Alexandre Desplat

My parents had a lot of movie soundtracks that they brought back from the States. So very early on I heard film music at home.

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I can't watch a movie where the actors are great and the photography sucks.

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I knew how incredibly rich 'Valerian' was visually and the adventures the heroes go through. They are one of a kind. They have nothing that you can compare with DC or Marvel. They're not superheroes they're just heroes but they're also human beings. And there was also something there that I always liked. In these novels, there was a lot of humor.

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In a time when directors did not fear composers with a strong voice, Morricone wrote scores like operas or symphonies, with passion, scope, bravura and intelligence.

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Every director has his own syntax, his own grammar, his own words.

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I'm there to tailor something very precisely and something very subtly to dialogue and the actor's energy. I'm there to bring out something that isn't spoken. 'King's Speech' is the perfect film to do it.

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In my early teens, I started collecting soundtrack albums.

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Composing is to think. It is to have your mind trying to find what is the best sound that the movie is going for: the best melody, the best texture, the best structure and dramaturgic arc for the film. Then you discuss that with the director. He's the leader. He's the one showing you the path to follow to find the soul of the film.

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I'm a flutist so I know what they can deliver in terms of texture and sound and blurriness and softness. It's a very soft instrument.

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Francois Truffaut's 'The Soft Skin' starts with a very mundane scene of a family and a man driving to the airport. Yet the music is like a thriller, and you don't understand why. It's not until later that you learn it's because the movie is a thriller.

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I have no favorite museum, but it could be the National Gallery in London; it could be the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Every city has a great museum.

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I started piano like my sisters. After one year or two, I didn't like it anymore. Then, because I like trumpet, I played the cornet. When you are 7, you can't play trumpet - you play cornet. And something didn't go well. The teacher was too hard. Too rough. Suddenly, there was this instrument, the flute, that I could immediately play.

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It's not easy to write an understated score over a loud one.

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I've been very lucky early on to be surrounded when I was a child by music from various countries. My parents would listen to a lot of music coming from other universes.

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Some films that I love, I love them also because of the music. 'Vertigo,' for example, is a movie where the music is doing 70 percent of the job.

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We will always hear the vibrations of Ennio's music and feel it in our hearts.

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If I wanted an open space, I could do a documentary about fishes. Then I would have an open space to play my music. That's not how I visualize the work I'm doing.

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Berlin was the first, the very first to give me an award. I am eternally grateful to them. It sits on my desk - the Silver Bear. All the others are stored away. It's the only one I look at. It watches me while I work.

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I wanted to be a film composer because I heard scores that could stand alone, from 'Vertigo' to 'Star Wars' to 'La Dolce Vita,' because this music has so much history. They're weighed with the history of music. They come from somewhere, they have a past.

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It was quite frightening to be asked to write the music of a Western because there are so many things that you can refer to that can be cliche, and that could really poison your mind, from Morricone, to Bernstein, to Neil Young. So much music has been written for Westerns, that you wonder how you're going to find a new or different idea.

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Quotes by Alexandre Desplat