Filmmaker performs live soundtrack to new movie

Film director Mark Jenkin has been performing a live soundtrack to his new film to "heighten the emotion" felt by the audience as the drama unfolds.

Jenkin's third film is the story of missing fishing trawler Rose of Nevada, which mysteriously returns to a Cornish harbour. Two young men, played by Callum Turner and George MacKay, join its crew unaware how their fates will change.

Jenkin has been performing the score live at theatre screenings with his musical partner Dion Star. They use improvised and composed pieces including tape machines, synths, guitars and field recordings.

He said the soundtrack could change at each showing. "We react to the film live with the audience," Jenkin said.

Jenkin's "creativity" has been praised by music critic Mark Kermode who saw one of the performances.

"Seeing the film with a live music performance is fantastic because they are creating the music right there in front of you.

"It's brilliant, it really adds another dimension to the movie," he said.

Jenkin, who performs with Star under the banner The Cornish Sound Unit, said they "reimagined" the soundtrack each time it was played so it was never exactly the same as it is the film.

"The music in the film is made by me in an idiosyncratic kind of way with lots of tape machines and stuff.

"We reimagine the score live, so it is bigger, because when you are on stage in front of a screen you don't want to not be doing things for large proportions of time," said Jenkin.

He said the music "played along with the audience's reactions".

"We are reacting to the audience - you can feel what direction they are going in, which bits they are finding funny and which bits are feeling emotional - we can heighten that and play with it.

"Sometimes I look to Dion and say we have done something special there. It's transcended what was there before.

"We are very much in the moment when we're doing it."

He said the instruments and techniques used to create the soundtrack had a direction of their own.

"Some is made using tape-to-tape machines. It's like a wild animal, you have no control over it, the only thing you can do is turn it off and we don't do that. It never sounds the same twice."

Jenkin said he liked adding a live element to the film-watching experience.

"The rooms we watch films in we call a cinema. Americans call them movie theatres. I prefer that, I like the idea of it being theatre, with a live element."

But Jenkin said what they were doing was "nothing new" and harped back to the days when a live pianist would play during silent movies.

"From the beginning of cinema to when talkies came in, every film had a live score.

"We are going back to the roots of what the cinematic experience was."

Kermode said he was not the only person who had been absorbed when watching the film with the live soundtrack as musician and radio presenter Jarvis Cocker shared his enthusiasm.

"I was at a showing when Mark was doing a live soundtrack and the really lovely thing was it was packed and at some point Jarvis Cocker came in and was overwhelmed by it. So next time he was on 6 music he played one of the tracks."

Rose of Nevada, released in 2025, was filmed in Hayle and Mullion in Cornwall and Jenkin has spoken about the challenges that tide and time presented him with.

Newlyn-born Jenkin won a Bafta for his debut Bait in 2020, a film documenting tensions between longstanding and new residents of a Cornish fishing village.

Jenkin said after filming Bait and the 2023 folk horror film Enys Men, which centred on a woman living on a Cornish island, he had said he "didn't want to do anything with boats again".

He had a change of heart however and decided to go ahead with Rose of Nevada, which was all filmed in west Cornwall and premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.

Since appearing in the film, Turner has been named as one of the favourites to be cast as the next James Bond.

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