As do most great film composers, Graeme Revell possesses an identifiable voice that runs through the many successful scores he has written for every imaginable genre of film. From the gothic, supernatural “The Crow” (1996) to the Latin-flavored “Out of Time” (2003), Graeme combines multi-cultural influences with electronics and sultry, often dark, orchestrations. And many of his scores have a haunting and even glassy edge to them, as evidenced by his music for the mysterious “The Negotiator” (1998) and the eerie thriller “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle” (1992). What did films and film music mean to you when you were growing up? I didn’t really take much notice, except I was a very big fan of musicals as a kid. In New Zealand, seeing films all the time was not a big part of the culture. It’s much more of an outdoors lifestyle there. I probably only saw one or two movies per years until I was about eighteen. My favorite musicals were “Oliver”, “The Sound of Music”, and “West Side Story”. Then, I suppose, I started to notice the Maurice Jarre scores. I got an interest that way. The other person whose music I noticed very much early on was Bernard Herrmann. As a young adult, I became more of a film fan. I suppose I was a foreign-film guy initially – Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Godard, Wenders, Roeg, and Kubrick, among others. Film music came to you in a rather unusual way. How did your career begin? For years, I had been working as a fringe electronic musician/performance artist in my group SPK. I’d expressed a number of times in interviews that I would really like to be involved in film, but I didn’t receive any offers, so I decided to write an album in 1982, which initially was called Music for Impossible Film. I eventually retitled it to Songs of Byzantine Flowers. It took about another five years before the opportunity to write for film came along. I was sitting in my publisher’s office when George Miller called up wanting a little piece of rap music or hip-hop music for “Dead Calm”. I overhear this and said that I could do that. They said, “Okay, how long will it take?” I said, “About five minutes.” It actually took an hour, but they liked it and it worked really well. They were having trouble with their composer, so they asked me, “What else can you do?” My publisher gave them a record of mine, and they really liked it and that’s how it came about. I was extremely lucky. I would say that your sound is tribal and rhythmic and dramatic. It also has an edge of darkness mixed into it, giving it mystery. What are your inspirations for your music? I have a great passion for all kinds of music that other people wouldn’t think go together. It’s fun, and I love finding new types of music from around the world that I haven’t encountered. I found early on that tribal and techno rhythms drive action scenes in a very visceral way, and I’ve layered textural elements on top to punctuate important moments and cuts. When I began film-scoring, the attention to detail in the editing by composers was at a much lower level. With modern scoring techniques and frame-accuracy through computer-control of sequencing, so many more moments can become exciting. How did your work lead you to the U.S.? After “Dead Calm”, the man who was to become my agent and friend, Richard Kraft, called. He had heard my score and started calling every person with my last name he could find in the southern hemisphere. I think I was his sixth or seventh call. It was the middle of the night in Australia, so I thought it was some friend in America just playing a prank, you know? But he was for real. I came to the States and haven’t had a day off since. Pretty cool. I really had a lot of great fortune getting into this industry. Film music is a tricky art form. What sort of skills does it require, and how did you know it was meant for you? From my point of view, I suppose, I’m very eclectic. I wouldn’t have been a very successful rock musician even if I tried to be because my attention span for particular kinds of music is very limited. In other words, I like to change a lot. So film music is the ideal art form for me because from one six- to eight-week period to the next I can be scoring anything. I could be scoring horror music with an electronic component or some tribalism or rock-‘n’-roll, but the next job will be something like I just finished with Carl Franklin, which is a Latin music score. Next month I might move onto some big classical piece. It’s just such a wonderful opportunity that I knew would suit my temperament extremely well. As far as the skill set involved, it’s really quite enormous. But, for me, it comes down to two things: understanding drama and how a script works and reacts with all the rises and falls and the characters involved, and, at the same time, remaining as musical as I can be. Ultimately, it’s music and drama. Many people will talk about the political skills necessary to try and fulfill several people’s agendas or visions at the same time when some of the team – the studio, the producer, or director – don’t really see eye to eye. That’s another trick. I always say that, instead of arguing in an academic way about how something should be, let me write the music or let me write two pieces of music for that scene and let’s look at it. One finds there’s a surprising commonality at the end of the day. Music works as it works. And if it doesn’t, it just doesn’t. Most people agree on that when they see it. How do you score a film? What’s your process? I feel like an artist, and I have this palette beside me, which in my case is sound. I tend to know what that palette of sounds is going to be when I start out. Then it’s a matter of mapping out the drama and figuring out how many themes I need and beginning thematic writing. In my case, the thematic writing often is not just a series of notes. It’s more of a series of colors, or textures as some people call them, as well as notes. I just go from there, building up blocks of thematic material. With romance or drama films where two characters become intertwined, I particularly like the idea of designing something that can intertwine at some point in the picture, and not have motifs for every different character, which is a style that I think is gone a little bit. We now have to think, particularly on the kinds of films that I work a lot on – fantasy and action films – about the attitude we’re trying to promote. In other words, you would never score a love theme for two eighteen year-olds with the kind of instrumentation that you would use to score a love theme for two thirty year-olds. That wouldn’t work. It has to be much more song-like for the younger demographic, something more contemporary, whereas you might use the strings or some more common orchestral instrument or guitar for an older audience. I always take that very much into account. After that, it’s a matter of the usual path of composition. Scoring to picture using sequencers. Playbacks to the creative team to get approvals. And, finally, enhancements using real instruments and orchestra. What’s your feeling about the orchestra versus the synth sound? To me, they both go together. I had a conversation the other night with some people at an awards dinner. We were talking about certain scores that had been thrown out. I said, “There’s a common element among them.” And they said, “What’s that? They all sound different.” And I said, “Well, on the one hand you’ve got somebody scoring a film who is very good orchestrally, but doesn’t have a clue about synthesizers or electronics or rock-‘n’-roll. In two other cases, you have guys who’ve come mostly from the electronic or rock-‘n’-roll field who were asked to deliver that plus the orchestra, but they’re not capable of it.” In a lot of the big blockbuster movies, it’s very necessary to have both sets of skills and to understand how they go together, which I think the most important advance in film scoring in the last ten years. Hopefully I’ve had a major influence in showing that they’re not two different worlds anymore. They really are the same world. There are melodies and passion that you can’t deliver with a synthesizer, and there are interesting, previously unheard sound textures that you just can’t deliver with the orchestra, that you can only deliver with the synthesizers. There’s also that cutting drive of electronically generated percussion that an orchestra just can’t do because you don’t have the timing, the crispness, or the impact from acoustic instruments. “The Crow”, the first and its sequel, seemed to elevate your career to a higher level. Would you talk about your experiences with them? What inspired them, I suppose, is my great love of world music. They were probably the first movies I’d worked on that were purely comic-book fantasy and set somewhere in the future. Now we’re in Detroit, ten years into the future. So what’s the music in Detroit ten years into the future? I don’t know, it could be anything. What is so wonderful about those kinds of films and the scoring opportunities is that you’re not locked into a genre at all. The scripts also really inspired me. They were just revenge fantasies. Here was a guy who lost, in one case, his girlfriend and, in the other case, his son. In revenge, there’s not really a sufficient motivation for you to like a character very much. My idea was to make him much more human – to keep reminding the audience of the intense sorrow behind what was happening. The thing that was really upsetting and astonishing about “The Crow” was the real-life death of Brandon Lee. The film became a real tragedy in my mind when I was scoring it. I felt like I was almost writing a mini requiem for Brandon. I spent a lot of time and a lot of passion on that, and I think that it worked out. Hopefully, I did him justice. “The Craft” also has a dark storyline, yet your approach to the score was quite different. Describe your use of tribal and Middle-Eastern influences. It’s sort of two things. There’s a lot of atonal/ambient orchestral stuff, which I did because they wanted an orchestral score without any budget at all. I think that was the first time when I went out of town and just recorded blocks of atonal-style textures with an orchestra. I only had one day. And I just wrote down all sorts of Penderecki-type ideas and recombined them into the score later on using samplers and tapes and so on. Then, because they were involved with magic in the story, I decided to go to Indian and Middle-Eastern music a little bit. A score that I love is “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”. You did a superb job of creating suspense with dark motifs that are almost romantic in a perverse sort of way. What were your thoughts on this film? Thank you. Well, when I met Curtis Hanson, he asked me if I had any objections to using a Gilbert and Sullivan song as part of the theme. He wanted to have it playing in the family situations to throw the audience off to what’s happening in the background, to make the audience think that these people were completely innocent and gullible. I said yes to the idea, but expressed reservations because of the 3/4 time of the original, which sound very nineteenth-century. So I asked him if I could turn it into 4/4 time, so that it was less like a lullaby. That was fine. That was an interesting task. The only thing that I would say about the scoring experience is that it was my first very real encounter with temp music. Up until that point, I had never encountered it – we didn’t use it in Australia at all. Was the temp music a Jerry Goldsmith score by any chance? Yeah. There were two – a Jerry Goldsmith score and a Howard Shore score. I’m not all that proud of that score. I was a little too young and inexperienced to know how to reference something and not actually copy it, you know? It was certainly a learning experience. It was something that I feel like I didn’t do really well that time, but from then on, I didn’t have any trouble with that sort of thing. I always ask that they don’t temp a movie that they’ve asked me to work on with my own music. Even though they feel that it’s actually being respectful to me and that it works, in my opinion a composer gets more badly trapped by his own music than he does by somebody else’s. You’ve already done it. How can you chance it? You’re well-known for heavily textured, dark, or action-oriented scores. Do you feel you have been left out of another side of scoring that you want to be considered for? Very much so. I suppose every composer answers that in the affirmative. I’ve tried very hard to take films, often for no money at all, that give me an opportunity to shine in those areas. I guess I’m thinking in terms of films like “Human Nature”. I really had to try hard to get that because nobody really believed that I had the sensibility for it. What I really like about films like “Human Nature” is that they’re the ones I actually enjoy watching the most. And so they’re the ones I think I would enjoy working on the most. I really love Spike’s work and I love Charlie Kaufman and the Coen brothers. Having mentioned all of those people, there’s one lucky composer out there, isn’t there? What are your goals as a film composer? Mostly, to try to broaden the frame of the genres that I’m able to work on.