Highly talented and prolific composer Robert Folk is best known in Hollywood for his many well-written scores for comedy films, most notably the popular “Police Academy” movies (a film series that has run from 1984 to 2006) and “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls” (1995). Folk, however, is adept at writing in all current musical styles and for all film genres, and his music often weeds diverse streams of popular and classical music. His score for “Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace” (1996) is dark and powerful; his score for “Miles from Home” (1988) is lighthearted yet emotionally driven. A musical chameleon in the best sense, he regularly and skillfully reinvents his compositional voice to provide each film he scores with its most compelling music. Folk is also a first-rate conductor who has conducted prominent orchestras around the world. Tell me a little about the beginning of your music career. I started out in the late-sixties, first playing some guitar and piano. I got involved with a bunch of rock-‘n’-roll bands in the Boston area. My main ambition was to be a songwriter at that point. It was really The Beatles that did it for me as far as music goes. That just kind of captured my attention, and once I started heading in that direction, that’s all I really focused on. I decided at that point that music was going to be my career, although I took some wandering paths through different types of music and different types of musical arenas. Besides The Beatles influence, was there music around your house that also influenced you? You know, my father, although he was not a professional, was a classical violinist. I hear plenty of that. My brother was also a violinist. My sister was a pianist. There was quite a bit of classical music flowing around the house. But I wouldn’t call it an artsy family. My father was a career military officer. When he left the military, he worked at the Pentagon for a number of years. Same with my brother. I wouldn’t call it your typical musical family, but there was some talent. Then, being that age, the whole rock-‘n’-roll explosion took over the household as far as I was concerned. Were you aware of film music prior to your career? I was certainly aware of film music from my teens on. But I was not really aware of the composers who were involved, just the experience of hearing music with film. It was more of an appreciation for the music but with no particular awareness of who was creating it. And I had no thought about ever doing it. How I happened, by accident, to get involved with film composing is a whole story in itself. Do you remember films that inspired you or captured your attention? I can’t really cite one or two or several films that had that much of an impact on me. I know that I was very struck with John Williams’ early stuff in the mid-seventies. That’s probably the first time that I wondered, “Gee, who is that guy, and what’s his background?” Coincidentally, he was a Juilliard guy as well and studied with Rosanna Levine. What led you to work in film music? What project was this? It was a documentary called “The Planets”. It’s not a film that’s seen by many people, just a small documentary. Nevertheless, they took the music seriously enough to want to record with one of the world’s great orchestras. For me that was quite a thrill – being in my mid-twenties and having access to that kind of an orchestra. So when I finally finished up at the school, I decided to move to L.A. That Royal Philharmonic recording, along with some other recordings of my classical music, got me my first project out here. When I arrived here in L.A. in 1980, it took me about five or six weeks to land a feature film with Fox. It was not a very good film, a thriller called “Savage Harvest”, for which they sent me straight back to London, where we hired the National Philharmonic Orchestra. How do concert music and film music work together? And how do they differ from one another? They work together because the more diverse your writing background is, the better prepared you are for writing in the film medium because there are so many different film genres that require so many different types of scoring. All the techniques that I acquired in the classical world, and also as a rock-‘n’-roll musician, have come into play in various film scores I’ve written. The difference between concert music and film music is pretty clear. You’re subordinate to a film: You’re part of a team. The music is one element. It’s not the only element. Of course, when you’re writing for film, you’re also being influenced by the director’s intentions and desire as well as your own. Whereas, if you’re writing a concert work, the only thing that matters is the music itself, and you’re the only person to consider as to what the motivation of the piece is or what the style of the piece is. There’s another difference, too: With film music, you have the whole scheduling aspect. You have very little time to write film music, but you have so much time to write classical music. Financially, how do they compare? There’s no comparison. You can make an extraordinarily good living in the film world, particularly if you are ranked within the top fifty composers, to pick an arbitrary number. In classical music, you are dependent on grants and commissions. It’s a very different way of making a living. I think there are far fewer classical composers who make a significant living than there are film composers. In the classical world, people like John Adams, with that level of commercial success, are pretty rare. There are probably only a dozen guys who are on that circuit. The “Police Academy” series launched your career in films. What were some of your experiences working on these films? I started the first one just a few years after I had gotten here. I think I had done two or three films before that picture. They were thriller/dramas. “Police Academy” was such an enormous hit – it has so much commercial visibility – that, of course, in this world I was tagged right away as the guy who wrote comedic scores. I had really good experiences working on them. We always had really top orchestras here in L.A. to record all the scores. It was challenging music. The whole military tone to them, along with punching up the humor. If you listen to some of that music apart from the film, I think you’ll see a lot of integrity in it – a lot of virtuoso writing for the orchestra and, at the same time, a lot of fun. It was also good to have that vehicle to return to every year for a while. I think that maybe after the first four of them, they started going down in quality, and we were all affected by that. It bothers me that we, the enthusiasts, cannot hear this music without seeing the movie over and over. To me, your “Police Academy” scores are classics that I grew up with, and I know many would agree that an official release would be fantastic. Exactly. From a collector’s point of view, at some point it would be nice to put out a CD from that series. I have been approached a couple of times about it. I think it could be done. I think that maybe a deal could be struck with the union at this point. You know, the unions are different in today’s world. There might be a way to finance it that would make sense – at least to put out a thirty-minute CD if not more. “Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace” has to be one of your most amazing works in terms of depth, creativity, and complexity. I really love that score. The disappointing thing about it is that when the film was first dubbed and finished for New Line, we had a phenomenal dub from Todd-AO, where the music was incredibly present and really effectively supported the film the way that both the director and I had intended. Sadly, as can often happen out here, when the movie was turned over to the studio and the executives saw it, they decided to re-cut it. Then they remixed and re-dubbed it, and not a lot of the music was left by the time the film came out. It was really frustrating for me because I’m certain that, if the film had done well and the music had been left alone, it would have allowed me to work more in that genre. Talk about your use of orchestrational color for this film. That was another London recording. It was the London Symphonia. London’s my favorite town to record in, along with Los Angeles. I would put them on equal footing. When I know I’m recording for an orchestra of that caliber, I know there are no restraints on the virtuosity of the music or the orchestrations. With that in mind, I thought of that score as the fusion of a Strauss orchestra with some electronic elements, which were thrown across it. The electronic elements were mostly for motion and energy and the sci-fi subject matter. I think it has inspired a lot of composers to revisit that sound. I think so. Like I say, I am more of a student of classical music than of film music, so I’m sure you can find other film scores that are of that making that preceded my score for “Lawnmower Man”. I do think it had some impact on style, though. I certainly have heard a lot of similar approaches to things over the year. “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls” is a score with an eclectic mix of sounds. I’m impressed with your fluent writing for both electronics and orchestra. Which do you find most challenging writing for? I live in both those worlds. Having been a rock-‘n’-roll kind of a kid, I was always into electronic elements: percussion, drums, and whatnot from the time that I was a teenager. I feel really comfortable in both of those worlds, and sometimes they fuse well. “Ace Ventura” was a happy musical landscape for me because there were no budget limitations. It was recorded here, in L.A. When you’re using rhythm players, electronic elements, and orchestral players at the same time, you really can’t beat Los Angeles because the rhythm players out here are by far the best that I’ve heard anywhere. So, in that score, you’ve got like a dozen of the best rhythm guys in the world playing next to a ninety-piece orchestra. We did it all live, all at the same time, which was really interesting. Dennis Sands is one of the few engineers whom I would have entrusted that kind of recording to, because most people would have recorded that score in sections – the way you would do a record, starting with drums and bass and then adding guitars and then electronic and percussion elements and then the orchestra and finally the choir. But there was something kind of unique and fun about doing it all at once and actually having it come off well, having the final mixes sound really resonant and orchestral but also fluid and groovy. One of the reasons we made the decision to do “Ace Ventura” all at once over on the Sony orchestral stage was the time element. We had release dates. We didn’t have enough time. We just had to get it done in a certain number of hours. The way they set up enough isolation to keep all the rhythm guys sounding good and yet have the orchestra have that big concert-orchestra sound to it was pretty amazing. It’s one of my favorite experiences. “Nothing to Lose” has a similar fun style, with the jazzy urban beats and electronics. It’s definitely a fusion score that has just born out of the movie, where you’ve got Martin Lawrence and Tim Robbins, the hip-hopper meeting the baby-boomer straight guy from the suburbs. Then, when they leave L.A. and go out to Arizona, you’ve got a Southwestern feeling that creeps into the score. I added six saxophones because I thought that hearing these three tenor and three baritone saxes honking away throughout the score would make everybody smile. It was a huge saxophone sound laid on top of, once again, some of the most amazing groove players anywhere on the planet Earth. What genre do you find most appealing to write for? My favorite film that I’ve worked on is “Miles from Home”, which did not get a lot of exposure. It was a Richard Gere and Kevin Anderson film from the late-eighties. A straight-ahead dramatic picture but romantic overtones and Americana settings. You know, I would love to do more in that genre given the opportunity. As every film composer will tell you, whatever your biggest-selling movies are, those are the kinds of scores you are going to do the most of. That’s just the way it happens out here. It takes twenty-to-a-hundred-million dollars to make a movie, so they get the guy who has plenty of that stuff on his résumé. Then, every few movies, you get a chance to do something different, which is always more than welcome. I feel that if you’ve got a deep musical education and you’ve crossed a lot of stylistic barriers, as a lot of film composers have, there’s no reason why you couldn’t pull off any kind of a score. I’m sure that’s a universally held felling among film composers. When you interview people for your book, I’m sure you run into it. I just don’t think people understand how diverse we are. The system doesn’t get it, and it never will get it. It is what it is. There’s no use lamenting it. If you’re going to work out here, it’s just one of the things you have to accept. But it isn’t easy to accept, because we know what we are capable of doing. What scores do you feel represent your talents best? If I were to pick a couple, I would say “Lawnmower Man” in the action genre, probably “Ace Ventura” in the comedy genre, “Miles from Home” in the romantic drama. Probably those three films. I also did a small film a couple years ago called “You’re Dead”, a British thriller. It was a film that I really enjoyed scoring because it was really a dramatic thriller-action piece, but with a lot of emotion in it. It was another opportunity to reach out into those styles. I think that’s a great more-recent example of something that shows my work off well. Back to my question about your favorite genre… I love melody and theme. For me that is usually a drama or a romance. An example is a film like “Can’t Buy Me Love”, where you can write a really strong romantic theme and use it throughout the whole movie. That’s always very rewarding for me. I acknowledge that, in recent years, scores seem to be less and less thematic and more rhythmic. But I think that melody and theme are really important in coming up with a signature for a movie and in coming up with something that is memorable for a movie, so that when you think of that score or film ten of fifteen years later, it just pops into your head. That’s an important element in film-scoring, and I hope that it comes back into play a little bit more importantly in the next several years. Although I enjoy the rhythm and percussive kind of scores that you see mostly going on right now, I think that things are going to go back the other way in a couple years. I think that maybe you’ll still have the rhythm and percussive elements, but maybe you’ll start to hear more themes again.
It was just a strange twist. I was as Juilliard for ten years, writing a lot of concert music. I figured I would always be there. I was a faculty member – and it doesn’t really get much better than Lincoln Center in terms of the classical composer’s world and the classical-music world in this country. My plan was simply to stay at the school, stay on the faculty, get involved with some of the other Lincoln Center institutions, continue writing concert music, and do the usual combination of commissions, grants, and so on.
Then, a student of mine’s father, who was a filmmaker, asked if I would want to score a film for him. He knew my classical writing; he really enjoyed my work, but had no idea whether I would be appropriate for his movie or whether I knew the first thing about film music. So it was kind of an interesting twist that he should choose me to write a score for him. It was very unexpected. I had no plans to go into film music. I wasn’t thinking about it. But the experience of working for him, which led to recording with the Royal Philharmonic in London, was so satisfying and interesting to me that, when I finished that project, I started to think, “Well, gee, this is something I might really want to pursue.”