Ella van der Woude - How to Shoot a Ghost (OST) (Vinyl Pre-Order)
PRE-ORDER 'HOW TO SHOOT A GHOST (OST)' NOW ON 12" VINYL
How to Shoot a Ghost is the new short film by director Charlie Kaufman (director of Synecdoche, New York, writer of Being John Malkovich and Oscar winner for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), starring Jessie Buckley (Oscar-nominated for The Lost Daughter, and known for Wild Rose and Men, having previously worked with Kaufman on I’m Thinking of Ending Things). The film premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival:
Two newly dead young people meet in the streets of Athens, amid the pulsing cityscape and the ghosts of history. One a translator, the other a photographer, they were outsiders in life; in death, they struggle with the residue of their longings and mistakes. They wander the city together, finding consolation in the difficult beauty of existence and its aftermath.
Ella van der Woude:
“When the producers reached out about scoring a short film called How to Shoot a Ghost, directed by Charlie Kaufman, I honestly assumed it was someone starting out who simply shared his name. I didn’t know he had directed another short before this one, and the whole situation felt too unlikely to be real. By the time I came on board, the edit was nearly finished, so things moved quickly, and I started working soon after our first Zoom meeting.
Eva H.D. (writer) and Charlie Kaufman worked closely together throughout our process, and our weekly meetings often made me feel more like I was in a Kaufman film than scoring one; their dynamic was funny, and the circumstances in which we met – different time zones, freezing screens, life happening in the background – added an extra layer of absurdity.
A film always has its own will, and you have to figure out what it wants. The main challenge in scoring this film was shaping and punctuating the music that appears almost continuously. It took me a moment to understand how much the film’s narration would rely on the score. I intuitively felt like keeping a lot of open space for the voice-over to unfold, but Charlie and Eva rightly encouraged me to create something far more propulsive and illustrative than what I would naturally write. That’s something I really appreciate about film scoring: you end up making music that still sounds like you, yet takes you somewhere you wouldn’t have reached on your own.
In this case, the musical language is clear and simple, which gave me the freedom to experiment more with arrangements and textures. I worked from a solid foundation of piano and cello lines — played by Alistair Sung — which created the ground for the saxophone, performed by Hristo Goleminov, to soar and dance freely alongside the wonderfully wild cello work of Brent Arnold. You can hear this interplay clearly in Is Beauty Enough?
The film is full of beauty – an intimate connection to the material world and, ultimately, a graceful farewell to it. The music aims to evoke these emotions in the viewer.”
Charlie Kaufman:
“We were fortunate that she agreed to work with us. The film is less a conventional narrative than a collage, a day in the death of two ghosts wandering Athens. It mixes actors, street photography, archival footage, and home videos to create a tapestry that jumps back and forth in time. We needed a score that could move nimbly through all the various moods and still maintain an emotional throughline. Ella worked creatively and tirelessly with us to find so many beautiful and soulful solutions. Her extraordinary score, so integral to our film, is a work of art in its own right.”