INTERVIEW WITH DARON HAGEN, CO-PRODUCER, WRITER, COMPOSER, DIRECTOR AND EDITOR OF “9/10: LOVE BEFORE THE FALL”

Daron Hagen, welcome to the World Film Festival in Cannes! Congrats on winning in the “Best Ensemble Cast” category for your opera film. First things first, thank you for this beautiful work, from both a musical and an intellectual point of view. 9/11 changed the world and America. Why revisit this harrowing terrorist act now?

Practicality and positioning determined the timing. As a Manhattanite, I thought about creating a work that spoke to the trauma for nearly a decade before finally writing a treatment to apply for a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to underwrite the screenplay and musical score. I had made my first “operafilm” (an experimental 60-minute short called “Orson Rehearsed”) and had learned enough to get started on the screenplay and score of “9/10.” At that point, COVID jolted the American opera world into a sudden, sort of scattershot rush into releasing archival videos online of earlier staged productions and calling them movies to provide content to their subscribers while their live venues were shuttered. I didn’t want my actual auteur film project to be lumped in with that movement, so I concentrated on executing the soundtrack and slowly creating a situation where I could film it. The location, producers, and team came together suddenly in Chicago in fall 2021. In exchange for my directing a staged version of the operafilm with young artists at the Chicago College of the Performing Arts, where at the time I was teaching composition remotely, the conservatory served as a co-producer when I brought in my own “New Mercury Collective” team of professional actors, musicians, and behind the camera talents to film in spring 2022.

You said, “Together, we’ve created something new here that combines the emotional punch of cutting-edge live operatic performance with magical realism and the psychological verisimilitude of gritty, intimate, indie-auteur filmmaking.” How important is indie filmmaking in the cinema industry in your view?

I am beginning my 45th year as a professional composer, but I have been making independent film for only about ten years, so I don’t feel qualified to sound off about why the cinema industry needs indie filmmaking except to point out that outliers enliven every artform. There’s something interesting to be said about how the struggle indie filmmakers seem to have pulling commercial cinema out of its comfort zone is, ironically, similar in some ways to what I experience as a fine artist drawing from indie cinema (and film music) to draw the so-called “classical music” world out of its non-commercial comfort zone. Live opera singing on camera (rather than lip-synching to playback) doubles down on that because it blurs the line between artifice and reality, documentary and improvisation, filmic and stage performance. In the concert world—and to some extent, the opera world—”Your music is so tuneful, so ‘cinematic,’ is a calculated, intellectually facile put-down thrown about primarily by conductors and critics still stuck on the modernist lie that emotional vulnerability is cheap or unintelligent. I wish that “Maestro” had been the sort of film where Bernstein’s anguish over this issue could have been unpacked a bit more, but it had another story to tell. Live performance is gladiatorial by default; wedding it to film captures lightning in a bottle.

We feel compelled to ask you to comment on the words of Dante Alighieri “Remember tonight, for it is the start of everything”. Tell us more

The film begins with Dante’s words as an epigraph for a number of reasons: first, it is the line that the four characters will sing as they both contemplate the joy of beginning lives together as married couples and the sudden implication that their lives are ending; second, it is a frank evocation of the Underworld for those who watch for those sorts of things, signaling that what looks like an Italian bistro might in fact be the bardo, or the Underworld; third, it of course refers to the fact that the story is happening only hours before the Twin Towers disaster would change everything forever; finally, it clearly delineates that we, the witnesses to the narrative about to unfold, are perched, Janus-like at a moment where we are simultaneously looking backwards and forwards.

The “chaos at least is comforting”. Tell us about the “sweet spot” mentioned in the lyrics

The “sweet spot” that the two men refer to is, as Corey sings, “the point at which you’re high, but not so high that you’ve gone too far.” As Aaron Sorkin had Leo McGarry say in his teleplay for The West Wing, “who wouldn’t want that feeling to last forever?” For Tony it was the moment “before the wheels come off,” how, as he fell, like DeLillo’s falling man, he “fell for” Bibi, who describes her feelings for him as the state of “not being addicted to love but being in love with an addict.” It refers to Trina and her struggle with the Doctrine of the Fall and binary thinking in favor of multi-factor thinking, as when she sings that “the Truth is a feather in Justice’s scales” moments before Corey recalls hanging in mid-air like Icarus as the wax began to melt. It’s the moment of maximum potential and opportunity, the state of being fully alive because one is in proximity to death. It’s the moment before existential nausea strikes, what the Apostle Paul referred to in Corinthians when he explained that we do not now see clearly, but at the end of time, we will do so.

It is the moment just before Charon extends his hand for payment—the big quartet to the Dante words filled with joy and remembrance, optimism, and clear-eyed forward thinking. This is the point at which I bring in an oscillating figure in the strings drawn from my opera Amelia that is associated at the beginning of Amelia with the same sort of moral confusion Benjamin Britten tags it to in Billy Budd but which I transform at the end of my opera, with the birth of a child, into a paean to the belief that “anything is possible.” In my first operafilm, Orson Rehearsed, I begin the overture with the same oscillating figure transposed to tubular bells as a manic, bardo-bound Welles struggles with the heart attack that is ending his life. In 9/10 (in every way a follow-up to Orson) I place the figure back up into the strings to underscore the fact that nature at the very least teaches us how to let things die.

In your film the restaurant Passagio represents the Styx and the voice of Charon are being rendered by a violin. Music is a kind of über-language that conveys the unsaid/unspeakable?

Exactly. It is why I became a composer, why I gravitated towards opera, and ultimately to this new genre “operafilm,” which itself exists in a liminal zone between opera and spoken drama, music and words, tone poem and film.

There is this poignant moment when Charon extends his arm for the chosen ones have to pay their penny to cross over to the Underworld, and one protagonist is overwhelmed by wrath and denial and first turns him away, before eventually coming to terms with his fate. Then the other chosen ones also embrace as they find their inescapable fate hard to fathom. To what extent can we learn from this scene?

I am particularly gratified that World Film Festival in Cannes chose to award our film the laurel for “Best Ensemble Cast” because the entire sequence for each character was developed together in group discovery and rehearsal. I knew how long each of their moments would last, but not exactly how the beat would play it out. They had marvelously prepared themselves and were so emotionally brave to take on the acting challenging as a pantomime after 45 minutes of singing their hearts out to an audience only a few feet away and all around them. I cannot praise them or thank them enough. What I learned from writing, directing, staging, and filming that scene was that, in the end, it was the collaboration made possible by our mutual love, trust, and friendship that mattered; it was not my authorship that mattered, but rather the process of inhabiting for a time that “sweet spot” together.

Tell us about any upcoming movie plans you have?

Frances Richard, Vice President for concert music at ASCAP, who passed away only days ago, was a great mentor to me, advised me very early on always to have five pitches ready to go in case I ran into a producer or Intendant of an opera company. In fact, I am ready to go with five different projects right now, and will pounce on the one that, like Orson and 9/10, comes together. The music and the stories and the images are in my head where they’ve always been. They’ve never been more vibrant. It is the delight and lightness of being an indie that makes it possible for a project to suddenly crystalize and demand immediate execution. That delight makes me feel young, and as though anything is possible.

©2024 Isabelle Rouault-Röhlich