Mica Levi on scoring ‘Under the Skin’: ‘I dreamt the world came out of Scarlett Johansson’s face’

Mica Levi aka Micachu of Micachu and the Shapes has spoken about writing the score for Scarlett Johansson-starring film Under The Skin.

Levi was recently awarded the European Film Award for Best Composer for the project.

Speaking about the work to The Guardian, Levi talked about the gender disparity within the film world and also about how previous teenage experiences informed some of the music.

Speaking of how she came up with the music, Levi revealed that drug taking was a reference point for inspiration and that the soundtrack lead to some bizarre dreams.

“I was associating it with rushing, with taking drugs, a foreverness, a euphoric and warm, overwhelming but not complicated, wash,” she said of one particular scene, before joking that “One night, I dreamt the whole of the world came out of Scarlett’s face, like she was vomiting it out of her. When I stopped working on it, I was like, ‘I have to stop dreaming about this’.”

Elsewhere in the interview, which focused on the March 2014 film in which Johansson plays an extraterrestrial disguising herself as a human woman, Levi also spoke of the gender divide in the film world.

“When I was at the European Film Awards, most of the people there were old white dudes,” she began, referencing the ceremony which took place on December 13 in Latvia. “Overall, the film world is just white men. I think that’s weird because film is storytelling and I don’t believe that it’s just white dudes telling stories, you know? Think of music, which has all these different genres – pop, rock, hip-hop – which attract different pockets of people. Film doesn’t have that.”

Continuing on to reference her own recent success at the ceremony, Levi then stressed the point stating, “I think the important thing is to not let your gender prohibit you. If you do come across any obstacles, or across somebody who says, ‘Oh, you’re pretty good for a girl’, then it shouldn’t be your problem; it’s their problem.”

Levi previously spoke to NME about her work on the soundtrack. Click here to read the full interview.