I’ve made a video that lays out the evidence for this - https://youtu.be/36ExvkMIipU. Part 2 is coming soon.

For those that don’t know, Sparks have made funny and catchy pop music for almost 50 years, influencing artists as wide ranging as Bjork, Beck, Sex Pistols, Erasure and Red Hot Chilli Peppers, making great music to this day yet somehow have remained obscure.

Leos Carax said this about this about his collaboration with Sparks: “We had 80 songs and only kept 42. There were many versions of every song, depending on where the story was going.”

So during the 8 years of development, pieces were added, removed and altered, and this concept is embedded into the movie itself. If you look at the quotations, additional music and archival movie footage used throughout, something interesting connects it: there’s an uncanny number of references to creative works that were changed into something different, moving it beyond from the artist’s initial vision. Just like ‘Annette’.

‘The Crowd’ by King Vidor This movie from 1928 is used during a montage of Ann’s performances. Its original release was delayed because the movie studio was displeased at the lack of a happy ending. At their insistence, seven alternative happy endings were filmed.

‘Till the clouds roll by’ While Henry is babysitting, the TV shows a musical number from this 1946 Judy Garland movie. The song, ’D’ye love me’, was filmed by a different director (her husband Vincente Minnelli) but then cut from the final movie.

‘Oceans’ Footage is used from this French nature documentary which was distributed by Disney Pictures. The final cut had 20 minutes of violent footage removed to make it palatable to a young audience.

‘Rogue one’ We see this playing at a cinema while Henry rides past on his motorcycle. The Star Wars spin-off had extensive reshoots with new scenes, including a new soundtrack and ending.

‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ There are several visual parallels between ‘Annette‘ and the first feature-length Disney movie. It was originally conceived as a comedy piece, with a continuous run of jokes from the dwarfs. In later drafts, scenes were removed in order to focus more on Snow White and the Evil Queen, and less on the comic relief.

‘The Night of the Hunter’ The shot of Ann’s body falling to the depths of the ocean calls back to this 1955 American Thriller. The screenplay was by James Agee, based on his own book, but director Charles Laughton rewrote most of the script without credit. This was partly because the story features an evil preacher, highly controversial at the time, so the changes were made so that he would appear unordained.

‘Bluebeards Castle’ This opera was completed in 1911, but not taken seriously because of its single act structure. It was modified in 1912 and a new ending added in 1917.

‘National Brotherhood Week’ by Tom Lehrer This is the song that goes “and the Catholics hate the Muslims, and the Muslims hate the Catholics”. The musical satirist would often update the jokes in his songs at live performances.

‘Symphony No. 2’ by Gustav Mahler This was composed reusing elements of the composer‘s first symphony,

‘Otello’ by Verdi This was written between 1879 and 1887. Many drafts exist between the libretto first being written and its completion, with notes and letter published showing the evolution of the work as the music demanded changes to the text and vice versa.

‘Carmen’ by Bizet This was altered several times during the rehearsal for the first performance. As such, the vocal score from March 1875 shows significant changes from the version of the score sold to the publishers, which is in turn different to the orchestral score. Nobody knows which version was originally performed.

‘Madam Butterfly’ by Puccini First completed in 1904, this was withdrawn after a disastrous premiere. In total Puccini wrote five versions of this opera.

‘Norma’ by Bellini When composing this opera, Bellini wanted it to be performed by star soprano Giuditta Pasta. To entice her, he offered to retouch or even change the character completely to suit her.

‘Symphony No. 4’ by Brahms The debut performance was a scaled-down preview played on two pianos to a small audience of friends. Despite going on to be a classic, it was panned by the audience, with critic Eduard Hanslick describing it as “being given a beating by two incredibly intelligent people”.

‘La traviata’ by Verdi This opera was envisioned in a contemporary setting, but the authorities insisted it be set in the past.

‘Mother Courage and her Children’ by Bertold Bretch This 1941 play includes the quotation “War is like love, it always finds a way”, which likely serves as inspiration for ‘True love always finds a way’. For it’s second production in 1949, Brecht revised the play to make Mother Courage less sympathetic, because despite rave reviews, he felt that critics misunderstood the piece.

These works aren’t necessarily being evoked because of their stories or themes, but because of how they were changed. Leos Carax and Sparks are showing us that the movie we’re watching is inextricably tied to the method used in creating it. In other words, it’s not just an incidental bit of trivia that ‘Annette’ had several drafts, it’s core to the understanding of the movie.

With the release of the Unlimited Edition of the soundtrack album, Sparks gave some insight into a previous draft, and it helps us to better understand the final movie. It includes a handful of demos and unused songs which show a very different trajectory for Henry McHenry. Instead of destroying his career by offending his audience, he’s instead met with indifference because falling in love and having a child has taken away his edge as a performer. We therefore know that Henry’s comedy routines were rewritten, and this fact can be used to explain a lot.

The title of Henry’s show is The Ape of God. This is a term for Satan that originated from the Middle Ages, meaning that he impersonates (or apes) godly things to make people do evil. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes it as “an evil who attempts to imitate God through spurious, malicious creations that he interpolates for the divine creations”. The word “interpolate” means “to insert something (of a different nature) into something else”, which is what the screenwriters are doing by reworking these scenes. The Henry McHenry that we see isn’t the character as originally envisioned - he’s a rewrite, and this explains the uncomfortable anti-comedy of his routines.

One of Sparks’ defining characteristics is humour, with a distinctive style of wit that’s been a constant presence in their music throughout the decades. Their songs feature colourful characters and clever pop-culture references, but with ‘Annette’ they go in the opposite direction, filling it with sadness at every turn. If you look back through Sparks’ catalogue of songs, finding something without an element of joy or humour is rare. They’re a “fun” band, but that element of fun is mostly missing in ‘Annette’ - this is fundamentally different to the Sparks we’ve seen before.

This was explained by Leos Carax when asked how the movie was reshaped from Sparks’ original screenplay.

“The only changes I made were with the writing. It was only a storyline without characters. The brothers live in this Sparks bubble, which is pop fantasy. There was a lot of irony. Irony in a cinema is a danger, I think. It has a tendency to make everything less crucial, less real. It’s a bit too easy for cinema, especially today. I had to make that irony into something else. We had to really create Henry as a character.”

Here’s the theory: Ron and Russell wrote a comedy that was true to Sparks, then employed Leos Carax to impose restrictions on the rewriting process. These were the changes necessary for the band to achieve their dream of making a true art house tragedy.

I still have lots more to share on this, but in the meantime I’d love your thoughts.