Anné Kulonen on bringing Paradise Highway to life through sound

The thriller Paradise Highway, the debut offering by writer-director Anna Gutto, opened in US cinemas in July 2022. With a solid backbone and familiar story arc, the film is clever in its ability to subvert the tropes and add depth, twists and ethical challenges surrounding its central theme of human trafficking. Taking inspiration from Thelma and Louise, Gutto pays homage to the film in a number of ways and successfully carries out what she saw as its ability to be ‘a movie about sexual assault that managed to not be an “issue” movie.’ It stars Juliette Binoche as Sally, a trucker in the Deep South, who gets caught up in the dark underbelly of human trafficking alongside Morgan Freeman (Gerrick), a retired police officer who’s worked tirelessly throughout his career in pursuit of ending it.

Anné Kulonen, a Finnish-British composer born and raised in the city of Tampere, was on hand to bring Gutto’s gritty drama to life: “Leading up to the shoot, Anna didn’t have a composer yet, so we had a call after I’d read the script and talked about the trucking world and her research into human trafficking. She didn’t want the film to ever seem exploitative, because it could easily become that, and I think she handles the topic really sensitively. The numbers on how many kids are being trafficked are pretty scary. They don't necessarily need to be physically chained, control can happen in other ways – like drugging or threats to your family and she wanted to highlight that.”

Growing up Gutto actually had neighbors that turned out to be trafficking young girls, “Anna wanted to show that it really can happen right next door and it doesn’t seem that extreme.”

When researching the film Gutto became friends with an American female trucker Desiree Wood: “Both Anna and Juliette (Binoche) traveled around with her and even slept in the truck, to get a real sense of what it was like,” Kulonen explains. “Anna was talking about the sound world and how crazy it was, with all these constant different noises and sounds. There’s a scene in the film where Gerrick (Freeman) after seeing Sally (Binoche) beaten up says to her ‘Your truck got a beating too’, and Sally replies ‘My truck and I - we’re one.’ This line really stuck with me: Sally’s truck is her home and her life, it’s where she always is, always on the road. It felt more than just an arbitrary location. It felt like an extension of her and her character. So I thought - let's mess around with that sound world and see what we find. Lucky for me Anna was instantly on board!”

The Peterbilt truck is that very specific American long-haul truck and Kulonen set about finding ways to incorporate its sound into the score: “There wasn’t really time to record the truck on set, so I used a Peterbilt library I bought - a few long recordings of someone driving along somewhere and recording everything for about 3 hours straight - and I started experimenting with those. The film has this real sense of forward drive and constant motion, so I wanted to have a lot of pulses and repetitive, relentless rhythms at the core of the score. Rather than use too many synths, I wanted this to be more of an organic electronic score, where the sounds come from the trucking world as much as possible and they’re very much our own. To bring out some music and textures from the truck engines, I messed with the time and pitch and used different plugins to help create clearer rhythmic motion. Movement by Output is great for this kind of stuff. Signal, their pulse engine, is also a great tool for rhythmic structures.”

Amongst the more traditional sounds were the guitars, plucked, bowed, electric and acoustic. “Cory’s amazing, he’s an American living in Paris,” Kulonen says of her guitarist Cory Seznec. “Originally, we were exploring going a bit more bluesy with the score, obviously Mississippi/Tennessee [where the film is set] is the area for it. Anna and I talked about this a lot and what felt right in the end was to feature blues by showcasing the music of local musicians in scenes that have diagetic music. Robert Kimbrough Sr, who Anna met when in the US, actually plays in the bar during a scene in the film and his music is also what Gerrick (Freeman) listens to in his car.”

When watching the film, the sweeping shots of the huge dusty roads and expansive landscapes work very well with the guitar choices that Anné went for. “Sally’s (Binoche) instrument is the bowed guitar. It was really early on when that idea started. It is not an easy thing to get exactly what you want out of it, at least for me,” she laughs, “The neck is not curved like a cello or violin. But I really like the brittleness and scratchiness, because it kind of felt like her, she had a rough childhood and not an easy life. That really became her sound and motif and it reappears throughout the score. The themes for three of the main characters - Sally, her brother Dennis (Frank Grillo) and the trafficked young girl Leila (Hala Finley), are closely connected and for me that was purposeful, as I felt they’re all quite broken souls, just searching for family and connection and that’s why I didn’t want them to be that different - it’s all part of the same fabric. The score as a whole has a sort of dirty, distorted, rough sound and that’s what we wanted, not polished, so it reflects what the characters are like.”

In order to create that sound, I asked her what tech helped her get there, “In my setup I use a lot of Universal Audio plug ins. With this score the Little Labs VOG Analog Bass Resonance Tool was great for max lows, Maag EQ4 for adding space and air to the bowed guitar and strings. Brainworx bx Saturator V2 allows for really precise saturation and it’s a great colouring tool for getting the tone you want. Reverb wise - Lexicon I’m generally using for elements that sound good with longer, fuller reverbs, the EMT 140 Plate on elements that need a shorter snappier reverb, like drums/percussive elements. Decapitator by Soundtoys is great for adding crunch and distortion.

Cory recorded remotely for me using a bunch of guitars: 1939 Recording King Carson Robison Model K, 1960s Harmony Sovereign H1260, Late 60s Kent 740 and National Estralita Deluxe, recorded using Audio Technica AT4040 Mic with a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface.”

When grappling with a feature film I ask Kulonen what her process is, how far do the cues tend to change from demo to final idea and what her workflow is like.

“It varies a lot how much a cue changes during the process. Sometimes you go through a few ideas before finding the right one for a scene, but the first idea can also be the one that sticks. Some of the early recordings I did of the bowed guitar, I couldn’t replicate again [when re-recording] - I couldn't get that weird bend or scratch that happened at this point or that. They probably aren’t the best quality recordings but we liked them and rough was actually a good thing for this score.

Scoring a film is exciting, but it can also be quite tough to begin with, though the deeper you go, the clearer things get. When there are so many scenes and so much detail, to keep it all in your head can be tricky - I find a visual map of the whole story really helps… but then that keeps changing as well,’ she laughs.

Another important aspect of the composing process is of course the working dynamics between the post-production team and Kulonen brought up how pleased she was with the process, “One thing that was really great about this project was how collaborative it was between Anna, editor Christian Siebenhertz, sound designer Hugo Ekornes and me. Anna is really generous when it comes to collaboration, encouraging everyone’s opinion, and both Hugo and Christian are amazingly analytical and articulate about sound, so that made up a super open and creative atmosphere. All the post was done at Storyline in Oslo and Steve Parr, my trusted mix engineer finished the score with me.”

A poignant element in the soundtrack is the use of Blondie’s One Way or Another during a driving scene where the young girl Leila (Finley) and Sally (Binoche) are enjoying their time together and singing along, which is then reflected in a cover version by Anné and Philip Kay in the closing credits produced in a way that compliments the overall sound of the movie. “After doing a couple of rough sketches, it didn’t quite feel right, so I parked it as it made more sense to bring it out of the fabric of the film and I knew the scenes that I wanted it to be connected to but they weren’t that set yet”, Anné says, “My thought behind the cover was always about turning the original’s meaning on its head and making it about hope and connection - these lost and fractured souls finding each other. Phil’s just brilliant to work with and I’m really happy with what we came up with.”

With a traditional classical music background, Anné was attending the Tampere Conservatory from the age of five, playing classical piano and for the next decade was enroute to becoming a classical pianist.

”I got to a point in my teens where I wasn’t really wanting to do the full-on Conservatoire training. I think it was an issue then, and I’ve heard even now, that as amazing and grounding as that kind of strict training is, they don’t seem to have enough flexibility for the young students when they’re at a point where they perhaps might want to do something else…,” she explains. “I was not encouraged to compose, or accompany, or improvise. I was only being trained to perform existing pieces as a soloist. I think that if you feel the kid’s got talent, it’s the most important thing to actually keep them interested. And those are all such valid skills. If they have a little bit of freedom in terms of what area of music they might explore at a certain point, they’re more likely to come back. That’s not to take away from it, it was amazing training and I’m very grateful for it.”

After taking a break she was able to return and explore different avenues, “when I came back to music, I came through sonic arts, jazz and experimental music in London. It’s a blessing in disguise composing wise, since my tool box is so much more expanded now than it would have been if I had just kept doing classical. I love messing with sound in general,” she says, “I think that’s what I enjoy the most, not limiting it to just the traditional sounds, pitching and instruments - anything in this sound world can become your instrument and that’s the fascinating thing.”