What is your approach to scoring a picture like this?
This is really the only action film I’ve ever done. “Batman”, although it had action sequences in it, it was really a mythic comic book movie, a different kettle of fish. In action movies, the music has to be loud. The orchestration has to be big because you’re fighting a lot of sound effects. I also felt like there had to be a lot of apocalyptic music in it because of the content. Los Angeles was on fire and since there are a lot of action-type movie fights the approach was to have electronic motors that would go at a very excited tempo and to have a lot of experimental orchestral hits – stings and stabs that go with the characters as they pound each other. The electronic underpinnings to the things created the speed and the unusual orchestration for punctuation, gave it the emphasis, heaviness, and the power you need in a film like this.
The other thing it had was a lot of humorous qualities to it, a lot of absurd characters. That gave me a chance to be more orchestrally ironic and developed. I think this score had a tremendous amount of variety in it, and, for an action movie, I was able to wedge in a lot of variety.
Explain your take on scoring absurdity and these over-the-top characters in “Demolition Man”.
Actually this was bland, loud, and masqueraded itself as a movie. In “Batman Forever” you had some absurd characters, which are Tommy Lee Jones and Mr. E, or Jim Carrey. Those were absurd over-the-top characters. In that movie what you do is take the lead and, if there’s a zany character, you can go nuts with whatever tool you have, whether it be avant-garde jazz or an LSD version of Guy Lombardo. With Tommy Lee Jones, who played the villain, you can be as darkly orchestral as you want, as long as it’s very clear to the audience that this is the zany character and this is the villain or this is the hero.
In “Demotion Man” the characters were almost neutralized in the sense that there wasn’t one strong director leading the way. There was Joel Silver who was producing and a director who was trembling under his feet. There wasn’t ever a sense that you were sitting in the copilot’s seat with some creative partner. You get a sense you’re contributing to something that is either going to make thirteen million dollars the first weekend or not. You’re not really making a movie; it just feels like being a pipe fitter in an industry.
You took this genre and put your stamp on it with a huge orchestral sound, combining it with some avant-garde orchestration.
There’s a little bit of that in there and some of that material became the prototype to my “Batman” scores.
Compared to “Alien 3” and some of your other scores, wasn’t this more of a mainstream orchestral score for you?
I think so. It’s the closest to being straight and mainstream. Compared to the action scores that I’ve heard that preceded it, it doesn’t sound like it comes from that tradition.
What did you learn from scoring “Demolition Man”?
That I don’t particularly like to score action movies because you waste your time. It didn’t waste my time in my career because it led to a lot of other opportunities, directors, and people that I’m very happy about, but it wasted my time because the sound effects are so loud. I was competing with so many explosions, gun shots, and loud sounds. You wonder why you try so hard.
Did this make you apprehensive about the “Batman” films?
No, because I know that in the right hands – unfortunately I wasn’t in the right hands – the music for “Batman” could be played loud. I remember Elfman’s music was played loud, so I said, “Maybe I have a shot here.”