Cliff Martinez’s music is anything but simple, although one might detect a hint of the influence of minimalism in his scores, which have the ability to pull filmgoers into altogether new realms, new ambiences. His music often arcs across a film, flowing from scene to scene with great internal continuity. His eight collaborations with director Steven Soderbergh have allowed him to speak in his unique voice while bringing to each movie a different style of expression. From his pulsating, electronic scores that propel “Narc” (2002) and Soderbergh’s “Traffic” (2000) to his less dense, eerily spiritual music for Soderbergh’s “Solaris” (2002), Martinez has repeatedly proven to be a talented film composer who chooses to use predominantly synthesizers to express his very contemporary musical voice. How did you enter into the film music world? I played drums in rock-‘n’-roll bands for about ten years and became fascinated with the music technology in the eighties. I had a drum machine, a sampler, and one of the first hardware sequencers ever built. This was around the time I was in the band Red Hot Chili Peppers, and there was no place for that kind of technology in that band. They weren’t interested in it. I just started creating bunch of strange music using samples of kitchen utensils and so on, but I couldn’t find an outlet for that kind of stuff until I was channel-surfing one day and saw “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” and thought that it would be a perfect outlet for the music, which I thought was new and wonderful at the time. I happened to know the director of the show. I contacted him and sent him tapes of the music I was making. And my first scoring job became an episode of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse”. I started in TV, and after that came my first feature film, Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape”. A lot of your music is atmospheric and with a dominant use of synthesizers. My style has been influenced by Steven Soderbergh because most of my early film projects were directed by him. Steven has generally preferred a very stark, minimalist style. I think I have a natural tendency toward that sound anyway, but I would have to say that the films and the people I work with have had a very strong influence on my sound. You use the orchestra occasionally, but is it less of an interest to you? I’ve used the orchestra for films, but most of the films I’ve done are small independent films with limited budgets that preclude the use of an orchestra. I would like to use more orchestral elements in my scores. I have, however, been fortunate a couple of times. “Solaris” is my only orchestral score that I would really call “atmospheric”, which was what Steven was looking for. He wanted an atmospheric ambience that was also organic and orchestral in nature. How did your relationship with Steven Soderbergh begin? I was doing a scene in the film “Alien Nation” for a friend of mine who was primarily a sound designer. Steven, who was his roommate, happened to walk in and heard what I was doing. He liked what I was doing and asked me if I would be interested in scoring his first film, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape”. I agreed. Your music is somewhat outspoken. Does this provide challenges when you want to expand into different genres or A-list films? Aside from “Traffic” and “Solaris”, which were really big studio films. I suppose that’s a problem. Typecasting exists for film composers as it does for actors. With my scores being electronic and unconventional, I haven’t received a lot of calls for big studio pictures. The few that I have done are through Steven. I’m beginning to work with other directors now. I have a film coming out from Lakeshore Pictures this year called “Wicker Park”. I’m gradually working my way up, trying to become more of name-brand, but it’s taking a long time. Some composers don’t really get exposed because they’re typecast, like you said. That’s true. Partly it’s the politics and partly it’s if you have a certain style that they know you for. I don’t know exactly where my music fits, but it probably isn’t viewed as a commercial style. Do you have a dream project that you would like to do? No, not a particular film. After “Solaris”, I wouldn’t mind doing one that is more of a conventional science-fiction picture. I’d also like to do a comedy or a big action-explosion summer movie. I would just like to tackle some of the other categories I haven’t had a chance to do. “Solaris” was great fun because it was outer-space music, something that I’d never done. That was exciting. Your “Solaris” score is an unusual approach for this style of movie. The music was translucent while encompassing all the emotions of the film at the same time. Well, I guess that’s something that I’ve had some practice with, having worked with Steven. He has always wanted the music to stay out of the way somewhat and not be overly emotional or dramatic, to be atmospheric without being obvious in its emotional tone. The problem I had was making a purely atmospheric score with little emotion. It’s hard to create music that has ambiguous meaning. Perhaps a lot of the emotion to the score of “Solaris” is unintended. I tried to be emotionally neutral. It was a mutual decision that the music in “Solaris” would be a little bit more emotional than Steven would typically prefer. It was filmed with much more ambiguity than Steven’s films have been, so we thought that the music needed to be more direct. So it was just somewhat more traditional in that regard. I suppose making it more emotional than usual was the easy part. It is always difficult to create music that is stripped of all that. “Traffic” seems to be your most complex work in terms of the separate elements in the movie. I guess it was complex in the sense that there were about four or five separate storylines. When I looked at it in the script stage, it seemed very fragmented, and that it would need the score to pull the film together. However, when I saw the rough cut of the film, I didn’t have that perception at all. It was tied together very well despite the different storylines. Steven had this clever device of color-coding the different scenes. Mexico had an amber color and Washington blue… There were things about the way it was assembled that pulled all these different stories together nicely. So the music didn’t have to function that way. The challenge was to create compelling, interesting, dramatic music minimally. For example, Steven used a temp track that was one note for two minutes. It was really hard to design music that was a single note for two minutes and that had something to say without being monotonous. The challenge was to create very austere, minimalist music that served the dramatic needs of the film. It was music that was interesting as a stand-alone experience as well. You have the ability to mesmerize the listener with a surreal landscape of sounds without using many themes. How do you go about developing a score like this? Usually, the rough cut is where the process begins. If I get the script, it will give me some ideas, but those ideas are usually wrong the minute I see the film. Usually, everything changes as soon as I begin to put music against a picture. That’s when I have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. The filmmakers have an influence on the process. Generally, there’s a temp score. This tells the composer where the directors wants the music, and it gives an idea of the style they are looking for. All of those things steer the project initially. It just comes from watching the film and being inspired by it and trying to figure out what the music can do to contribute to it. I usually look at what’s weak about the film that the music might be able to improve. You’ve worked a lot with Soderbergh. Does he now offer much direction to your music for his films? Steven doesn’t say a lot. During “Solaris” and “Traffic”, we probably had no more than four conversations total over a three-month period. He does, however, narrowly define the kind of grammar he wants used. With “Solaris” and “Traffic”, he assembled a pretty complete temp score. It told me the spotting of the music and what style he was looking for. After that, he trusts me to create the music within those parameters. He only steps in if I get off track. Sometimes it’s frustrating not to have much contact with the director, but I guess after working with him for fourteen years now, he trusts me to a degree. Is there a score that you would call your prized work? Well, my favorite up to today is “Solaris”, because of the scale of the project. It was exciting to be able to hear ninety people play my music. Unfortunately, it was one of the films that died a swift miserable death at the box office. Nonetheless, the scoring of it was one of my peak scoring experiences. Were movies a big part of your life growing up? Did you know about the industry at the time? I didn’t. I always went to the movies, but I never paid that much attention to the music. I got into electronic music and, then, this is where my own tastes took me. I didn’t want to write pop songs. I wanted to write unusual music, and it seemed like the only outlet for that was film. Film was the only place where you heard jazz, world music, and modern twentieth-century symphony styles. Are there film composers now that you admire or listen to? I have respect for anybody who is making film music, because it’s not easy work, especially when it has to be done very quickly. I like Thomas Newman. He’s one of the greats. I also like Carter Burwell and Harry Gregson-Williams, along with the big-shots, John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. Of the older guys, I like Bernard Herrmann. I think he was the original minimalist. I really admire his music. It’s amazing how just about every composer I’ve interviewed has mentioned Herrmann. He’s such a huge influence. Definitely. He’s one of the real artists within the film-music hall of fame. He was associated with some great films. “Vertigo” and “Citizen Kane”, and his work on its own is amazing stuff.