The Sisters Brothers

Quartet Records and Why Not Productions present the new score composed by two-time Academy Award-winning composer Alexandre Desplat for the newest film from Jacques Audiard. Desplat and Audiard have worked together on almost all the director's films, beginning in 1994 with Regarde les hommes tomber.

Audiard's The Sisters Brothers is a picaresque western starring John C. Really, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed. Based on Patrick DeWitt's novel, the story revolves around the colorfully named gold prospector Hermann Kermit Warm, who's being pursued across a thousand miles of 1850s Oregon desert to San Francisco by the notorious assassins Eli and Charlie Sisters.

As usual in Desplat's compositions for Audiard, the result is fascinating and unusual, revolving around an obsessive leitmotif, effectively orchestrated for violin, electric cello, piano, double bass, percussion, saxophone and guitar. As Desplat says, "Because the movie's so different, it allows something different. There's no brass, there is a little jazz combo, but it's playing something strange – oppressive, dark music. It was a long process of experimentation and trying not to be influenced by Bernstein, by Morricone, by anybody."