)
The Luzhin Defence by Marleen Gorris (2000)
A Hell of a Day by Marion Vernoux (2002)
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Peter Webber (2003)
Birth by Jonathan Glazer (2004)
Syriana by Stephen Gaghan (2006)

MasterClass animated by Stéphane Lerouge