Where are you in relation to the film-scoring scene today? And I was wondering what your feelings are on the condition of film scoring today.
Well, I just finished a movie with Julie Taymor, who I work with quite often. We had just finished our third Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream. And Midsummer is a special play because it starts out with uh as being a tragedy set in Athens and, for all intents and purposes, the audience thinks they're going to be in for a rough ride. And then abruptly it becomes a wild comedy involving young love, and so it's one of the most unique Shakespeare experiences. And from a composer’s point of view it's challenging. And there was very specific in writing, where he wanted certain songs to be sung, as well as dances to be played, and it's just one of the great challenges in the Shakespeare canon. And this latest film is one I'm especially proud of. One gets so much working on these classical projects because of, you know, it's like an onion. Every time, there's another layer revealed in Shakespeare's work.
You know, you hear about this, about Shakespeare, and the little bit of Shakespeare that I have studied in my life – I mean, everything is there. I mean, all the building blocks of drama; they were all there in Shakespeare's work. And I'm wondering from a musician standpoint if you find that the case with the musicality of Shakespeare as well.
Iambic pentameter and various meters. If you break out of the shackles of his instructions, there's a huge world there, and the beauty about this Shakespeare is that it has that dimension where it's completely fulfilling, the process. It's like locking yourself in a room and you can get what you can, or being out in the amazing natural surroundings, like the mountains or at the seaside or something. It gives you back even more than you're giving it, you know?
And maybe this is a challenge with, or the primary challenge, with any piece of music you write for material. But we talked about the musicality of Shakespeare and the iambic pentameter and the kind of lilting quality of that. Is it a particular challenge to write music that complements that and doesn't compete with it?
Oh, yes. You have to, I like to say, dance between the raindrops in working with Shakespeare. Being that this is my third film – “Titus”, “The Tempest”, and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” – I find that, you know, you don't want to trample any great artist’s performance, with Anthony Hopkins in “Titus” or Helen Mirren in “The Tempest”. These people, they're complete artists, and it's a complete package, so you have to learn how to support all the rooms as a compass or as a bed, as a world, where they can be comfortably supported, not be distracting. Sometimes though you want to pinspot some words and highlight some words and phrases by musical emphasis, but in general it's a very very very tricky and subtle path you have to take with Shakespeare scores. Other times you can be, you know, huge and orchestral like I was in “Titus”, especially the first cue later made famous by the movie “300” with that – borrowed illegally of my music, at that point. But you can see it can have range between very very very very subtle and very very big in the cinematic.
Well, you know, whenever I speak to composers I always discuss where film composition is today. And I'm a huge film score fanatic, and personally, me, when I listen to the soundscape in film today, I miss the melodic quality of it, the melody of it, the kind of recognizability. It seems to be more and more used as an extension of sound effects now, and I'm wondering if you see that and if you're troubled by it.
No I'm not troubled by it at all. If it's excellent art, it's excellent art. And, for example, in the TV series a few years back recently, “Breaking Bad” – I don't know if I’d include “Better Caul Saul” as the same situation – but the composer there was using sound as sonority, not particularly melody all the time. And it was very very very well-crafted and very well-supported in the television series. Melody is, certainly in these television series, melody is not neglected. And it always goes with the subject matter. If it's something that's usually based on romance and based on those type of principles, you often get melody that goes with it, as well as in my work, you know? It's true there was lots of big melodies in “Michael Collins” and the “Batman” movies, and even in “Heat” there was melodies, but not as much. But when you get to a movie like “Frida”, it’s all melody; it’s all tunes, you know?
It just depends on what the project calls for.
That’s right. But I don’t lament too much about that, because every director has to make a decision whether it's driven by melody or not. But, you know, it's refreshing when it is, because it adds so much character to the project. But some of my early projects like “Alien 3”, short of the very end, melody wasn't an important aspect; it was more making the orchestra get under your skin and then release, or be a vehicle for a fright and make us feel uneasy.
And, boy, does it ever! I mean, that score – it's, I think, one of the most defining scores of that era. And that took you something like a year of experimentation to create that, didn't it?
Well, David Fincher was nice enough to let me do my own thing and he didn’t interfere. And he wanted me to compose a complete score, which is electronic first, and complete – no temp music, he didn't use any temp music – so that in the end I composed and orchestrated that electronic score with some of the electronic elements back into the acoustic orchestra. So it had a unearthly feel to it. And, short of last melody where Ripley jumps in the lead, it's not particularly melodic.
Yeah. Well, I know that was a very difficult shoot for him.
It was difficult for him, yeah.
Did you experience any difficulty with, or in general with studio people, meddling with the music and offering notes that aren't helpful?
Yes, but it wasn't overwhelming. As long as Fincher was around, things went pretty smooth. As soon as he disappeared there towards the end, I was – you know, it was me versus them. Until then, everything was smooth.
I want to ask you about a couple other specific scores, and you mentioned one of them. One of my all-time favorite films is “Heat”, and I'm thinking of a scene when you know, that you have a film and the kind of the centerpiece scene – it has to work. Like the coffee shop that you wrote something like a two-minute piece very subtly underscoring that moment. Tell me about the processes of creating that, because that's a scene particularly where you absolutely do not want to interfere with the combination of those two actors face-to-face for the first time.
Well, I haven't seen the movie since I wrote it, but if I recall, what I wanted to do is, throughout the movie is a lot of electronic, like, electric guitars mixed with string quartet mixed with percussion and vocal effects. Quite often my voice. And this is the scene where the two American icon actors are finally in the scene together. I approached it like I was doing the Lincoln-Douglas debates or something like that, you know? Something that was completely Americana, taken from the lineage of my teacher Aaron Copland. Very very very stately. Stately and elegant, and to play against the fact that these guys are killers and cops and they're one of them is going another at one point. So I thought it was neat to make it completely an American experience, Americana experience, in a classical sense that we're used to when we see great statesman or great events in American history. So that was a wild, wild idea but I think it was pretty successful; it heightened the iconesque role they played in American life at that time, Pacino and De Niro, you know?
I absolutely agree because, I mean, it could have it could have been music that played up the thriller aspect of it, but I found the music to be almost very contemplative and melancholy in a way, almost like it was about that tragic inevitability that awaited them both.
That's right, that's right.
Yeah. It was beautiful. Beautiful. And when you're working with somebody like Michael Mann and I think of his films, and music is such a –
[unintelligible] and “Public Enemies”, so I worked with him again.
Yes, and his music is such an essential part of the texture of his films. He has to have a very special musical language with you, I would think.
Well, he's a music fanatic and he loves music. He's – as the project is developing, he's listening to a million-and-one things that he'd like his, you know, movie to sound like. And he’s so devoted to the musical aspect of the thing that sometimes it's frustrating, because he wants something very very specific and it's tough to find it, because he often changes his mind. It's his right, his right to change his mind; he's the director, it is his project, his script, his idea, but a composer has to be prepared for that – an idea that, you know, you're in his world and you have to adapt.
Yeah, yeah. The other director that you've worked with frequently besides Mr. Mann and Julie – Neil Jordan, who you've done remarkable work with. I was listening to “The Butcher Boy” earlier today, and it's so beautiful, that score, but also I think you started with him on “Interview with the Vampire”. And, was that a project that – I mean, I seem to remember, because I've always been obsessed with film scores – was that a project that you came on to almost last-minute?
Last-minute yes, yeah. Mr. Fenton was doing the score, and they weren't happy with the final product, and um George Fenton was asked if he can stay and finish the project, but he couldn't; he had another project to attend to. So the whole movie was left in – fell in my lap, so to speak. And I had, like, nearly three weeks to do everything, compose two hours of music in three weeks, so it was a more of a reflexive process than a reflective process, and I had to just to reflex my muscles, and just go into the day knowing I'm going to compose four minutes of music a day or something like that, or ten minutes of music, or two reels of music, and the speed, I think, of the creative process worked on my side, because they didn't have much time to muck with it and make changes. I just had to get from the beginning to the end, and I based my musical ideas on the fact that you have a chronological aspect with vampires. They live a long time, so let's say the music went from a very sort of a medieval sound, with Latin and children and things going through the harpsichord, then a classical period of music, and going into the modern piano and modern orchestral music, and then through even the rock, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ at the end. So it had a chronological imperative to it as a backbone of what I was writing. So it was a very simple plan, you know? But I was able to complete it, and I was very – I'm still very happy – with that score.
Oh, it's fantastic. I mean –
It works in concert; you know, it works away from the movie as well.
That fascinates me how, you know, you think about screenwriters and directors and actors doing research into a project, whether it be in investigating a time period or the particular region of the world where the story takes place, or what have you. Can you talk about any of your credits and that kind of research that went into it, so people can understand what goes into building a score like that?
Well, sometimes research gets you so far, because any time you research something you realize you need about a few years to research anything, to do anything properly in another person's culture, so you often – you have a feeling, let's say, on a movie like “Michael Collins” which is here the most important political personality in the history of Ireland. And I was asked to write the music on his behalf, you know, in the movie. I don't know the history of Irish music and all the folkloric veins and avenues of that music. So I just made a general sketch in my head of how he wanted to sound, and I hope that was appreciated on the Irish side, and was; it's beloved over there. But there was no way of avoiding the fact that it had to sound from that world, in Ireland, you know? And Neil was more interested in the drama of it all, the Shakespearean aspect of Michael Collins and de Valera, and how the musical approach to drama was very important to him. And to me it was a special project because I read the script and I said to Neil Jordan at the time, You know, I'm missing the female quality in this script. There was more female involvement, female contribution to the revolution. And so I started the whole score – set the music in Gaelic or in Irish, and not in the English language to begin with. So you hear a non-English language during the Easter Rebellion. By the way, April, is now 100 years’ anniversary, April 1916, so it's now it's approaching April
2016, so it's a 100-year anniversary of that event. So I composed it for Sinéad O'Connor and orchestra. So when men are shooting up men in the rebellion, and you hear women and you hear the Irish language and you hear the word, the very words used from the Easter Rebellion in the Irish language.
Wow. That's a stunning score. Did you think in terms of – for Michael Collins and his struggle, did you think in terms of creating something anthemic?
Oh, absolutely. More than once, and to make anthemic qualities run through the whole film musically. But I actually had to write a new Irish national anthem, you know? And that was very funny. I had to sound like it was written in early 20th century, like Elgar or something, John Fields, composers that came from that era. So I actually wrote a new national anthem from Ireland in that movie. Not used by the Irish nation, but it served well in the movie.
The last question I usually ask of my composers, I'm always curious to know: If you taught a class on film composition, what example throughout history – and you can use your own as well – would you use? Which tracks or particular films or cues would you use to teach various lessons?
There's a big divide between writing scores that are driven by melody. For example, Nino Rota’s scores for film in general is driven by melody. “Godfather”, “Romeo and
Juliet”, “La strada”, all the Fellini movies; the melody is a backbone that drives the drama and the action and puts the personality on the move. And on the other side Bernard Herrmann is – you can use three notes, sometimes two notes, two chords, to create a atmosphere of imbalance, an atmosphere of psychological dilemma. And he rarely relies on the melody and he relies on textures and repeated chord changes and it's equally effective. But it underlines the two big avenues you can you can traverse to get to the end with your director that you're working with.
Yeah. You know, it's interesting because –
If I were to teach, I would show those examples as a vehicle, as a testament that you don't have to do something one way, you know? Sometimes you can blow it apart completely and do really unexpected things like I did in “Drugstore Cowboy”, for example, or sometimes “Butcher Boy”, and sometimes “Titus”. And, yeah. And my own scoring, you know, it's a matter of scoring every moment in a movie like “Batman Forever”, or, you know, something like that. It’s a big franchise, and every moment, every turn, every gesture every, you know, explosion, every chase, everything has to be covered. And dialogue is rattling on and you have to still compose and still hear the dialogue. So that's a completely other avenue of expression a composer has to be, you know, cognizant of and have chops in that area.