Something to watch tonight: Friday 30 August

Max Richter’s Sleep (Johns, 2019)

We are big fans of com­poser Max Richter in this house. In fact, the editor-in-chief can spot a Richter soundtrack at 100 paces and there are plenty of them.

Sometimes it’s just the one track (“On the Nature of Daylight”) used in mul­tiple films. We have heard it in Shutter Island, The Last of Us, The Handmaid’s Tale and – most fam­ously – in Arrival where its pres­ence as the open­ing and clos­ing theme meant that Jóhann Jóhannsson missed out on an Academy Award nom­in­a­tion for best ori­gin­al score for the rest of the film.

He also scored The Leftovers – the greatest TV series of the last ten years.

His piece “Sleep” is the most streamed piece of clas­sic­al music of all time, per­haps because it is eight and half hours long and designed to be listened to overnight and is designed to be listened to while you are asleep.

Richter also per­forms “Sleep” live and in 2019 par­ti­cip­ated in a doc­u­ment­ary about the sta­ging of a show at Grand Park in Los Angeles. The audi­ence are each giv­en cot beds and told to bring a sleep­ing bag and pil­lows. I reviewed it for At the Movies dur­ing the lock­downs in 2020:

The dir­ect­or Natalie Johns, with the help of some drones, lev­it­ates above the park but we also meet some of the audi­ence to hear from them what they anti­cip­ated and what they got from the mes­mer­ic and trans­port­ing music.

Richter’s part­ner Yulia, who co-produces the con­certs and who is clearly a cre­at­ive force to be reckoned with – Richter calls her the brains of the out­fit – fea­tures as we learn about their rela­tion­ship, their cre­at­ive part­ner­ship and meet their delight­ful chil­dren, but it is Richter him­self who is the star of the show.

Refer a friend

Born in Germany but raised in the home counties of England, Richter has one of those voices that you could listen to for hours, not least because what he says is so insight­ful but also because it’s so gentle and the tone is so pleas­ant. He’s very soothing.

In fact, the whole film is very calm, as you might expect.

There’s a sur­pris­ing amount of sci­ence involved in the think­ing behind “Sleep” – he worked with a neur­os­cient­ist to under­stand the dif­fer­ent stages and what was hap­pen­ing to our brains so he could mim­ic, or lie along­side, the nat­ur­al rhythms and pro­cesses and try and find music­al lan­guage to express it.

As a bonus, here is the 2018 music video for “On the Nature of Daylight” fea­tur­ing Elizabeth Moss (who would go on to use the track three years later in an epis­ode of The Handmaid’s Tale that she directed).

Where to watch Max Richter’s Sleep

Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on DocPlay

Canada, Ireland, USA & UK: Digital rental

Further reading

Just in time for Father’s Day, RNZ have pos­ted my latest list­icle about movie dads. From Darth Vader to Viggo Mortensen in The Road, here are a few of my favour­ites. Let me know some of yours in the comments.

Favourite comments

There was lots of nice feed­back on the Mad Men piece from Wednesday.

DT of Wellington thanked me for let­ting him know about Matt Zoller Seitz’s online book­store: “I’ve got my eye on the Deadwood Bible, but the ship­ping is rather excru­ci­at­ing. Don’t sup­pose you have any oth­ers you want to pick up to reduce the over­all cost?! Ha! “

Reader MN said: “Bedrock TV for our house and thanks for remind­ing us of Soller Seitz. I recall read­ing his recaps of the final sea­son in real time and being more impressed with those pieces than the show itself at that point (I nit­pick about S6&7). Gotta revis­it the writeups!”

And NoWrongAnswer wrote: “And all that smoking. I finally star­ted watch­ing it for the first time this month. I agree with your com­ment that there is barely a wasted moment. What a script. What a show.”