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Ólafur Arnalds had a cold knot of dread in his stomach when he flew to Cork to say farewell to his friend and musical collaborator Eoin French – aka Talos – shortly before his death, last August.

“He was in his last few days – a week – and we knew it was nearing the end. I was so nervous. I was kind of crying the whole way on the plane. I was shaking, walking into the room to come talk to him,” Arnalds, the composer, producer and DJ, says from his studio in Reykjavík.

He was struck by French’s positivity at their final meeting at Marymount Hospice – how at peace he was with the world. “I walked out of that room laughing. That’s the kind of a guy he was. He was the one on death’s door. But he cared about making me feel good on our last meeting. He cared that I would walk out of there with a good memory of our relationship.

“He asked me, ‘How are you doing?’ I was, like, ‘F**k that. How are you doing? Are you okay, man?’ He took this with the grace of a god. Sorry to use such a big word, but that’s the kind of a person he was.”

With such a wide range of musical interests and inspirations, he found a kindred spirit in French, who, across his three albums as Talos, incorporated influences as far-flung as Sigur Rós (from Arnald’s native Iceland), Bon Iver, Frank Ocean and Cocteau Twins.

[ Talos: To listen to Eoin French’s music was to be transported to a hauntingly beautiful parallel dimensionOpens in new window ]

As French’s health declined, he and Arnalds met to finish a series of compositions they had worked on the across the previous several years. Those songs are being released this month under the title A Dawning. It is a beautiful tribute to French, a songwriter from just outside Cork city, whose hazy, dreamlike music was punctuated with bursts of wonder, like rainbows followed by a sudden downpour of emotion.

Powerful feelings likewise ripple through A Dawning, whether via the ambient throb of Signs, which features a tender vocal from French, or the haunting We Didn’t Know We Were Ready, a sobbing acoustic number in which the Irish singer looks forward to the “peace that breaks at dawn”.

As is inevitable given the circumstances in which it was made, the album arrives with an aura of sadness. Yet for Arnalds it is not a project about death so much as an outpouring of joy and an acknowledgment of the preciousness of life – a point the musician, with Nordic directness, is eager to get across.

“Enough for the death questions, because, actually, we made this record while he was very much alive,” Arnalds says. “You’re now looking at it with the perspective of [French’s death]. But, the record, it’s not about that: the record is a celebration of life. It’s a trap, a little bit, for us, you know – me and you talking in an interview, or for a listener, for fans, for journalists – to kind of put this record always within that box, to always frame it [with death].

“I’ll tell you, when we wrote those songs we were having the best time of our lives. We were having a beautiful time together. We were communicating as friends through some of the best music both of us felt like we had ever done – and that’s what this record celebrates.”

Arnalds and French were introduced by the festival programmer and artistic curator Mary Hickson, who brought them together for Sounds from a Safe Harbour, in Cork.

Arnalds has a lump in his throat as he remembers their first meeting against the unglamorous backdrop of a hotel conference room. Despite the inauspicious setting, they had a creative spark from the outset. The collaboration continued after French received a cancer diagnosis in November 2023. He died on August 11th, 2024, at the age of 36, survived by his wife and daughter.

“It was the hottest day of the year in Cork, and we were doing this kind of artistic residency connected to the Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival,” Arnalds says of their first get-together. “We wrote the first songs in a conference room on the second floor of the hotel. It was pretty bare bones, very institution-like. But with an upright piano. That was wonderful. We had our laptops and a couple of microphones. We would have to turn off the AC while recording anything. [It was] sticky and sweaty and [we were] drinking copious amounts of coffee.”

The death of a friend is never easy, but Arnalds was struck by Irish people’s openness about the subject.

“Iceland is Protestant – in its modern roots, anyway.” Ireland and Iceland “both had the same kind of old pagan traditions. Today we’re Protestant, and death is not something you face. You don’t look at that in the eyes. And it was eye-opening for me to be in Ireland for a wake. There’s just dancing and singing. I was absolutely fascinated by it, and very impressed.

“And I wish we had even half of that here. I feel like here, someone dies … they get kind of removed very quickly. We wait maybe two weeks or so, until a convenient day for the funeral. We might have a little open casket for the closest people the night before. Then the funeral will happen in the daytime, and afterwards people will eat some cake and go home.”

Much of the album was put together at French’s house near Clonakilty, in west Cork. The landscape reminded Arnalds of home, Ireland and Iceland being, he says, two hunks of rock plonked into the North Atlantic. He also felt parallels between the Irish language and Icelandic, both under threat in a globalised world – albeit for different reasons.

“It’s no wonder that we connect quickly to Irish people. We didn’t have our language taken away from us in the same way Ireland did. But we are currently fighting not to lose it in a different way – through globalisation and social media and just technology that always is in English. Kids are starting to speak English instead of Icelandic sometimes now. So we are also fighting a fight for our language.

“It was fun to discuss that with Eoin and talk about those things. And I’ve been very impressed meeting so many Irish people in the last couple of years and seeing the revival of the Irish language. I find it absolutely beautiful. Look at Kneecap,” he says, referring to the Belfast-Derry group who rap largely in Irish.

Arnalds is polite and thoughtful but not a chatterbox. French operated on a similar wavelength. Both were comfortable in silence, which perhaps explains why they worked so well together.

“It is something we felt like the music is partly about. How much can be said in the silence. How brotherhood goes deeper than [chatter]. We would talk all the time, of course. But it never felt like we had to. And there would be whole evenings, whole days sometimes, where we would say, like, four words. We would just focus on the music we were making, or, on some occasions, just the books we were reading separately.

“There’s some kind of a magic that often happens with music – when you are doing music together, you are speaking to each other, you are communicating to each other. It just doesn’t have to be big discussions.”

Since French’s death Arnalds has been tweaking the album. He is glad it is coming out into the world and is looking forward to returning to Sounds from a Safe Harbour, where he will participate in a tribute to French at Cork Opera House on September 11th – having already delivered a musical elegy to the Corkman on The Tommy Tiernan Show last January, when he performed We Didn’t Know We Were Ready, alongside its co-composers Niamh Reagan and Ye Vagabonds. They were joined by other acquaintances of French, including the Watford sisters The Staves, Kate Ellis of Crash Ensemble, the Cork singer Laoise Leahy and the superstar Dermot Kennedy.

Honouring his friend’s memory has been immensely emotional. That said, Arnalds has understandably had some anxiety in the run-up to the release. Finishing the LP in his studio, he would sense French at his side.

“I would miss him a lot. I would feel nervous. Am I doing the right thing? I can’t ask him does he like this. I would feel self-conscious around our friends or family, me being given the role of representing him in this way.

“On the other hand, there is no better place to channel your grief. I feel extremely fortunate to have this. I’m very glad I have this as a way to channel my emotions. A lot of the time I could feel him next to me working on this. We were still having a good time together, in some way.”

Olafúr Arnalds & Talos: A Dawning is released by Deutsche Grammophon on Friday, July 11th. Remembering Talos is at Cork Opera House on September 11th, as part of Sounds from a Safe Harbour

Riccardo Scamarcio pops up on my Zoom screen at a roadside cafe with a curtain of blue behind him. Darkly handsome in a crisp white shirt, he puffs on a cigarette – very old school – while answering in the most cleanly perfect English. He is crossing the mountains to Tuscany. The spirit of classic Italian cinema could hardly be better honoured if he were rendered in black and white.

I mention this as his appearance reminds me of how Johnny Depp came to cast him as Amedeo Modigliani in the American actor’s second feature as director. Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness follows the painter and sculptor as he cavorts through an earthily rendered version of early 20th-century Paris. There is a great deal of arguing in bars and necking in graveyards.

Depp had arranged to talk to Scamarcio early in the evening, but he was forced to knock the meeting back by three hours. At that point the Italian was driving with his daughter and the nanny. He called into a petrol station. Happily, the staff recognised the star and allowed him to use a side building for the Zoom.

“We were talking, and after a while Johnny says, ‘Hey, man. Can I say something? Where are you?’ There was stuff around for cars, oil, strange tools around me. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Johnny, but I’m in the gas station. I was driving, and this is the only place I could stage the Zoom call.’ He says, ‘In a gas station!’ I didn’t know this at the time, but the producer was there off-screen. And Johnny said, ‘He is in a gas station. This is my man!’”

This is how the business now works. You do press interviews in hillside cafes and take auditions in petrol stations.

“Yeah, it was rock’n’roll,” he says. “Johnny is a very special person. He is very sweet and very gentle and very kind to every single one. He is a person who likes paradox.”

Scamarcio, now in his mid-40s, has been exhaustingly busy in Italian cinema and TV for more than 20 years. Back in 2005 he was rough-hewn in the epic gangster flick Romanzo Criminale. He has worked with Abel Ferrara and Costa-Gavras. You can see him in Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, about Silvio Berlusconi, and Nanni Moretti’s Three Floors. He doesn’t need to stretch into English-language productions, but he, nonetheless, has been happy to show off his polyglottal talents in films such as John Wick: Chapter 2 and Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice.

“It’s very important to work in other countries,” Scamarcio says. “In English you have more opportunities. The market is bigger. I speak very fluent French too. So I’ve been shooting films in France. I’m very known in my country. When you work outside your country it’s fantastic, because people don’t know you, so nobody cares. They have no expectation from you, right? There is another level, which is the language. Acting in another language is like having a mask.”

How familiar was Scamarcio with Modigliani before coming to the film? The elongated faces and mournful eyes that characterise his work are – though, as the film explains, underappreciated in his life – now an immovable part of the culture. That must be even more so in the artist’s native Italy.

“Yes, of course. My mother is a painter,” Scamarcio says. “I was obsessed with this big book that had pictures of his paintings and sculptures. My mother was always saying, ‘Why is this boy so obsessed with this book?’ Maybe it was a sign. I knew, of course, he had a very, very tough life.”

It hardly needs to be said that Depp is currently a controversial character. The Kentucky actor – somehow now 62 – has been a ubiquitous presence since the late 1980s. He was Jack Sparrow. He was Sweeney Todd. He was in a rock “supergroup” called Hollywood Vampires. (Three Days on the Wing of Madness is dedicated to late guitarist Jeff Beck.)

Over the past decade, however, he has drawn more attention for an acrimonious split with Amber Heard that led, in 2022, to Depp suing his then former wife, who had accused him of physical abuse, in the United States, for defamation. Heard was found liable. Two years earlier he had lost in the British courts after suing News Group over allegations of abuse against Heard published in the Sun newspaper. The dispute has, to say the least, caused some division on social media.

[ Who Trolled Amber? review: Relentless dig beneath Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard libel case makes a staggering revelationOpens in new window ]

When the mess went away (for then, anyway) Depp returned to a project he had first discussed with Al Pacino decades earlier: a study of Modigliani adapted from a play by Dennis McIntyre. Indeed, Pacino, who has an amusing role in Three Days on the Wing of Madness as a flamboyant art dealer, had been toying with the idea way back in the 1970s. Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci and Francis Ford Coppola were all involved in conversations about it.

“Pacino was supposed to direct this project, and then he didn’t,” Scamarcio says. “It was his passion project since when he was young. Then he met Johnny in Donnie Brasco and they become friends. Pacino says, ‘I have this project. Maybe you could be perfect to play Modigliani.’ So Pacino was supposed to direct the film and Johnny to play Modigliani. It didn’t happen.”

Scamarcio is politely euphemistic about his director’s recent complications.

“Johnny had his problems that we all know,” he says. “When he won the case and he was back, Al says, ‘I think the moment is now correct for you to direct the film. I’m too old. I don’t want to do it. You should do it.’ And, as Johnny says all the time, if Pacino comes to you and says do something it’s better you do it.”

The resulting film is an amusing, anarchic romp through a highly romanticised version of Paris in 1916. As you might expect from Depp, there are a few rock’n’roll touches. At one stage The Black Angel’s Death Song, by The Velvet Underground, and Tom Waits’s Tom Traubert’s Blues vie for our attention. None of this gets in the way of a hugely charismatic turn from Scamarcio. He does good work as a misunderstood master who can barely scrabble together a few sous for artworks that would later sell for millions.

It is more than 28 years since The Brave, Depp’s indifferently received directorial debut. Did Scamarcio feel he had what it takes behind the camera?

“Basically it is about trust,” he says. “I felt that my director, Johnny Depp, trusted me very much. That is what it is all about. This is what an actor needs from his director. He needs to be loved and trusted. We did this journey together – experimenting things, changing, just trying to get some special life there.

“He was talking about Marlon Brando, when they were friends. We were talking about all the processes of being a cinema actor. For me, it confirmed all the things I believed when I think about my job. My job is to create an atmosphere.”

For all the flash and bang of Three Days on the Wing of Madness, it is at its best in the conversational duel between Pacino and Scamarcio. The older actor is a marvel. After a few decades of chewing the scenery, he seems to have recovered an inner calm.

“He’s still there, fighting as an actor and an artist,” Scamarcio says. “But with the simplicity and the fairness and the honesty of a 20-year-old actor.”

I wonder if Scamarcio could sense Pacino’s Italian roots. The American is, after all, only one generation distant from Sicilian origins.

“Oh, yeah. Because, well, you can take away an Italian man from Italy, but you can never take Italy away from an Italian. You know what I’m saying?”

Scamarcio does not seem to sleep. Early previews of the current film will feature a conversation, filmed at Tate Modern in London, between Scamarcio, Depp, the art critic Waldemar Januszczak and British artist Polly Morgan. He has another three Italian productions on the go. Will we hear him in English again soon?

“There is the international language – which is acting,” he says with a charming smile. “Being alive on scene – and being obscene. Being obscene, which means ‘out of scene’. It comes from the Greek.”

I’ll take his word for it. Educated man.

Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness is in cinemas from Friday, July 11th, with previews on Thursday, July 10th