Alexandre Desplat

“Yea, there is no way you can get away from critics. It's all over the net. Sometimes it's useful to read things, good or bad. Sometimes it's painful. Sometimes it stupid because they say stupid things.”

“Argo' was a very exciting project for me because I knew that I could mix together influences from my youth as a young musician and a young composer.”

“My art is applied to another art which is cinema, that makes my life much easier.”

“You do movies because you love movies and you write music because you love writing music, and sometimes there's this magic combination.”

“Mozart for me is the No. 1 composer. His music is not just joy or sadness. It's deep emotion with a touch of lightness, which is the most difficult thing to do.”

“I was raised by women. I have my parents, but I have two older sisters and I would learn from them about what is a female and what is a girl and what is an adolescent and what is a young woman and I was very close to them.”

“The great directors, I've learned, have a great sense of rhythm.”

“I never dreamed of writing for concert or opera. I always dreamed, if I was a composer, to write music for films.”

“I'm a flutist so I know what they can deliver in terms of texture and sound and blurriness and softness. It's a very soft instrument.”

“Every film is a human encounter. It's people trying to collaborate and create something together.”

“The main difference I'd say is that European cinema has always used less music than American cinema for historical reasons.”

“I'm being offered great movies by great directors and that's what I love, that's what I've dreamed to do, and that's what I do all day long. So I have to do it.”

“When synthesizers appeared everyone was a composer suddenly.”

“I just write from dawn to dusk.”

“I usually like to introduce the film and the music with the opening titles. It's a great help for a composer to bring the audience into the work that we're going into.”

“A film is a film and it has to be good to be inspired. That's number one. It can be Italian, French, German, American. It's moving images in front of you and with a strong director who injects his point of view and artistry.”

“I always try to do movies that are different from the ones I've done before.”

“I just work 18 hours a day, every day. And I don't go on holidays. And so, I guess I will die young.”

“I played the piccolo in the 'Ides of March' and 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox' score.”

“I've been pretty lucky to work with directors who were quite influenced by European cinema.”