MRH :    Did you always intend on becoming a film composer?

AL : I started playing music when I was 9 years old, and almost from the beginning I became interested in composing rather than performing. When I learned my first couple of chords, I would compose song after song just based on the two or three chords I had learned.

I have always loved watching movies, and I think that I have always paid special attention to the music. I was a teenager in the eighties when movies like Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and some of the Star Wars and Superman films came out.

I think that everybody knew those scores at that time, but it wasn't until the late eighties that I discovered a soundtrack on an LP record. One of my friends had bought the soundtrack from Hellraiser by Christopher Young -- my friend was a huge horror film fan, and I think he bought the album because it looked cool with Pinhead on the cover.

We would sit and listen to it, and I think it was then I realised that somebody was actually composing the music that was heard in the movies! So from the mid-nineties or so I started composing music for student films, short films and the sort, working my way up through commercial music, documentaries, and a couple of things for stage plays. My first composing job was actually for a stage play called Vampires !

MRH :    What composers do you admire (past or present)?

AL : There are many composers from the past one must admire - from the old classical masters to the film composers of the golden age -- they made the foundation of what we build on today. Take something like The Planets by Holst which he composed in 1916, Carmina Burana by Orff from the thirties, Wagner's leitmotif writing and so on -- you can hear a lot in these works that is being used in film music even today.

Somehow, I think that the music you grew up with will always have a special influence on you. I grew up with the music of John Williams, Alan Silvestri, Christopher Young, James Horner, and Danny Elfman to mention a few, so they are all very special to me, and I still listen to their music.

MRH :    Most North American film music fans can cite several European composers from England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, but Northern Europe is still poorly represented on CD, and I wonder if the situation is similar to that of Canada, where there exists local and national productions, but only a few native composers have managed to cross-over to the American and international markets. Swedish and Danish composers are certainly able to practice and develop their craft, but is working on projects beyond international borders still a tough hurdle to overcome?

AL : Scandinavian movies often have very small budgets, and because of this, big orchestral music is unfortunately quite rare in these films -- there might not even be financial room to hire a composer, or perhaps the producers will choose to spend their money on something else.

Often the entire soundtrack for these films would consist only of pop songs, as the producers often get these songs for free as promotion from the record companies or from the artists themselves. This is of course much cheaper than hiring a composer and an orchestra, and they might even be able to make some extra money by releasing a soundtrack album with the songs.

Also, very few of the films being made are big fantasy films or adventure films, not to mention vampire films (Frostbite is actually Sweden's first vampire movie ever!). Most films are about the everyday lives of ordinary people, sometimes made to look like documentaries to make them seem more real; the music in those films would obviously have to reflect that -- meaning no big orchestral scores.

In Denmark, some of the established directors came up with a concept known as ‘Dogme,' which is basically about making films based on certain rules. One of the rules is that there can be no music added to the film in postproduction -- meaning that if there should be music in the film, it has to be played live while shooting or come from a source on location, like from a radio.

This is an interesting idea, but not so great if you're a film composer! Furthermore, the majority of Scandinavian films are not released outside of Scandinavia, so audiences in the U.S.A. would never be acquainted with these films and their respective scores, making it much harder for a Scandinavian composer to get heard outside Scandinavia.

I was lucky that the director and producer of Frostbite wanted a real orchestral score, and that the film has now been sold to more than 40 countries around the world, including the U.S.A. as well as most of Europe, including England and Russia. This has given a large number of people the opportunity to see the film and listen to my music. I even won a prize for Best Score at the Screamfest Horror Film Festival in Los Angeles, and I didn't even know that the film and the score were in competition!

Since the release of Frostbite, I have been in contact with a couple of Danish directors that really liked the score and now want similar music for their films. Some of them actually told me that they put on my music when they write their scripts, so hopefully we will hear more of this kind of music in Scandinavian films.