This movie shows Americana in a violent and self-serving angry mood, a powerful role with a despicable character. In this project you ever found ways to experiment again, like in the cue ‘Newsreel Mirror’.
‘Newsreel Mirror’ was really great filmmaking on Ron Shelton’s part. In the scene, Cobb was invited to Coopers Town, which is America’s Baseball Hall of Fame. And as he’s looking at a newsreel at this celebration everybody is seeing the accomplishments of him as a baseball player. But Cobb is seeing what a despicable character he is. He’s seeing, “His wife stole his whiskey and she paid the price. Here Cobb is beating up a fan, and here he is being a racist.” So he’s seeing what a shit he really was in his life, while everybody’s applauding and having fun. That’s one layer which let me be a little surrealistic.
On the next layer, which was before Cobb came around, baseball was played like a game. He came in and played it like a war, like he was this guy from the south that was avenging the south in the Civil War. He would raise his spikes and cut you up on purpose. I started with this very sunny original ragtime piece, as if it were played on some quiet steamboat with everybody very properly dressed, and how it would seem on a sunny Sunday hearing this polite ragtime music. Then it went to this really angry avant-garde-type orchestral music as you watched him steal bases and stuff. Then it went to this aggressive barrel house-type jazz. Weaving historical American music and coming into collision with orchestral experimentation was a way of making those scenes really interesting.
You said that Cobb’s classic scientific approach to baseball both collided and cohabited with his irrational, almost transcendent abandon of the game. That it was these opposing forces that gave you the key to composing the score: “Composition as collision.”
That’s right, composition as collision. In the very beginning you’re hearing what would sound like a guy working in the field singing this hymn, which is a pretty bloody hymn. This is colliding with a very Americana-like-sounding orchestral score.
Is this ‘composition as collision’ a contrast of different styles?
Yes, very specific opposite kinds of styles that all contrast and collide.
Why did you decide to take a larger orchestral approach here?
Cobb was an operatic type figure; he had these big, romantic, almost operatic-type themes, which played in contrast in collision to his very character.
Emotionally this must have been an interesting change for you because all of a sudden you were given the chance to let yourself go and compose violent because of the emotions that came through in “Cobb”.
Ron Shelton is a great guy to work with. Somewhere along the line I think he also had something to do with me scoring “Interview with the Vampire” because Neil rented out Ron’s house in New Orleans when he was doing “Interview with the Vampire”. I think they knew each other and I think Ron said, “You ought to listen to Elliot’s music”.
Why did you reuse the cue ‘The Beast Within’ from “Alien 3” in your score to “Cobb”?
Because it fit perfectly. It fit too perfectly to a scene where Cobb discovered that Stump found the secret letters, so he was about to almost kill this guy. It was literally ‘The Beast Within’ Cobb. It couldn’t have worked more perfectly than the temp music. We simply did it again. ‘Let’s acquire it.’ That’ll come up many times in my career where I’ll do something perfectly in one movie and I can’t get any better if I did it right, so I’ll just say, ‘Acquire it and let’s just re-record it.’
It’s pretty strange to think that you would score a film about an American baseball hero, but you took ‘Cobb’ one notch higher. You brought your perspective to it, and made it more than work for the film.
I’m a huge baseball fan, and I was able to communicate the type of enthusiasm I have for baseball. But also Cobb, oddly enough, was a classical music enthusiast and an opera fan. The first meeting, we said, ‘Let’s take an operatic approach to this character.’ This was coming from the director as well. Something big, orchestral, operatic, and grand, as the grand hero or the hollowness that happens to one who thinks of himself as some grand hero.
This seems to parallel your piece based on the 30th anniversary of Ebbets Field leaving New York.
The Ebbets Field piece is much more technical. In composing outside of film one writes a piece that can elapse over a period of an hour twenty minutes. In moves you have to write very well-delineated themes or sonorities that have to work for a short period of time.
I can’t wait to hear your orchestral version of our National Anthem at the World Series.
If I wrote a National Anthem for a baseball game, I would take the original one and edit it. It would go like this: ‘Ba, bada, ba ba ba. Ba, bada, ba, ba, ba,’ end! That would be it.