Get yourself the Grizzly Man DVD if you want to see In the Edges. And you do.
Build-A-Bear:
Richard Thompson Scores Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Flick
Director Werner Herzog once said, “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.” For his documentary Grizzly Man, about Timothy Treadwell—a self-styled naturalist whose enthusiasm for getting inside the mind of the Alaskan brown bear was such that he ended up inside an Alaskan brown bear—Herzog demanded a soundtrack that drew on dark wildness.
Richard Thompson could have said no: “If you do a lot of soundtrack work you get used to having stuff chopped around, hacked up, ditched unceremoniously.” But given a chance to work with Herzog and two longtime friends—Erik Nelson, Grizzly Man's producer, and improvisational musician Henry Kaiser, who produced the film's music—Thompson signed on as the primary composer and performer.
The musicians didn't see the finished film before they began; they didn't work “to picture.” Instead, they followed the direction of Herzog and Kaiser, their knowledge of some of the film's scenes, and their own artistic impulses. “I didn't want to have a score written from millisecond to millisecond; I needed a basic mood and a climate,” says Herzog.
The creation spawned another creation: As the musicians worked at Berkeley, Calif.’s Fantasy Studios, Nelson shot a documentary of the process, called In the Edges. The title comes from Thompson: “If you rub the edges off music, you really take away the music itself. The music is in the edges; it's in the rough bits.”
“Werner was in the studio for the whole thing, which was, uh,” Thompson pauses for a long time, and then laughs: “Well, I won't say 'intimidating.' I think it was a kind of focus for everybody. Werner knew exactly what he wanted; he didn't necessarily know how to get there. That was our job: to figure out how to arrive at his vision.”
In the Edges shows Herzog directing his musicians to go bigger (to Thompson: “Plant your foot down. You are too melodious. Change the planet!”) or smaller (to Kaiser: “If you go too wild, I'll step and trample on your foot!”) It also contains music that didn't make it into Grizzly Man, including a duet between Thompson on guitar and Jim O'Rourke (Sonic Youth) on prepared piano.
A soundtrack album is planned, and In the Edges may be released as an extra feature when Grizzly Man comes out on DVD. Or maybe Herzog will again get his way: “It could really be a film on its own, in its own right,” he declares.
Harp, Sep/Oct 2005
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