Scheduled for December 20th 2001, chosen by TF1 (one of France’s largest Television broadcasters) for the winter season film by Alain Corneau, "The Prince of the Pacific", featuring Thierry Lhermitte, using the music of Deep Forest.

As an appointed engineer of the group, I had the opportunity to live that magical episode... The page has just been turned, and I want to share with you all the fever and enthusiasm that we felt during this adventure... Like a little "making of", here comes the story of the making of a soundtrack.


The context
I met Eric Mouquet about one year ago during the recording of Catherine Lara's last album "Aral". [As matter of fact], I also met Michel Sanchez, his inseparable accomplice. Similar points of view, a capability between our musical tastes, and an obvious correspondence made us think about tackling new projects together. Consequently, Eric and Michel told me about the music of that film during the Spring of 2000. A small trip to Tahiti was organized in order to be dive in the film's ambience and sample some chants, drums and other local sounds. I was supposed to go on that expedition too. Unfortunately, due to some scheduling problems, I wasn’t able to make it. End of August 2000: the surprise!... For commercial reasons, the release of the film, initially scheduled for March 2001, was moved forward to December 2000. What had appeared as a quite comfortable time table turned out to be a dangerous exercise... We quickly remixed some themes by Michel and Mouquet. Super, very nice... but everything still remained to be done.


The images to the music
On September 1st, Alain Corneau invited us to the first preview of the film. We began with a overview of the whole film. We then took a deeper look, from one shot to the next, describing the musical needs, all this in one night. It was quite interesting to notice that, even at an intermediate step of pre-editing, without any transitions between shots, with the dreadful quality of a high-compressed image, it was still possible to feel the emotional power of a good film. All three of us will remain deeply moved by the scenarios and the characters. Alain attaches a lot of importance to the music (his knowledge on that topic is unquestionable) and shows a lot of respect towards musicians working with him. He had several good ideas, but almost never authoritarian.


Working with and against time
The next day, our three heroes established their plans in order to deliver the soundtrack on time, "5+1" mixed. The mixing of music, sound effects and dialog was scheduled for November 1st. We worked on the scoring until October 19th, the first day of the spatialization of our work in Dolby 5+1, at the Guillaume Tell studio.

Our personal experiences in the field of film music were quite different from what we were expected to produce this time. Even when Eric and Michel worked on the soundtrack for Catherine Bogelow's "Strange Days" and Robert Altman's "Prêt-à-porter", they had never been that close to the images. As far as for me, I had worked on traditional film music, spending years in collaborations with Michel Legrand, Michel Portalor and Claude Bolling.

So we had to find our own method, to equip ourselves, to compose, to record, mix, and improve according to Alain and Thierry's comments. No big deal! (joking)


The tools
We obviously wanted to keep the flexibility offered by the use of a Direct-to-Disk, since we were all too used to "Pro Tools 24 Mix Plus" that we employ through "Logic Audio" while recording, and with my "Samplitude PC station" while mixing...

It appeared unconceivable to use a traditional recorder. After some hesitation towards the advice of several experts, we decided to copy the sound and dialogs from the video tapes on our computers, and to transfer the film on small sequences encoded in Quicktime and Avi formats. Those formats, in spite of their poor quality, are very useful and synchronize very easily in Logic Audio on the Mac and Samplitude on the PC. They allowed us much freedom (it is quite surprising to move a Midi object in Logic and see the images automatically snapping to the related point!). Of course, we could always use our video tape to obtain better image quality and to help isochronize our machine. This helped us in evaluating the result Images+Dialogs and music on a longer timescale.


The method
Thanks to that extremely efficient system, we chose a chronological composition of the music. Even the last minute changes on the film didn’t bother us. The music was recorded through the Euphonix console in a Logic Audio/Pro Tools system, pre-mixed on the Mac and the Euphonix, multi-channel recorded (32 bits float) in Samplitude. That way, an average of 24 stereo channels were necessary for the mixing of each sequence of the film.  Rhythms, sequences, effects, drums, reverb were done on separate channels. Those channels could be converted at any time into multi channel tracks through the Sony Oxford at the Guillaume Tell Studio.

The rendering
A private screening and a meeting in Paris with Alain, Thierry and all the team had to be organized, in order to finalize the correspondence between the music and the film. We consequently scheduled a meeting on October 15th, in Eric's Studio in nothern France, for a group viewing.  Our fatigue and stress made that moment unforgettable. They were all present and we wondered whether they would like it or not?  We were awarded an unanimous "Yes, we’ll take it!". The music and its emotion were definitely present. After some minor changes, we returned our copy to Guillame Tell's on the morning of the 19th. My friend Didier Lizé, quite experienced in the field of film soundtracks, was recruited to supervise the 5+1 mixing. It took us 4 days to achieve it on the Sony Oxford which remains a model of flexibility. Multi channel mixing is really enjoyable! Obviously, we missed some options and it that was quite a shame, due to a potential compatibility issue with certain Dolby Stereo standards, we had to draw particular attention to phase width and ensure that putting sounds backwards did not transform them into mono sources... There’s no doubt that Dolby Digital will reach its maturity very soon and become the gold standard.  A closing film title made us return to Guillaume Tell Studio. On October the 23rd, our part of the job was finished, and guess what, Sony Columbia announced that the soundtrack had to be returned and mastered before November the 7th at 12 am!!!
…Mission accomplished, with the Logic projects, we re-recorded, edited, remixed and gave back our copies in time, with, as bonus, some extra versions of the theme.

For some emotion
I will never forget those months of hard work. A film is quite a thing with strong characters, atmospheres, colors and almost...smells!  Eric, Michel and I knew almost all of the dialog by heart and we often surprised the team, when we spontaneously gave the answer to the other actors! Until the end, we remained quite moved by the words of the talented François Berléant, an inspired Patrick Timsit, a funny Thierry Lhermite and a moving Marie Trintignant... The tenderness and talent of some of the other less famous actors were touching as well. Guess what? We enjoyed the film, we liked the people who made it, and oddly enough, the most difficult thing remaining is getting out of that universe...
What about our next soundtrack!

One half of Deep Forest: Eric Mouquet...

Eric, could you describe to us the process of gathering samples in Tahiti ?
Michel and I only spent 10 days there, but that trip was well prepared... During a previous trip to the Pacific,  I had already sampled some Haka chants and some polyphonies, while Alain Corneau, the film's director, had found and recorded a Tahitian choir. After listening to all that stuff, we agreed on a very traditional type of music, far from the "Ukulélé" classic. In Tahiti, we got in touch with Paparai, a music director that knows the traditional culture of the islands very well, in order to tell him what we were looking for. When we met again, he came with about 20 musicians and singers, men and women. We simply recorded them in their natural environment, on DAT, with some microphones.

Did the composition start just after you returned to France?
Because Alain likes to incorporate the musical ambiance before he starts to shoot, we had to immediately begin composing, helped by the scenery, drawing particular attention to a good association between the characters and the music, in scenes like the opening titles, to the overall  atmosphere...

We find a wider range of types of music (styles, colors...) than in any of the other albums from Deep Forest...
That album is quite a special one since it’s a film soundtrack. Music has to serve the motion picture; dialogs and sounds are also present. Therefore, the connection between the music and what is happening on the screen is quite strong. And because a lot is going on in that kind of adventure film, from suspense to comedy, you notice a variety of moods in the music.

For the "Prince of the Pacific", what tools did you use with Michel?
For the music we always use Logic Audio Platinum which manages the audio of the Pro Tools 24 Mix Plus. That configuration is very stable and powerful, since it allies the sound quality of Pro Tools 24 bits with a user-friendly editing interface in Logic, without mentioning the TDM plug-ins - we have the whole collection! We encoded the film in AVI format and simply synchronized it with the music by adjusting the timecodes.


thanks to C-Real for providing us a copy of this interview, and to Pierre Jacquot for sending us a scan of the Cover.