Yorgos Lanthimos has developed a reputation in the film world for his unique style of filmmaking, recognisable aesthetic and use of the absurd. But did you know he had never worked with a composer on a score for any of his films… until now? Here’s everything you need to know about the music behind his 2023 film Poor Things and the unexpected new composer behind the Poor Things soundtrack.
Who composed the Poor Things soundtrack?
The Poor Things soundtrack is composed by Jerskin Fendrix, a first-time film composer. It is Fendrix’s first collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos, the film’s director, and is incidentally the first time Lanthimos has worked with a composer in any of his films. ‘Both of us were quite apprehensive and coy about the whole thing, but it’s nice that we both came onto this as virgins, I suppose,’ Fendrix told The Upcoming in a recent interview.
When Fendrix was brought onto the project, the set designs and vision for the film had been drawn out. He had written most of the score before filming had even begun, thanks to Lanthimos’s detailed vision. Although the film is loosely based on a novel by Alasdair Gray, Fendrix was instructed to not read the novel before scoring the film.
‘We didn’t have any references at all outside of the film, which was actually a very odd but very helpful way of going about it,’ Fendrix explains. ‘We didn’t talk about any other music or composers or films, but I had everything I needed. The script was extraordinary – I was extremely moved by the characters and the way in which they expressed their emotions. That was a great foudnation for where the themes and the melodies needed to come from.’
‘When Bella falls in love, I wanted the music to fall in love with her,’ Fendrix says about his process.
Fendrix wanted to put humour at the core of his writing, something he shares with director Lanthimos. ‘Humour is a really important part of human experience, and every serious thing that happens to someone is peppered with stupidity and ridiculousness.’
How did he create the score for Poor Things and what inspired it?
Fendrix wanted to play with human life and the weirdness of the nature of mortality, so he used a lot of live recordings in the score and put strange synthesized effects on them to create a new digital soundworld.
They recorded each instrument’s line individually, which was a labour-intensive process but allowed Fendrix to have complete control over every single sound being used. Wind instruments were used in the Poor Things score, but not used in a ‘conventional’ way. ‘Wind is great because it uses breath, either coming out of you – like a flute – or made mechanically – like a pipe organ or accordion. You make the machine breathe on your behalf.’ Processes were adding to mechanical wind so they could bend in the same ways that other wind instruments like flutes or saxophones do.
Who is Jerskin Fendrix?
Jerskin Fendrix received an Oscar nomination for Poor Things, his very first film score, as the youngest nominee for the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2024 at just 29 years old.
He has previously written pop music and an opera, but Poor Things was an entirely new experience. ‘I had no idea what I was doing for any of the process whatsoever,’ he says. ‘It was completely terrifying.’
What music has appeared in other Yorgos Lanthimos films?
While Poor Things is the first feature film Yorgos Lanthimos has created in collaboration with a composer, it’s certainly not the first time he has used music as a significant characteristic in his films. In fact, classical music often plays a crucial role in his storytelling.
The Lobster uses string chamber works by Beethoven, Schnittke, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Britten, while The Favourite features Baroque works by the likes of Purcell, Vivaldi, Handel and Bach, Romantic works by Schubert and Robert Schumann, and 20th-century and contemporary works by Messiaen, Ferrari and Anna Meredith.