Art & Creativity Quote by Alejandro Amenabar

Amenabar is quietly confessing a heresy in an industry that fetishizes “more”: more strings, more layers, more emotional underlining, more proof of craft. His point isn’t that music fails, but that it can succeed so loudly it crowds out the film it’s meant to serve. The most pointed phrase here is “too well finished.” Perfection becomes a kind of noise. A score can be impeccably engineered and still feel wrong because it leaves no air for ambiguity, performance, or silence to do their work.

The intent is practical, almost editorial: to defend subtraction as a creative decision, not a budgetary compromise. Directors and composers are always negotiating control over the audience’s feelings; music is the fastest way to tell viewers what to feel and when. Amenabar is warning that the more “elements” you stack, the more you risk turning emotion into instruction. A busy score can act like emotional spam: constant prompts that flatten nuance, leaving every scene “important,” which means nothing is.

There’s also an auteur’s subtext. Amenabar, who composes as well as directs, knows the seduction of the score from the inside: the temptation to solve narrative problems with sound, to patch pacing with crescendos, to sweeten thin characterization with lush themes. He’s arguing for restraint as confidence. If the image and the cut are doing their job, the music can dare to be partial, even absent, and the film becomes more alive - because the audience gets room to participate rather than be pushed.