Alexandre Desplat has been announced to score the drama The Special Relationship. The project traces former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair’s relationships with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The movie is directed by Richard Loncraine who previously directed the action thriller Firewall which also had a score by Desplat. The film also marks another collaboration between writer/producer Peter Morgan, who Desplat worked with on The Queen. Michael Sheen reprises his role of Tony Blair from that movie is joined by Dennis Quaid as Bill Clinton and Hope David as Hillary Clinton. The BBC produced movie is scheduled to come out in May in the UK. A domestic distribution deal and release date has yet to be announced.
Desplat will also continue his relationship with director Stephen Frears (The Queen, Cheri) on Tamara Drewe. The movie about a young newspaper writer who returns to her hometown in the English countryside, where her childhood home is being prepped for sale stars Dominic Cooper and is scheduled to come out later this year by Sony Pictures Classics in the United States.
The extremely prolific composer also has the highly anticipated Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on his slate of upcoming projects and is still working on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which should come out later this year.Desplat’s music can currently be heard in theaters in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer with a score album out on Varese Sarabande Records. Also, the French prison drama A Prophet which Desplat scored a while ago was just released in the US in limited release by Sony Pictures Classics. The movie is one of the frontrunners to win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film next week. Desplat himself is nominated for his score for Wes Anderson’s animated feature The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
In other Desplat news, David Poland’s DP/30 blog has just uploaded a video interview with the composer. He talks about his Oscar nominated score, as well as his collaboration with directors such as Roman Polanski and Terrence Malick. The complete interview with the composer can be found right here: http://www.dp30.com/blog/2010/02/26/fantastic-mr-fox-composer-alexandre-desplat/
