Composer
Website: andreafarri.bandcamp.com
Contact: Micah Benton, [email protected]
Most recent: Io Capitano
Film composer Andrea Farri was gifted a piano as a young musician by legendary Italian actor Roberto Benigni and spent his childhood playing multiple instruments and writing music. “When I was seven years old, I discovered John Ford movies. I loved the huge sky, horses running, cowboys and all the amazing soundtracks with violins. At that age, I decided I would like to work in cinema and make music for movies,” Farri says.
While still a teenager, Farri provided music for theatre and dance companies, including playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. Most recently, he scored Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano, an award-winning, Golden Globe-and Oscar-nominated film about two Senegalese men who travel across Africa and the Mediterranean to reach Europe. The film earned Farri a Best Soundtrack award at its Venice Film Festival premiere.
“Io Capitano tells the story of a great adventure. The protagonist was like a modern Ulysses. It was important that the music was epic. It was a coming-of-age story as well. A classical approach could not be used, so I tried to blend acoustic instruments with electronic music to have a contemporary atmosphere,” Farri says. Farri combined both classical and contemporary genres, incorporating traditional African sounds as well as the voices of the film’s main actors. “I think that the thing I learned was that, because the film is a long odyssey and an adventure, the challenge of the score was to hold the movie together – with all the different things that happen – without using too many different kinds of music.”
Farri recently worked with the London Contemporary Orchestra on music for an upcoming American television show, Roland Emmerich’s Those About to Die, as well as Peter Chelsom’s A Sudden Case of Christmas, due out this year.
