Mark Isham’s music speaks a language all its own. It fuses jazz, classical, and New Age elements with a distinctive use of electronic instruments, resulting in a very personal style. The musical landscapes that his scores depict are impressionistic and sometimes pastoral in their cool romanticism. Maintaining relationships with directors and producers that extend from one film to the next is an important part of succeeding as a film composer. Isham has had several multi-film collaborations, most notably with Robert Redford and Irwin Winkler. For Redford, he composed the lovely music for “A River Runs Through It” (1992) and the jazzy score for “Quiz Show” (1994). For Winkler, he composed techno-influenced music for “The Net” (1995) and a sentimental score for “Life as a House” (2001). The dark, suspenseful side of Isham’s music is found in his score for the thriller “Kiss the Girls” (1997). Recently, once again showing the versatility of his compositional voice, he wrote a lighthearted score for the animated adventure “Racing Stripes” (2005) and an intense, atmospheric score that profoundly impacts the film “Crash” (2005). Jazz and film-music genres often overlap, as in the film scores of Dave Grusin and Terence Blanchard, just to name two. How did you make the transition from a jazz musician to film composer? Basically, an opportunity presented itself to me. I’d been interested in music far beyond the traditional jazz genre from the very beginning and had been experimenting a lot with electronic music and ambient music. I have a reasonably thorough classical-music background also. I was involved in a record project with a friend who plays a lot of traditional Chinese instruments – flutes and percussion. We’d written a series of pieces for electronic synthesizers and his instruments, and we wanted to make a New Music record for ECM. We didn’t get the opportunity with ECM, but we distributed the music around to various friends after we’d done it, and it fell into the hands of a film director who was very excited by it and approached me based on that music to score my first film, “Never Cry Wolf”. So my film experience didn’t really start with the jazz genre. It started off with more of an alternative New Music genre if you will. It wasn’t really until my film with Alan Rudolph [“Trouble in Mind”] that the jazz influence really started to have a place in a film that I was worked on. The main thing was that I was not a jazz musician to begin with – I had already spent a lot of time in quite a number of different genres and was very interested in the idea of programmatic music and ambient music. That’s probably one of the reasons that film composing came quite readily to me without having been trained in it. So it wasn’t a stretch for me to take those ideas and apply them to film. And the first few films I did were very much along those lines. So you didn’t make a conscious career choice to work in film? No, not at all. It never really occurred to me to try such a thing until somebody approached me and suggested I try it. I said okay, and it took me about four and a half months to score that first film. It was a trial by fire, but I was put together with some very good music editors and orchestrators, producers, and engineers, and they really got me through the whole process. We came out with a very good score. Then I went about another year before I did any other film music. I went to being sort of a starving jazz musician and playing with Van Morrison. Then I came to my sense, as it were, and said to myself, “Film music was fun, and it paid well. They paid me to produce a large body of work. Let’s look back into that.” Then I got myself an agent and the rest is history. You have a signature sound. No matter whether you’re scoring a thriller or a love story, you seem to always have that unique sound. How did you come about developing your sound? Who and what were your influences? I think my sound had already been developing because I was working in a lot of different genres – writing different types of music and experimenting with different types of music – and the ideas that I was working with sort of applied themselves very well to film music. The basic influences from the jazz world were, of course, Miles Davis and Weather Report. I think that their influences extend beyond just their use in the jazz genre. By that I mean, for instance, Weather Report and Miles, both were great masters of contrast in music. In other words, they experimented by taking elements from different genres and laying them on top of each other to create something new. And that’s a concept that can be applied across the board, not just in the jazz world that they stayed in. That general concept can be used no matter what you’re doing. I think it became really apparent to me when I started to study Brian Eno and figure out a lot of what his philosophy was. He’d read a lot of John Cage, and John Cage I think wrote about music better than he composed it. He had some fascinating ideas, and a lot of this is the concept of music as a more sculptural art form. In other words, he’d take blocks of music and juxtapose them and build things out of them, as opposed to thinking of the compositional process in the traditional Western way of melody and harmony and counterpoint, things like that. Brian Eno and David Bowie and David Byrne also were huge influences on me all through the seventies. And, of course, I had my classical-music roots: I was a great admirer of some of the late romantics – in the interesting evolution of harmony – Gustav Mahler and Samuel Barber. And I was into some of the moderns, Takemitsu and Penderecki, just for color and texture. These were fascinating things to know about. So you don’t really rely on the influence of other film composers? Well, somewhat over the years I have. I mean, it didn’t start that way. In the early days, I was a big fan of Henry Mancini because he sort of crossed worlds. You could go to a big commercial film, like “The Pink Panther”, and all of a sudden there was this great jazz music, and it was the perfect thing for that movie. That had a profound influence on me. That was “Wow!” – the sort of thing that would excite me. Here is somebody who isn’t just working with the normal genres. He was willing to sort of stretch things and move things around and try things. That was always interesting to me. I have certain composers now whom I really admire, obviously. I think Tom Newman has shown a tremendous talent and ability in his career. I think the world of him. I’m a big fan of Elliot Goldenthal. I think he is the real deal. And you can’t touch someone like John Williams. I mean, he is perhaps the greatest of all time. It gets very subjective at this point, arguing who John Williams is and his tremendous legacy to the genre. In terms of direct influence on me, it tends to be certain scores more than certain composers. I will say, “The way the composer handled that sort of situation, I need to remember that. There is an idea that is fruitful. There is an idea that can really be explored.” Even though I didn’t care much for the movie, I thought Horner’s score to “A Beautiful Mind” was wonderful, and it was a unique score for him. I like seeing that, too: You start to think of somebody in a certain way and then, all of a sudden, it’s, “Wow! Listen to that.” That’s really a special moment for him and a special piece of music. John Williams’s “Catch Me If You Can”: I thought, “God, what a great thing for John to have done!” I mean, he found a vocabulary that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought was going to come from him, and yet he has proved to be a master of it and did just a fantastic job. You seem to write from the heart – almost in an improvisational style. How much research do you put into your film music, and how much of it do you find yourself developing on gut feelings? I tend to do a certain amount of research, but I’ve never been one for exactness… I don’t want that to come across in the wrong way. What I really mean is that I tend to be an impressionist when I do my research. I research into an area or genre or sound enough to get what makes it tick, and then apply that to what I do, so that the right colors and flavors come through. I manage to infuse what I want to do with those colors and with those flavors. And I can’t help but think that that comes from Weather Report and Miles, because that’s exactly what they would do. I mean, Miles, never, in his later years, played real hip-hop, but there was a definite influence. You would listen and you would say, “Well, I’m not quite sure what he means.” But on the other hand you get that flavor, which he took so much further to make it his own. I think that is part of the jazz experience that I love. I love having to learn about a new way of looking at music, a new point of view in the language of music, and then being able to make it my own so that I feel comfortable creating with it as a new dialect, so to speak. Improvising, basically? Yeah, in my jazz experience, improvising is the same basic concept as composition, except you have to get it really good the first time. So, the better improviser you are, the better composer you can be, I think, or at least the faster, more-efficient composer you can be. I’ve never been the type of composer who agonizes over the exact sixty-fourth note on this leading tone. I have much more of the latter-half-of-the-twentieth-century point of view: The tools of writing are tape machines and computers. You get something going and it has a vibe and it has a groove and it has a… It’s communicating. The emotion is there, and that’s what’s really important. Although I understand the rigors of the notes on the page and the score and getting it all sort of lined up for the rules of harmony – and I can use that as a tool – I’ve never elected to use that as my real creative jumping-off point. How do you approach a new film? What are your steps to creating a score? To me, it starts with the sonic vocabulary, to use the metaphor of the score. One of the beauties and challenges of modern composition is that it’s limitless now. If you were writing a hundred years ago, you had a finite vocabulary of sound you could choose from. Well, with the advent of electronics and recorded music and everything else in the last hundred years, obviously that’s been changing, and we reach a point now in this new century where it’s totally infinite. The first step for me is to pare this down, because if I leave it wide open for myself, as I go, it’s liable to just become chaotic. The sounds can so much dictate the type of composition that’s going to evolve. The first sort of experimental phase to me is pinning down the sound of the movie. What sonic colors match the story, match the images, match the tempo, the cutting, match the characters, and fundamentally match the emotions of the film? Not to say this won’t evolve, or that I’ll not throw it out halfway through and start all over. This is a very positive first step for me that can involve just sitting down for a week and programming or sitting down with five sound designers and saying, “Let’s build a new vocabulary here,” or sitting down with my orchestrators, and saying, “All right, let’s not use a traditional orchestra, let’s just write for ten violas and three basses.” I just try to get an idea of what vocabulary is going to be needed. And that, for me, just will start the flow. It just always does. It always has. I’ve never found that to be an ineffective way of starting. So when you look at a movie, do you look at the story and try to fill in the characters’ themes? How do you go about that sort of thing? I’ve found over the years that sometimes characters can have themes, but I’ve not really found them that helpful to me when telling the story. I find that what the story is telling me is more important to identify thematically. Let’s say you’ve got a story of a man and a woman, Sam and Grace, coming together and loving each other, then breaking apart, then coming back together again, and you have Sam’s theme and Grace’s theme, and when he’s on the screen you play him and when she’s on the screen you play her, and when they’re together, you mix them both together. That’s very cute, but it doesn’t necessarily help you at all emotionally. What I would probably find more helpful is a theme for loneliness and a theme for the satisfaction of a marriage or a relationship and a theme that represents the fear of commitment or whatever it is that’s going to happen in your story. One of those themes is going to supply the true emotions and the true goals and purposes of the story rather than just telling you she’s off-camera, but he may be thinking about her, or that she is about to come to the door. You know what I mean? The pictures are already telling you that information, so the themes can be more about the bigger things – like honor or betrayal or love or trust – the various sorts of things that great storytelling wants to tell us about. Ken Kugler has been your main orchestrator throughout your career. How important is it to develop such a long-term relationship? How often do you find yourself leaving him, since he knows, your style and how you approach things, to fill in the color and texture? The relationship’s quite important. Ken and I have known each other for a very long time, and we’ve gotten to a point where we don’t have to talk that much. Although I think it’s very important to always keep the guys as close in and knowing where everything is as much as possible. We just finished a film that is quite interesting. While I was writing away, all of a sudden I had this cool idea of what I wanted to do. I think other people have tried it, but until I actually started down the path, I didn’t know that anybody had tried it. I thought I was the first. Anyway, I called up Ken quite early on and asked him what he thought of the idea. He said, “It’s a very cool idea. Let me start to do some research.” So he researched players and the way these certain instruments should be recorded and whether we should do this with overdubs or do it love, all the big questions. He probably spent more time researching this concept than he did at the end of the day on the orchestrating. But it was time well spent, and that’s where letting him really get involved in the process is really good. The score that really launched your film career is “A River Runs Through It”. It is a sweet score and one that well deserves its praise. What was the experience like working with Robert Redford? How much input did he have in your work? Well, Robert is a really fastidious director. He’s a perfectionist and an incredibly bright guy who knows how to communicate well about what he wants. He already had a score on that picture that he decided wasn’t working. He knew a fair amount of what the movie needed and what didn’t work in it. Also, there was this area where it hadn’t been done quite right yet. He was very involved. He would come over to the house and bring some CDs and things. He worked very closely with me on demos. At one point, he had to be on the East Coast, so I would send demos to him via messenger, and he would call me while listening to the demos in his car. The score worked really well and people responded really well to it. Your score for “Quiz Show”, another Redford film, is certainly one of my favorites. Yeah, I loved that score, too. Unfortunately, I don’t know if the movie was marketed correctly. It didn’t get the audience I think it deserved. I think it’s another wonderful movie. Bob makes terrific movies. Your relationship with Robert Redford’s films abruptly halted. Your work on his films was superb, and I can’t imagine him feeling any differently. Knowing your capabilities and his sensibilities, were you bothered when he sought other composers? Yeah, there is a certain level of disappointment because I felt we were doing really good work, and I’ve never had the opportunity to discuss that with him. He told me that “Quiz Show” was the most enjoyable, productive scoring experience he’d ever had. I was very proud of that. But the truth of the matter is that I’ve been in the business a long time, and I’ve worked with a lot of different people who, at some point, just want to try something different. They hear something from somebody, and they say, “You know, that really strikes me. I would love to work with someone who could create something like that.” I think nine times out of ten that happens. I’ve had directors tell me, “Look, working with you was fantastic. I loved it. But I want to try this over here because I just think I hear something there that I know is going to connect.” That’s the decision that they make, and it’s an absolutely totally valid decision, obviously. “Blade” was a movie that I would not expect to see you attached to, yet you pulled it off seemingly effortlessly. Is there a dark side of you that needs to come out every once in a while? Well, to me, a movie like “Blade” really isn’t that dark because it has that comic-book element about it. It’s sort of three feet above the real darkness. It’s sort of tongue-in-cheek dark. You can be bombastic and big and gothic. I actually enjoy projects like that. I think they’re a lot of fun. But there are certain movies that are – to my mind – really dark, and I’m not necessarily sure I would get involved in them. Well, “The Hitcher” was a pretty dark film. Yeah, but again, I think different things push different buttons in different people. That was an early film for me. It’s about confronting evil. There is something to be said for that. It’s not something that’s easy to do in life. Whether that movie is good storytelling is a subjective opinion. Robert [Harnon] is just an old friend of mine. We’ve always hit it off. I enjoy working with him and I’ve done a lot of his films. Jeff Rona has worked with you on a few occasions, probably the most well-known being “Chicago Hope”, for which you composed a great theme and Jeff ran with the score. Why does a composer such as you, or James Newton Howard with “ER”, come onto the scene and then another composer takes over the show? It’s just a question of what you want to do in your life. Television was something that I wasn’t very interested in doing because it didn’t seem like an opportunity to write music in a way that would be satisfying. I had an album coming out and I wanted to take some time off to be able to do some touring, when it suddenly occurred to me that if I had a theme that was in circulation on TV, there would be a certain amount of consistent income from that without having to be home writing all year long. Then, when David Kelley was the one behind the project my agent brought to me, and I looked at who Kelley was and what he was doing, I said, “Well, let’s take a look at this.” That was basically how I entered the world of television. It was mostly because of David Kelley. I thought he was a tremendous talent and the show was going to be something interesting. How did Jeff Rona come into the picture? I’ve known Jeff for many years. He’s a talented fellow. I wanted someone I trusted to take over, and he was a good choice. Irwin Winkler is a director you have worked with on a few notable occasions. How does this sort of experience differ from working for the first time with a filmmaker? Yeah, I have a couple of guys: Irwin, of course Alan Rudolph. I’ve done over ten picture, I think, with Alan. I’ve done a couple with Irwin. What’s interesting is that of the three movies I’ve done with Irwin, the last, “Life as a House”, is probably the best score and maybe Irwin’s best movie, too. You know, when you start to get everything rolling like that, when the relationship is good and the material is good and the movie is going well, the results get better and better. Those are the experiences you are looking for. What about a new director? I’ve worked with a lot of new directors. I just worked with a first-time director, Wayne Kramer, who I think is going to be one of the all-time greats. We’ve just done a movie called “The Cooler”. Wayne’s a writer/director and he’s the real deal. He’s unbelievably talented. His first film got big raves at Sundance. Lionsgate is putting it out in November, close to Academy consideration time because it’s really good. What’s especially great about Wayne is that he’s a huge music fan in general. He knows more about film music than I do. It’s just a pleasure to work with someone who has such a love for the music and such respect for what the music offers, and then is so knowledgeable. I mean, his temp scores are just tremendous because he knows and loves that process of just finding the right music. You seem to have a more positive view toward temp tracks than most of your colleagues. Well, they’re great tools. The trick is not to abuse the tool. I guess the complaints you hear from composers are that the director loved the temp score so much that they wouldn’t take anything else but it. That’s happened to me, and most of the time I’ve been able to handle that. What I usually do is get the director to critique it. They say they love it, and I say, “Great, I’m glad you love it. Now that’s a flute in the beginning. Do you love the flute? Would a clarinet be better?” The next thing you know, “Well, it would be much better with a clarinet, and I really wish it would go down here when it goes up here.” You’ve got a whole slew of things that you can do to make it better and different. But having said that, I’ve also gotten caught in that trap myself and not necessarily been able to get out of it elegantly. I think it is a skill to know what music does and be able to duplicate it in a different way. Of course, that is one of the big things a film composer has to do that most other musicians never have to think about. There is somewhat of an objective result from a piece of music used in a certain way, and that same objective result needs to occur with a different piece of music. To a certain degree, it’s the responsibility of a director, too, to be willing to look at something newly and know whether the overall same objective result is being achieved, even with a different piece of music. What confuses me about the temp track is that it’s not used as a language so that directors can simply convey their thoughts. Well, directors use them differently. A lot of it has to do with the directorial style in post-production. I know some directors who put more time into the temp score than they do into the score. It’s the sort of thing they can control. They can sit down with the music editor and say, “Move that two beats over” or “Put a swell there…” The next thing you know, they have it exactly where they want it. That process with the composer is more difficult for them, but it shouldn’t be. If that’s the level of detail they want in a score, then they owe it to themselves to allow the time for that level of detail in the final score. Just find a general vibe, then go to work with the composer to find more of the details. I don’t want to get stuck on this subject, but I feel that if you get a composer in on the project early and put that composer’s own original music to the movie before it gets test-screened and so forth, then you have complete originality and style from the composer who was hired to suit the film in the first place. Well, I’ve just done that. I’ve just finished a film with Philip Kaufman that I worked on for close to eight months. At the last screening, I think eighty percent of the music was mine. And everyone kept saying, “That’s great! Whose music is that?” They were told, “That’s the score.” And everyone said, “Even better!” Was that easier for you? I don’t know in the end. It was certainly the way that Philip wanted to do it, and it was fun doing it with him in that regard. It was a lot of work. I’ve probably achieved equally good work coming in right toward the end, replacing a temp score. I don’t know which is more effective. It’s just another way of working. What is your prized project thus far? There’s a wide variety of different things that sticks out to me. I think of “A River Runs Through It” because I did the whole thing in less than a month and yet it turned out to be a strong piece of work and got recognized. I also have fond memories of strange scores, like the score to “Cool World”, which was like a huge orchestra and a big jazz band and drum loops. It was sort of a monstrous production. It was the first time I ever tried anything of that scale. And to pull it off and have it all work was pretty exciting. I also think of the exact opposite, a movie with no money and just a concept for the score, “Romeo Is Bleeding”, for which basically they had nothing, but they temped it all with “Basic Instinct”. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding. That’s like 1.3 million dollars you’re listening to. But I have an idea. Let me try some things.” I think it was one of the most creative and interesting scores I’ve done.
It just gets easier. You know them and you know where their tastes are going to be, and I think you’re a little more relaxed in saying what you think in a quick, efficient manner. You know how the communication goes between you. A friendship has started and it’s fun.