Volkswacht Bodensee - Music links past, present for Pedro Pascal's cellist in 'Behemoth!'

"I was so taken by what the story was and the... intimacy of all of it, in the way that I guess how intimate it can feel to listen to music and to be guided by music," the 51-year-old actor told AFP on Friday.

Jumping between past and present, the film tells the story of Alex Serian, a cellist who moves to Los Angeles to care for his dying mother and escape an overbearing ex played by Olivia Wilde.

While there he joins an orchestra that performs film scores, and the music they play serves as a link for both Alex and the audience, connecting fragments from his past that appear to have overwhelmed him.

Chilean-American Pascal said his character "just seemed like a person who is as much of a kind of passenger to his life as you are a passenger to his experience...as a viewer."

As he goes from city to city, lover to lover, the score for "Behemoth!" -- written by nine composers and which serves as the score performed by the orchestra in the film -- triggers the main character's memories.

The film marks a departure for Gilroy, who cut his teeth writing action movies like the "Bourne" films and legal thrillers like "Michael Clayton."

"I never wrote a character quite like this before that wasn't escaping or rushing towards" crises, the 70-year-old filmmaker said, adding that he was inspired by the legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, who "manages to be... a passenger in the movie, but never passive."

"And that's the trick to this: is to put him on the train and not have him run over by it. And that became possible when (Pedro Pascal) came on."

US actress Eva Victor, who plays one of Alex's partners in the movie, questions whether the main character is as passive as he appears to be.

"I feel like it's very active to be running from things and to be not engaging with things in your life... I think that's very actively self-sabotaging," she said.

R.Buehler--VB