The news landed yesterday without making a sound: Alberto Iglesias is scoring Succederà questa notte, the new Nanni Moretti. The film screens on Sunday 6 September at the Venice Film Festival. An Italy, France and Spain coproduction, 103 minutes, with Louis Garrel, Jasmine Trinca and Hippolyte Girardot, adapted from a collection of short stories by Eshkol Nevo. Moretti acts in it, as usual.
One line in the trade press. And for anyone who does this job, a small tremor.
Two names in fifty years
Here is what the announcement does not say.
Franco Piersanti scored Moretti’s first film, Io sono un autarchico, in 1976. He came back for Ecce bombo, Sogni d’oro, Bianca, then, after a long absence, for Il caimano, Habemus Papam, Tre piani, and again in 2023 for A Brighter Tomorrow.
The other name is Nicola Piovani. La messa è finita, Palombella rossa, Caro diario, The Son’s Room. There is even a record simply called Musiche per i film di Nanni Moretti.
Two composers. Fifty years. Plus a few films where Moretti did without an original score, because he has always preferred dropping an existing record onto a scene when it suited him, and half his filmography stands on songs.
So this is not an exclusive pairing in the Spielberg and Williams mould. It is something else, and I find it more interesting: a circle. Tiny, stable, reopened from time to time, and never widened.
Until Sunday.
A third man, and not just anyone
Iglesias is not a stranger passed in a festival corridor. He has been Pedro Almodóvar’s composer since The Flower of My Secret, in 1995. Thirty years of another long relationship, just as recognisable by ear. He has just delivered Bitter Christmas, released in Spain in the spring.
So the announcement says this: a director whose musical circle had not moved in half a century is letting someone into it. And that someone arrives with his own long history, with another filmmaker, in another country.
This is not a change of supplier. It is a closed circle opening.
Why it happens
I have no information about what took place, and nobody outside does. There is probably no drama at all. In this job, these shifts usually come down to things of disappointing banality.
A coproduction with Spain, where a partner has a say on key roles, and Iglesias is the obvious Spanish signature. A diary that does not line up. A film whose subject, here missed encounters between two people across several years, calls for a colour you cannot produce with the people you know too well.
One explanation should at least be ruled out. The classic break pattern is the director who comes up through independent film, reaches the big budget, and gives in to pressure from financiers to hire a more expensive, more reassuring name. That is plainly not the case here: Moretti has always produced his films through his own company, and Iglesias is not a studio choice, he is an author’s choice.
That leaves the hypothesis that interests me most, without my being able to claim it is the right one. Because it says something true about the job: when a director changes composer after a long loyalty, he is not looking for someone better. He is looking for someone who does not know him.
After eight films with the same person, you know what they will propose before they propose it. That is a comfort, until the day it is the problem.
The contradiction, all the same
I distrust my own formula, because it is neat, and neat formulas are often wrong.
The serious objection is this: people who make films are terrified of risk. A director generally tries to protect his working comfort, not sabotage it. Taking someone new means bringing back the uncertainty of the first time, when you do not yet know how to talk to each other.
There is even a distinctly less romantic reading of permanent renewal. A studio music executive tells of meeting a well known filmmaker who refused on principle to work twice with the same composer. Digging further, he understood it was not a search for freshness: the man was incapable of expressing what he wanted musically, and changing partners spared him from facing that. Fleeing rather than going deeper.
What saves my idea is a more precise version of it. A long relationship holds as long as the composer remains able to contradict the director. The day he no longer dares to push back, the day he delivers exactly what was asked and nothing more, he has become the hired technician. And a hired technician gets replaced without a second thought, even after twenty years.
Loyalty does not wear out through boredom. It wears out through politeness.
The precedent, to measure what it costs
When these relationships really break, it is not always discreet.
On 24 March 1966, Bernard Herrmann arrived in London to record the score for Torn Curtain. Hitchcock, pushed by Universal, had asked him for something light, poppy, a theme you could sell as a single. Herrmann had written for twelve flutes, sixteen horns and two sets of timpani. Hitchcock sent the orchestra home mid session and ended twelve years of collaboration in an hour. The film was scored by John Addison.
Set against that, one line in the trade press on a Friday is a separation of rare elegance.
What is worth keeping if you do this job
Two opposite things, and you have to hold both.
Long loyalty is one of the few genuinely enviable career models. Piersanti did not spend fifty years pitching Moretti. He did the first film, and became someone you call back. That is where a career is decided: not in landing the first film, but in becoming the person a director wants to work with again. Not a fortune, not statuettes. Someone who calls you back.
And it protects you from nothing. Fifty years of shared history do not guarantee the next film. A composer whose economic security rests on a single relationship, however deep, is one phone call from square one. That does not mean cultivating disloyalty. It means never having only one director.
And between the two, the only thing you actually control: keep saying no. A long relationship does not die of wear, it dies the day the composer becomes too polite to propose anything other than what was asked.
That is what makes the news slightly vertiginous read from inside a studio. It is not “Iglesias landed a good film”. It is “even a fifty year circle can open without warning, and you find out from one line in the trade press on a Friday”.
What to watch
The film screens on Sunday. The first reviews will say whether Iglesias bends to Moretti’s Italian-ness or brings his own language, the one we know from Almodóvar: taut strings, short motifs, a melancholy that refuses to settle comfortably.
The real question will only be settled in two or three years. Has a third name just entered the circle, or did we simply walk past a door that stayed open for the length of one film?