When you start to score a film, what are your first steps?
I get an emotional reaction from seeing it on the big screen and getting a sense of it. Usually the first thing I think of is how not to score it, what not to do; what traps you can fall into. And then I think of what the picture needs to either enhance its strong points or divert its weak points. I mull it around and usually talk to the director to get a sense of style and orchestration. Then I start randomly trying to improvise at the piano, little motifs that I think work with an orchestration in mind. I’ll ask for the film and start at a very early time, with no pressure on me at all, going in with a computer MIDI setup to explore different sound possibilities with the film. In this case I work a lot with electronic music producer Richard Martinez. Then there’s a soundscape created for a movie; you compose melodies and think about different instrumental and orchestrational feels for the movie. Some movies feel big and orchestral; other movies feel like retro-sixties. It’s a variety of possibilities.
Do you compose from pencil to paper or use MIDI due to time constraints?
Sometimes my hand with a pencil teaches me things differently than sitting down with MIDI. The act of holding a pencil, sitting down, and writing counterpoint or melody, is a different feeling and process. The beautiful thing about MIDI is that I seem to use a side of my brain that doesn’t get too fussy; it doesn’t get too wrapped up into details. It’s more of the side of the brain sitting there in the theater improvising with actors, making it work. You discard all the details and get to the essentials, which I find is really wonderful. Then I fill I the details later with either pen or pencil. When I sit down and write out a theme, let’s say if I have to write a very particular waltz or a fugue that needs very exact harmonies and counterpoints, I find that using the pencil is more helpful. So I use a combination of both writing it out by hand and MIDI. I find them both very helpful, but sometimes I’ll do something on MIDI and then I have to go back and say, ‘No, that’s not right. The harmonies aren’t right; it’s just dumb compositionally’ – but it worked really well dramatically, so I’ll figure out how to improve it compositionally. Then I’ll write it to work out the little details and make it right. It can work out both ways. Personally, if I sat down and wrote everything with a pencil, it would be far too complicated because the chamber music composition person in me would over-compose. I think I’d be too detailed, too intricate. It’s still a borderline too intricate. The beauty of me for MIDI is that it cuts to the dramatic core.
When putting together mockups for your scores, how elaborate are they and what do you think of this procedure?
They’re very misleading. It’s like taking a Polaroid of The David or the Sistine Chapel and saying, ‘This is one of the great pieces of art.’ It’s the difference of kind of seeing the colors, but there’s no emotional impact. This doesn’t give you any of the grace and elegance that you can get by just playing it on a piano, but some directors can see the general instrumental character of your music. It gives a general instrumental foundation. On a film like “Alien 3”, I spent months and months trying to perfect it, to make it sound right on a synthesizer, and they used that as the temp score for the entire movie. It worked very well, but it took months.
Do you ever use any part of your mockup in the score afterwards?
I don’t use the mockups, but I have used very specific electronic experiments along with orchestral music. Throughout my career I’ve been working with electronic elements and combining them with the orchestra, like actually taking an electronic sound and doing an orchestration that works with the electronic sound that enhances it; this enhances them both.
You have developed your use of electronics with the orchestra through the years. Do you enjoy doing this?
I love that. Very often I’ll come up with an electronic sound and say, “Wow, this is great. Now how do I create that sound that sounds like that electronic sound in an orchestra?” Then you think to yourself, “Well, maybe if this particular percussion bowed the gong or if these things had this particular harmonic or if the bass drum was muted in a certain way…” You put it all together and say, “That’s exactly how that would sound if it were created by an orchestra.” When you combine them both, it has a beautiful synergy to it. By combining both you create the wonderful presence of a synthesized sound that could have really been an acoustic sound, but sampled down into some sort of electronic sound. This presents the challenge of making this sound like it was played by an orchestra. It has a wonderful combination and creates a beautiful synergy.
Do you play keyboards on any of your scores?
Mostly on every score there’s remnants of keyboards I’ve played. When I’m playing things into the MIDI setup, quite often they end up in the movie. During the course of an orchestral score at the end I feel it might need a swatch of sound, so I’ll go in and sweeten the sound. Like, if you can’t hear the basses, I’ll replay in the bass part for support. I basically play at the keyboards and also some of the brass instruments, woodwinds. And I sang baritone in Juan Darien, but everybody sings. It’s a natural process that a lot of my playing is heard in the movies. All of the electronic keyboard stuff in “Batman Forever”, all that wild organ playing is me. The music here for Mr. E stands out as some of my better keyboard work. Although I’m not proud of anything I’ve played on the electronic keyboards because you can always manipulate them to sound right.
Do you conduct your own scores?
On my two early films back in the seventies I conducted. I was strongly influenced by my teacher John Corigliano not to conduct because, unless you’re a professional conductor, invariably you’ll start to compose pieces that fit what you can conduct. If it was too complicated to conduct, you wouldn’t compose it because you don’t want to be foolish on the stand. I find that if I hire a professional conductor, someone who’s in the orchestral world, like Jonathan Sheffer who’s got his own orchestra or Steven Mercurio who conducts opera all over the world, I can write anything because they have the technique to do it. Plus I can run from the mixing console into the room with the musicians and I can constantly run throughout the orchestra, tinkering with the orchestration, changing things here and there. I don’t have to learn how to conduct every difficult piece of mine. I am going to conduct the Belgium National Symphony at the Ghent Film Festival in October, unless I chicken out or don’t have the time. I’m a perfectionist, so it would be difficult for me to get up there and not be as on top of my craft as possible, as good as I want to be. I couldn’t imagine conducting one of my own films. It would have to be music that’s rather simple, in 4/4 or 3/4 and stuff like that.
There’s also something else that comes up when you’re conducting your own scores, and that is, there’s an ego problem. Let’s say you conduct something. It’s not right and there’s a mistake in the composition, so then you change it. You say, “O.K., second bassoon, play D instead of F.” Then after you change it you still think it’s wrong and you change it again. Then after you change it again you realize that the first time it was right. You keep asking the musicians to change things and then they turn against you. They say, “Why don’t you just tell me what you want to play, damn it?” Then it becomes very difficult for you, to stand up there for three more hours and make all kinds of changes. With a conductor it deflects all of that. I can say to a conductor, “Listen, you might have to change this three or four times; please tell the orchestra that I just want to hear a couple of examples.” They’re not mad at me. They can get mad at him, but they don’t get mad at me.
What are your views on orchestrating?
My view on orchestrating is being open to the history of orchestration. I think “Interview with the Vampire” is a very good example. I had very little time to compose that score. It took about three weeks. I thought about history because vampires live a long time. Various vampires in the movie lived in different ages or were representative of different ages. The movie opens with the very unusual sound of a glass harmonica, which Benjamin Franklin invented by the way, and a viola de gamba. All of a sudden, when hearing these instruments, it gives you a sense of an ancient sound and place.
The picture I was composing to was modern San Francisco. David Geffen called me and said, “I want a contemporary sound, modern, you know?” I said, “No, I think it’s better if you have an ancient and strange sound based on instrumentation from the mid-ages and the ethereal quality of a glass harmonica and voices.” That’s where the Latin and children’s chorus comes in. That fit very well there with the character Louis who felt more like a 19th-century romantic figure. The orchestration felt like it was almost in the world of Brahms, where you have a very rich string orchestra and you choose the strings and orchestra like using the G strings on the violins to create a lot of richness in the lower octaves and using trombones to support the strings in this Brahms/Mahler type of warm romantic sound.
For Lestat I tied to use more of a baroque style of orchestration where I used the harpsichord and a light string orchestra. As a project develops you start to develop a palette for orchestration. All “Drugstore Cowboy” needed was a small ensemble with a synthesizer, but in this particular case for the drugged-out scenes, because they were just like conversations in rooms, I used choirs of didgeridoo from Australia. In orchestration with didgeridoo for those scenes, it had an effect of being some sort of ritualistic drug act that people have been doing for thirty-thousand years. By using contemporary instrumentation, like saxophone and jazz in orchestration, it creates a different mood which might invite the audience into smiling or saying, “Yes, this is wonderful.”
In “Butcher Boy” I wanted to have this bubblegum pop sound, but with dissonant harmonies, so I used an old Farsifa organ as well as sixties avant-garde free jazz elements. The feeling of orchestration in movies is really thinking of orchestration as a character and how it fits the subject. It’s almost another character in a movie. It would be impossible for me to think of a movie like “Drugstore Cowboy” with an orchestral score. It would be impossible for me to think of “Interview with the Vampire” with an electric score – this just cries out for orchestral elements.