John Ottman’s broad filmmaking talents are daunting. He both edited the film and composed the music for the now-classic “Usual Suspects” (1995), “Apt Pupil” (1998), “Urban Legends: Final Cut” (2000), a film that he also directed, and “X2” (2003). Seemingly immune to the inherent pressures of balancing his multiple roles, he successfully dons the various hats and creates his movies with panache. Looking at Ottman’s long list of music credits, one notices that many of the films that he has scored have a dark, moody, ominous atmosphere about them, a quality that Ottman’s music captures and heightens very successfully with sultry themes, eerie-sounding arpeggio patterns, and his great command of colorful orchestration techniques. With every picture he scores (and he has scored every imaginable genre of film), his music is very well-tailored to the specific film, yet his colorful sound pallet and impeccable composing techniques remain consistent from project to project. How did film music enter your life? It was sort of a hobby, really. I started having fun doing it, while I worked a full-time job at a hotel. Just for the hell of it, I would eon my friends’ student films and re-score them because, usually, the music on their films was awful. I found out I had a knack for it. Then I started scoring Aampco Parking and Kwikset employee-training videos for a couple friends of mine who own a production company. I found out how cool it was to make a couple hundred bucks to write some music. I thought, “Gee, it would be so neat if I could get paid to do this for my job.” That’s how it all started. When Bryan [Singer] did his first feature film [“Public Access”], I was the editor on it, and the composer dropped out in the eleventh hour. I had been dabbling with music for these little videos and student films and I said, “You know, I can score this movie. As the editor, I know this character better than anybody.” “Well I don’t know if you can do dark music. You’ve just been writing all this happy kind of music,” he replied. And I go, “No, no, I really can do dark.” And that was the first time we discovered the symbiosis – me doing both jobs. Now the joke is that most of what I’ve been hired to score for the last few years are dark films! Film music is a difficult task in itself, yet you manage to be involved in editing and directing as well. What makes you take on all these tasks, and do you prefer one over the other? I don’t prefer one over the other. It sort of depends where I’m at in my life. If I stick with one thing for too long, I started to get antsy and want to move on to something else. Then I realize how good I had it on the other job! So I move back to that. I guess I’m never happy. The glass is always half empty for me. Both directing and scoring have their advantages. It’s nice to be the director because you’re the high man on the totem pole and don’t have people to answer to except for the executives. As the composer, you sometimes feel like the grunt because you’re not always in control. But, at the same time, you have a hell of a lot less to worry about when you’re the composer. You’re just doing one job on the film and not having to supervise every job. But directing and scoring was a very strange situation. I’m somewhat used to being schizophrenic and having to compartmentalize between jobs, having been an editor and a composer on the same movie. But, when you’re the director, it’s very strange, because directing is a highly insecure job. You’re desperate to have test audiences like your movie, and if you put together a temp score that everyone likes, it becomes a security blanket. I was fighting within myself to compose something different from the temp score because it was working so well. As the director, I was sort of my own worst enemy, loving the temp score, but as the composer, I felt like I really needed to part from it and do better. So that was a very strange position to be in. You recently both edited and scored “X2”. How was it for you working in what seems to be an impossible situation? Well, I wouldn’t recommend doing both jobs on a movie like that to anyone. What’s the phrase? “Don’t try this at home”? But it was one of those situations where Bryan and I go way back, and he really missed me doing both tasks for him on “X-Men”. I wouldn’t exactly say it was blackmail, but he pretty much implied that if I were the editor, he probably was going to like what I wrote a lot better. I felt it was worth getting through the scoring process alive by being the editor. So I did it for the sake of the score, and, of course, so I could make it the best movie I could to score! It’s hard to believe I got through that. It’s nearly an impossible thing because there’s a huge overlap between the editing and the writing of the score. I went into “X2” as a world I was going to define for the first time. I wanted to make it my own world, and no one wanted me to adhere to what was done before anyhow. The only piece of music that I really know of his is the theme, and I wanted to make sure that my theme had the same attitude; but I wanted to add some sort of humanity to it and expand upon that aspect in the score. I like to keep alive those earlier traditions of scoring – having strong character motifs, basically writing from characters. “X2” was so fun for me because there were so many characters to write for. I just interviewed a composer who disagrees with character writing. He stated that film music should be written for the scene and the emotion. It’s funny to hear opposing views on something that seems to be a main function in scoring. That’s funny. I have the total opposite approach, which doesn’t mean that characters have to have individual themes, but, at the very least, the film needs some sort of familiar signature musically – a theme! – to give it cohesion and greater understanding. I read the script, then I look at the footage. I will write the film’s overture, which basically has a lot of the themes – including character themes if appropriate – from which I am going to draw. If I haven’t created that well to draw from, then it’s more difficult to write the score than just scoring for the moment. Even if I’m doing an action scene, I have to sort of know what’s at the root of this action scene: Which characters are in jeopardy? What is the scene really about? I tend to be far more motivated if I know where the music’s coming from character-wise. The music is the soul of the movie. The more you pull out for the audience without hitting them over the head and without holding their hand too much, the better you help tell the story. It’s a fine line, of course, and it doesn’t mean that you write for every single character. I think approaching films that way is a dying art form. To me, the best scores are ones from which you can somehow take away the gist of a story being told without having seen the film. That’s very hard to do. It takes a lot more time for a composer to do that, but it’s worth it in the end. What influences have helped you to develop your style? I don’t know. I guess just growing up having been a “Star Trek” fan and, as a result, getting into Jerry Goldsmith and rediscovering his older scores. Then, John Williams, of course. I became a big fan and film-score collector. I was just an odd kid growing up in San Jose. I only listened to film scores and classical music. I guess they just rubbed off on me and the way I score movies. And when I would go to the symphony and watch performances of my favorite pieces, like Dvorák’s Ninth Symphony, which I knew by heart, I would sit there and say, “Oh, that’s an oboe doing that, “Oh, that’s a clarinet doing that.” That’s how I learned orchestration – by watching. How difficult is it writing for a film versus composing a piece without a film’s restrictions? I would say it’s a little more difficult writing a piece without some visual direction. And that’s sort of a double-edged sword because, sometimes when you’re writing something, you wish to hell the picture didn’t do what it did, so you could expand upon something. You find a really cool moment to write but the moment’s too short. It’s frustrating; you really want to do more. Nevertheless, the picture really helps me write. If I just had a blank screen in front of me it would be more difficult. However that’s what I have to do when I write my little overtures to my movies. But, as you write, you discover things, too. I’ll write the overture, but then as I start scoring the movie I’ll start discovering things: “Oh, I should change the theme to be this way.” Or I’ll discover new themes and go back into that piece and reintegrate or modify the themes I had written. Is film-music composition a natural talent – in the sense that one either is or isn’t in tune with the picture and having one’s music fit this medium – or is this something that can be taught? I think both. I think basically it’s an innate thing, just like anything creative, but you can learn to expand upon those things you already have, your innate talent. But I don’t think someone who has no sense for writing music can take a music class and become a really good composer. I think there has to be something you were born with. What about a Dvorák or a Mozart – putting them in front of a film screen? They possessed genius, but writing for a motion picture is an altogether different art that makes me wonder if it requires an extra something inside the composer to do. I think all the best composers are storytellers already, especially composers who wrote symphonies. But, having said that, I think there are two different breeds of composers. You can have music theory, but you may be clueless when it actually comes to writing for a scene in a movie. To write for a movie, you really have to have that popcorn mentality in a way. You have to think film. That’s why a lot of people who have ten times more musical training than I do may be lacking in terms of tackling the drama in a scene, which is where a film composer has to tap into his filmmaker side. Your first big film was “Usual Suspects”. You scored and edited the complex story with Bryan Singer. Tell me about this experience. How did it come to be? It came about because of our first movie, “Public Access”. That actually won at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993, but it wasn’t released. Based upon that movie, Bryan put the deal together for “Usual Suspects”. It was in his contract that I both edit the picture and write the score. If it hadn’t been in his contract, they never would have gone for that because no one had really done that before, especially a guy who had never written a score for an orchestra. But they were sort of trapped into it and were a bit ambivalent about the prospect, as was I. In fact, I remember early on, before we started the film, the producers met me for lunch. They sat me down, looked me in the eye, and said, “You’re sure you can do this, right?” “Gulp, sure.” I went home with my heart beating because I had no idea if I could pull it off. You know, I learned a lot writing for the orchestra, which was a trial-and-error process. What is your formal music training? I played the clarinet for eight years, and that was really the extent of my musical training aside from what I told you – watching symphonies. Then, in the eighties, when MIDI came along, I was able to sort of get out what was in my head, to use the keyboard as a pencil on a staff. I used to write songs with a pencil and paper when I played the clarinet, but I got very rusty. I guess Danny Elfman and I were sort of similar in that way. He was a trailblazer who took all the shit for not being classically trained before I came along. No longer in any meeting for a movie does anyone ask you, “Oh, what is your musical training?” I think he’s responsible for that, because they actually used to be concerned with that. He came along and actually put that to bed. No one really cares about that anymore. They care about the bottom line: what kind of music you produce and how well you score a film. What you say is inspiring. I’m a film-music enthusiast, the odd one in school who appreciated a different world. Like you, I played the clarinet and sang in high school. My aspiration is to be a film composer. You give me and others like me the feeling that whatever you believe can be achieved, no matter what hurdles you have to jump, as long as you are committed. Absolutely. With today’s technology, if you have a musical sense, and you have the motivation and the stomach to read a lot of manuals and understand the goddamned technology, you can do it. As long as you’ve got a musical sense and you can hear the music in your head, there’s no reason why you can’t do it. You have to learn a lot, obviously. Working with the orchestra more and more, you learn more and more, like the ranges of the instruments and not to do idiotic things. Like if you have one hundred pieces playing in the orchestra and then write a line for an oboe and hope to ever hear it… I guess that’s one of the biggest things I learned in my early scores: what were and weren’t realistic dynamics. “Usual Suspects” was a remarkable score that seemed to launch your career in the horror/thriller genre quite rapidly. Being typecast must be frustrating. What are your feelings on this? Yeah, I think it’s frustrating for any composer or anyone in the industry who gets typecast after being successful with a certain thing. You’ll always want to be given the opportunity to write something that shows that you can flourish in other styles. Actually, I have had the opportunities, but the problem is that those opportunities were films that bombed; so the work went unnoticed. Even though “Snow White” was a dark movie, as was “Incognito”, both were movies where I got to write some sweeping music that wasn’t necessarily completely dark. But, of course, no one saw those movies. You can write the symphony of your career, but if no one say the film it doesn’t really matter. That’s the way Hollywood is. They aren’t solely going to sell you on your talent. God knows, they’re going to sell you on the success of your last movie. It’s all about numbers. Some film composers actually have the film profits shown on their résumés. That’s the way some producers will look at a list. Half the time they don’t know anything about film music. All they know is “This person did a movie that made 200 million dollars. This must be the guy we need.” Even though, for all they know, the score for that movie may suck. But that’s the way it is. It’s a security thing. If producers see a film that made a lot of money, they want every facet that was involved with that movie. “The Cable Guy” is an outrageously fun score to listen to. Did Ben Stiller let you run a little wild with your ideas? The funny thing with “Cable Guy” is that Ben had never done a film with a film composer before. He had always done films with source music. He was under the misconception that the fil composer is on from day one of shooting. Well, I wanted to have it work out right between us, so I agreed to be on the film from the first day of shooting; and I was on the movie forever. The irony is that I think I wrote three hours of music for that film, but in the end, my score was like twenty-four minutes long because there were so many songs in the film; plus the film got cut down. But the good thing about it was that I was able to temp the movie with my own renderings without having to copy any temp score. That was the fun part. It’s important to be able to go to a scoring session and not have everyone surprised by what you did. Just for my own security and sleeping the night before the session, I believe in knowing that everyone’s on the same page. With “X2”, I wanted to make sure I formed a coalition, so to speak: I had the producers over here to hear all the mockups of the cues. That way, I knew that everyone liked the score and knew what they were going to get; so when we got to the scoring stage, there would be no situation where someone hears a cue and asks, “What the hell is this?” In your scores, I hear hints of a passion wanting to escape. There’s passion just screaming to get out. It’s very hard to do some scores where you have to hold back and be reserved for the sake of the movie. The theme I wrote for Jean Gray is very emotional – it’s the love theme. I hope that can show people what I can do in that vein. The funny thing is, again, executives who look at my résumé are not going to see “X2” as a romantic movie. They’re going to see it as an action movie. Despite the fact that I wrote a lot of humanity-based music, they won’t look at that because they’ll just look at the title. And, hell, I’ll take the big adventure films! But my dream score is a “Dances with Wolves” kind of movie. I would love to fill that John Barry voice. All the scores I have seem to be complicated. They’re exhausting to write – so many goddamned notes. It would be nice just to do a series of whole notes and call it a day! I really enjoyed “Trapped”. What I liked most were your subtle piano themes. They almost give this thriller a romantic touch. Do you use different instruments to convey different messages? Yeah, that’s sort of the thing I do. I love writing piano pieces because it’s easy to play both sides of the coin with a piano. You can be romantic and dark at the same time. I could have done an overtly evil theme for the bad guy, but I wanted to write something a little more romantic. I like to imply some sort of backstory with the score. Perhaps there’s some deeper reason why people are evil. There’s a romantic notion to taking on evil. Even Keyse Söze’s theme in “The Usual Suspects” isn’t plainly sinister but quite stirring. “Trapped” was a different-sounding score for me only because we had no budget. There were like fifteen people in the entire orchestra, so the score was about ninety percent synthesized. But something unique came out of it because we were so limited. Growing up, did you ever see yourself becoming a well-known composer? No, it was the last thing I thought I would ever be doing. My intent when I grew up was to be a film director who could hire my idol, Jerry Goldsmith, to be my film composer. It’s really quite bizarre. Even now I still laugh. I think it’s kind of crazy that I’m doing this. But I love it. Have you ever met him? Yes, I did at the yearly BMI dinner. My agent sat me down next to him when his wife left to go to the bathroom. So I knew I had about one minute to fill him in on my entire life. I think his head was spinning by the time his wife got back. I think I spoke too fast. This guy was probably like, “What was that?” To me, sitting down next to Jerry Goldsmith was like sitting down next to Jesus Christ. It was very difficult to speak to him, but, yes, I did get to meet him. Ironically, he had a scoring session for a film at the same time I was recording “X2”, but we booked our orchestra way in advance of his, so I had all his horn players. The irony: I stole my idol’s French horns. What do you feel are your strengths and weaknesses when you come to the table with your ideas? What separates you from other composers? I tend to be orchestra-based. I would say that if I were given a very synthesizer-heavy, drum-loop kind of score, I could do it in a unique way, but that sort of music is not really my bag. It’s funny because my agent said, “You gotta get music like that on your demo reel. You know whether or not it’s really right for the movie you ultimately get hired on or not, but it just turns them on that you do stuff like that.” A funny story: My agent also told John Debney the same thing. So John Debney took a cue from “Cutthroat Island” and put a bunch of synthesized drums under it. The cue he chose happened to be in a very constant time signature, so he was able to do that and put it on his demo. It sounds really cool. In my music I couldn’t really find anything like that because I tend to change time signatures all over the place. Do directors torture you with Bernard Herrmann and Christopher Young temp tracks? I think many get haunted by Christopher Young temp tracks. Many of his cues work very well on a number of different scenarios. One of his cues can work in an interesting way for three or four different kinds of scenes. His music always seems to bring something introspective to a temp. I love Chris’s music! And he’s a really nice guy! It’s actually a compliment that his music can work in so many different ways. I hear some stylistic similarities in your darker scores. Well, I think we’re both influenced by the same guys. When you hear Chris’s earlier work, you definitely hear a Goldsmith influence. I think, in the beginning, we were both Goldsmith wannabes, but then discovered our own styles, our own paths, and became secure with our own techniques. I feel more comfortable in my own skin now. I think it’s been the same with him for a while. There are definite Chris Young-isms in the scoring world, and I think I’ve forged Ottman-isms, too. Which of your scores are you most fond of? I would probably say “Incognito”, only because it was a movie that was sort of a composer’s wet dream because there’s no dialogue or sound effects in these long, extended sequences. So the score didn’t have to tuck itself under dialog. It was basically a movie that featured the score. It was basically expository music – almost like being commissioned to write a symphony. How difficult is it to be original? I think you just have to not be afraid to have confidence in yourself. Simply let your fingers work on the keyboard and just do what flows freely out of your head. Use The Force! Inevitable something unique is going to come. If you’re too paranoid about it and try to refer to too many other people’s work, you’re going to start to copy something, you’re going to come up with something less original. I found that if I just sit at the keyboard and doodle and just have the confidence in myself that “Gee, this might actually be better than what they’re thinking,” it always will be better. And I can sleep at night knowing what I wrote was really part of me. Sometimes it depends on your state of mind. Sometimes I’ll come back the next morning, listen to a part of a cue, and push the delete button.