In the world of movie composers, there isn’t a more distinguished or romantic traveler than Maurice Jarre.  His scores have journeyed to dozens of countries, translating their melodies into the soaring language of film music.  From “Lawrence of Arabia’s” wind-swept themes to the magical Russian winter of “Doctor Zhivago”, Jarre’s combinations of ethnic instruments and lush orchestrations have produced the cinema’s most passionate soundtracks.  “A Walk in the Clouds” marks another poetic score for Maurice Jarre, his Latin rhythms capturing the love between an American soldier and the daughter of Mexican winemakers, a cross-cultural spell that’s cast with guitar, song, and symphony.

Even though he’s never played a note before, Maurice Jarre’s own musical awakening came at the age of 16.  Born in Lyons to a father who was the French Broadcasting Company’s technical director, Jarre abandoned his own radio career in 1940 to enter the army, then studied composition at the Paris Conservatory of Music after the war.  Dedicated to turning his drive into technique, Jarre was taught by such famed composers and conductors as Arthur Honegger and Charles Munch.  The budding composer soon found that his greatest interests lay in ethnic and electronic music, fields which Jarre helped to pioneer as an orchestral percussionist.

The French National Theater provided Jarre with a valuable training ground in film scoring.  Named as its musical director, Jarre often had to write impromptu music a few hours before the curtains opened.  His collaborations with Jean Cocteau, Harold Pinter, and Albert Camus would eventually lead Jarre to compose for the larger canvas of film.  He wrote over 40 scores while in France, including the impressionistic melodies of "Hotel de invalids" and "Eyes without a Face" for director Georges Franju.

In a prolific scoring career that’s spanned over four decades and 200 movies, Jarre has composed for every film genre and musical style, working with such top directors as Alfred Hitchcock (“Topaz”), Peter Weird (“Witness”), Franco Zeffirelli (“Jesus of Nazareth”), and Adrian Lynne "Jacob’s Ladder").  A sampling of Jarre’s scores includes such massive films as “The Longest Day”, “The Professionals”, “Grand Prix”, “Enemy Mine”, and “The Train”.  Other films like “Moon over Parador”, “Lion of the Desert”, “Shogun”, and “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” allowed Jarre to combine a large orchestra with Spanish, Arabic, and Aboriginal instruments.  Yet Maurice Jarre was equally capable when turning completely to synthesizers in “The Mosquito Coast”, “No Way Out”, “Ghost”, and “Fatal Attraction”.

Presented with the French Legion of Honor Medal for his cinematic contributions, Maurice Jarre continues to score films with an enthusiasm that’s taken his music far beyond the boundaries of a film screen, and into the world’s musical consciousness.  “A Walk in the Clouds” continues to show the composer’s best talent, to write majestic, yet emotionally intimate music that touches the heart.

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How did you get involved with “A Walk in the Clouds”?

I’d met Alfonso Arau in a restaurant, and thought I didn’t know him, Alfonso said that he hoped to work with me one day.  Later on, Jerry Zucker asked me to score “First Knight”, which was originally three hours long.  I told him there was no way I could compose 90 minutes of music for his movie in six weeks, especially since I didn’t use outside orchestrators to help me write scores.  Jerry understood, and respected my honesty.  Then a short time later, I was offered “A Walk in the Clouds”.  A Cuban composer had already done the film’s temporary soundtrack, but the studio didn’t want to use his music for the actual score.  So they were looking for someone to compose the music, and I was thrilled when they screened the music for me.  It was a beautiful film, and I wanted to work with Alfonso after seeing “Like Water for Chocolate”.  And it turned out that “A Walk in the Clouds” was also a Jerry Zucker production, so I remained in the same film family! There was more time to score “A Walk in the Clouds”, and it didn’t need 90 minutes of music.  When you think the film is really good and interesting, the inspiration comes a lot easier, especially since I’ve had so many romantic adventures!

How did the film affect you?

“A Walk in the Clouds” is so touching because it’s seen through the eyes of an unwed mother in 1945, which was a very backward time.  As she falls in love with an American soldier, the film shows the Mexican traditions of her family in the Napa Valley wine country.  So in addition to being romantic, “A Walk in the Clouds” is also an epic.

What approach did you and Alfonso want to take with the score?

Unlike many directors, Alfonso knows what he wants.  Because he’d made an epic picture, Alfonso and I agreed that “A Walk in the Clouds” should only be scored with a big orchestra.  That would give the wine country its feeling of open space.  When it came to the romantic music, Alfonso asked me to give him ‘Lara’s Theme’! All I could tell Alfonso was, “Sorry, but that’s already been done!”

How ‘Mexican’ did you want the score to be?

Alfonso wanted the score to have a Mexican flavor, but one that wasn’t too big.  I’d studied Latin music a long time ago in France, so I was able to write in that style.  I used native instruments like the salterio and the guitarron.  When I played the ethnic music for Alfonso, he hugged me and said, “Maurice, I’m sure there’s Mexican blood in you somewhere!”  Alfonso was at all the recordings, and insisted that they be done in Hollywood.  That made me very happy, because the studios often want you to do a cheaper score in Eastern Europe.  It’s disgusting to have a $40 million production trying to save $100,000 on the score, and getting poorly-performed music instead of a fantastic soundtrack.  And the studios still don’t save any money, because they have to bring the producer, the director, the music editors and their wives overseas! That’s why I prefer to score films in Hollywood, because they have the best musicians and technicians.

Your scores are famous for their ‘ethnic’ sound.

When I was at the Paris Conservatory, all of the studies had to take courses in musical culture, and write in five different styles of ethnic music for their conducting theses.  So I chose Russian, Arabia, Asian, Indian, and Hillbilly music.  I didn’t know that I would use these styles for “Doctor Zhivago”, “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Shogun”, “A Passage to India”, and “Resurrection”.  Chinese, Arabic, and Indian music is incredibly sophisticated.  When you learn those musical cultures, you realize how poor the Western ear actually is.  On “The Man Who Would Be King”, I had Indian musicians playing with the London Symphony Orchestra.  You should have seen their faces when the Indians lit incense, and sat on rugs next to their instruments! They thought, “My God, we’re going to be here for a month! How can they play with us?”  But because I knew Eastern music, I was able to write the Indians’ parts in a notation that they could understand.  So even though the Indians had no idea about Western music, they got every take right.  At the end of the recording session, the London Symphony gave them a standing ovation.  Now it’s different, because you can sample any exotic instrument into a synthesizer.  But a sample can never match having the real musicians playing for you.

Was it intimidating to get “Lawrence of Arabia” as your first Hollywood film?

I was in France when the film’s producer, Sam Spiegel, asked me to score part of “Lawrence of Arabia”.  He was impressed after hearing the music I’d written for “Sundays and Cybele”, which won Best Foreign Picture in 1962.  It was also my first Oscar nomination for Best Score.  Yet there was no more than ten minutes of music in the film, which was composed for three instruments! Now I’m asked to write over two hours of music for a hundred musicians! When I came to London to work on “Lawrence”, I had no idea how great or demanding the film would be.  The first rough cut I saw was 40 hours long, and it took a whole week for me to watch it! I researched Lawrence’s history for three months before I started scoring the film.  Unlike my later score for “The Message”, a film about Mohammed that was told from the Arab perspective, “Lawrence” was seen from an Englishman’s point of view.  So the film’s score was mostly Western, with some Arab feeling to it.

Did the musical scope of “Lawrence” intimidate other directors hiring you?

After “Lawrence of Arabia” Fred Zinnemann asked me to score “Behold a Pale Horse”, and I was happy to be using only twelve instruments on it! I also did small scores for pictures like “Weekend at Dunkirk” and “The Collector”.  Then when David Lean wanted me to score “Doctor Zhivago”, the guy at MGM’s music department told him, “Maurice is very good for open spaces and the desert, but we have better composers for Russia and snow!”  Yet “Doctor Zhivago” became one of the first movie soundtracks to really sell.  It even topped the Beatles for six weeks on the music charts.  And then I didn’t get one movie offer for six months!  Hollywood thought that I was only good for 100-piece orchestras and epics.  It never dawned on the studios that I could write music for chamber orchestras and comedies.  The only reason I finally got “Gambit” was because the producer was a friend of mine.

Did you have to change the way you scored films when you moved from France to Hollywood?

I don’t think so.  If “Judex” was an American film, I’d probably score it the same way that I did in France.  Its director, Geroge Franju, was influenced by the German Expressionists.  Like David Lean, Georges couldn’t read or write one note of music, but he knew how it should sound in a film.  My musical education taught me to be very open, and never to have an ego.  I consider myself lucky to have worked with directors from across the world, and I love the exchange of ideas between a filmmaker and a composer.  While I offer the director my opinion, I never question his judgement.  He’s the master of the whole deal.  David Lean once said, “I think your music can come in so subtly that the audience won’t hear it.” And if he didn’t want the audience to hear the score, then that was fine with me.  Some composers in Europe say, “I don’t write music for films.  I write for myself first of all.”  Bullshit!  If you’re an architect and you have to build a temple, you don’t say, “I’m going to build a villa!”  That kind of attitude is really snobbish.  They think the director will take care of everything, and that only works if the director’s a friend of the composer, and he patches the score all over the film.  You can be 100% original to yourself, but you still have to work with someone else’s material.  So I’ve never viewed myself as a prisoner when I’m composing.  The music is always mine.

You’ve composed some of the cinema’s most popular themes with “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago”.  What do you think makes a theme reach beyond the film screen?

Luck, and also the fact that I’m trained in the classics.  Mozart, my favorite composer, always had a theme.  So when I studied harmony, counterpoint, and composition, I was always looking for a musical “line” that would make sense.  One of the most difficult things about scoring is interesting the ear with only a few notes.  That’s why so much music disappears.  It’s all mood instead of melody.  Mood is very easy to do, and a lot of composers are good at it.  But they cannot write four notes with an interesting theme.  So it’s all a question of luck and inspiration.  A lot of young composers ask me how to write a good theme, and I tell them to listen to nature instead of leaning theory all the time.  Wind makes the most beautiful music.  Composers also have to listen to different music instead of blasting their eats with the same bang-bang-bang crap.  Young people start to lose their hearing because they’re accustomed to such a high level of decibels.  If you think about it, the composers of the 19^th century never had the awful sounds of motorcycles and cars around them.  Our ears are in perpetual electroshock!

Besides your orchestral scores, you’ve also done a lot of remarkable electronic scores like “The Year of Living Dangerous” and “Witness”.  How did you get interested in synthesizers?

I studied the ondes martenot, an electronic instrument which was the ancestor of the synthesizer.  Yet I could never use electronics early in my career, because I was known as a “romantic composer.” Finally, Peter Weird asked me to do a completely synthesized score for “The Year of Living Dangerously”.  I was very happy for the chance, and went to Australia to record the music.  But I couldn’t find any synthesizer players, or basic electronic instruments.  So I ended up recording all of the sounds from scratch with an engineers.  Over two months, we took simple things like a piano, and then treated it electronically to make a different sound.  I could have done “Witness” with an orchestra, but the reason I scored it electronically was because the Amish people don’t believe in music for religious ceremonies.  They didn’t have any instruments, so it would have been wrong to have an instrumental score.  I also went with electronics because Peter didn’t want the film to have any sentimentality.  Synthesizers gave “Witness” that cold feeling.  Some people complained that I was putting a ‘real’ orchestra out of work with Witness, which was ridiculous.  Even though I only had eight synthesizers players on the film, it was still more expensive to score with them.  I don’t want to replace the orchestra, I just wanted to have a different sound.

Why do you think you’ve lasted so long as a film composer?

Luck again! When I came to America in 1964, people wanted me to go to Hollywood parties.  And I went to them for about one year, and it was fun to become friends with movie stars.  But after a while, the dinners and people got very boring, and not one of these dinners got me a job!  So I said, “This is stupid.  I’d rather stay home and read a good book and listen to music.” From that time, I’ve rarely gone to these so-called “Hollywood parties.”

What kind of films would you like to score now?

It depends on the director and the story.  There are films I just won’t score.  30 years ago I may not have said that, because you can’t be too choosy early in your career.  But now every time I turn on the television, there’s some film with a person getting his brains blown out.  It’s totally crazy! We’re in a sick society when you can’t show a woman’s naked breast on TV, but can have a person’s brains being splattered all over it.  I don’t want to score those types of violent films, and I also don’t want to work on movies where the top executives are calling all of the creative shots.  They have no qualifications in music, and that’s the reason so many good composers have their work rejected.  I need to work with a strong director who won’t change the music to suit the studio.  And unfortunately, there aren’t many people like David Lean around anymore.  Now I’m very happy when a director like Alfonso Arau asks me to score “A Walk in the Clouds”.  It’s nice to work on a movie that respects the value of the family, and shows a beautiful story.