How did you meet director Barry Levinson and get the job to score this?
Through my agent, who knows Barry very well and figured I would get along very well with him. I found Barry to be a delightful man, very funny. I don’t know why he decided to use my work, but he’s been aware of my music and has used it for temping some of his films. He’s a terrific man.
This was a great departure from your last film; your style here has gone off into a completely different direction again.
I was very happy to work on this project I wanted to pick up the strand of the work that I did many years ago before on “Alien 3”. I wanted to go back to that and find a project where I could do more electronic and orchestral experimentation. I was very happy to find a project where I could do that again.
How did you approach scoring for an environment with intense suspense differently this time?
You have to have something to contrast it with. There are a few themes in there that are actually quite lyrical, beautiful sounding, with pretty melodies. Very often the ocean is a very beautiful place. You can’t syncopate something unless you have something to syncopate against. The counterpoint of having some beautiful themes and showing beautiful imagery to the feeling of being claustrophobic underneath the ocean could only be solved by the beautiful themes.
As it got worse for the characters, at one point I composed an entire cue recorded with an orchestra, played the entire cue backwards – now I composed dramatically to the same cue backwards. So I reversed the tape and composed the forward orchestra with the backwards orchestra going at the same time. There’s a forward orchestra and a backward orchestra going at the same time.
What was Barry Levinson’s reaction to that?
It didn’t get into the picture. I had to rerecord something where he wanted it to be more heroic. The cue didn’t make it in the film, but it made it on the CD. Fair enough if he wants it to be heroic; he’s the director. I wanted it to sound like these guys couldn’t find their way out; they were totally lost, they didn’t know what they were doing. It was like the worst LSD trip imaginable.
There are some great adventurous musical-type passages in some of the underwater scenes with the ships. It sounded completely different from “Alien 3” to me.
The only reason I said “pick up the strand” is that it gave me an opportunity to go further; to take it to the next step. Bob Elhai and I worked extremely close on this movie working on experimental-type orchestration.
When you’re composing for a sense of tension or urgency, do you just react to it?
There’s often something in a movie that sets off a pace of what you think the thing should be. Sometimes it’s in the actor’s performance; the nervousness in which he’s moving around or in which he’s pacing or in which his speech patterns are going. You then pick up a rhythm from the speech patterns or something; then you lead with that. Quite often it works very organically. When you can work organically it works very well.
Let’s say there’s a scene where the room’s filling up with water and there’s no escape. Also, the room is not only filled with water, but there are snakes in it. I’ll do something very organic with the orchestra by having a pile-up of textures that would constantly get thicker and thicker to feel like there was water filling up a room. Having brass clusters on top of brass clusters on top of string clusters, and that simple organic approach works very well. Also using variations of clock sounds and time bomb-type sounds. Things clicking away orchestrationally that would give you this feeling.
When I mean biomorphic or organic, when John Williams did “Jaws” and the famous Bum, bum. Bum, bum, pattern, that’s simply a heartbeat speeding up. So we all react to that because it’s real; it’s biomorphic. When Bernard Herrmann did the famous string sound in the “Psycho” shower scene, it’s an abstraction of your central nervous system feeling those sharp stabs, but also it’s bird sounds, that are organic. If there’s a bomb ready to go off and you’re underneath the ocean, if you can abstract the sense of a clock, then you might be getting to something and sometimes it’s as simple as that.
You have an uncanny sense on how to interpret sound into vision. How was it working with Barry Levinson on this project?
Wonderful. The only problem was that the special effects didn’t come in so I was composing to a blue screen half the time. He’d say, “Trust me, right over there the planet Venus spins around, then there’s a black hole, and a giant spaceship comes in here.” I didn’t see any of it.
You must’ve had a wonderful imagination to do this film.
Well, Barry would just tell me these things. And he said, “Man, you are the best blue screen composer around.” Please, no more blue screen ever again. But I loved Barry’s personality and liked him tremendously as a human being.