“John Adams’ music comes to me constantly," says filmmaker Luca Guadagnino. "Discovering it was transformative and changed my life as a director forever." Nonesuch Records released the soundtrack to Guadagnino's new film, After the Hunt, which includes a selection of Adams' works. Adams’ music has featured in almost all of Guadagnino's films, beginning with I Am Love in 2009. In a new essay, accompanied by a complete playlist of Adams' music in Guadagnino's work, Nonesuch's Matthew Rankin explores the connection between them.

John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of music. His works are among the most performed of all contemporary classical music, long embraced by the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, instrumental soloists and singers, choreographers, and opera directors. Add to this list the visionary filmmaker Luca Guadagnino.

Music plays an integral role in all of Guadagnino’s films, and the relationship between his work as a director and the music of Adams is an especially profound and distinctive one. Beginning with I Am Love (2009), Guadagnino has used Adams’ music in almost every one of his films. With After the Hunt the symbiotic creative pairing enters a new phase.

Guadagnino discovered Adams in 2005 when he received a copy of Naive and Sentimental Music as a birthday gift. “I put the disc in the CD player, and suddenly when those first notes, dun dun dun started, I immediately got completely kidnapped by the musical world of John Adams,” he explained to Pitchfork in 2018. “Since that first epiphany, I started to dig into him. I started to look for everything that I could find recorded by John Adams, and I became a sort of an encyclopaedia of what he has done as a musician.”

I Am Love was inspired by and scored entirely to Adams’ pre-existing music.  In an audacious updating of Antonioni’s La Notte, the film opens with scenes of Milan pulsating to the rhythms of The Chairman Dances. For the next two hours the viewer experiences a rush of images, sounds, senses, textures and tastes, enhanced by a total of seven of Adams’ works used in imaginative and bold ways, culminating with Harmonielehre for the powerful final scene.

This was the first time Adams had allowed his work to be used in this way. Taking an unorthodox approach, the film’s star and co-producer Tilda Swinton had written to Adams to seek the rights once the film had been completed. Fortunately, Adams replied, saw the film, and gave his permission. He also suggested that “Music by John Adams” be included in the main title, which was something that Guadagnino himself had really wanted to do but didn’t dare to ask. And so began a singular relationship.

“John Adams’ music comes to me constantly,” Guadagnino has said. “I can say really that moment in 2005 was transformative and changed my life as a director forever. There is something Wagnerian and also something minimalist in his music, which I found very fantastic because he just goes beyond the strict rules the minimalists gave to themselves.”

Following I Am Love, Guadagnino demonstrated his understanding of the broad possibilities of the composer’s music when he skilfully used Harmonium in Inconscio Italiano (2011), a documentary about Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia. Similarly, in Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams (2020), about designer Salvatore Ferragamo, he used Adams’ Common Tones in Simple Time.

For his next feature film, A Bigger Splash (2015), Guadagnino was able to use his original introduction to Adams’ work, Naive and Sentimental Music. It sits naturally alongside songs by Captain Beefheart, The Rolling Stones, and St. Vincent as the drama unfolds on the seemingly idyllic island of Pantelleria.

The concluding part of Guadagnino’s “desire trilogy” (begun with I Am Love and A Bigger Splash) was the Oscar-winning Call My By Your Name (2017). It opens with Adams’ Hallelujah Junction, and also features Phrygian Gates, as well as original songs by Sufjan Stevens, plus hits from the 1980s in Italy, chosen, as always, by Guadagnino himself. These musical cues all act as, what he has termed, an “emotional narrator” to the film.

The 2020 miniseries We Are Who We Are features no less than ten pieces by Adams throughout its eight episodes. In the words of Rolling Stone, they are “crucial sonic guideposts," beginning with the song play I Was Looking At the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and including a memorable paintball fight choreographed to Short Ride in a Fast Machine.

“The world of the music of John Adams is a world that comes with a very great package of intellect that I found fantastic,” Guadagnino has observed. “It comes with a capacity of interpreting reality, interpreting the history of the reality, interpreting the history of the United States, and understanding even the boundaries of music to become a cunning exploration of the identity of human nature and the politic relationship that ties all us in. I can’t think of how to put it differently.”

In After the Hunt, the thriller’s suspense, feeling, and questioning is heightened by the texturally inventive score from the two-time Oscar-winning team of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. “Trent and Atticus brought me these extraordinary piano notes that underline the question of do we believe this person or not,” Guadagnino explains. “This theme of doubt starts up in the first scene and keeps expanding. And then, around the structure they created, we brought in pop music as well as contemporary composers like John Adams.”

The five Adams pieces that Guadagnino uses in the film each mark and enhance significant moments in the plot’s development. Gnarly Buttons is the first, arriving as the tension mounts and the ostensibly perfect domestic world of the protagonists is undermined.

One of Guadagnino’s favorite scenes in the movie occurs in the apartment of psychiatrist Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his college professor wife Alma (Julia Roberts). “Alma and Frederik have this kind of little modest conversation, and then he takes off his headphones and the music is Adams’ ‘Put Your Loving Arms Around Me’ [from Gnarly Buttons], which tells a lot about their relationship. I like that scene very much. I like the intimacy that Michael and Julia brought to it.”

The retrospective Adams CD box set Earbox appears as a prop in one scene, and later Adams is mentioned by name in the script, when Frederik asks “You don’t like my beloved Adams?” after Alma tells him to turn down the music. The piece in question is The Death of Klinghoffer, an especially important work for Guadagnino, and one that he has used before, in I Am Love.

The attention Guadagnino pays to constructing his world on film is further illustrated in his exacting choice of needle drops. In After the Hunt, works by Julius Eastman, György Ligeti, and Ryuichi Sakamoto complement those by Adams and the Reznor and Ross score. So do songs by Ambitious Lovers, The National, and Everything But The Girl as the film explores the notion of polarisation and the dynamics of power and control.

As Salon notes in its review, "In what seem like pivotal moments during After the Hunt, conversations between characters are all but drowned out by music. Tense discussions of life-altering events are matched by the diegetic decibels of smooth jazz or string symphonies. Elsewhere, the audio drops out completely, replaced by the noise of a ticking clock that lingers just long enough to make the viewer squirm in their seat. And sometimes, an otherwise unexceptional sequence in the film is interrupted by a discordant two-note sucker punch; a jumpscare with no scare, courtesy of Reznor and Ross’ typically superb score, signaling a shift in the swirling power dynamics at play. It doesn’t totally matter what a character is saying or doing in these moments, because their interior motives are not up for debate or conversation. These people might look like they’re conversing, having lively battles of collegiate wit, stereotypical of an Ivy League institution. But really, every last one of these characters is unchanging in their values, steadfast players in a game that has multiple possible outcomes, but only one winner."

According to Adams, “Luca is one of those very rare film directors who has a true ear for music. He understands intuitively how crucially important music is to creating the emotion and mood of a scene. I like to think that music is the most psychologically precise of all the arts: a single change of harmony or tempo can tell the viewer more about a character’s thoughts and intention than hundreds of words or special effects. And Luca understands the use of music at the deepest level. Ever since I Am Love, where he used my music so vividly and so knowingly, I have respected his gift. Every film since then has been a privilege and a delight for me to see and hear.”

Once you have seen the world through Guadagnino’s eyes, it is hard to imagine any other soundtrack than Adams. It is as if Adams and Guadagnino were made for each other, artistically, a perfect fit. Guadagnino’s deep connection with Adams’ music is evident, and yet it is a reciprocal partnership. Adams’ music enhances Guadagnino’s films, which in turn add new dimensions to Adams’ music.

 —Matthew Rankin, Nonesuch Records

Nonesuch Records made its first record with John Adams in 1985. He was signed exclusively to the label that year, and since then the company has released more than 40 first recordings and over 30 all-Adams albums, including the soundtrack to Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, as well as 2022’s 40-disc Collected Works box set.