Rachel Portman is one of the very few women film composers to have found great career success in the movie industry. She is also the first female composer to have received a Best Music Oscar, which she won for “Emma” (1996). Portman’s music can tug at the filmgoer’s heartstrings while carefully distilling a film’s emotional essence. From her introspective score for “Ethan Frome” (1993) to her soul-felt music for “Great Moments in Aviation” (1993) to her inspiring score to Robert Redford’s “The Legend of Bagger Vance” (2000), Portman’s music always enriches a movie’s emotional depth as it gently pulls in listeners as if it intends to consume them in a great yet lovely sea swell. “Used People” launched your career in the States. Was writing for film your goal in composition? I had done theatrical films in England before then, but I hadn’t done an American feature. You sort of have to break slowly into these things before people trust you to let you work on their film. Writing music for films is what I love to do really. I love music that tells stories. I love finding colors and dramatizing and energizing a film. A film sometimes needs energizing in the score. Writing music for movies is a wonderful job. You are one of the very few female composers to attain huge success in film music. Did your career choice pose any specific challenges for you, and, if so, what kept you motivated to continue forward? I’ve never had any problems. I can barely think of any moments when I’ve been treated differently. I was lucky because the schools and the university I went to gave me a lot of experience for coping in a man’s world. I did my A-levels, which in England means from the age of fifteen to seventeen, at a school where there were hardly any girls. The school, which was extremely good academically, was experimenting with allowing in a few girls, like two in each section of about seventy other children. So I never felt myself any different in a way. The same thing happened when I went to university. I went to an all-male college, where there were very few girls. People were always asking, “How are the girls doing?” So you had to work very hard to compete. I never batted an eyelash about being female. I never felt self-conscious. I’ve always thought of myself as a composer, not as a female composer. I think if you project that, people tend not to see otherwise. Why do you think that our culture segregates men and women in career fields like film directing and film music? There aren’t as many women in most areas of film. It’s strange. It seems to be changing slower than I thought. I mean it’s definitely a historical thing in terms of women. You read in the paper every day that women aren’t as big earners as men in the city. They don’t take the top jobs and all of those kinds of things. Slowly, women are infiltrating into areas in film. There are a lot of women film editors. Also, historically in classical music there are hardly any women either. It’s strange. Your classical approach to scoring films is a breath of fresh air in this world of technology. You have done a couple scores that have used synth textures, but obviously you are more sought-after for your orchestral style. Is this your choice? The world of technology, as you put it, is a world that just doesn’t really speak to me creatively. I’m interested in live music and acoustic instruments. To me, they live and breathe and bring life to the music in a score. How you can make an “instrument” made up of potentially eighty or ninety players work as one thing is a constant source of fascination for me. You can never exhaust the different colors that you can conjure up with orchestration. That’s the music that I write. That is my voice and I don’t mind if I’m not considered for some things because of that, because I would be considered for others that would interest me more. Orchestra is your voice, with which you seem to speak so effortlessly. When you sit at the piano, composing, do you hear the instrumentation in your head or is it part of the discovery process as you fit the music to the film? I do hear the instrumentation, although I don’t hear it in its entirety. Often the instrumentation sort of comes together as I’m writing, and then I always leave the orchestration until later. Orchestration is such a detailed thing. It’s so tricky. Even though I’ve probably got a good idea in my head, I don’t focus specifically on that until the writing’s in place. You tend to favor clarinets and flutes and a couple of other instruments. They mean different things emotionally to me. Depending on the melodic line they’re playing, the voice of a clarinet is more appropriate than the voice of a soprano saxophone or an oboe or a flute or a string section or just violas. Which composers influenced or inspired you as you found your own voice? Ravel and Bach, who is probably my all-time favorite companion in music. I don’t know why. I just find that his music gives me huge sense of self and serenity that I sometimes need. And it can make you feel centered again, if you are rushing around or stressed. So he’s the person I come back to. I think I was slowly influenced by Ravel as I was growing up, and Debussy to a certain extent. But in terms of film composition, I’ve never formally studied film music or film composers. I don’t tend to buy scores. You began by orchestrating your own music. At what point did you realize that you needed a second hand, and how difficult was it to share some of the responsibility? It’s very difficult to share. I feel like it’s still my orchestration, though. I don’t feel like it’s anybody else’s voice in there. I still write out a very comprehensive map of the orchestrations with the orchestrator I work with. And I’ve worked with the same wonderful orchestrator, Jeff Atmajian, for many years now. He completely knows my shorthand, which enables me to put it down very quickly. It was interesting to write the opera because I orchestrated every single note of that again, and it was wonderful to do it. There’s something very caring and loving about the orchestration. It takes a lot of time because, for each instrument, you have to put in the expression, all the crescendos and decrescendos and the manner in which they’re going to play. Whereas when I work with Jeff, if I’ve specified that a melody is going to be on the oboe, for example, I don’t need to write those things out because I know that Jeff can tell from the way I’ve played it on the piano. He listens very carefully. He’ll be able to give them the expression and the dynamics that I didn’t have time to do. He’ll have a piano sketch of it too, and he’ll have the film. He can tell the expression that I want. He can put that in. In general, what would a composer look for in an orchestrator? It depends what you’re looking for. I want somebody who is meticulous, who doesn’t make mistakes. I don’t want somebody to change anything. I’ve worked with orchestrators who want to put their own brushstrokes on something, and that’s a disaster for me, because I want somebody to follow exactly what I would have done myself. I sound like a monster saying that, but what I mean is otherwise. I know there are other composers out there who are perhaps not so controlling or perhaps aren’t so sure of their own orchestrations. Maybe they’re not sure how to write for the orchestra what they intend to convey, in which case, they would rely more heavily on an orchestrator. With “Emma” you became the first Oscar-winning female composer. What was it like for you personally to receive this recognition? It was a huge shock and really good fun to get to go to all the parties. It was all I could dream, really. It’s not something I ever think about as the badge of pride, and I don’t think it means that you did the best scoring, either. But it does endorse, most definitely. It is something that makes people think, “Well, she must be all right!” if they haven’t heard of me. You worked with Lasse Hallström on “The Cider House Rules” and “Chocolat” and received two more Oscar nominations. What memories do you have of these two scores and working with Lasse? Working on those films were very good experiences for me. I really enjoyed the challenges. I really liked working with Lasse. It’s not easy to read his mind. It’s not easy to understand what he’s after, but I think his films are very clear in what he means. It’s part of my job to determine what people are really looking for. And if that means searching for a while, that’s fine. I loved “The Cider House Rules”. It’s a special film and I loved working on it. It was a long journey because we wrote quite a lot of it and then went back and worked on themes again. A lot of it stayed and I wrote a whole lot more. It was a big commitment. The fact that I’d worked on “The Cider House Rules” made working on “Chocolat” much easier. I had three and a half weeks for “Chocolat”. It was just about to come out and I was doing a re-score on it. There was hardly any time. That music just popped into my head, though, and it spoke so clearly, and it was so much fun to do as well. To me, it isn’t as great a film as “The Cider House Rules”, but Lasse said to me when he made “Chocolat”, “This film is like a soufflé. It needs to rise. A good soufflé needs to be extremely delicious but very light.” I thought that was a wonderful thing to say. One of your scores that has impacted me dearly is “The Legend of Bugger Vance”. Robert Redford’s films seem to have an aura about them in all aspects. The music he gets from different composers also has this magic. What were your experiences working with Robert Redford? How large of a role did he play in your music? I really adored working with him. He is a fascinating man and a great storyteller and a very seriously good human being. He spent a long time talking to me about that film and about gold and about letting go of one’s great desire to do something really well and how you reach to a different place. What was wonderful about him was that he was always available to talk to me about any scene or any moment or what was happening in the main characters’ minds. He was terribly eloquent about it, which gave me a lot of food and a lot of material to work from. The other really good thing about Redford: He talked to me about what he wanted in words and adjectives that described what he was feeling, which is the best way for a composer to work. As opposed to a temp score? As opposed to, “Oh, I love the cello!” which is a nondescript killer. He asked me to interpret musically what he felt emotionally, which was great. “The Human Stain” has to be one of your most emotionally powerful and captivating pieces. When writing for such heavy emotions, or any emotions for that matter, do you find the sound within yourself, or do you rely strictly on what is on the screen? “The Human Strain” was a strange kind of experience. I’d talked to Robert Benton a bit about the film, but we hadn’t really discussed the music when I said to him that I thought it would be really good if the music just had its own abstract voice that didn’t really bear any relation to the film. The music would sort of be in its own place in the movie. I watched that opening with the car driving and I just wrote this piece. There was no reason for it. I mean, I wasn’t trying to do anything specific. We hadn’t talked about it. I played it to him and he said, “That’s it. That’s what I want.” Then that became the thread that went right through the whole film. It’s weird because it just sort of popped into my head, utterly unconnected to the film. To me, it isn’t in a traditional dramatic sense. It’s sort of this dreamlike trance. Do you think it’s based on your personal emotions? I don’t know. It’s sad, but it’s not trying to be too sad or too emotional. It’s full of pain. It’s also slightly secretive and hidden. It also had this prepared piano in there. It’s got this broken thing going through it very subtly, like these slightly broken notes, which you can just hear sometimes, that just stop it from being perfect. The other thing that was great was that I used a lot of strings in it, a lot more than I normally would, so it feels like waves. It’s heavy and hovering. The weight of strings is enormous. It’s like a big swell in the sea that’s fairly calm. It goes up, then it comes down. It recedes and then comes up again. The strings play very quietly. Nobody plays loudly in that score. It’s amazing that you use this analogy, because I recognized this. I listen to it when I am drawing or painting. It’s almost a tool that instills a picture or an emotion of the ebb and flow of the tides. Yes, it’s just like that. That’s what I wanted to do with it. That is what I mean about orchestration being fun. The written idea for “The Human Stain” is incredibly simple, but the execution of it – the way it’s played – is very living and breathing. It has its own life. If you played that with everybody wearing headphones and playing it to a click, it would kill it. Your latest score, “The Manchurian Candidate”, is a leap into a new realm for your music. Director Jonathan Demme, no stranger to the ambient and minimalist approach to film music, pulls out a different sound from you, versus most of your other work, which is melodic and constantly moving. Was this score challenging for you? “Beloved” was probably the most fulfilling experience I’ve had working on a film. He said that he didn’t want me to use any traditional instruments at all and that he wanted me to look to Africa. So I researched a lot and I found all these players and put together this score with this weirdest, oddest group of handmade and African instruments and a lot of singing. It really freed me up from writing for orchestra. It was very good for me to do that. It was also a very emotional score for me, and I love that. Jonathan pushed me into other areas. I worked on that film for nearly a year. That’s a long time these days. On “Manchurian Candidate” it was a totally different thing. It was harder to find the voice, much harder. Jonathan is always looking for something very specific. It’s, again, my job to find that. A film like “Manchurian Candidate” could be scored a hundred different ways. It’s a thriller. The music could either roll up its sleeves and get really busy, making you feel really frightened, or it could stand back and just be a layer that keeps you sort of uneasy the whole way through, but also sort of binds the piece together. That film was a very complex, complicated journey and a really wonderful experience, too. I haven’t done many thrillers, so it was fascinating for me to do it. I really enjoyed the challenge. I love doing new things. I love going into areas where I haven’t been before. That makes me very keen to work on new projects. If, for example, I were constantly writing romantic comedies, I’d be feeling very sad by now. Which would happen if you were typecast. Well, after I did “Benny & Joon”, every quirky romantic comedy seemed to come my way. I’m very glad I don’t work in that genre only anymore. You have composed an opera. Can you tell me about this and if there will be a CD release? Yes, it’s called “The Little Prince”. It’s a full-blown opera. It premiered at the Houston Grand Opera [in 2003]. It’s going to New York City and Boston next year. Sony is putting out a CD of it. It’s being filmed by WNET for the BBC, which is great because operas normally do not get filmed. I think it should be available in the shops in the next few months certainly. It’s very close to the book. It’s a very emotional and very moving story. I wanted to write an opera that you could take a child to but also enjoy as an adult, because there are very few of those. The opera has a boy in the lead role, and it also has a children’s chorus in it. It has adults in it, too. It’s a really fun thing to perform, because the grownups get a huge amount out of working with children, and the children have an amazing experience of working in an opera. It’s great. In music or in life as a whole, what has been your greatest achievement? It’s either having three children or, I should think, the opera just because it’s such a huge piece. It’s like writing a book. I think “Beloved” would be my greatest film-music achievement in my mind. That or “The Human Strain”. I’m not sure.