The Long Night

A two-hour feature, thirty-one cues, and a string quartet tuned to a radiator.

The first assembly ran two hours forty with no music in it. The director's note at the first spotting session was “nothing that comforts”, and the practical version of that was a rule: no cue may resolve. Thirty of the thirty-one cues end unresolved, on an open interval or on a phrase the edit cuts off. Only the last cue lands on a tonic chord. It holds for eleven seconds before the cut to black.

The pitch material comes from the location. On the scout, D.O. recorded a radiator pipe in the house knocking as it heated. Pitched down two octaves, the knock gives a note about a quarter-tone flat of B. We used that recording as the tuning reference for the whole quartet, which is why the score sounds slightly wrong against everything else in the film. It is. The players tuned to the pipe instead of to A440, and the second reel keeps a take where you can hear them drift back toward normal tuning and correct.

“Nothing that comforts.” Director's note, first spotting session

The main title was the only cue written before the shoot. It exists as a four-minute piece, and the editor cut the ink footage to it. That is why the plate above breathes on the beat instead of the music chasing the picture.

Recorded in Studio 1 and in the stairwell of the location, which had a six-second decay we wanted for the corridor cues.