Seppuku Paradigm on Creating the MARTYRS Soundtrack

One of the key aspects of Pascal Laugier's film Martyrs is the soundtrack. The music ranges from creepy ambient to acoustic balladry, all of which adds an extra emotional depth to the film. The main theme is particularly effective as the soft melodies and contextual lyrics are a stark contrast to the film's hard imagery.

The persons responsible for this great work are Alex and Willie Cortez, who operate under the moniker of Seppuku Paradigm. Many are probably not familiar with the work of this duo but that is likely to change soon. The pair also created the soundtrack for Eden Log, which is screening along with Martyrs as part of the Midnight Madness section at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. Given the important role of music in Martyrs, it seemed appropriate to pose an inquiry to the Cortez Brothers about their experience working on the film. Their first person account is featured below.

Writing the score for Pascal Laugier's 'MARTYRS' was such an intense and extreme experience that I don't know where or how to start. We got the gig very late in the process of making the movie. We were hired as a replacement, some 'high profile' musician had fled when confronted to the task ahead I guess. More seriously, composing the soundtrack turned out to be a painful process indeed. The combination of stress, lack of time, lack of sleep, lack of natural light and fresh air, extremely long hours (on our last day we worked 35 hours in a row with small 15 minute naps every once in a while) and the darkness of the movie itself put us in a kind of altered state, some sort of daze where reality would sometime fade into something very strange, hard to describe beyond that. To the point where I personally started thinking that Pascal was performing some kind of mental torture on us so we would at last be able to identify with the characters of the story and thus create music that would seem to be oozing from the images themselves. . . We felt like martyrs, literally. I have never told this to Pascal actually, and I don't really think he was playing with our minds either because he's way too honest to do this; if anything I have to thank him for this experience because in the end, some of the songs created for MARTYRS , I feel will stay with me for a long , long time. They MEAN something, to me, personally.

Some people have asked us what were our musical influences for this particular work. I don't really want to deconstruct the creative process and put names on what is essentially unconscious and instinctive. For sure a lot of artists have participated in giving some shape and form to the mental magma that in the end crystalized into music pieces and songs. We had talked a lot with Pascal about the characters' feelings, the tragedy in the story, the melancholy and most importantly the love story upon which rests the whole movie. That's mainly what we concentrated on. Then there was the general conviction that we should go for a sound that would induce some sort of nostalgia, which was also very interesting because we usually have a quite futuristic sound, very dark and cold. This time we had to put some of the more modern aspects of our sound aside, reinvent ourselves as a musical entity while retaining what makes our sound interesting and personal. Overall, working with Pascal on 'MARTYRS' was a very enriching experience, a roller coaster ride into hell and heaven. I sincerely hope that we make you 'feel' when you watch the movie.

Willie Cortez for SEPPUKU PARADIGM.