Did both you and Neil go out on a creative limb to do something different here?
No. It’s always the drama of a picture that tells you what to do, and this is definitely a great movie to the end. I wanted to use a string quarter in the movie to show the raw emotions that this woman was going through. I wanted the directness, the rawness of it with the string quartet material. The guitar stuff I wanted for the evil crazy character. Neil was always temping this character with rock, but it never seemed to work because of the drumming.
What was the key to scoring “In Dreams”?
The key was using a string quartet with a larger orchestra and guitars. It was very difficult to bring out the individual high-wired emotions of the characters, where it was almost like their nervous system was being stretched on a wire. The only way I could think of doing this was with individual string instruments. When you start working with a string quartet you get this intensity of mood, emotion, and rhythm that you can’t really get with a large orchestra. You get an individual personality coming out of the viola, the two violins, and the cello that I thought was essential for the movie. There was an exposed nerve quality that only a string quartet can give you.
How difficult was it to find this approach?
It was relatively easy because, when I saw it, right away I felt it needed that string quarter aspect to it. This actually came to mind when I was watching the first screening of the film.
In a film like this, don’t you think a composer has to be a psychiatrist as well as a musician?
The hardest part of the music, doing the movie, was the simple piano themes. That’s the rocking two-note piano themes during the psychologist scenes where the piano is basically telling an underlying story between the psychiatrist and the patient. Just two or three notes rocking back and forth together.
Was your scoring based on the Annette Bening character’s state of mind, or the anticipation of what was about to happen – reality creating dreams, so to speak.
It was both reality creating dreams and dreams creating reality. That switched from scene to scene. The fact that the Robert Downey character and the Annette Bening character both had a canal that could go between them was just one of those things where these two people were connected psychically. They were the opposite; she was a loving mother while he needed the love of a mother. So it’s classic Freudian stuff. That really fascinated and scared him, but I also wanted it to be really emotional as well.
This is some of the most intricate orchestral string work you’ve composed so far.
It was intricate in the sense of rhythmic patterns and almost chamber music-like in its sound. There was also a lot of interesting electronic elements in there, which were samples of guitars that were used and distorted in various ways. There was also that very simply hymn on the song ‘Dream Baby’. It wasn’t as intricate as “Alien 3” in terms of orchestral intricacy; it was more compositionally intricate.
As this was your fourth film with Neil Jordan, did you get a free rein to score it?
He works by typically listening to the first third of the music I do to see if I’m on the right track, and then he waits for the orchestral session. Neil and his editor, Tony Lawson, are very active in terms of seeing the development of what you’re doing.