When did you know you would be scoring “Michael Collins” with Neil Jordan?
While I was doing “Interview with the Vampire” Neil sent me the script to “Michael Collins”. We got together socially in Dublin and talked about how you would approach a film like this. Since it’s mainly a film about a male struggle and there’s a female character, but she doesn’t come until late in the film or have a large part in it, I wanted that sense of femaleness to be very strong, because those are the mothers of the sons that go off and die. I also wanted the Irish language, the Gaelic, to be represented. So I wanted this female chorus with Sinéad O’Connor as a soloist in with the orchestral music. We also discussed that, other than a couple of places, it shouldn’t necessarily have an Irish sound to it. Neil felt if I went in that direction it would sound like a documentary as opposed to a drama.
I really heard and felt religious overtones from the musical opening with Sinéad O’Connor.
Yes, absolutely. A very strong feeling of Catholicism as well as a sense of ‘what a pity’. Jesus Christ said it best when he said, “Don’t cry for me; cry for Jerusalem.” If you think about Ireland and the troubles, the constant conflict, or the Balkans, then you think of Jerusalem itself. “Don’t cry for me, cry for Jerusalem” says it best.
Just imagine if you were Jesus Christ and you came down and you look and you see, ‘What’s going on here? Protestants and Catholics are fighting? What?’ If Jesus exists up there, he must think of this as the most foolish, absurd thing.
Your score sounded really gallant here.
I was trying to seek a sense of nobility. There was one anthem and that was when the Irish flag was raised as well as the British flag. I wanted it to sound very imperial British anthem-like sounding. How it actually sounded if someone composed it back then.
There was some real powerful driving symphonic material here. Two cues, ‘Fire and Arms’ and ‘Winter Raid’ are both very powerful.
Also I used Uilleann pipes, which is like an Irish bagpipe, but not in an Irish way. I played traditional Irish reels, but then I had the musician improvise almost in a late-John Coltrane style on the Irish pipes. I played it at various click track tempos with three different pipes, playing on three different click tracks, playing almost free jazz. But the Irish-based modes, with the orchestra over it, so it had almost a whirling quality about it.
This is such a fascinating score because it has a mixture of various things.
A lot of the music came from the feeling of the art direction. It has a very delicate Edwardian piano melody for the love theme. This is a very innocent love triangle and there’s a great deal of grace that Julia Roberts had in the film. She looked beautiful and Sandy Powell created the most beautiful costumes; you had this beautiful Victorian hat, there was an old train, a romance, this was true love, it was all those things and more. I wanted to have that Victorian, Edwardian sense of innocent courtship. I wasn’t trying to experiment, but just do exactly that. In a movie where there is a great deal of brutality, I wanted to have something that had a beautiful serenity to it. In a way that Steven Foster would write these beautiful little love songs with an other-age sense of romance.
Was it easier working with Neil Jordon second time ’round?
I think it was love at first bite. When we first worked in “Interview with the Vampire”, we just loved working together. He’s a man with a tremendous sense of humor, history, and trusts in the artists he’s working around. We’d go out at night and talk about movies, Yeats, the history of art, and he’s just a great guy, a terrific person to work for.