At a masterclass at the 50th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Alexandre Desplat talks about working with Terrence Malick on 2010's Tree of Life. "The most important thing for me, for music to express," the composer, who's worked on nine features in 2009, says, "is the invisible, to show what is not in the film, whether outside the frame, or in the depth of field." He offers a cooking analogy about when the score and the film finally work together. When spaghetti is cooked just right, he says, throwing his arms up toward the blank screen behind him, "It sticks to the wall. You know it's right when the music sticks to the scene." Asked if there are scores he wishes he could have written to earlier films, he thought for a moment, and answered, "Thousands... Polanski, Chinatown, Malick's Days of Heaven, Hitchcocks... Color! The things Polanski and Jerry Goldsmith did with silence in Chinatown... Un Peau Douce, I would love to have been able to do a Truffaut."

Below, Desplat answers a question from the audience about Tarantino's soundtracks; describes the "exaltation" and "crap" of the film composer's life; and talks about working with light and "color" on Vermeer-based fantasy "The Girl With The Pearl Earring."

McCarthy thinks there's too much of ordinary things. "Well, I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so." Hillcoat follows with an example of gatekeepers of culture tightening the process. "No, you're absolutely right. Just as an example, the Toronto Film Festival is one of the biggest in film festivals. They have made it, for the first time ever, much more difficult to submit a film. They charge an entry fee and they still had 4,000 submissions just this year and they boiled that down to 300." Now imagine the twinkle in McCarthy's eye: "This is just entry level to what's coming. Just the appalling volume of artifacts will erase all meaning that they could ever possibly have. But we probably won't get that far anyway."