The film Last Days follows a fresh-out-of-rehab rock musician named Blake — modeled after Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain — who’s battling a drug addiction and neglecting his family and career. Gus Van Sant’s 2005 movie has been adapted into an opera that will make its U.S. debut on Feb. 6 with the LA Philharmonic.
Oliver Leith was a composer-in-residence at London's Royal Opera House when he decided to make his first opera based on this movie. He tells KCRW that the movie finds its magic in ordinary life: “We know what happens to the character in the end, so all these everyday, mundane things are reframed, there’s a heaviness and a heightened-ness to them.”
Matt Copson — the show’s librettist, co-director, and art director — says Blake purposely does not have a voice in the opera.
“The language of opera that everyone else is singing is super alienating to this character who is on the precipice of death and is as alienated as a human could be,” Copson explains. “That felt like a really exciting development theatrically — to have somebody who everyone is obsessed with … they're not allowed to express in the same way that these super expressive opera singers are.”
He continues, “It's extremely physical and … [an] animalistic approach to performance, where somebody really has to express so much with their body because they don't have a voice themselves.”
Agathe Rousselle plays Blake, who doesn’t sing in the opera, but only mumbles. The French actress saw Last Days 15-20 times before Copson approached her about the opera. He says she was “obsessed” with the movie and Nirvana heavily influenced her teenage life.
Blake is modeled after Cobain, but Leith says the similarities stop there.
“It was important for me to distance it from that. The main thing about this is that it is opera, and they're singing like opera singers, and that world is stifling and … alienating. … The house itself is musical as well. So this alienation continues into objects. And so, ‘Why is everyone singing? But also, why is the doorbell singing? Why are the trees singing?’”
Copson says the production fuses — and speaks to — the different materials in the modern world.
“An opera combines theater, music, fashion, acting, and movement. … There are all of these forms that take from film … art … ballet … music. And then [Oliver Leith’s] music … isn't just subscribed to a traditional orchestra. There's electronics at play, but there's also strange uses of percussions. There's bottles … rakes … bean bags … all these everyday items.”