Larry Schwartz
Eight-year-old Felix Dallwitz impressed his schoolmates with a trophy he took to show-and-tell at Elsternwick Primary School recently.
Burkhard Dallwitz plays down the Golden Globe award. “I looked at his kiddies’ cricket trophy and there’s not all that much difference,” the Melbourne-based composer says of the trophy he won recently for his work on the soundtrack of the Peter Weir film, The Truman Show.
“I suppose it’s 15 seconds of fame,” says Dallwitz, whose career prospects have improved dramatically since he was short-listed for the prestigious award last December.
“I think in America, where they take these awards very seriously, they see it as a rubber stamp of approval,” he says. “I’ve had an agent for over a year over there. I think with that they obviously exploit it. They put big ads in the trades and it probably means that I’ll just have more meetings
for more job offers.”
After years working on fairly modest Australian projects from his studio in Elsternwick, Dallwitz is thinking of packing up and moving his family to the US for at least a few years. In recent months, he has been based in LA, working on Supernova, a $65 million MGM science-fiction movie
from director George Roy Hill, starring James Spader, Angela Bassett, Robert Foster and Lou Diamond Phillips.
He was in Los Angeles working on this score when he was woken at 6.30am by his agent telephoning with the good news.
“It came completely out of the blue,” says Dallwitz, 40. “Quite frankly, when I saw the competition I was up against – John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer and Randy Newman … I thought that’s as good as it will get.”
He didn’t bother to prepare a speech until somebody pointed out that he was going to look very foolish if he didn’t at least think about it. He sat down for 20 minutes the day before the award and scribbled a list of people he might have to thank. He rented a tuxedo and went along “with
absolutely zero expectations”.
“It’s fun if you’ve never done this before,” he says. “I was having a good time when it came to the original score category and they announced the name. I can remember hearing my agent, who was sitting behind me, screaming in my ear. That was the first thing I noticed. And then I just
thought, Try to remember who you have to thank, focus for the next 20 seconds, and get it right. Don’t make a fool of yourself.”
Dallwitz is a German-born Australian resident who had no thought of migration when he arrived here 20 years ago. He wanted to see the country because his mother had spent her childhood here, but thought he’d travel on to Latin America. He decided to remain, studied at La Trobe
University and married an Australian. His wife and two children, Felix and Carlotta, 5, had returned to Melbourne from Los Angeles days before the Golden Globe awards in time for the first of day of school.
Previous work includes lesser-known projects, such as the science fiction movie Zone 39. “Every time I used to do a reasonable-sized project,” Dallwitz says, “I’d make a compilation of the music I’d composed and send it out to producers and directors and production companies. That (Zone
39) was the tape I’d also sent to Peter Weir. That was my foot in the door. Otherwise it would never have happened. It was just a major break for me.”
He enjoyed working with Weir. “I’ve always been a great fan of Peter Weir’s. I thought if I was ever lucky enough, he might hear my music and perhaps like it. He’s a fascinating person in the sense that he’s incredibly enthusiastic and he’s passionate. There is absolutely no kind of posturing.
He’s very down to earth and a lovely person to work with.
“Peter is known to play a lot of music on the set while he’s shooting a film. Then when he looks at rushes, he brings a boom box into the theatre and he tries out different things.”
By the time Dallwitz came on board, Weir had already approached the American avant-garde composer Phillip Glass for permission to use some of his compositions and selected a few classical tracks. Dallwitz’s role was “to glue the whole thing together with the original score”. He wrote
for scenes for which Weir had not yet selected music.
“I think, ultimately, successful film music should be as simple and as straightforward as possible in just underscoring and highlighting the emotions,” he says. “I don’t think it’s about wizardry and wonderful technical things. It’s about getting the simplest idea across so that it really serves
the film.”
After Dallwitz had completed the soundtrack for the The Truman Show, Weir suggested he compile a soundtrack CD. It was while working on the album in LA that he had meetings with agents “and that got the ball rolling and they got me this next film”.
After years of quiet industry, his horizons have opened up. “It has made a big change,” says the musician, who grew up outside Frankfurt and learned classical piano from the age of eight. “The last 15 months have turned my life upside down.”
The Sunday Age, 28th of February 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 