Ping-ponging into movies

SYNTH wizard Lopatin riffed on electronica for the “Marty Supreme” score.

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electronic sounds, chime patches and drones that trigger an unexplained comfort. (He’s an elder millennial, more like an Xennial.) A doting Duran Duran-loving sister helped, as did his father’s jazz fusion cassettes. He grew up during a decade of synth wizards: Jan Hammer on TV every week with “Miami Vice,” Vangelis and Giorgio Moroder winning Oscars.

But Lopatin is quick to take our conversation to a deeper level, invoking the ghostly idea — originally articulated by Jacques Derrida — of “hauntology” and cultural trash remixed into treasure.

“There’s a rich and vast tradition of reappropriating ugly things and taking them back and making them beautiful again and salvaging things from the dumpster,” he says. “I think it’s basically about looking at your environment, including the stuff that’s meant to just be there fast and cheap and then disappear, and be the type of person for whom that long-tail stuff is actually fascinating. I was always drawn to that.”

In the case of “Marty Supreme,” set in the early 1950s, that means a radical use of electronica: sequenced beats, zinging harps and treated choir voices. It’s very much Lopatin’s “Chariots of Fire.” Some moments would work perfectly as the climax of a Rocky movie (“We went full Bill Conti for a while, then we pulled back,” he says). Others have the expressive tenderness of a Tangerine Dream-scored fantasy like “Risky Business.”

For Safdie, that process entails going to a vulnerable place with his composer, lunging for the feelings as best he can. He gives me a taste.

“I'll say: ‘The feeling of this piece is intoxication, it’s cosmic. You're entering into a world—you're basically on a spaceship and you're going to a new place but that place is beautiful and it’s full of life’” he says, smiling. “Those are the things we talk about. And then Dan is really good at interpreting feelings through melody. He’s kind of a melody master.”