Lukas Dhont, Valentin Hadjadj Discuss ‘Coward’ Score, and Edward Berger, Volker Bertelmann Talk About Music for ‘The Riders,’ Starring Brad Pitt

Collaboration sits at the heart of the World Soundtrack Awards' Film Music Days. Live performances will reimagine cult favorites through daring new scores, while networking sessions are built to pair rising composers with directors who could become their lifelong creative partners. Two panel discussions at the WSA will turn the spotlight on some of European cinema's most durable director-composer partnerships, offering tangible evidence of what such alliances can accomplish. Founded in 2001 by the Ghent Film Festival, the World Soundtrack Awards remains one of the few international honors devoted solely to music composed for the screen.

Valentin Hadjadj and Lukas Dhont first crossed paths as students, and that early connection has evolved into a professional bond anchored in a shared creative vocabulary. Dhont notes that Hadjadj comes aboard at a very early stage of the script and writes music that aligns with its emotional tone. Over the years, the two have built what Dhont calls their own language, one conveyed largely through drawings. A scene's essence might be sketched as a spiral, or as something harsh and desolate, and this visual form of communication tends to work best for them. Hadjadj, for his part, is most drawn to a project's inception. Writing before the shoot, he says, expands the range of musical possibilities: the imagination is freer, more experimentation is feasible, and the editing rhythm has yet to impose its constraints. Music can thus take on a dimension that would not surface on an initial viewing. Once a film is complete, its aesthetic and narrative are essentially fixed, whereas Hadjadj wants music to offer an alternative lens. Their earlier features, "Girl" and "Close," both incorporated musical performance, though neither did so as extensively as "Coward," a World War I drama that Dhont initially pitched to Hadjadj as a musical about the repression of emotion. Dhont's "Close" went on to claim the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2022, solidifying the pair's standing on the festival circuit.

For the film's violent sequences, Dhont wanted the score to evoke the cries of countless men, as though voices buried for generations were surging upward. The music, he believed, needed to swell louder, more present and more sharply defined, until the boundary between score and sound design disappeared. Hadjadj incorporated archival war songs and revue numbers performed on screen, yet he avoided treating the score as a museum piece. He treated the period only as a starting point, reaching beyond its familiar musical tropes toward something more contemporary. The predictable path, he observes, would have been broad, sweeping, martial orchestral writing; instead the team opted for a more pop-leaning approach. He chased textures rather than orchestra, borrowing production instincts from modern pop. Because the film did not yet exist, he could compose from the story rather than the image, and that separation, he feels, helped render the music more universal, even transferable to today. The approach mirrors a wider trend in recent war cinema, where filmmakers increasingly prefer atmospheric soundscapes over traditional orchestral bombast to convey psychological states rather than battlefield spectacle.

Composer Volker Bertelmann took a similarly modern route into the Great War with his reverb-soaked, Oscar-winning score for "All Quiet on the Western Front," though his method differed sharply. Now on his sixth collaboration with director Edward Berger, Bertelmann prefers to come in late, writing to a nearly finished cut. He is a firm believer in not joining too early, preferring to watch something first and then compose in response, immersing himself so thoroughly that he feels inside the film, its story, scenes and characters. He constantly shifts into other worlds, stepping into someone else's shoes. At times he is not underlining what appears on screen but the mood beneath it, the activity inside a character's mind. Music, in his view, can supply that additional layer, like a spice. Bertelmann also came to film relatively late, after first establishing himself as a recording artist, and that background shapes how he works, sometimes making him feel like a performer interpreting another person's material. When he makes his own records, nobody directs him, which he finds wonderful; he probably would not write a very romantic score for himself, being more melancholic by temperament, and he regards those albums as a mirror of his inner world. A film, by contrast, carries a different obligation: you must locate the right level and the right nuances to elevate things and make particular moments land. Bertelmann's Oscar win for "All Quiet on the Western Front" in 2023 made him only the third German-born composer to take home the Academy Award for Best Original Score.

That sense of obligation makes trial and error essential to his work with Berger. The director acknowledges that sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes both parties simply have to experiment, but the reassurance of being able to say "can we keep trying?" or "I don't think it fits yet" makes the exploratory process far easier when you are working with someone whose music you love. The partnership continues with "The Riders," a Brad Pitt-led film slated for release next year, which Berger and Bertelmann are currently deep in. The project represents a tonal departure for the longtime collaborators, demanding what Berger calls fragility and tenderness, along with instrumentation that will express the lead character's fragile soul. It is an inner journey, Berger says, following Brad Pitt's character's descent and then his liberation from whatever occupies his mind, so the music should give voice to what drives him, what lives inside him and his inner unease. After viewing a rough cut, Bertelmann has already come back with 25 themes. Pitt, whose production company Plan B has backed films ranging from "12 Years a Slave" to "Moonlight," continues to favor director-driven projects, and "The Riders" marks his first on-screen reunion with Berger after the pair worked together on "All Quiet on the Western Front."