What’s the most difficult job you’ve ever taken?
The most difficult job I had in composing, not composing but arranging songs for a movie, was “Across the Universe”, because there were 33 songs. And I was responsible for producing at least 20-something. Twenty-five, or something like that.
It wasn’t the Beatles situation, it was thinking about those composers – George, John and Paul, not in any order – as composers who are like George Gershwin or something.
And there was quite a challenge for morphing it from a band situation, or a rock and roll situation, to a dramatic situation. And changing keys for adjusting a tessitura range for the singers, etc., was a huge, difficult task. It was daunting for me to be involved but very satisfying in the end.
What do you see as one of the bigger challenges of composing music for film as opposed to concert works?
I have a tough time enjoying something that I don’t know the outcome of completely when I’m composing it. I understand volume, but it’s hard to get a complete grasp on all the sound effects that are required for an action movie.
In some cases it works out great, really great. In other cases I say, “Why did I go to all that trouble composing and working on the orchestration and revisions and modulations and instrumentation, and now I can’t hear it because there’s a car chase happening?” So, you know, I enjoy car chases, but in this case, I can’t anticipate what will happen. I understand turning down the volume. I understand getting rid of the music completely. But I have trepidation in composing something that a giant block of sound effects will be added to it. But it’s where the challenge is I suppose.
What’s your process working with a director to achieve his vision or your own?
It’s a chronological process. I whittle down and whittle down along with the director in the situation, until I have something that hopefully the director can see, or revealing his or her vision. Because whether it’s an actual pencil or whether it’s a delete button, I’ve found the process of eliminating the extras revealing and very instructive to me. All the work, all the extra stuff, if I boil it down to the essential property of what I’m going for, what the director is going for. That’s where the eraser comes in quite often.
You’ve talked about reflective music versus reflexive music. Can you elaborate on that concept and how it changes your approach to a film?
Reflective versus reflexive. That was referring to “Interview with the Vampire”, because I had approximately three weeks to write two and a half hours of music. So, therefore, I had no time to really reflect. It was just a reflexive process. “Go! Go! Go!” I relied on my subconscious, on my training and my various situations in other movies to rely on. I couldn’t stop, I had to do it. Whatever it is, it’s coming out on June 27th, you know?
And the scary thing is seeing your name – for example on “Batman Forever” or other movies like “Interview with the Vampire” – going down in the Subway in New York, and I’m halfway done, and seeing your name on the poster, and saying, “Oh, God,” you know. I have a long way to go in two and a half weeks.
There’s a lot of pressure on a big studio film. And they get ferociously large here in L.A.
Tell me about jumping into the film composing industry as a young musician and orchestrating cues.
I started out for the first 10 years of my professional life orchestrating exclusively my own scores. And then I worked with, and continued to work with, a wonderful orchestrator who started as my assistant, and we both exchanged one page of his, one page of mine, until I wrote one page out, and he wrote 10 in the same amount of time.
So he was perfectly suited to work along with me in the film medium. He’s a very gifted musician, and especially in film, it’s something about the hours, and something about the grinding schedule. You absolutely, absolutely need someone to be your second heartbeat, so to speak. Or you’d just be dead. [Laughter]
How is it different writing for film versus another musical work?
Well, it certainly it is. Ballet, opera versus film. Three situations. In ballet, for example, you are working with flesh and blood. So if the choreographer wants a solo for two lasting I don’t know “X” amount of minutes, you have to put in built-in pauses, so that dancers have a chance to rest. In other words, you can’t write a 20-minute adagio and expect the dancers to keep up the duet.
In opera, you chose your own clock based on flesh and blood, how much a singer could sing.
You brought up a very interesting idea about film music’s role in a film, as it relates to time. How can music bend timing of a film?
It’s very specific about malleability of time. You can bend time in such a way that a 20-minute sequence of the movie feels like 10 minutes by adding something that pulls you along, and some string that all of a sudden engages you, and 20 minutes ago, you said, “What happened? It felt like 10 minutes.”
In the same way, you can make a millisecond seem like three minutes. And everyone says, if they’re in a car accident or if they fall or something, especially in impact car accidents, you imagine things traveling in slow motion even though it took place in maybe a second and a half. That’s the feeling. Not to be horrific or something, but take a kiss, for example. A composer can have a gift of making that kiss seem more significant, seem more temporally significant, seem longer.