Rolfe Kent’s clever character-driven score to director Alexander Payne’s “About Schmidt” (2002) fits the film’s eccentric characters to a “T”, deeply, through unobtrusively, exploring their minds while breathing great liveliness into their bizarre personalities. British-born Kent has maintained a successful ongoing relationship with director Payne, working also on Payne’s films “Election” (1999) and the Golden Globe-nominated “Sideways” (2004), for which Kent provided a jazz-based score. Although Rolfe is a relatively new addition to Hollywood, his star is in ascension, having already built an array of fine credits, including James Mangold’s period dramedy, “Kate & Leopold” (2001), and the romantic comedy “40 Days and 40 Nights” (2002). Tell me about the young Rolfe. My music career probably started in my early teens. I didn’t study music, but I was always playing on pianos at my high school. One of the music teachers encouraged me to put my music on paper. He got people to play it at school. So that’s really where it began. And now you are a film composer. It led to film music because I loved film music. Perhaps it was the glamor of film, I don’t know, but the idea of being involved in film is certainly a very attractive idea, especially because music – classical music – has very little significance for me because I didn’t grow up in a musical family. We didn’t hear music very much. So most types of music meant very little to me, whereas film music meant a lot to me because it had associations – images from films, stuff filling your head when you heard the music from those films. Films and musicals appealed to me very greatly as a child because they had these associations, because they meant something. They were about something. So, I was about eleven when I thought, “Okay, I really like writing music and playing music, and I really like what happens when you hear film music away from the film – it fills your mind with images. So that’s what I want to do. I want to write film music.” Do any particular scores from that period stand out in your memory? No. There’s a mixture of stuff: “The Jungle Book”, “Mary Poppins”, James Bond, “Lawrence of Arabia”… All these movies had very memorable music elements and memorable film images as well. Composers are often typecast from the beginning of their careers. This happened with you in romantic comedies. I would think that this is a tough gig because of the limited vocabulary, but you’ve managed to stay away from the clichés and have developed a technique that is unique. What are your feelings on this? There are worse things than to be typecast. Hollywood likes to make things more manageable by simply thinking that any creative individual does only one thing. It doesn’t seem like a downside at first, because at first it’s great to be getting the work. It’s great to be invited to participate in that process. But the creative downside of being asked to do a similar type of job again is that it becomes harder and harder to work out satisfying ways to say the same kinds of things. In other words, you establish a musical vocabulary for comedies that is uniquely yours. But you tire of that vocabulary pretty easily because after you’ve done two or three films, then “Oh, now what am I going to do?” So, for me, there have been two challenges. One is to make sure that comedy becomes only part of what I do and not all of what I do. And the other is to find the different ways of scoring these things. For example, I approached the score to “Legally Blonde” in a completely different way from what I had ever done before because I really needed to feel like I was making progress, that I was moving somewhere new, starting from a very different angle. I think that’s an ongoing thing. Even if you are into typecasting, if you are into just doing one thing, it still seems vital to find new ways to do things and new musical vocabularies. Are there genres that particularly interest you now or that you hope to break into soon? You said that comedies don’t provide a very broad canvas for music. The music is not likely to be noticed by the audience because it doesn’t have very much room in which to work. I would very much like to be working on some films that have more room. “About Schmidt” actually has a lot of room for the music. There’s an opportunity for the music to be heard and to do some serious work. So that is very satisfying. I would like to get more dramatic films, because the canvas is very exciting to me. You’ve formed a strong composer-director relationship with Alexander Payne. I have a number of relationships with directors. My relationship with Alexander Payne is the most high-profile. An established composer-director relationship makes it much easier to work and to know the terms upon which you are involved together. The way I work with Alexander has a very unique character to it. Because I know the relationship is in existence, I can get involved much earlier than I might in some other project, where they’re waiting to the last moment to decide who they’re going to have score the film. I’m involved in scoring the film while the film is still being edited, so there’s a lot of organic movement, both in the score and in the film, all the way up to the film’s completion. It’s a very creative environment to be in. Alexander is a very creative director and very open to ideas. I hear in your work a strong reference to characters more than the scenes or overall atmosphere. I don’t know. I think every film is different. I’ve always varied my approach. I watch the film and talk to the director, and I “listen” to film. By “listen”, I mean I live with it and I think about it and I experiment to see what direction is going to work. What does the film really need? The truth is, some films do not need music, and some films need a lot of music to help tell the story. So I try to work out what it is that the film is really asking for, what will help it really live on the screen. I don’t know if I’m actually character-driven or simply personality-driven. I think that my contribution has a lot to do with putting personality into music. So it becomes very personal because it’s very much about finding qualities and reactions in myself and figuring out how to contribute them to the film. Your voice is often the orchestra without a lot of focus on modern technology. I love acoustic sounds. I have a lot of time for synthetic sounds, but acoustic sounds seem to captivate my interest in ways that synthetic sounds can only occasionally achieve. I don’t think there’s ever a substitution that I care for. I don’t really like the result from using synthetic sounds instead of real acoustic performances. But there are synthetic sounds that are very interesting and very useful because they’re nothing like any real acoustic sound. They’re very cool sounds that are just unique on their own. Drum loops I think are terrific. I do demos and my demos are done synthetically, but I don’t intent them to end up in the fil. They are always replaced with a real live orchestra or band. Among the things that make your music blossom with color is your versatile use of sounds and ethnic instrumentation. How do you come up with these ideas? Again, it’s my fascination with acoustic sounds and what certain sounds do. As a very small child, if someone had a piano, I would go and just bash on the piano. I was fascinated by its timbre, its sound qualities, what it does acoustically, what it does around your head. The same applies to all instruments that I come upon. They have unique qualities that do certain things – they emote in certain ways. I think it’s very easy to be very boring with sounds. But it’s also not very difficult to find sounds that have great depth and quality and interest. I don’t need to use particular ethnic sounds or sounds from any particular culture, but I’m fascinated by the qualities that they contribute. And that’s what draws me to certain things. Certainly Russian instrumentation, or Greek or Chinese, have certain qualities and effects that really interest me. I go for interesting sounds simply because I’m fascinated by them. “Kate & Leopold”, bouncing between two time periods, was a step in a different direction for you. Was this challenging? Well, it was done very quickly. I think we got it done in five weeks. It was a very intense five-week period of long hours. The director, Jim Mangold, was very closely involved, coming over to my little studio two or three times a week to hear what I was doing and give me some direction. He was very clear as to what he wanted – that we had different time periods and different emotional things going on. And he had very clear ideas about how to deal with those time periods. He felt he was making a sort of fifties movie or sixties movie along the line of a Rock Hudson and Doris Day kind of innocent romance. So the contemporary portions of the music would have a slightly dated Mancini quality. And that’s what I attempted to do. The period stuff, which was set back in the nineteenth century, would have a much more classical approach. I originally wrote the main theme as a classical waltz, and it because this Gershwin-esque love melody, which seemed to translate very well. I fell in love with the tune. Maybe I should be embarrassed to say that, since I wrote it, but once I translated it from this very classical waltz, which you hear only at the very end of the film, into this Gershwin kind of jazz string arrangement, it achieved a seductive quality that was enormously satisfying to me. You use the tuba as a comedic tool in “Town & Country”. Why did you choose this instrument? I did a cue in demo form in “Town & Country” and the director just loved the tuba sound. That was really the reason there was so much tuba in “Town & Country”. It is a good sound. It has a really great flavor to it. I get nervous when sounds are that effective because I worry that no one will want me to use any other sounds again. We’re so used to bass sounds coming from certain instruments, yet there are loads of different instruments that play bass sounds. There’s bass saxophone. One of my favorite instruments of the moment is the rumba box, which is a Caribbean instrument. It’s really just a giant thumb piano, but it’s a bass instrument and it sounds terrific. I’m always on the lookout for other ways to do the same thing; to move from tuba, for example, to using bass clarinet or contrabassoon makes perfect sense to me, but they have different personalities. It’s a question of whether that personality matches the job you need to do. What are your thoughts of a score being listened to outside of a film? Do you keep that in mind when you’re writing the score? It’s like job number two. Job number one is to make the score work for the film so that the film moves in the way it was intended until the vision of the director is realized. And job number two is to write music that is so good that people will want to hear it outside of the film. So it’s the second priority, but it’s definitely something that I like the idea of, because the music is one of the very few elements involved in the film that can be taken away from the film and appreciated independently. Do you ever take an interest in the listeners’ opinions? I’m interested in what people have to say. But frankly, I’m not very aware about many people reviewing my scores. So there hasn’t been a lot to think about. Randall’s theme, which is a character-driven theme in “About Schmidt”, shows up in many cues and changes the tempo of emotion. Talk about the overall chemistry of this score. It was a very tricky one. The film may be very clear about what it is now, but it wasn’t clear what it was when we started on it. Instead of taking a short period of time, it actually took a good three months. At least half of that was just searching for music or ideas that would resonate with the film. The temp score never worked and was never used as a basis for anything. So it was very much up to me to unlock the character of Schmidt and find a way of making him seem resonant, making him someone we identified with, someone we understood and even cared for. Even though he’s not a particularly likeable character, nonetheless, he is a human being and he has things that we understand and identify with. So I spend a long time trying to figure out how to do that for him and, of course, for the other characters, the other elements in the film, Randall being one of them. Randall is not a sophisticated character. Randall has the tuba and, in a way, that was the most two-dimensional piece of music. It was really playing him as a humorous character. But the rest of the film had a much more sophisticated approach from Alexander and, hopefully, from me. This score was a slowly evolving process, and the great discipline that Alexander imposed on me was to keep things simple. They should be melodic, but they shouldn’t be fussy or complicated. So the score actually is very simple-sounding. There is not much in the way of counterpoint or any of that kind of thing. It’s very narrative and fairly straightforward. Throughout this score, when I was really thinking about how to nail it, I would never manage to find a melody. But when I stopped thinking about it and started just playing and playing around with ideas, the good ideas came out. Mood is a huge factor in this score, and it takes so many different turns that I often couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be a comedy or a drama. The Russian-style march was forceful, but yet it has a funny tone to it. Tell me more about your reason for using the various styles you used. The Russian sequence was all about momentum. That’s evident just looking at the picture. He has got so much anger and momentum going on that it was really just a question of sticking with I and supporting it and making it as big and energetic as it needed to be. He is, at that particular point, both angry and, from our point of view, a figure of fun. We’re clearly not entirely on his side as we watch him go ballistic, but it’s kind of ridiculous. So the music had to take it seriously enough that you’ve got the energy and the momentum there. But the music didn’t really want to be comic; it wanted to be serious in such a way that you would see the ridiculousness of it. I think the pompous Russian quality highlighted its ridiculousness. Actually, the music is what told me whether to laugh or not. Right, the function of the music that I come up with is generally not to make the joke, but to set up the environment where you understand that it is a joke and that you have license to find things funny. Alexander’s films certainly tend to be very satirical. There is the possibility that you could take things seriously, the things that when they look bad, feel bad. And if he wants you to regard it as satire – see the humor in it – then that’s something the music can contribute. It can give you a different point of view, a different perspective, so that you see it the way Alexander is looking at it, not just for what it is on its own. I am so moved by your passion in “About Schmidt’s” dramatic cues. You write romance and comedy very well, but what I take from your music is the style of almost an operatic tragedy, such as when Warren’s wife dies or during the last letter to Ndugu. Is this style your coming out or becoming more natural? At the moment, it’s something that I’m very keen on. The breadth of emotion in this film I respond to very deeply. I’d say the answer is yes. It’s funny: I always thought I was very emotional in my music, except in Alexander’s films, because he generally doesn’t want emotion, he wants a distance. When we started “About Schmidt”, he said the funniest thing. He said, “Rolfe, I know you’re very dry in your music, but I want you to be emotional here.” And I was like, “It’s not me that’s dry, it’s you that’s dry. I’m dying to do emotion.” It was very funny that he had thought that. I don’t know how he comes to these conclusions; I’ve always thought that emotional music comes very readily to me. Which one of your scores are you most fond of? “About Schmidt”. I think it is the most complete score I’ve written. Have you set any goals for your career’s journey? I want to keep doing work of quality and variety. I suppose one ambition at the moment is that I want the witty material to be part of what I do, not all I do. I do a variety of different kinds of films, but the ones that do well so far have tended to be on the wittier end of things. I’d like to achieve some more balance in what I do.