The Envelope: Godzilla, Alan Turing and more move to Alexandre Desplat’s music

He has six Academy Award nominations and more than 150 composing credits in film and TV, but Alexandre Desplat is still keen for a new challenge. “I’d never done an epic movie about war like ‘Unbroken,’ never done a monster movie, never done such a referential kind of score, paying tribute to my elder idols,” he says by Skype from Paris of his Elmer Bernstein-esque work on “The Monuments Men.” “Never made a movie about a mathematician, trying to convey with music this quick brain which goes faster than everyone else. I’d never done a movie set in the middle of Europe.” That last project, Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel,” is the director’s third film with Desplat, who says they have developed a signature sound. “I think we found that in the first movie, on ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox.’ He allowed me to do things I’d explored in previous films of mine in Europe,” says Desplat. “It’s as if he summarized all these quirky ideas I had before using mandolins, cimbaloms, and put them in one box — banjos — and shook the box: ssshhhhkk, ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox.’ Then shook it up again, ‘Moonrise Kingdom,’ and then again for ‘Budapest.’ But yes, there is a box which belongs only to Wes.” Anderson and Desplat delighted in mixing sounds from Switzerland, Russia and others for the film’s fictional Central European nation, and in shaking out individual parts of compositions.