Lopatin’s distinct sonic touch has come to define frenetic, anxiety-inducing character studies like Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019). With Marty Supreme, his third collaboration with director Josh Safdie, Lopatin not only delivers his most personal score to date, but one that renders each frame an aural plane of introspection.

Yet, for Lopatin, approaching this hectic odyssey about a scummy table tennis maestro with dreams so destructive they put Icarus to shame, all comes from psychologically attuning his auditory vision to the character—a task that came naturally to the electronic composer.

“In a sense, it was easier this time around,” Lopatin tells RANGE over Zoom in a room inundated with physical media, “Because much like an actor would have to find some sort of personal experience to reflect off of to wrap their head around a character, it’s much easier for me when I can truly appreciate the film through a psychological and emotional lens… I work better because I have a point of view.”

He continues, “With Uncut [Gems], you have Howard Ratner, with Good Time, you have Connie, and those are fun characters to score, but they were foreign to me, they were really exotic in a psychological sense.” Now sitting forward in his chair, “But Marty is not, Marty is me.”

He adds, “It was easy to get into that, there were so many incredible coincidences and kismet things that linked the concepts that I had for the score together, like listening to an early cut of the film instead of watching it, and hearing the sounds of table tennis and linking it to Marty himself.” It’s a perspective that allowed Lopatin to not only tap into the heart of protagonist Marty Mauser but also to build lasting motifs that transcend musical periods and styles.

Lopatin notes, “His buoyancy, his mercurial nature, his excitable nature, his speed, and the sound of the game helped me find a parallel in quick strike, percussive, mallet-based sounds that were also prevalent in New Wave music—because that was an era where the first digital synthesizers coming out were sampling all of those organic instruments.”

He continues, “It all came together in a perfect storm, you’ve got mallets that are basically the game but are also like the character, but you also have this panoply of sounds from the ‘80s that are actually marimbas, vibraphones, and xylophones, and all of those sounds that decorate those synth-pop songs that dominated the ‘80s.”

Despite being set in the 1950s, Lopatin’s anachronistic synth score courses through the film, defining, layering, and texturizing not only the film’s most electrifying moments but also the motifs and thematic tenets of Marty’s chaotic world. Though for Lopatin, it all boils down to a Jungian struggle between what he calls “The old world and the new world.”

“It’s the Puer and the Senex, the young man and the old man,” He continues, “there’s all of these people in Marty’s orbit that are trying to influence him back as he’s trying to influence the world. They’re all trying to limit him and hold him down… there’s this pressure placed on him to compromise his integrity.” Lopatin definitively proclaims “I call that the old world, and [Marty’s] the new world—the new world is driving through the old world on the way to destiny.”

He notes “The new world has a sound, and it’s one that hasn’t even been born yet, it’s a dream.” With his pupils practically dilated, he adds “The old world has a sound, and it’s a labyrinthine, maze-like sound. That’s where our orchestra flutes, choirs, zithers, percussion, and all of those elements come into play—the kind of quasi-baroque feel of some of the music is there as an environmental pressure that Marty is cutting through like a hot knife. And that’s the score.”

The process of stoking that anachronistic battle was born out of a burning desire for experimentation. A desire that set the traditional models of composition ablaze. “Ultimately, so much of the score was born out of this really, really strong point of view—developed by Josh and [Ronald Bronstein]—that imagines Marty Mauser at a Tears for Fears concert in 1984 maybe reflecting on how we arrived there in his life,” Lopatin adds, “That was such a powerful thing to me, I could never get over it.”

Though the film is absent of any flashbacks and flash forwards, Lopatin sees the score as “a product of the film as a memory, through Marty Mauser’s mid-life, present moment at a Tears for Fears concert.” An effect reinforced through stellar ‘80s synth-pop needle drops that fuse with Lopatin’s sumptuous score. “So, the music would dissolve and abstract,” Lopatin continues, “and the music of Tears for Fears would somehow, through some weird magic trick of the mind, become something else as Marty is looking back and thinking.”

Leaning back in his chair and staring off, “That’s a pretty fucking experimental way to approach a score,” he adds, “I don’t know if any element of the way Josh and I do things is traditional—we always get so bored.” With a wry smile, he laughs, “Certainly you want to make sure it’s on the rails and isn’t ridiculous, but we really believe in our own bullshit meter.”

“People often say, the bullshit meter is going off, guys, we can’t do this, but we have to stick to our guns, be brave, and be honest, and when we do that, we generally start floating away from what’s right towards what’s interesting.” Lopatin continues, “We have no interest in doing things the right way, we want to do things the interesting way—and it becomes the right way.”

“Much like the central thesis of the film, Josh and I don’t care about what’s anachronistic and what’s not,” Lopatin, now staring directly into his webcam, “it was never a word that occurred to us. We were just trying to nail what was at the heart of the film.”

After sonically weaving the fabric of three of the most palpably lived-in, riveting characters of the last quarter century of American Cinema, Lopatin seems primed to carve a new pantheon of character-driven scores. A rising discography that enthrallingly teeters between psychologically and psychically dissecting its protagonists. Though in Lopatin’s mind, he’s firmly on the side of the latter. “Psychically is right, I love it.”

Marty Supreme is in theatres worldwide on December 25th.