The movie The Mean One was #2 at the box office after its first week of release and Yael Benamour, the French singer/songwriter, composer, and music producer created the score for it. The Mean One is a horror/comedy and a parody of “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” (based on the Dr. Seuss’ 1957 children’s book, “How The Grinch Stole Christmas”). The film was written by Finn and Flip Kobler and directed by Steven LaMorte. It stars David Howard Thornton as the Mean One (the Grinch) and Krystle Martin, John Bigham, Chase Mullins, Flip Kobler, Erik Baker and Amy Schumacher are also in the movie. The story is about a young woman who defends her town from a murderous green creature who goes on a killing spree during the holidays.
Yael’s music is exciting and also thoroughly appropriate and precisely to the beat of the emotional content in the film, whether the scene is presenting quiet dialogue or a fight to the death. Her translation of fantasy scenes into music is wonderfully done also. Her music can certainly stand alone and on its own be enjoyed, but her intuitive musical nature is able to perfectly join her creative composition of sound with each frame of the movie, which doubles or even triples the intensity of impact that the film’s creator had in mind. It’s as though the music is a clone or a shadow of what’s happening with the characters, and it heightens and magnifies the emotional perception and reaction of the audience.
Her scores in every film she has worked on have kept pace perfectly with what is shown on the silver screen. She has studied music since she was five and has been a composer of original music since the age of twelve. Her first love is music, of course, but her passion is composing musical scores for films. She feels that each new music assignment is a fresh start, a new beginning, because it’s all about feeling. Each job brings new feelings for her to experience and transcribe into music. She starts her day centering herself with meditation and then she enters her recording studio where she spends the whole day composing, arranging and producing music.
When she works on a film, she works closely with the director, as she did with Steven LaMorte on The Mean One, to make sure that he got the music and the feeling that he wanted. They go through the entire film, minute by minute, beat by beat, and they listen to each other’s suggestions and then she goes and writes the music and manifests it into something that becomes an integral part of the film. Next time you see a movie, try to imagine what it would be like without music. Movies can hardly survive without musical scores like the ones Yael Benamour creates.
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