Klaus Badelt grew up in Germany, but in the late 1990s, his film-music talents brought him to Hollywood, where he quickly became one of the most sought-after young composers in the industry, first working under the wing of Hans Zimmer at Media Ventures. He collaborated with Zimmer on several films, including “The Pledge” (2000), and the dark, introspective film “Invincible” (2001). Badelt has since moved on to such solo projects as the sci-fi epic “The Time Machine” (2002) and the intense “K-19: The Widowmaker” (2002). In 2003, he wrote a bold, rollicking score for movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s powerhouse adventure film “Pirates of the Caribbean”, and since then, Badelt’s list of big-film credits, including “Catwoman” (2004) and “Constantine” (2005), which was a collaboration with composer Brian Tyler, has grown steadily. Tell me a bit about Media Ventures, and how you became involved. The main idea was to have a creative community made up of composers and people in affiliated fields, such as music editors, production designers, visual-effects designers, casting agents, and so on. This creative vibe is super-appealing to anybody who is interested in filmmaking. For the filmmaker, it is just incredible to have a place like this. I always see myself as more of a filmmaker than a composer; I just happen to express myself in music. After all, I’m doing one part of the movie. How I got involved? I just showed up one day when I was on vacation from Germany. I simply asked if Hans had a second. I saw on his website that his way of working was very similar to mine in terms of synthesizers and high-tech production. Anyway, I showed up and for some reason they let me in. I got to meet him and we kind of hit it off. I remember sitting on his couch, listening to what he does when he’s writing. He would turn around and ask me a few questions about different approaches. I remember asking myself, “Why is he asking me?” From then on, I started hanging around and being useful. I was very willing to come here and start over again – so I did the whole story of cleaning the kitchen and hanging around as an intern just to see how the big guys were doing it. Then I started working with Hans. I also was working with Harry Gregson-Williams at the time. Things developed, and at some point I started doing my own films. Were you always interested in film music? I didn’t begin with music actually. When I was twelve, I saved enough money and bought my first film camera and started shooting short feature films. I was always interested in film. And I did music since I was very little, so I would combine them. The educational system in Europe, especially in Germany, didn’t really support this art form at the time, though, so I started studying composition and recording engineering, and I discovered that this was actually what I wanted to do. It was horrible, though, because they wanted to make me a concert piano player. I was way too lazy and I didn’t really want to do it. So I started working with film composer and music producer Ralf Zang, basically starting the same way as I did her in L.A. I showed up and said, “I am interested in music. I never did this, what do you think?” We talked a lot. And, at some point, I started writing for him. It was a great collaboration. I did that for a few years until the first vacation I ever took, which catches up the whole story to now. What have been your strong musical influences? Many different ones, but mainly the masters in the classical world, the romantic works of Wagner and Mahler. But then, I like lots of rock music and pop music, too. There’s this new guy called Jack Johnson, whom I really adore. When you watched films when you were young, were you conscious of the score? I have to say I always listened with two brains, so yes, I was. At the same time, I liked to get immersed into the film, which I still do. Then, when I watch it a second time, if I really liked it, I listen to the music. There are only a few films where I consciously listened to the music while it was playing from the beginning. Do you have any examples? I remember very early on I saw “Once Upon a Time in the West”. It was like a music-video clip to me sometimes. I was totally fascinated by that. I remember that as one of the first times I listened to the music and became aware of it in film. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer seems to have a certain sound that he expects. Can you tell me what goes on behind the scenes when you’re working on his projects, as opposed to other projects? Good question. Jerry does expect a certain style. He has certain tunes in mind, even though he is really not a musician. If you would ask him, I’m sure he would tell you he has no clue about music, but he does have a very good feel for it and for what he wants. The music in his films has a certain style, and you can recognize them by that. If you write a score for him, you expect to deliver that. Yes, you know, there are still opportunities to put your own personality in there. For film music in general, you can’t have an ego because it’s the film that’s first, not you. The trick is not to lose your personality either. That thin line is quite tricky. With “Pirates of the Caribbean”, the overall sound is very Jerry, and I’m proud that I can actually deliver that. At the same time, there are a few things in there that are not Jerry. The ethereal, abstract tension themes for the curse, for example – it’s almost not music there. When we proposed that, we thought for sure it wasn’t going to go by him, but he was even more excited. In the end, he is always full of surprises. He even pushed me to do different things sometimes. In another episode in the film, we used the tuba and the piccolo together, which is something I’ve never heard in a Jerry Bruckheimer film, and we thought, “We cannot do that.” We actually hid it from him until the very end, so there was almost no time to change it if he disapproved. By accident, we played the wrong mix for him, and it was in there, and we looked at each other while it was playing, really scared. He looked around and said, “This is brilliant.” He really loved it. So never believe what you hear about people. Moving ahead a little bit, there’s a director, Werner Herzog, who I’d heard was supposedly a slave-driver who made people suffer. I was told, “This man is mad. He’s going to drive you crazy.” I ultimately got to work with him, which was quite an honor, and I haven’t had a more rewarding experience with a director ever. He knows exactly what he wants. He doesn’t have to prove himself. He just lets you create and is very cautious about making suggestions. He didn’t really spot the film with me or ask me what to do. So, my experience was quite the opposite of what many people told me about him. “The Pledge” is an edgy and unique score that leaves the listener almost unsettled. What brought you to use the desolate solo female voice? I watched it without music and was immediately inspired. What came to my mind was a Scandinavian hymn I once heard. It has this pureness and this innocence in it. I wrote a very simple tune, basically like a Scandinavian hymn of the eighteenth century. Of course, it has nothing to do with the film. I just saw Jack Nicholson’s character ice-fishing in the beginning and I thought, “Wow, this could be very interesting.” The director was immediately hooked on it, too. He felt this gave his film another dimension. In general, voices seem to be the most intense instruments. I found the solo voice through our violin player, who came to me and said, “I know what you’re looking for. I heard my wife singing in the shower, and she is great but she never did anything professionally.” We had her come in, and she was so untrained, so innocent, and yet so fascinating. She was amazing. She was very talented. She was absolutely perfect for it. This was a project where I had ten days to write the whole score, record it, produce it, and mix it. So I took one day to write the themes they needed. Then we got a handful of players in the recording room in this chaotic hustle. Sean Penn would come at night from San Francisco, where he was still cutting and in post-production. He would come from there almost every night, bringing a few bottles of wine. He’d listen to the cues, make some notes and opinions, and then he would go back to San Francisco in the morning. We didn’t really sleep much, but it worked well. If you had had more time, would you have taken a different approach? That’s always a question, isn’t it? While I was doing it, I thought, “This isn’t a good way of making a film, because what I would have liked to do was be able to make some mistakes and try something knowing that I had time to actually go back or try a different approach.” Now, looking back, I think, “Wow, I can’t believe we achieved this in such a short time.” Should we have done it differently? Maybe not. Regardless of time, it was the right thing to do. It kept the composing minimal, which I think it was appropriate for the film. “Invincible” is an operatic-style score with string blended with a powerful, dark choir. How did this style fit the concept of the film, and was this your first intention? It is a saga of a national hero. It’s like a story you want to tell for generations. Producer Gary Bart was related to the great-great-grandson of the hero in the film. He just wanted this film to be done about this man and his family. So I wanted something that musically lifted this story up to becoming something like a bedtime story you tell your children of your mother or something that happened to your parents or to your grandparents. So my approach was to lift this character up to this larger-than-life hero, even though the movie is very intimate and very close. It’s not thousands of shots on the battlefield, it’s just this one guy who, by accident, turns into this hero. The music is such complex music because I thought of it as tunes that wrap around the action like a cancer. It’s suffocating. It almost has an uneasy feel to it. You cannot use this music in any other movie really. You cannot temp any more with this kind of music because it’s almost too important, which I usually don’t do. But I just felt it was right to give this guy, who is very simple, yet very straightforward and very honest, the complexity and the depth that he actually has and the story has. Hans Zimmer was involved in both “The Pledge” and “Invincible”. How much of a role did he play in these scores, and what was the reason for the collaboration? First of all, it was the beginning of my career. “The Pledge” came ot me through Hans. Sean asked Hans for help, and Hans said, “Look, I can’t really do much on this. But here, I know this guy, who don’t you try him?” So that’s how I met Sean. Hans got a little bit involved here or there, but he just didn’t have the time to really do it. “Invincible” was the same thing: Hans introduced me to Werner. On “The Pledge” more than “Invincible”, Hans would come in and write a little or share with me the way he looks at film, which is very interesting. I basically had to do them myself. It was very scary. I thought I wasn’t ready for this kind of music and this kind of director for “Invincible”. The first music of yours that captivated me was your score to “The Time Machine”. From the themes to the orchestrations, it feels as though you sunk your teeth into this one wholeheartedly. It was fantastic. It was enormous. The opportunity was great because it was a film happening in the future – but in a very primitive future. We’re not in Africa or South America; it’s a primitive New York of the future. So what do you do? I thought we needed music with familiar elements, but with something new. So that’s what I did. For the main theme I recorded an orchestra and a real opera choir. At the same time, I had one woman vocalist sing all the voices of what the choir wound sing, just herself 150 times. I built a choir from this one voice and combined those two to create thing unique sound of two different worlds, at the same time creating one new song – not a duality, but one. It’s a dream to do an adventure like that. There was a love story in there, so I could write a love theme. It was so emotionally driven in a way. Whenever a film has such emotional reasoning for the characters, it’s wonderful to work on it. Your scores are often thematic. Where do you find your inspiration? Do you often write from your own emotions instead of directly from what is on-screen? I always do. I never actually write the themes to the picture. My way of writing is like this: I get involved early on in the film, sometimes even before the script or when the script is being written. I read it or watch the film maybe once or twice. I don’t look at it for a while and just try to have it sink in, and write the themes or maybe a few pieces. If I have the time, I’ll take ten days or three weeks maybe, to write these themes, maybe longer if I have the time, because it’s defining the vocabulary. Then, after I do all of this without the picture, I put the picture back up and see if it sticks somehow – if I wrote for the right film or not. This way, for me, I don’t get stuck in details. I don’t try to do the twist and turns of the film yet. So I have time to create emotionally valid material. Then I can adjust it. “K-19” is a score that is inwardly emotional and dramatic with regard to the characters. How much research did you do for the characters? A lot, actually. I had this wonderful director, Kathyn Bigelow, who also did a lot of research. She developed this film for seven years. And I just tried to catch up with her and did the same research. The Russians of the time had a very different way of thinking, a different way of looking at honor and the military and happiness. She went to Russia to find only a few survivors, and went out to the original K-19, which, by the time the movie came out, was destroyed for obvious reasons. She insisted that scenes had to be shot in Moscow. Like, for example, the cemetery scene, which you could shoot in the Fox lot, of course. But, no, she insisted on going to Moscow. It was really cold there, really freezing. And it really has this character that you cannot find somewhere else. Another thing that helped a lot was that we had access to the Kirov Orchestra under the conductor Valery Gergiev, who is quite a unique and strong voice in the classical world. We had the chance of going to St. Petersburg to record the score at the Mariinsky Theater, where Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture had its premiere. That was quite exciting. The Kirov Orchestra had never recorded a film score or even knew how to record to picture. But I didn’t want to put them in a situation that they were not familiar with, so I handed the score to the conductor and said, “Here, just do it.” He would look at the scene, have the score in his hand, turn around, and from there the picture was turned off, and he would just conduct the piece like it was Tchaikovsky. In many ways, this is very different from how we would have done it with a studio orchestra. So I had to get used to it, and I loved it. Then, of course, we had a major job making the music work again to the picture, because the timings were all different. The cue that was supposed to be three minutes was now six, because they just played it slower, the way they normally would play it. Gergiev gave the signature of Russian musicianship history to it. You cannot tell anybody what to do there, so you have to just be happy that you’re so lucky to be able to have access to that. It was quite an amazing experience.