In 2005, Gus Van Sant released Last Days, his meditative and almost wordless film loosely imagining the final days of Kurt Cobain. In the film Cobain becomes Blake, a spectral figure who drifts through his house, occasionally eating cereal and noodling on his guitar. Not much else happens. It’s great, we promise.

Almost twenty years later, Last Days has been reimagined as an opera by composer Oliver Leith and artist Matt Copson. On paper, it is a concept that should not work. Opera is a form built on grand gestures and oversized emotion, and Last Days is the total antithesis of that. Yet when the opera premiered during a short run in 2022, it was met with rave reviews. This season, the production returns to the Royal Opera House for an extended run and a new leading man: the rising actor Jake Dunn, slipping into Blake’s fluffy green coat and white sunglasses.

Ahead of the revival, we caught up with Leith and Copson to discuss the unlikely transformation of Gus Van Sant’s work into opera and the delicate task of adapting such a singular film.

Barry Pierce: I’m curious about which one of you watched Last Days and saw opera in it?
Matt Copson: We both come from different worlds, music and art, and when we first met we were trying to find a middle ground. And I think we came across this idea that we were both interested in: the idea of magic and also banality, and how those things are not necessarily opposed to one another. So we had a bunch of references that came up in conversation. Beauty and the Beast was one, whether the Disney or the [Jean] Cocteau or whatever, in terms of the animated spaces and buildings and characters. And then Last Days as well, particularly this one section where the main character eats cereal. Just thinking about how it is so inherently not interesting on its own, but nothing is interesting on its own; it is only interesting in its relativity, and this relativity is death. At a certain point, we felt there was a lot more to mine in this.
Oliver Leith: It is a film about feeling as well, right? And that was the feeling we were interested in chasing. You know, I joked to Matt about wanting to write an opera about taking the bins out, which we have done. [laughs]
MC: And then I was also thinking, every day I see a young kid wearing a Nirvana T-shirt. It feels so far removed from the original reference at this point, but it is also one of the only things that culturally is completely standing the test of time from the 1990s. I was also intrigued about this moment in time when you had rebellion within the mainstream.

BP: Oliver, this is the first time you have done an operatic project on this scale. How did you approach the adaptation?
OL: Well, there is no music in the film, but the sound is super interesting. We use a lot of real sound in the opera, but it is sort of musicalised and warped into the score. The other reason for it being suitable is that Blake is a really alienated character, and the way to make him even more alien is to surround him with opera singers and a building that basically makes sound, so everything around him is scored apart from him. Opera is a strange premise, so we have put a real person, who does not sing, in the strange premise.

“I joked to Matt about wanting to write an opera about taking the bins out…”

MC: That was the approach from early on. We wanted this Theatre of the Absurd approach to it, where the main character is basically in a play, but everyone else on stage is in an opera. That seemed like an interesting thing to do, and to use opera as this extremely alienating thing, contrasting the opera with total banality.
OL: The most melodramatic thing that is happening in the piece does not have any music. All the singers who are doing the most normal things, even the DHL driver, have melodrama in their music. But Blake, the only person who is going through something melodramatic, is silent.
MC: But it also feels emotionally truthful for it to be like that. When something extreme happens, it is often the banality of it that is also the tragedy. Opera just felt like the right form for this. Ollie would probably consider himself an outsider to this world.
OL: Yes, I am not a die-hard.
MC: And I am from a totally different world too. I barely knew the terminology of things. But…
OL: We both believed in the potential of it. We did not do the text-then-music production thing. We wrote it completely together.
MC: So I would write some text, send it to Ollie, Ollie would write some music, send it to me. We went back and forth.

“Blake is a really alienated character, and the way to make him even more alien is to surround him with opera singers”

BP: That is so interesting because that is absolutely not how operas are usually written. Usually the librettist produces the full libretto, and then the composer makes the score to fit around that.
OL: I find that completely insane.
MC: I am in the position where I am writing and also directing, so when we are in the room we are able to say, “This is too long, this does not work,” and then instantly change stuff. We used rehearsals as a continuation of the writing process.

BP: I am intrigued by how you approached producing the libretto, because Last Days is practically a silent film. I don’t think there is a single word said in the first twenty minutes.
MC: A lot of the words I wrote are stage directions. The libretto mostly denotes what Blake is going to do at all times. I had already drawn out what the stage would look like and how the exits and entrances might work. But I could only do that because I knew I would direct it. If you have a mute character, their actions are really important all of the time. The film itself was mostly improvised. Gus Van Sant sent us the script he worked with for the film, and it was two pages with some scribbles on it. So what we did was less an adaptation and more a continuation of an idea.

“Gus Van Sant sent us the script he worked with for the film, and it was two pages with some scribbles on it.”

BP: I am surprised to hear how hands-on you both are with this project, especially with Matt directing it. From previous interviews I have done with opera makers, they rarely become so involved in the actual staging of the piece. This feels like something you have both realised entirely from beginning to end.
OL: For me, as the composer, I find it so weird that it would reach a point where they would be like, “OK, you will not be in the room for this bit.” I know how something looks and how it sounds. Those things are linked. We knew what the house looked like before we started it.
MC: I think the dream of opera is still the Wagner idea, all of the elements operating together. Because if they don’t, unless that dissonance is interesting, which it potentially could be, then it really should be about all of these things being unable to exist without each other.

BP: Could you see some other opera company taking the work and doing their own thing with it?
OL: It will happen. I have to be open to it. However I don’t think we would ever make something where we knew it was going to go into someone else’s hands. But I do think it is interesting to see other people picking things apart. Sometimes people completely misunderstand things, and you see that happening all the time. But that is part of the history of opera.

BP: I know that, in a strange cyclical way, there is going to be a film version of your Last Days, a film of an opera of a film. What can you tell me about it?
MC: I always had the plan to re-adapt the opera back into a film.
OL: That was almost one of the first discussions we had.
MC: There is an idea that is central to Last Days, which is about assimilation. Any kind of rebellion, any avant-garde, any kind of resistance, becomes assimilated. It is an inevitability within the society we live in. It is interesting that Generation X was so preoccupied with sell-out culture, whereas that is kind of a laughable idea to millennials, who sold out upon arrival from the womb. I was thinking about this character who did not want to be assimilated. He did not want to be on stage. And I thought about how interesting it would be to take these forms, opera, theatre, film, and to keep on adapting and shifting them.
It is all live singing in the film. It is pretty much its own thing. But it is shot, and it will come out next year. In the mornings I am editing the film, and then I come to the Opera House to rehearse on stage. [laughs]

Last Days runs at the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House until 3 January. More info and tickets here.