Before he was a Hollywood composer, Christopher Lennertz was an assistant to Basil Poledouris. He has a candid chat about 'working your way up', contending with samples, budgeting with package deals, and how TV remains a good training ground for young composers.
I met Chris Lennertz on the set of “Beachhouse”, a University of Southern California (USC) student feature film that he hoped to score. In meeting him I knew he had the right amount of presence, confidence, and what-have-you to make it as a film scorer.
At just 23, Lennertz recently graduated from USC’s prestigious film scoring program. He studied under such minor individuals as Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, and Bruce Broughton. His assured aura about him did not seem to stem from arrogance but from perhaps an understanding of his field that he attained from his schooling as well as from being an assistant for Basil Poledouris for the past two years.
Meeting him again for this interview, at a decent Venice restaurant, I am reminded that if anything, this guy has what he needs to succeed in this world of egos: a grip.
We should make this one side, 45 minutes, so I don’t have to cut out a lot of stuff.
Okay.
I’m sure Lukas won’t want it to be too long. We could do like a quarter of a page little blurb, one question: “So what do you think of the future of film music… great thanks a lot…” Anyway, was it intimidating coming out into the real world, out of USC?
Yes. The strange thing was, coming from a school like SC with the professors here, you know, Elmer and Bruce and Chris Young, all year you’ve been talking about $250,000 a month music budgets and London Symphony and things like that. And then you come into the real world and somebody smacks you with a movie with a $500,000 complete budget and the biggest star on it is, you know, Loni Anderson or somebody, and it’s beach bimbos in France. It’s a culture shock more than anything else. You have to work your way up there.
We often talk about the hacks versus those who have been classically trained, like yourself…
My biggest thing has always been melodies. If someone has a real talent to write good melodies, I can’t fault them for that. If they’re got the brains to hire good orchestrators and people to get them out of a jam, when given the opportunity to make that kind of money and be in that profile of a career, you can’t blame ‘em. It’s just frustrating for people who are in my position who spend a number of years in school studying orchestration, composition, both classical and film, being out there in front of a symphony orchestra for two or three years, doing recording sessions, scoring student films, really feeling like you’ve worked your way out with every sense of it. You know the range of your own instruments, you know the unusual sound that the oboe makes at such and such pitch. And then somebody coming from the rock world or knowing a certain producer or director, who is basically someone who fumbles around with a synthesizer – and today’s technology, you can make a synthesizer sound pretty damn good fumbling around with it… It’s just frustrating for those people who put in the real time to get to that, you have to work twice as hard to get the chance to do something impressive.
Did SC prepare you for the synth-type work you now have to do?
I think it does. I don’t think that the premise of film composing changes between electronics and orchestra or live instruments. It’s the same, it’s just a different palette. Whether an artist is using oils or watercolors, he still needs to be a good artist to make a good score. I’ve heard scores that are almost completely electronic that I’ve liked immensely and I’ve heard scores that are full orchestra that I haven’t thought were that great. The bottom line comes down to the craft. And I think the schooling that I went through and that a lot of people go through really teaches you to compose, not to make sounds, or soundscapes, which is the easy way out. And with low budget movies, the expectations aren’t very high. The movie that I just finished, when we were mixing, everyone was amazed at what I thought was average, part, you know, what I thought was expected. They were so used to one or two synthesizers playing a rhythm groove underneath a melody. That’s not film scoring. That’s writing songs and pasting them in.
You’ve adapted what you’ve learned in school onto a shitty horror movie. It’s almost a tougher job, I would think, on a low budget, crappy movie.
I think so. They’re always saying, “Save my film,” “Save this film,” “This scene isn’t scary and it needs to be.” I’ll do what I can but the music is not gonna save the film. The sound effects, the music will help a bit but it’s not gonna save a film that’s not good.
If I turn on Cinemax 3 or whatever it is and watch one of those movies, the music does anything but save the movie.
The expectations are so low and the reason they are so low is because of what people can get by with. The same thing goes for the films. If all films that were in the low-budget range were of the quality of, say, a “Pulp Fiction”, the music would then elevate itself to that quality as well. When you’ve got a film whose major plot twist has to do with a skateboard that can talk or so-and-so who happens to be a murderer in a strip club, you can’t expect that to be very inspiring to a composer or a sound effects editor or to other artists who are trying to help out your work. It’s trying to get inspired by something that’s not inspiring. It’s very hard to do…
Just imagine a better film or…
Yes. Often I do.
Does it work?
Yeah, it does. A lot of times what I’ll do is actually go through and do the timing notes to the movie and really watch the scene and know what the scene is. I know this is a scene of so-and-so getting shot and then running down the hall, chasing, and then there’s a suspenseful ending when he gets killed. Say that’s the scenario. What I’ll do is then turn it off, and I won’t write to picture. I’ll write to those timing and I’ll let my mind imagine the same scene with better actors, and better sets and better production value. In that sense the music comes out and hopefully, I guess the point is, the music will be written for that movie and hopefully elevate the movie that I started with to that, or closer to that level.
You’re not afraid of it sticking out like John Barry music in “The Specialist”?
No, I’m not, because, I don’t know, I kinda think that it’s all basically a formula. Say, if you have Toyota but you happen to use the best gasoline you can use, it’s still gonna make your Toyota run better. You know what I mean? I don’t know where that came from. [I laugh] It’s one of those things where I just feel it’s my job to do the best job on the music that I can and if the film falls short, it’s really not my fault. You know. [laughs]
Talk about SC as a stepping stone…
It’s amazing being in Los Angeles especially at a school like that, one renowned for its programs in film. You have a tendency to meet all kinds of people. When I went to USC I knew I was going to do music in general. I had a composition teacher sophomore year who ended up being friends with a major studio musician in Hollywood, Ralph Frierson, the big session keyboard player. He introduced me to Ralph, and Ralph invited me to go check out a film scoring session that happened to be a Henry Mancini session for the movie “Tom and Jerry”. I went and basically spent the whole day watching Henry work. And I remember at the end of the day, Hanna and Barbera were there producing the movie, and they decided that the ending wasn’t right. I saw Mancini run into the next room and close the door, and about five minutes later he walked out with a stack of music and just passed it out to all the musicians. One, two, three, they did two rehearsals, two takes, and everyone loved it, the producers loved it and they said okay, that’s a wrap. They changed it right on the spot. Like a good 16 bars of music. In five minutes. I saw the power, the glamour, and the rush of that area of music. I turned to Ralph and said, “Okay, this is what I’m gonna do.” And from then on the only question has been how do I get there.
Easily that could intimidate you more than anything else.
I think a lot of people are intimidated. What people don’t realize is the personal side of the business. You need to possess a certain amount of self-confidence and social graces to make it as well. All of my classmates at USC were incredible musicians, they were all very talented. But when you subtract the number of people that didn’t necessarily have the self-confidence or the drive to get in there and make the connections that they needed to make, I think it diminishes my competition greatly. That has a lot to do with it. But being at USC you certain were exposed… After I met Henry Mancini I went on to the film scoring program, I studied with Bruce Broughton, Chris Young, David Raksin, and Elmer Bernstein, one of my most favorite teachers of all time. He’s a genius. I love the guy. He’s incredible. I went to Elmer’s scoring sessions, to Bruce’s scoring sessions. I still keep in touch with Chris Young a lot. I met Basil Poledouris at a seminary, he’s also a USC graduate. We actually ended up meeting at a later date. His studio’s four blocks from my house. So whenever I’m not working on my own film, I’m working on Basil’s stuff. We just finished “The Jungle Book”. We’re starting “Free Willy” the sequel in about a week. So it’s been infinitely an amazing experience for me to have that kind of training and the people to back up the training. And they’ve been great. They’ve just been incredible.
Do you think film composers as compared to other talents in the industry are more friendly or down to earth as people?
Oh yeah. One of the things that I really enjoyed as I slowly began to meet the top notch composers, the real steadfast composers, the Basils and Elmers or the world: you’re kind of intimidated when you first meet them, but I was just amazed at the normalcy of their lives and of their personalities. They’re caring, they’re fun, they’re family people, they have real strong family lives. And that was something that I was worried about when I first got into this. I was worried about the Hollywood stigma that it’s just cutthroat and whatever. And yeah, it is to a point, but a composer has one of those jobs, creative and important and very rewarding, where except for the film score crowd like yourself, Basil could walk down the street, I could walk down the street in 20 years and nobody’s going to know who I am. And that’s great. I think that makes everything a lot easier.
They’ll never see your face but they’ll hear your stuff and at least you’ll be remembered or whatever.
That’s the thing too. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t, that I didn’t have an ego or that I wasn’t attracted to the world or film music or film because I just like attention. I’m definitely the kind of person that likes to be the center of attention, that’s why I like conducting my own stuff. But it’s one of those things where if you want to be the center of attention, you can – someone asks for you, you say, “Oh I just finished this film…” But it’s not one of those things where everyone in the whole world is gonna be… the people who really care are the people who are really film music lovers and will appreciate your work. So I think that’s a great luxury of this particular career in film.
What do you think is the most valuable thing Basil has taught you?
I think the one thing that he taught me that I needed is patience. He would talk about how it took him eight years to get his first feature after he got out of USC, when he finally got his big debut on “Big Wednesday”. John Milius was one of his best friends from USC. I get depressed doing movies that don’t necessarily have the budgets or the scope to accommodate real sweeping music that I like. It’s nice to have somebody like him in his position to say look, it’s gonna change, it’s gonna get better. I have about ten of fifteen friends who are close to me at SC who I know are going to be successful in the film world and are going to ask me to do their music. So it’s kind of a waiting game and he’s made it a little bit easier to take that news. He’s certainly been a big help with introducing me to the film world in general and to the politics of the way things work.
Have you had trouble finding your own voice despite this?
Tough to have everything sound completely original. You take in all the ingredients of the recipe which happen to be all your favorite composers, and then it takes a couple of years to mix them together and eventually get your style out of that mixture. When you look at the composers that are big right now, you know they did that with Bernard Herrmann and David Raksin, Max Steiner, all those guys. I think now we’re asked to mature in the same way but the ingredients of our mix are Goldsmith and Williams, guys like that, and then what we have to do is kind of take all that in, take all the knowledge in from them and their style and kind of [laughs] come out…
Make it your own.
Yeah… come out with our own voice. It’s hard to have that always be original, especially with being young and not having a lot of time to mix it around. It’s important to really try to steer your director away from the temp tracks and convince him or her to give you the freedom to try something new.
You have to fight to be unique, right?
Yeah, I think you do.
In order to stand out, you have to be unique, that’s…
You do. There’s a lot of people who can copy styles but I think the ones who are going to be the next Jerry or the next John Williams are gonna be the people who are not copying styles, the people who no one else sounds like. Hopefully, I’m not sure if I reached that point completely yet, I wouldn’t think I have, but I plan to. That’s definitely something I work towards and try to steer the films that I do towards allowing me to do.
What do you think is different about a composer going out into the world now as opposed to, say, 10, 20 years ago?
The thing that depresses me is with the onslaught of all these video game movies and cable channels, there’s so much… it’s good because there’s a lot of work but it’s also bad because it lowers the expectations, which means a lot of people who probably don’t deserve to be getting the work that you should be doing are getting it. It seems that in the old days, people like Goldsmith were getting into films by starting in smaller TV shows. Now, it’s basically look, Mike Post and Snuffy Walden are doing all the TV there is. And they have 18 people in their company writing for them. It doesn’t give people a chance to move up… TV is just different than movies but at least the production value is good. Yeah, you might be working for an 18 piece group rather than a 90 piece orchestra, but it’s a good training ground and certainly a lot more respectable than B movies.
That must be discouraging.
Yeah, and the other thing that’s discouraging is that a lot of people won’t take a chance on a composer. There’s a lot of these young directors who are in their early and mid-20s who are getting their first-look deals with MCA and Universal, or they’re the young screenwriter who gets the chance to direct his first movie or something. It’s their first time, but they’ll still go and hire James Newton Howard. I’ll be interested to see what the guys who did “Clerks” finally do on their first studio movie. Is the studio going to let them go out and find someone their age with their experience and their life experience to score their movie? Probably not. They’re probably going to take somebody in their 40s and go, “Here.” That’s one of the reasons that the changing of the guard doesn’t happen as often as it does for directors and actors, because it seems to be the same people over and over again. And I’m not saying, I mean by all means these people have certainly earned their greatness and they’ve earned their spot. But when you get these 20 year-old filmmakers working with 40 or 50 year-old composers, I think they should be working with people their own age because that’s where you get the new ideas. I know I’ve got so much in common, I know what they went through, we went through the same thing, the same time frame, our minds work the same. I’m the person that should be writing the music for their movies. And I think that the studios or somebody is not allowing that to happen, you know? [This is totally true and happens all the time. Sam Raimi couldn’t or wouldn’t use Joe LoDuca on “The Quick and the Dead”; ditto Danny Cannon jettisoning David Arnold on “Judge Dredd”. In both cases, Alan Silvestri was needed to make the studios feel comfortable. –LK]
It’s usually the risk that pays off the biggest.
Right… I’m sure half of this is because of the fact that yeah, I wish I was doing these movies. Great, I’ll admit that. But it does make sense.
It’s a heck of an excuse anyway. Do you think the young new composers are taking as many risks as they used to, or are they just repeating the same old thing?
I think a lot of them don’t take risks now. A lot of composers in general right now are not taking risks; at the same time you have to add that the director is not allowing risks to be taken and if you wanna work… even the movie I just did had a very obvious temp score that this particular interviewer could pick out right away, at least the main title of it, the rest of it I got a little more freedom. But a lot of times you will have a director say to you, “This is really what I wanted but I can’t afford it, I want as close to this that you can get without being sued.” And then my response to that is, well, I’m gonna get as far away from that without getting fired.
[laughs] Now that’s a quote.
That’s one of the other problems with B movies. Most of the time B movies are copies of A movies, rehashed, so they want a copy of that score or that style score. When you keep copying everything like that, it’s really hard to be really creative. There are a lot of supporters for new talent, there’s been a lot of people who have been enthusiastic about me, about young composers in general. The people at Gorfaine-Schwartz have given me a chance, I’m not necessarily a full client but they’re very nice to me over there. The people at BMI, they’re great, they’ve been amazing to me… they’re really a big proponent of new things, and they’re trying real hard to keep their minds open to new stuff. And then they support you, you get a hit movie, and you’ve got the director who’s just making the remade version of such and such, and then all of a sudden all this excitement, all this hype about doing something new gets stonewalled. And it’s sad. When you look at all the best movies in history, they’re the “Star Wars”es, the movies that people said were not gonna make it or were just too far-fetched. Those are the kind of movies that are gonna make somebody a big star and I wish the people in the film world would take a couple more chances on that. Let young people like myself get involved ‘cause we’re the ones who really have the new ideas… you know what I mean. And you, when you direct, I’m your man. Or whatever you decide to do.
You were talking about music budgets at one point.
What’s very discouraging is that presently with the package deal you get a certain amount of money and you need to come up with the entire thing. No matter how much you spend on recording, or mixing or hiring players or whatever, it all comes out of your budget that they give you. So, if you spend all that money, you don’t have any money left, you got paid zero dollars for that film. The last film I did, I spent 80% of my budget on production. I took 20% home and that’s ridiculous. They wonder why the scores aren’t that good. Some people will say, “Forget it, we’ll throw 80% into the score and make it as good as I possibly can.” Other people are going to say, “Well screw it, I’m just gonna put all the money in my pocket, do it completely on synths, completely low quality, not invent anything in the score.” It’s encouraging low quality basically because everyone wants to get paid. At some point in your life you’re not gonna be in the position to say, “I could spend the such and such on the production.” You’re gonna need all that money and you’re gonna end up putting out a cheesy synthesizer mock-up that you did in two weeks without any live elements or anything like that.
On one of those mini casio keyboards…
Yeah, and it’s discouraging. They keep asking for more when achieving less. You really get what you pay for. I’m a big proponent of live instruments. If I never had to do a completely synth score again in my life, I would be the happiest man on the planet. I have a hard time making mechanical sounds emulate human emotions. I really feel that human emotions should be played by people and with human sounds. It always sounds second-rate to try and do the opposite.
What about A-class film? I mean Hans Zimemr is stuck Mr. Synth-boy.
But it’s synth with orchestra. A lot of synth are for a purpose too. Tom Newman, when he did “The Shawshank Redemption”, something that I liked, when you got into the cold dark prison all of a sudden you started hearing the samples of the metallic rhythms, and then when you got into the emotional scenes, you got back into the live instruments. To me that makes perfect sense.
It’s a delicate balance. It should stick out.
Definitely. James Newton Howard’s another great composer who can mix the synths and orchestra. I think “The Fugitive” was great. When everything came in it made sense. So it certainly can be done. Synth is just another instrument. It shouldn’t be sued in place of… it’s just another color to the palette. Unfortunately with our budget it’s the only color. [laughs]
Do you think it’s rare for someone to invest, like you did, 80% of the music budget? You said they were surprised…
I think it is rare. I’ve seen other films that this company has done and the scores were not necessarily outstanding. I think they were surprised but that was the point I was trying to make, it was like, look, just because the film I’m working on is not an A film doesn’t mean I’m not gonna take every step I can to make the score an A score, because if I wanna be an A-list guy… if you lower yourself to whatever plane you are forced to deal with I don’t think you’ll ever make it to the next level. If you always work towards where you want to be, you’re gonna end up slowly working through the middle section, you know what I mean. My feeling is right now, especially at this point in my career, I’m so young that if I ever do anything half-heartedly that could be a death sentence. I think an A-list composer can get away with doing a mediocre score and have it not make that big of a difference, but when you’re at a point where every score you do is the next step up this ladder and you’re as impatient as I am, you have to keep climbing with every single score regardless of the medium that they give you. You can’t let it drag you down.
From what I heard you’re on the right track.
That means a lot more coming from you, a film scoring connoisseur, than… my mom or my friends. I remember playing one of scenes for Jerry and he said, that’s really good. Coming from him, that’s a really big boost. [laughs] Basil heard my last score and said, “Oh, I really like that.” If Basil and Jerry like it and somebody like you, or a director that really likes good film scoring, that means a lot.
I don’t see you stuck in B movie land for very long.
I’m hoping this is a step on the ladder rather than the plateau. Spend now, play later. The only way you can move forward is if you’re forward-minded, if you’re a dreamer or whatever they want to call it. It’s the only way you are going to get to that point. You might never make it to exactly where your dream had been but the only way you’re gonna get close is to take that road.
Addendum published October 1995 in the Film Score Monthly #62 “Mail Bag”
Someone brought it to my attention that there was a section in your interview with me that was run in the last issue that could be taken the wrong way. When I was comparing the older generation and the present day, I was speaking sarcastically and in an exaggerated tone about a handful of composer doing most of the TV shows right now and understandably needing assistance to get it all done. Unfortunately, I don’t think that it came across as a general statement. I was not speaking specifically; in fact, I only mentioned the two composers I did off the top of my head because they do a lot of work and I enjoy their music. I apologize to them and I’m truly sorry if anyone got the wrong idea.