In contemporary arthouse cinema, the line between score and sound design is often very blurry, but rarely is it navigated with as much familial intuition as in the work of composer Giorgi Koberidze. Following his work on his brother Alexandre Koberidze’s acclaimed What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, Giorgi returns to score Dry Leaf, a deeply personal family endeavor directed by his brother and starring their father. The film is a visual experiment, shot entirely on a low-resolution, early-2000s Sony Ericsson mobile phone, resulting in a dark, painterly, and heavily blurred image. To counter this, Giorgi crafted a score that is sharp, digital, and startlingly clear to anchor the film’s hundreds of hours of raw footage.
I sat down with Giorgi to discuss the challenges of finding the emotional core of Dry Leaf, the influence of Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke, and the delicate art of making music sound Georgian without ever touching a traditional melody.
Hammer to Nail: You work across composition, electronic sound, and music programming. How did such a diverse background shape your entry into film music?
Giorgi Koberidze: I come from music technologies and electronic music initially. My interaction with classical music, acoustic instruments, and traditional composition started later, during my master’s. That’s when I started to compose, first of all for my brother. Coming from electronic music to classical really changes how you look at acoustic instruments. You have a big background in these electronic techniques, and then you try to adapt them to acoustic music. For someone coming to classical music later in life, you need to find benefits from your old backgrounds. It worked super unconsciously, but trying to connect my old knowledge to this new knowledge definitely shaped my approach.
HtN: Your first feature score was for What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? What was that initial experience like, writing music for your brother?
GK: Somehow, it went really smoothly right from the beginning. I know my brother, and I knew exactly what he wanted—not in terms of specific music, because we never actually talked about the music, but feeling-wise, rhythm-wise, and mood-wise. With directors I don’t know, it’s always hard to communicate what kind of movie it is and what music they need. With Alexandre, already from the first pieces I sketched, it worked.
HtN: Your scores with Alexandre don’t really follow a traditional leitmotif structure; they focus more on rhythm and texture. What is the underlying musical logic when you work together?
GK: It’s interesting, because in What Do We See, there actually is a leitmotif that follows the main character. It starts with easy sketches and ends with an orchestral variation. But there’s a funny story behind it: I never considered that melody to be the movie soundtrack. I was the sound recordist on set, and I was just whistling this random melody I had written a year prior on the street in Italy. Alexandre was sitting next to me and asked, “What is this melody?” I told him it was just stuck in my head, and he immediately said, “Wow, I think this has to be the soundtrack.”
A still from WHAT DO WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK AT THE SKY?
HtN: Dry Leaf is very much a family project, with your brother directing and your father starring. Does that level of trust make the collaboration easier, or more demanding?
GK: Demanding for sure, but at the same time, I have no stress about making mistakes. Sometimes, if you have ten sketches, you might only keep three to show a director because you’re a little ashamed to show the rough ideas. Here, you are so open that you can show very first ideas and sparkles of thoughts, so communication goes smoothly. For Alexandre, working with our father was beneficial because you can spend as much time with them as you need without worrying if the actor is super tired. I was recording sound on set for Dry Leaf, going to the villages for months over a few years, doing what we had to do without the pressure of a big set and a ticking clock.
HTN: You worked on both the sound and the music. Did being on set recording audio help you write the score?
gk: 100%. The shoots were so long—altogether maybe eight months—and I was simultaneously composing my album. The album wasn’t planned to be part of the movie, but Alexandre used it as temp music while editing, and we couldn’t get rid of it because it worked so well. I’d say 70 to 80% of the music is written specially for Dry Leaf, and the rest is from that album. It really blends together.
HTN: How do you and Alexandre decide when a scene needs score versus when it should rely entirely on the ambient sound?
GK: Alexandre always has very specific ideas of where he wants music and sound. Because the movie was shot on a mobile phone, he had hundreds of hours of material—it’s very easy to just press record. He really needed music from the beginning just to have something on the table to start editing, so he wouldn’t get lost. That’s why there is a lot of music in this movie. Without it, I think the movie would fall apart. The music is really keeping all those materials together.
HtN: We have to talk about the unique visual style of this film. The film was shot on a low-resolution Sony Ericsson phone. How did that impact the texture of the music?
GK: The image really affected the sound. The movie looks very blurry, like an old painting; it’s from a four-megapixel early-2000s camera. When I saw the first one-minute cuts, I tried to compose music that sounded the way it looked: a little blurry, using low-register instruments. I was happy with it, but when we watched the first five-hour edit of the movie, we realized that a blurry image paired with blurry music was too much. It was probably unwatchable. So we decided—and I think it was Alexandre’s idea—to go the opposite way. We kept the blurry image but made the music very sharp, digital, high-pitched, and electronic. I had written the score to be recorded with acoustic instruments, but we decided to keep the clean, sharp computer sounds because the contrast worked much better.
HtN: There’s a short, repeating piece of music in the film that feels a bit like the classic Dies irae motif from the Gregorian chant before morphing into something else.
GK: That’s one of the tracks from my album, Forests, Tales, Cities, Forests, that wasn’t initially meant for the film. Alexandre used it as a temp cue for editing, assuming I would write something similar later. But it worked so perfectly with the image that we fell in love with it. I just called the label boss who published it and asked, “Can I use this in our movie?” and he was happy to clear it. Usually, directors use temp music from random composers and ask you to copy it. We were lucky because the temp music was already mine.
HtN: Does that specific piece have a special thematic meaning for the film?
For me, it nicely reflects the inner world of the main character, Irakli, and what he’s going through while searching for his daughter. It’s his world seen through his eyes. Even though he is dealing with this problem of finding his daughter, he still sees the world in a beautiful, romantic way. We never actually discussed the specific meaning with Alexandre, but that’s how I look at it.
HtNL The film showcases the beauty of the Georgian countryside, and the score also feels influenced by traditional Georgian folk music. How did you incorporate that?
A still from DRY LEAF
I sometimes use a traditional Georgian string instrument called the “chonguri,” but instead of recording the instrument live, I sampled separate notes to create a sampler instrument and played it that way. Mostly, the score has a Georgian feeling without using old traditional melodies or harmonies.
My favorite Georgian film composer, Giya Kancheli, scored most of the great Georgian movies from the ’70s and ’80s. His music sounds incredibly Georgian, but in one of his last interviews before he passed away, he said he never used a single Georgian melody, harmony, or instrument. He achieved that sound without directly touching traditional materials. Those materials have had their own life for centuries, and it’s a dangerous area to edit them. I try to avoid directly touching them and instead aim for the feeling.
HtN: How did the father-daughter relationship in the film inform your composing?
GK: The emotional core actually came before the shoot. Alexandre needed music to start working, so he gave me the book Platero and I by the Spanish author Juan Ramón Jiménez. It’s about an old man walking with a donkey, and it has these road-movie vibes. That feeling of traveling and being alone was the main cue for me to start working, rather than directly thinking about the family relations.
HtN: What other musical influences did you draw from for this project?
GK: The Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke was a big influence, especially his symphonies. The idea of using the clavichord—which plays the main theme—comes from Schnittke. I was listening to one of his symphonies and thought, “I really want to use this.” I asked our university if they had an 18th-century clavichord. They did, but it was so old that it was lacking some notes. I had to write the music in a way that avoided using those broken keys!
HtN: You mentioned that an album of yours ended up providing some of the temp track that made it into the final film. Can you talk a little more about the album?
GK: It’s an amazing story. One of my favorite composers is Nicolás Jaar. In 2018, I just randomly sent him some of my music via SoundCloud. Just a message saying, “Hey, I really like your work, I wanted to share mine.” He answered me two years later. He said he liked it, wanted to get on a Zoom call, and told me he wanted to fully finance an album for me through his label. He said, “You can do anything you want, take as much time as you need.”
It gave me the possibility to record an orchestra, hire musicians, buy equipment, and use a studio. It took three years to finish: one year to compose, one to record, and one to edit. First of all, the music was meant to be played in cinemas, but without an image. You sit in total darkness for an hour and a half and just listen. The vinyl release actually has a small note advising listeners to keep the room dark and recreate a cinema environment. Cinema halls have the best sound systems and the best chairs—so why not use them for listening sessions?
– Frank Yan (@frankyan2)
