Harry Potter 7

Last year was the year was the year of Harry Potter 7, parts one and two for me where I spent about six months in London with Alexander Desplat, orchestrating his score to the last two Harry Potter films. It was nice for me because I worked on the first three, so it was like a whole decade later, and here it was, all coming to an end. So we got back from San Francisco and I get this call, and it says "call Harvey Weinstein's office" and they had a number and I called that and I said "this is a joke isn't it?" Because I'm used to talking to directors, but not people who run movie companies. Well, it turns out it wasn't a joke, and it was Harvey Weinstein calling me up to see if I could meet him at two o'clock that afternoon at the Peninsula Hotel. It turned out he had a movie called My Week With Marilyn, about Marlin Monroe, and he'd had Alexander Desplat write a theme for Marilyn and Alexander had said "Well I'll write you the theme, but Harvey, you must use Conrad Pope to write the score." And that's what began a series of events that led us to my many weeks with Marilyn, and then ultimately our two weeks in London recording the score and that's where we just got back from.

We recorded the score to My Week With Marilyn. It's a BBC production, so it's actually a British production, starring Michelle Williams, who's American of course, as Marilyn Monroe, and Kenneth Branagh as Sir Lawrence Olivier. The film takes place in 1956 when Marlin Monroe went to England to film the great classic, which no one has now seen except maybe on youtube, called The Prince and the Showgirl with Lawrence Olivier. It was a film that Lawrence Olivier hoped, with the presence of Marilyn Monroe, would rejuvenate his career as a film actor. Sadly, it did not. By the end of the experience it actually drove him back to the stage, and into Sir John Osbourne's play The Comedian, which became the next step in his career, bringing him greater accolades as a stage actor.