Benh Zeitlin

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” seized the attention of the film world last year, and now director/composer Benh Zeitlin is taking his movie on a tour featuring a live orchestra that highlights the importance of the musical component in the film’s success.

The movie will screen at 8:30 p.m., on Saturday, Aug. 10, at Mass MoCA, with Zeitlin, musical partner Dan Romer and the Wordless Music Orchestra performing the live film score.

Nominated for best film, director, actress and screenplay at the Oscars, a four-award winner at Cannes and the grand jury prize winner at Sundance, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” follows bayou dweller Hushpuppy (played by newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis) as she faces a natural disaster within her community and embarks on a quest to find her lost mother. It has a fairy tale quality, but without the usual trappings.

“To me it’s a very real story that’s being told by a little girl who thinks of her life as a fairy tale,” Zeitlin said. “That’s always how I would say it. You’re experiencing this world through the eyes of a very imaginative, very young soul, who has a very different idea of how things work than adults do, so the music is always meant to express the way she would tell you the story as opposed to just what’s happening. Her life is a fairy tale to her, so hopefully that’s the way the audience experiences the events that happen in the film.”

The musical score has always been an extremely important part of the film and Zeitlin’s creative process. It extends the storytelling and performances by adding extra emotional dimensions and also offering further explorations of the main character, Hushpuppy, while still grounding her in a sense of place that exists outside of her.

“The culture of the film is rooted in South Louisiana and we wanted Cajun music to be the forefront texture,” Zeitlin said. “It was just finding the right balance between something that felt of the world of the film, the music that would be played in the town, and then finding some other texture that was more about Hushpuppy’s more mystical, philosophical, interplanetary conception of how things worked. It was about finding the balance between those things and getting it so they both still existed, but you always felt like you were in her head.”

Zeitlin began writing musical cues alongside the screenplay early on, as he does with virtually any film project he takes on. None of that score got used in the film, but it was absorbed by what the film became.

“The concepts behind it are really integrated from the moment the script is written, knowing what role the music is going to play, what it’s going to express, what needs to be said, what’s going to be embedded in the music,” said Zeitlin. “The music was always very much going to be the broadcast station for Hushpuppy’s head to frame the world in her terms, to give this ramshackle place a very mystical grandeur that it wouldn’t necessarily have just looking at it.”

Zeitlin says that music is often the first thing that comes to him when he begins creating a film, but he takes into account how the actual realization of the movie might reshape those musical needs, even as it has all been spurred on by that same music.

“You feel the music as you begin to feel what the movie is going to become, which happened with this,” Zeitlin said. “But when we got through the entire process, that initial score was almost too oriented in Cajun music. It felt like the score was coming from the culture of the film as opposed to the character of Hushpuppy. As we worked on it, it became much more about expressing her through music and then coloring it with the Cajun music that is the opposite of that.”

Zeitlin’s own history with music began casually, as part of a rock band with his friends in seventh grade that saw him write a couple songs that he describes as “incredibly bad,” but taking those lessons into college. There he started working in theater, wrote a couple musicals and began writing for film, devising ways in which the music he heard in his head could be translated to support the stories he wanted to tell.

“I’ve always thought that music is a better emotional language than talking,” he said. “The goal, when you’re writing a film and you’re trying to make a film, is to articulate those really complicated feelings, so a lot of times you have it in the music. To me, the labor is then getting it into the film, which is a much more complicated process, but music can very naturally express that stuff.”

Zeitlin has worked with Romer on all his previous short films. The process involves Zeitlin coming up with “rudimentary skeletons” during the scriptwriting period and then sending these to Romer to get his reaction.

“The score doesn’t really start to exist until we get together in a room, and I’ll play him these 30-, 40-second chunks that I’ve written until we know which two are actually worth saving,” he said. “Dan takes those things, together we expanded them, he writes new themes that go alongside the main theme and then the orchestration is very much his world. We’re both there for everything. It’s something that I couldn’t do without him because I’m a very nuts and bolts musician — I can barely play the piano — so it really gets fleshed out when both me and Dan get in the room.”

Zeitlin and Romer met through mutual friends from both high school and college, and they cemented the musical partnership in college when Romer snuck Zeitlin into his college’s music studio to clandestinely record a score for Zeitlin’s first short film.

“Dan and I both like to work 20-hour days and never stop to do anything else and charge at a project with our entire lives,” Zeitlin said. “It’s very rare you meet a person who likes to do that, so when we saw that in each other, I think it was clear that this was going to be a life-long partnership.”

Their latest project together moves well beyond film, though is still related — a pop record that is based on the new work in their next film. Zeitlin says that the songs stand alone, even though they are embedded in that film, and the hope is to “put out a big epic pop act and put out a record that doesn’t have a movie going along with it.”

“We’re trying to find a New Orleans pop star to collaborate with and launch a project with,” he said. “That’s the plan right now.”

As to the particulars of the next film, Zeitlin is keeping that a secret for now, but did say that it, like all his other films, was formed by music.

“The beginning of the writing process to me always begins with a 500-song playlist,” said Zeitlin. “That’s where things start. You get the feeling, you get the idea and then you build the songs. And once you’re listening, you’re writing songs and those two parts are inseparable. So it’ll be a little while before it’s done, but the same process is happening again.”

Zeitlin will not reveal anything further about the film, other than to say that behind-the-scenes, the production will incorporate the same processes as “Beasts,” and in this way, hopefully maintain the same spirit.

“We’re making the film in the same way with the same people,” Zeitlin said. “I can say that much about it. It’s not like it’s related to ‘Beasts’ as far as a sequel or anything like that. We’re really trying to protect and preserve the process that we used to make that film, which is very unique, very much outside of the industry. The new project is very much going to be made in that same culture. That much I can say.”