Colin Farrell shows Jamie Lee Curtis music by Irish composer and she loves it

The annual “actors on actors” video pieces on Variety’s website offer performers in the awards crossfires an opportunity to exchange ideas and celebrate each other’s talents. This year’s partnership of Jamie Lee Curtis, a potential Oscar nominee for Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Colin Farrell, near certain nominee for The Banshees of Inisherin, was an inspired choice. There are no two more lively interviewees on the planet. “Ireland is an incredibly friendly country,” Curtis says, in a moment of diplomatic perfection.

The most intriguing section of the conversation finds Curtis asking Farrell for a piece of music that inspires him. He reaches into an inside pocket for his phone and plays a few bars of a surging operatic aria (or so it sounds). Curtis leans back and closes her eyes. Farrell looks contemplative.

“It’s nice. Huh? It was an accident, but it’s an Irish composer,” he says.

“It’s not an accident,” Curtis says wryly.

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“Patrick Cassidy is his name – Vide Cor Meum,” he says. “There is forgiveness. There is revelation. There is hope. There is the acceptance of sadness. Not just the representation of sadness, not just the witnessing, but the accepting of it as a part of our life.”

Vide Cor Meum has an unlikely history. Like a small few pieces of film music – Ennio Morricone’s Gabriel’s Oboe from The Mission for instance – the piece has escaped its origins and become a part of the wider culture. Twenty years ago Cassidy, a Mayo man, was asked to compose the tune for Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal. Derived from Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nova, the music appears in a scene at the opera house in Florence. Any old opera would have done, but Scott, a perfectionist, fancied the idea of an entirely new piece. Cassidy, whose cantata The Children of Lir had been a hit in Ireland, proved the perfect collaborator.

“I was working with Hans Zimmer at the time, who was the composer on the movie,” Cassidy told the Den of Geek site in 2021. “He works on a lot of projects simultaneously and he knew my strength was choral music ... They needed an aria and they were shooting the scene in two weeks. So I was in the right place at the right time.”

It was a great opportunity for the Irish composer. He had been in Los Angeles for a year and was working for Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions. Hannibal, sequel to Silence of the Lambs was a commercial hit, but reviews were mixed and the film is far from being the most celebrated Hannibal Lecter adventure. Cassidy’s piece has, however, grown in popularity. The melancholy nature of Dante’s verse permeates the aria. But it is the surging quality of Cassidy’s composition that has registered with audiences. The tune was originally intended to last just a minute, but when Scott and legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis heard the initial sketch, it was expanded to two and a half minutes. A four-minute version was then commissioned for the soundtrack.

That piece’s popularity helped Hannibal’s elevation to a place in the top 100 soundtracks of all time as voted for by listeners to Classic FM. Scott was so fond of Vide Cor Meum that he also included it in his 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven. “I loved it in that movie,” Cassidy said. “I thought that was an incredible scene. In many respects I even nearly prefer it in that movie than I do Hannibal.” Cassidy went on to compose an opera about Dante that was scheduled to premiere in time for the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2021, but, like so much else in the Covid era, it ended up delayed.

The conversation between Farrell and Curtis meanders over a wide range. They discuss inspirations, favourite films, lessons learned in recovery and the joys of coming home. “L A means more to me than I thought this city ever would,” Farrell says. “But when I go home, it makes sense to me in a way that no other place would have the business making sense to me.”