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Safe soundtrack liner notes
by Todd Haynes

Safe is a movie: it tells lies. But unlike most movies, Safe lies on purpose.

Throughout the film, what we hear and what we see are two very different things. The film's cool presentation dehumanises the affluence of suburban Los Angeles; just as the mysteries of environmental illness undermine the surety of new age thought. But nowhere are these deceptions more cunningly poised than in Ed Tomney's evocative score.

That ability of synthetic music to transcend into something rich and corporeal - it's all in the timbre, Ed would say. What matters is not composition but instrumentation: the way the sounds are treated, layered, lacquered. The reverberation of analogue synthesis as opposed to the cleanness of digital recording. Random experimentation. Mistakes. I watched as Ed, stealing sounds from the pits of tenement piping or the cacophonous mass of his industrial orchestra, collected raw material for his own brand of aural alchemy.

Ed's score makes reference to New Age music much in the way the plot of Safe refers to disease movies. In each case the conventions are overturned. When Carol White discovers Wrenwood, the new age health retreat "nestled in the foothills of Albuqurque", there emerges in the music, wafting through the general disquiet, a suspicious calm. Is this the answer? Disease movies and New Age gurus say yes. But as Safe reveals the personal toll these spiritual fixes take, the score spills open. The synthetic calm darkens, and New Age composure gives way to loss and uncertainty.

Like most films, Safe was a collaboration with other artists, each contributing to the film's overriding principal of restraint. In strict opposition to current trends in movies, I wanted to tell a story as quietly as possible. The result, in every aspect, is a minimalist film: from Julianne Moore's courageous simplicity and Alex Nepomniaschy's immaculate camera, to the bristling composure of James Lyons' cutting and the quiet force of Ed's music. This restraint provides spaces for the person watching, resulting in a film that cannot be read literally. Instead, the steps we take toward understanding Carol's illness are weighted with a sense of the inexplicable - of a mystery unfolding.

Ed's music plays an essential role in that mystery.

I agree with Fassbinder who said, "revolution doesn't belong on the cinema screen, but outside, in the world". To provide an audience with a solution - to give them the revolution - is to deprive them of the necessity of creating their own. Viewers of film have extraordinary powers: they can make life out of reflections on the wall. Perhaps it's in the spaces we allow them to reflect themselves that films encourage these powers of transformation to continue - even after the movie is over.

- Todd Haynes, New York

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