When we think of modern animation music, the first composers who come to mind might be John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams, who collaborated on “Antz” (1998), “Chicken Run” (2000), and “Shrek” (2001), helping to create a new era of animated adventure. Very early in his career, Powell seemed to be following in the footsteps of Hans Zimmer, for whom he worked at Media Ventures, but since then, Powell has created a fresh new cinema sound that is all his own. His entertaining and spellbinding music is intense and energetic and reflects certain interests he maintains in ethnic music and the latest electronic-music technologies. With his scores for the intimate “I Am Sam” (2001), the mysterious “Bourne Identity” (2002), and the suspenseful “Paycheck” (2003), Powell built a unique palette of complex textures that at any given moment may be drivingly rhythmic, eerily ambient, or traditionally melodic. Where did you get your start in the film industry? It’s interesting because, in the fifties and sixties, my father was a tuba player with The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, in which he actually performed a lot of film scores. I remember at about age three being taken along to the recording of Ron Goodwin’s score for “Battle of Britain”. This influence led me to desire playing the violin as a child, but I remember my father saying, “Don’t be a player, be a composer. There’s a lot more money in it.” I was very insulted by that at the time. I assumed he meant that I wasn’t going to make it as a violinist, which he was absolutely right about, of course. I studied violin, viola, some percussion, as well as played guitar and keyboards in bands anyway. I went to Trinity College of Music and studied composition for four years, and then electronic music and percussion. Later, after unsuccessfully producing a band, I got into doing jingles – advertising music – for a while until I became bored with it. Long story short, I had met Hans Zimmer in the midst of all this, which later brought me to L.A. With all this influence of composition for moving images, did you see yourself here today at an early age? Was this a dream you set out to accomplish? I think it was a lifelong dream, but I didn’t realize it until I was actually doing it. Thinking back to the time when I saw Elmer Bernstein’s “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Great Escape”, I remember thinking that the way the music supported these images was incredible. It made everything so exciting as a combined art form, which profoundly affected me at an early age. So I think even though it wasn’t in the front of my mind until I went to music college, I had this feeling that I would love to be doing films. Here you are with a strong music background, writing music for commercials. How did this take you to L.A. and working with Hans? I had known Hans for a while, working at the same company together, writing jingles. At that time, what was great fun was trying to write pieces that excited him. Hans is really interested in people with a sound that differs from his, although a lot of stuff that comes out of Media Ventures fits into his style, but it’s for commercial reasons. Basically, I just tried to write pieces that got him going somewhere. I was at Media Ventures for only about two and a half years. At a certain point I wasn’t seeing my wife at all. I was in a room with no windows, just working all the time. It got to be too much. That’s why I worked at home for a while, even when I was associated with Media Ventures. Many listeners have enjoyed your collaborations with Harry Gregson-Williams. Was this an enjoyable experience for you, and what did you gain from it in your own work? I love Harry. I think he’s an incredible composer and an amazing human being, but he’s very different from me. What was interesting and wonderful and maddening about working with Harry was that we are so different. It was very mind-broadening to see how somebody else who comes from a quite similar background approaches things from such a different angle. It’s a very difficult experience writing a film score with somebody else. I think “Antz” was very much a revelation for the both of us. We would sit down and write the themes together and then divide up the work on a cue-by-cue basis. If one of us wrote a cue that was completely hated by all the filmmakers, the other person would try it. This works so well because there is nothing worse than doing a cue that doesn’t work and having to completely revise your first impression that you felt worked best for the scene. To have somebody else step in and go, “Okay, I’ll have a go at it now,” is great. By “Chicken Run” we became a bit more of a well-oiled machine. “Shrek”, however, was a tricky film because there were so many songs in it that the score played a much lesser role than it had in the other two films. Where do we fit in in the greater scheme of things when they have six or seven songs? All three films were different, educational, and very trying at times just because music is a very difficult thing to talk about and, you know, you’re talking about music with somebody else who has a very individual style. There were a lot of negotiations and some struggles to try and work out how we were going to combine our efforts the best. It’s not an easy thing, but it was very rewarding. You have so many approaches to your scoring, but your style always seems to be somewhat “tribal”-influenced with your beats and sounds, as in, for example, “Endurance”. Where do you find your sources of inspiration? I have always loved world music, but I really got into it when I was in Trinity College of Music. They had a big library of records at that time. I remember sitting in the record library, which was right down in the deepest bowels of the basement, going through these crazy records that had probably been donated. Eventually I’d just go and search out $500 worth of CDs a week. I had about 5,000 CDs, and I’d try and listen to them as much as I could. What led to your instrumentation for “I Am Sam”? I felt that it had to be very delicate and small, so I bought some ukuleles and did a demo with them as well as guitars and a bit of piano, keeping it simple. The players made a big influence on that scores, especially Heitor Pereira, George Doering – each of whom is as good a guitarist as there has ever been, and each of whom is very different in style. I found that I could write some really simple things that these two guys could make come alive. It’s certainly a unique sound that worked very well. If it had just been strings, it would have been another cliché. You experiment with sounds. In “Forces of Nature”, for example, you use the sounds of a telephone dialing and all sorts of unique beats. How did this come about in your music? Ultimately, I probably am a little bit embarrassed by those cues now. I probably would have done them differently today. It was just a way of trying not to be cliché, which maybe it wasn’t, but it was definitely too obvious. Looking at Jerry Bruckhemier’s and John Woo’s productions, for example, how much are composers who have been associated with Hans Zimmer expected to work in his voice? Are these cases where Zimmer, if he couldn’t be involved with a project, would present it to you or whomever with guidelines? It’s not Hans. Using the same [sampled] sound library has a lot to do with it. But it’s mainly commerce. In “Face/Off”, I tried to put in enough of my own voice that I didn’t just sound like Hans, but it’s an 80-million-dollar film, and the first film I’d ever done. I think I would have been stupid to sound like Jerry Goldsmith or John Williams or anybody else really. Clearly, they wanted Hans – they wanted his kind of approach, so I gave it to them. I tried to give them enough of that so I could also experiment a bit with my own voice. So it’s kind of a combo, and I’m sure some people think that it sounds just like Hans. A bit of it had to, because that’s what was going to work. In other bits, hopefully, it feels a little bit more personal to me. I posed these same questions to another composer who was pretty offended by them. Some are touchier about it than I am about it. But, yeah, there’s an approach to cues that I think came around with some of the composers who were connected with Media Ventures, for which Hans definitely led the way. I think some of it works extremely well and some of it is beginning to get very old. Hans has been doing scores recently that don’t sound anything like his earlier work. People don’t realize how little he likes everyone working in that style. But, at the same time, it’s a business. You’ve got all of the same sounds that Hans has been using for the last ten years. The trick is to find a better alternative, but when you’re early in your career and you’re in the midst of trying to keep your best chance going, you’re not necessarily going to have the time or the will to experiment. So that’s why the younger composers will go with what’s kind of an accepted sound. But you pick up training you can’t get anywhere else. You get these experiences and things rub off from people that you normally wouldn’t get to meet. So there are all these dynamics that are very difficult to explain. It’s a commercial business and yet it is also a great artistic experience. You have a truly creative and authentic voice. Well, I think this is just me trying to pursue the kind of music I like. Hans is definitely embedded in there in an inspiration sense. The first time I saw “Driving Miss Daisy”, I thought, “This was a really unusual score that was really well done, really cool.” I thought, “Man, this guy’s got balls!”
In the end, though, I’m very confused. Stylistically, I love lots of stuff. It all goes in and mangles up and, hopefully, comes out in some interesting way. I’ve always believed that style is the mistakes you make trying to steal other people’s ideas. You start sounding original when you let yourself make these mistakes that are your own oddities. So I just try to make music that helps to tell stories, and I just love a variety of music styles. I would describe myself as a “music slut”.