Don Davis has earned his reputation for being both versatile and influential the hard way: Before composing his own feature-film scores, Davis accrued an impressive list of allied credits, which included the prolific scoring of television movies and series (“Hart to Hart”, “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “Tiny Toon Adventures”, “Beauty and the Beast”, et cetera) and orchestration for Randy Newman, James Horner, Mark Snow, and others. In his futuristic score to “The Matrix” (1999), the first installment of one of the most successful trilogies in film history, Davis molded an extremely eclectic, colorful soundworld that mixed pop music elements with both avant-garde and traditional orchestral and electronic elements. This pioneering score created a new musical landscape that perfectly paralleled the film’s new cinematic landscape. Davis also created highly imaginative scores for this film’s two sequels, “The Matrix Reloaded” (2003) and “The Matrix Revolutions” (2003). In 2001, Davis was presented the daunting task of scoring “Jurassic Park III” (2001), following in the footsteps of one of the greatest fiml music masters, John Williams. In this score, Davis craftily married his own voice to John Williams’ themes, keeping the film’s well-known musical fingerprint while making the movie his own. A composer with widespread musical interests, Davis has always kept a foot solidly anchored in the concert music world, writing prolifically for noted chamber ensembles. Currently, he’s writing an opera. We may not know what lies in this talented composer’s future, but we can be sure it will be exciting and new. You have had music in your blood from an early age. What were your influences while you were growing up? I started out as a trumpet player, so my early influences were more jazz-oriented than anything else. I was attracted to popular and rock music as well. I had fairly limited exposure to classical music; it was really jazz that got me involved in writing instrumental music. How did your jazz writing evolve into your writing for movies? When I started writing jazz big band charts back in junior high school, I began to develop a camaraderie with a number of other composers who were also writing in that medium. In the course of discussing music, our conversations would inevitably turn toward scoring for films, since that was the career arc for a number of film composers. At the same time, I was starting to wonder what sort of career could possibly evolve from writing for jazz ensembles. Although there was something of a big band revival at the time, I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to continue long enough for me to make a career out of big band arranging. This was one of the reasons that film music eventually seduced me. Did you have any interest in films prior to your career? Yes, film music had definitely made an impact on me, although it may have been primarily a subliminal one. When I was a child, I used to watch a lot of “Twilight Zone” reruns when I came home from school, such that I eventually was able to recall each episode by name, and I specifically remember the effect that the music had on me. Later on, when I started to study music seriously, I became aware of who Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith were, and I noted that these giants of film music were the same composers I had heard on that show. That was when I started to become aware of the cross-pollination that was going on between television and feature film music, and between jazz and dramatic music. Did any film composers inspire you? I think those two composers in particular, Jerry Goldsmith and Bernard Herrmann, are pretty hard to dismiss – they’re absolutely seminal to the art of film composing. John Williams has been a big influence on me, if for no other reason than the incredible integrity he puts in all his work. More recently, James Horner has written some remarkable scores that have made an impression on me, as has James Newton Howard. I think Randy Newman has written some incredibly wonderful music. I think that he is the most naturally gifted melody writer who’s writing at this time. I also think that he’s really the true successor of Alfred Newman, much more so than David and Tom Newman, who I believe are actively trying to distance themselves from the influence of their father. Many may not be aware of your collaborations as an orchestrator, particularly with Randy Newman. I’m not really sure that you can accurately call those collaborations. Randy’s sketches, like John Williams’, are very complete and fully elaborated. In spite of that fact, he is always open to suggestions. I might have suggested a different layout that would have possibly been better for a certain situation once or twice, but I would be hard-pressed to call what we did together a collaboration. I was orchestrating his sketches and certainly not co-composing. It is true that in my trajectory as a film composer I came up through the ranks as an orchestrator. My very first job, after I graduated from UCLA, was orchestrating for Joe Harnell on the television show “The Incredible Hulk”. After that, I worked for Mark Snow in the same capacity on the shows “Hart to Hart” and “Crazy Like a Fox”, and when he became unavailable, he was able to throw a few shows my way. So I started composing TV show scores under Mark, and that sort of experience eventually led to a lead-composer position on a TV show called “Beauty and the Beast”, for which I scored forty-six episodes. After “Beauty and the Beast” ended, my then-agent Mike Gorfaine introduced me to Randy Newman when Randy was looking for an orchestrator. I also had been orchestrating for James Horner by that time. How did these two gifted melodic writers – Newman and Horner – differ in terms of technique or approach? James is amazingly resilient, and he has always had a very strong picture sense. I think he is quicker to draw on different stylistic approaches than many other composers might be. You could say that James is more open to a broad view of what the film composer can bring to a film. Randy is very much the traditionalist, which is due mostly to the fact that he had a lot of exposure, both personally and professionally, to a number of old-school film composers, primarily Alfred Newman and Lionel Newman. There’s a pureness to the way Randy approaches dramatic situations. And since he became famous as a songwriter before he started to score films, he has retained a stature by which he can demand a lot of respect, and get it – not just for himself, personally, but for the music itself. There are very few people left who are dedicated to protecting our art, but Randy is one of them. Is your approach to scoring influenced by those composers you worked with? Absolutely. Every time I orchestrated for other composers, I took advantage of that unique opportunity to dissect their work, and as such I tried to absorb their points of view while all of the time trying to inform my own developing and, hopefully, unique point of view. I tried to see how I could adapt their particular insights to my own work. There are many times when I have been asked to do something melodic, and I would think about the way Randy might approach something, with that purity of musical sense that he has. Other times I might try to embrace the kind of versatility that James Horner has consistently shown in his work. What confounds me is that the body of your orchestration experience has been with thematic and emotional music, yet you are the action/adventure man a lot of the time. How did you get labeled so quickly in this genre? It’s pretty simple – the projects that I became known for as a composer have been action/adventure films. A lot of the composers get pretty upset about the typecasting that goes on in this business, but I generally feel pleased that, even though I’m being pigeonholed, I’m not being forgotten entirely. Following in the footsteps of John Williams, “Jurassic Park III” must have been a little intimidating. Did you set up a lot of pressure or expectation for yourself? It was difficult, and more than just a little bit intimidating, there’s no question about it. I definitely wanted to elevate the music that I was writing to the level of integrity that John Williams puts in all of his music. Just making the attempt to incorporate the melodic, textural, and orchestral integrity that John Williams routinely puts into his work was really quite an intense challenge. How did this project present itself to you? Originally they wanted John Williams to score “Jurassic Park III”, but he wasn’t available. Still, since this was a sequel to a franchise in which he had established the original musical voice, and since it involved some of the people who are central to his stature in Hollywood, he justifiably wanted to maintain a certain amount of control over what was really his domain. So John and Mike Gorfaine discussed who they thought would be the best custodian of that domain, and my background as an orchestrator, along with my credits as the composer of “The Matrix”, convinced them that I could do justice to the project. What an honor that one of the greatest film composers put faith in you to carry forward the musical integrity that he brought to the franchise. It was a very big honor, and one that I did not take lightly. Let’s talk about your “Matrix” trilogy scores that have set a new standard or perhaps a new tradition in terms of scoring action film music. I had a number of conversations with film editor Zach Staenberg before we spotted the film. We talked about how exactly the music should be approached, and often we would discuss the possibility of utilizing what some might call the postmodern style that is heard in the music of Philip Glass, John Adams, and Steve Reich, among a number of other composers. After these discussions, and especially after putting some of that music up against the film, I felt very strongly that this approach would work especially well in that particular film. Actually, I had become interested in exploring that kind of approach in film scores quite a while before I had the opportunity to work on “The Matrix”, but that movie was the first film to come along in which I felt that the approach could work in an organic way, without imposing a non-germane style to the picture in an obtrusive way. So I worked on developing an approach that incorporated the soundworld of that style, but all the time still enabled the music to function dramatically. Also I felt that, in general, the music needed a bit of a hard-edged veneer to it, to keep it from veering too far into New Age territory. I felt that it was absolutely necessary to keep a consistent approach going through each film in order to maintain the stylistic integrity of the trilogy as a whole. Although there aren’t any themes, per se, aside from Neo and Trinity’s love theme, there is definitely an abundance of thematic material and motifs from the first film that I was able to develop quite a bit in the second movie. “The Final Flight of the Osiris”, the anime short film that precedes “Reloaded”, established some thematic material that will find its development in “Reloaded”, and “Reloaded” establishes some new material that is going to be exploited further in “The Matrix Revolutions” as well. I definitely tried to keep a consistency of style and attitude throughout the three films, not just for franchise identification, but because I feel that sort of musical development over the course of the trilogy lends the kind of richness and integrity to the overall process that is in keeping with Larry and Andy Wachowski were establishing with the trilogy in the first place. Was it difficult to avoid repetitiveness and maintain originality through the hours of music you created? It certainly required some thought. There is no question about that. It was never acceptable for me to simply rewrite the preceding score. I think there may be a certain amount of repetition that is acceptable when developing a score with this kind of scope, but I don’t think anyone can claim that the later scores are simply clones of the first one. That makes sense. When John Williams, for example, continues the “Star Wars” series, he has his recurrent themes that tie together the whole story alongside a great amount of new material to fit each specific film installment. Certainly, and that, along with the “Indiana Jones” trilogy, is among the best examples of that kind of stylistic development. I think that it’s important for sequels to keep that consistency going throughout every installment, for all of those reasons. You are working on something quite exciting outside of the film realm. I am actually working on an opera now, for which I have received a commission from the Los Angeles Master Chorale, which will present it in November of 2005. The Chorale, along with an orchestra and five operatic soloists, will be performing what is essentially a preview of an opera-in-progress. It’s kind of an unusual situation because I’ll be writing the excerpts before I actually write the opera, in order to meet the deadline for the concert, and then I’ll be going back and filling in the rest of the opera between the excerpts. I’ve been thinking for quite a while about the dramatic point of view that a film composer can contribute to opera. I think it very possibly could be a welcome and refreshing point of view that may not be obvious to a composer who hasn’t worked in the theater of the absurd that we call film music. It’s really a massive challenge to tackle such an enormous undertaking, so that’s definitely where I am going to be turning my attention to when I am not working on any film projects. How does a concert piece differ from a film score in terms of writing for each medium? Well, for me, the difference between film music and writing concert music is as different as night is to day. I really don’t want to be in the situation where I am writing a piece for the concert stage that is essentially no different from something that I might write for a film. I think there’s a lot more opportunity to really detail the music in a serious composition. The important thing to remember about film scores is that film music is not about music, it is all about film. The focus of a film composer’s attention always needs to be on what will make the film better, and if a composer gets too wrapped up in the music itself, the film will be worse off for it. When I’m composing music for the concert stage, I’m able to give my entire thought process to the integrity of the music itself, and therefore, I’m able to justify everything I do in strictly musical terms. My goal is to infuse the music with such detail that deleting a measure or two anywhere in the composition would create an irreparable fissure, whereas film music, almost by definition, must be absolutely resilient to that kind of circumstance. It has to be created with enough modularity such that two bars can be taken out and it will still make perfect sense musically, because the structure of film is constantly changing with the re-editing that is always being done. The film industry continually evolves, and composers have to adapt to its changes. How do you view yourself in terms of this evolution? I’m actually very happy in the situation that I find myself in. I don’t have any specific techniques for dealing with change, except that I try to be constantly aware that this business changes very rapidly and we all have to be ready to change with it. I like to think that I’m resilient enough to accommodate the inevitable changes that will certainly come my way in this business. I suppose the most important thing to remember is that, although change is a frightening thing, it’s only the fear of change that will paralyze us, and if we can learn to embrace those changes as an exciting challenge, then the task before us becomes a happy one. When I first started working as an orchestrator and then as a film composer, things were so different that it could almost be mistaken for an entirely different business. We had no sequencers, no synthesizers, no computers, not even video machines – everything was done with a pencil. It’s almost incomprehensible that we could work back then without the benefit of seeing the film we were working on in a videocassette player. We would go to a screening room and watch a screening of the film, and then go home and work to the timing notes that the music editor prepared from a Moviola. Also, there were no mocked-up demos of cues back then. The directors would hear the music when they got to the scoring stage and the orchestra played it. Many of the composers who got used to working that way weren’t able to acclimate themselves to the environment that we now find ourselves in, in which each cue has to be demoed for the director before the scoring session. It seems to me, then, that the best way to achieve longevity in this business is to be resilient enough to embrace whatever comes our way, because the only thing we can be entirely sure of is that the future is going to be very, very different.
Aside from these mechanical issues, I also approached the creative aspect of the two mediums differently, in a physical sense. When I’m scoring for film, I’m always writing at the piano and synthesizers, directly into the sequencing programs that I use to synchronize music to films. By contrast, when I’m composing concert music, I almost always write the music at a desk away from the piano, and I only use the piano to check the music after I’ve written it out.