Last Days

Composer Oliver Leith and librettist/co-director Matt Copson’s Last Days had its world premiere at The Royal Opera in 2022. Adapted from American director Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film loosely based on the final days of grunge icon Kurt Cobain, the opera is an introspective exploration of alienation, banality and silence amidst noise, with costumes by Balenciaga and an original aria recorded by singer-songwriter Caroline Polacheck.

Gus Van Sant’s film Last Days (2005) is the third and final installment in the director’s ‘Death Trilogy’, which began with Gerry (2002), about two hikers – both named Gerry – who get lost in the desert, and continued with the Palme d’Or-winning Elephant (2003), about a high school shooting. Van Sant’s trilogy was a departure from his earlier commercially-successful films Drugstore Cowboy (1987), starring Matt Dillon, and Good Will Hunting (1997), starring Robin Williams and Matt Damon, as well as his indie cult classic My Own Private Idaho (1991), starring River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. Like Gerry and Elephant, which draw inspiration from real-life events (the former a news story, the latter, the Columbine shooting), Last Days is loosely based on the final, unaccounted-for days of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who died by suicide at his home in Seattle, Washington in 1994.  

Though Van Sant originally sought to do a biographical film on Cobain, whose band Nirvana not only popularized alternative rock but skyrocketed the singer to international stardom, he later changed direction opting for a more abstract depiction. Taking inspiration from the art house films of Chantal Akerman and Béla Tarr, Van Sant has likened Last Days to slow cinema, with its nearly real-time events and lack of plot and dialogue. For much of the film, the character of Blake (Michael Pitt), reminiscent of Cobain, inaudibly and incoherently mumbles. This style of speech – or non-speech – is maintained in Oliver Leith and Matt Copson’s adaptation, with their Blake, French actor Agathe Rousselle (of Julia Ducournau’s Titane), doing the same. For more on the making of Last Days, including the director’s encounter with Cobain.

Leith and Copson’s idea for an operatic adaptation of the film came about pre-pandemic. ‘We had talked about Last Days as a reference for this sort of everyday lull,’ says Leith. ‘Everything in the film is heightened, no matter how mundane it is, because we know that Blake will kill himself. After a long time, climbing the walls to find an analogy for it, we knew that we needed to adapt the film.’  

Assembling a dynamic team, including set designer Grace Smart, Balenciaga for costumes and co-director Anna Morrissey, Copson and Leith crafted what would become a critically-acclaimed work, with sell-out successes in Covent Garden, as well as at the opera’s US premiere at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Thomas Adès. Smart’s set designs blur the lines between chaos and isolation, her depiction of a cluttered environment, including a television set with a plaid backdrop, a kitchen area with cereal boxes, and a shotgun prominently displayed, setting the scene for Blake’s final days, while the oversized, deconstructed, sculptural designs by Balenciaga communicate eccentricity and alienation.