You have a natural theatrical sound in your writing, which leads me to believe you’re among the few composers who actually sought a Broadway or film career from the beginning. I’ve been a fan of all kinds of music, but I’ve certainly been heavily into Broadway musicals and film musicals. I wasn’t a student of film music – that part of my life just sort of happened. It fell in my leap while working with Bette Midler on the songs for “Beaches”. That worked out very well for me, being the one who brought to the table ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’, which is a song I had heard someone singing in New York. It had just been kind of languishing, and I knew it was perfect for the movie. That was a big success for her and for myself. And I got to work with Rob Reiner, whom I knew from my relationship with Billy Crystal. He asked me to do “When Harry Met Sally”, which was another great way to use other people’s music as an entry into film scoring. It was my arranging skills that were called upon there. Through those two movies, I learned how to place music into movies and a lot of the nuts and bolts. And I got to forge relationships with people at Disney and Rob Reiner. Those two movies just exploded and became a tornado of film-scoring jobs and great successes. The first few years of my career were one hundred-million-dollar movie after another. That leveled out after a while, but for the first two or three years, every single movie I worked on was a huge success. You are not only friends with Billy Crystal, but you have collaborated in various areas with him for a few years now. That must be a blast. It’s just great to be able to work with one of the greatest comedians. There’s simply no one out there who’s better. When I write material for him, like on the Oscars, it’s great to know that he’s going to land the punchline that’s in the lyric and deliver it the best it can be delivered. That’s thrilling. And we’ve been friends for twenty years now. How did that start? On “Saturday Night Live”, where I was working as a funny piano player, arranger, writer – a catchall musical kind of guy. A friend I had met on the New York cabaret circuit – playing for nightclub performers – used to do the job, and when she stopped doing it for two years, she told them to call me. That was the perfect job for me. I’m just perfectly suited to sitting at the piano, improvising with comedians and coming up with stuff. So Billy and I really hit it off. Also, Martin Short was there the same year. Those are two friendships that I’ve had since then. Describe your relationship with Rob Reiner and how you started working together. I met him when we were both working on a Billy Crystal HBO comedy special that he was appearing in and I was playing on for Billy. He also came to see Billy’s act, where I used to play under Billy’s monologue and kind of fool around with him on stage musically. So Billy set me up with a meeting when he heard that Rob wanted an arranger to help put together a score of American standards for “When Harry Met Sally”. Rob just gave me the job and it went really well. Then he called and said, “I’d like you to score my next movie, ‘Misery’.” And I was like, “Terrific!” My first compositional job was a psychological terror movie, which I didn’t really have much knowledge of. That went well, and Rob just kept doing one movie after another, each in a different style. So I was really lucky to go from “Misery” to “A Few Good Men” to “The American President”. His movies have afforded me a lot of opportunities to work in different styles. In my opinion, Rob Reiner seems to pull out the best in your work. What are your thoughts on this? He makes me be as simple as I can be. Whereas in other movies I get more of an opportunity to be over the top, Rob prefers to be under the top or under the table. And the movies he works on are so stylistically different from one another that they give me a lot of opportunities to be that kind of musical chameleon that I happen to be. The other day, when we were talking about that, I said, “I don’t mind being jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none.” And he replied, “Don’t sell yourself short, Mark. I think you can at least say you’re jack-of-all-trades, master-of-some.” “Misery” was obviously not familiar territory for you, so what was your approach? Like I mentioned, “Misery” was my first movie as a composer. I had to deal for the first time with film-scoring’s mathematical side – figuring out how to write a piece of music that is going to do all the right things it needs to do at various points – which is a huge part of it. A piece of music is a minute long, and every few seconds it has to be doing something very specific. It’s just an endless Rubik’s Cube puzzle. So I had to learn all that. I had to learn how to work with the computer and synthesizers and deal with the director and learn how to write every day of my life – from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep – which I never had to do before. And then there was the fact that it was psychological-terror kind of music. This was a case where I was happy about a temp score, because I was able to listen to it and hear how certain rhythms and textures created certain moods. I was not trying to copy it – I’m not capable of copying Jerry Goldsmith. That was a bit of schooling for me to be able to just listen to that, just how to get a vigorous sound out of violas and have a rhythm going. I just had to experiment by trying stuff. I ended up being pretty happy with the way it came out. I also had an orchestrator on that who really helped me with the timing issues, which I was just learning. It only took a few movies to master that part of it, because once you figure it out, it’s no longer so daunting. I think that horror scores would be one of the most difficult. Yeah, it is very hard, but with “Misery”, I had no choice. Perhaps my own terror of failing helped me create the same kind of mood. But, like I said, Rob likes things simple, so he wasn’t looking for the densest and most complicated music. I had that in my favor. “A Few Good Men” is another score that worked very well in the film, but it was not what I was expecting. What was the reason for creating a dark-heavily synth-based score versus using the bugles and the snare drums heard in most military movies? Well, that’s just what he was asking for. He liked those low droning notes, so that the music doesn’t telegraph too much. So that was another one where he wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Not until the last three minutes of the movie does it really fall intoa traditional movie-orchestra sound. But the last few seconds were so old-fashioned and traditional that when he heard it at the recording session, he said, “I’ve got to have them put (The End) on the movie,” which hasn’t been seen in a long time. So he did that as almost a tribute to the music I had written for that final shot. Generally, how does the director know what music he wants, and how is this communicated to the composer? They figure out what they want the music to be: What purpose should it be serving? They can speak in thematic terms. When I say thematic, I mean moods and emotions. You know, that’s any area where the temp score is useful. It can certainly be a useful tool in a musical dialogue with a director to hear what he’s liking and not liking. The bad part is where they fall in love with something in the temp score, and not only are they in love with that certain piece of music but with a certain style of music. Then it’s almost impossible to even try to get them to consider another take on how to score a scene or a movie. Just getting them to not be in love with the oboe that was in the temp score or the string section coming in exactly as it was in the temp score is often impossible. I think that “The American President” might be your greatest work. It represents the essence of excellent film music. Thank you. That’s one of my own favorites. And that was a perfect movie to be able to work on. It was humorous, romantic, serious… That’s the kind of score I would like to be doing more of. Your colorful orchestrations support the film beautifully. Do you ever look for inspiration outside of the film? You know, for me it’s always the movie itself. That’s what always inspires it all, the images and the movie. That’s where the film composer’s lucky. You get to sit in an empty room and just call upon the muses for inspiration. You’ve got the images. You’ve got your job to do. And it’s all right there in front of you. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. There are so many different choices you can make. Each choice then defines your next choice. The images of the presidential things in that opening montage was just all I needed to start writing what ended up being there. That kind of flowing of images that they created for the main title just spelled it right out. I just followed the lead. You seem to have a natural talent or gift for writing thematic music. I’m much more into melodies and themes than some guys who are much more into the textural or rhythmic kind of scoring, which I’m not good at. Everybody has his or her own strengths. I’m just old-fashioned in that sense, which is why I love American standards and Broadway musicals. I finally got a chance to write an old-fashioned Broadway musical, Hairspray, which is what I was always longing to do. Every theme in all my film scores has lyrics to it. As I’m playing a theme, I literally have lyrics in my mind as if that character is singing a song in a musical. I don’t remember any of them, so don’t ask me to sing them, but I swear, on every movie, every theme has a lyric going on in my head at the same time. You are one of the few composers today who writes mainly for orchestra. How do you feel about scores with more electronics and less orchestra? I enjoy it. I don’t ever close my ears off to any music. I’ve just dabbled in it a bit. Thomas Newman is so brilliant. He can do it all. I mean, he writes beautiful orchestral stuff and yet he is so into that rhythmic textural stuff also. My hat’s off to that! So melody-driven, sweeping scores, such as “Patch Adams” and “Simon Birch”, flow most naturally from your pen? Yeah, I forgot about “Simon Birch” until you just mentioned it. I loved working on that film. That had like eight or nine nice melodies. The director [Mark Steven Johnson] was totally into that kind of music, and I just kept writing theme after theme for him to choose from. Luckily, I’ve never worked with an asshole. The director of “Simon Birch” was a sweet man. He so loved what I was writing. When you know you’re pleasing your boss, going to work each day is much nicer. What about “Patch Adams”? “Patch Adams” was a bit more of a committee thing. The director would come over with the editor and discuss things a whole lot more. And I actually had to kind of beg to get the job. You know, that’s the kind of music that gets beat up the most in reviews. I got a review from “Patch Adams” that called the music “obnoxious”. Look that one up in the dictionary. I could actually kill with it. It’s poison. That was nice of The New York Times. Then to ironically get nominated for an Academy Award for it was balm for that wound. How do you view people who rate CDs and rate your music? Do you ever take that stuff to heart? It’s tough to read it. Luckily, I see it done with all the other composers, too. So that makes it a little easier. Comedies, romances – they just beat up on those movies, and just beat up the music used in them – comedy music and romantic music, or what they call “sentimental” music. When they first brought me “Patch Adams” and I saw the first ten minutes of film, when I saw him smiling and dancing around in the children’s cancer ward, I thought, “Oh, they’re going to crucify me,” because I knew what kind of music a movie like that calls for. I knew what the filmmaker wanted me to do, and I just knew that they were going to crucify me. Sure enough, they did. Meanwhile, I love writing it. It’s music. Nothing deserves to be called “obnoxious”. Being able to write beautiful music is a pleasurable thing to do. Luckily, real people don’t feel like critics or like the film-score aficionados, who often over-analyze. You know, it’s music. It’s not necessarily meant to be spoken about so much. It’s meant to be heard and felt. Orchestration is an important part of your work. What is your relationship like with Jeff Atmajian and the rest of your team? I love them all. Jeff is especially brilliant and also a friend. We just think so much alike. Musically, we share a sensibility. I mean, Jeff is someone whom I can actually give a detailed piano sketch to and just know that the orchestration will be just what I was thinking. But it took me years and years to be able to let go to do that. Film-composing and orchestrating is really the same thing, and the composer does well over half of the orchestration within the actual writing. The orchestrators are brought in because there’s simply no time to go to a score and write it all out. Orchestrators, as they figured out a long time ago, just had to be part of the equation. I love orchestration and arranging. I pride myself on it, on getting into the details. It’s not like they add notes; they just make use of all the colors of the orchestra. So, even though I may have only done something with woodwinds, Jeff will know perfectly how to have the strings mirror, or what we call “ghost”, what the woodwinds are doing to make use of all the opportunities in the orchestra. Would you talk a little bit about your work in musicals? It’s what I enjoy doing the most. “South Park”, you know, is probably my favorite movie I ever got to work on. I enjoy writing lyrics as much as I enjoy writing music and arranging music. In “South Park” I got to do it all. Trey Parker was such a great collaborator. He would write the first verse and the chorus of a song and say, “Here, you finish it.” He would completely trust that I could write the second verse and chorus and make the style fit what he had already written. Once again, a shared sensibility came up. Once he trusted that we thought alike musically and lyrically, he just trusted me. Then to be able to arrange something correctly, like the brilliant song ‘Uncle Fucka’, and be able to create that perfect Oklahoma!-style musical sound underneath it. It was really great for me to watch Matt [Stone] and Trey hear the orchestration for the first time. I mean, the song is funny and brilliant, but to have the traditional sound underneath it just makes it all funnier. Do these two careers interfere with each other? Now that I’ve had the pleasure of having written a musical, I hopefully won’t let movie-scoring get in the way of, or stop me from, that being my main emphasis as long as I’m allowed to do it. It’s much more my heart and my soul. I understand that you have a good possum story. One of the odder moments in my film-scoring life occurred while I was on “Hearts and Souls”. One horrible afternoon, something was sticking around middle C and then middle C was fine and D and E were sticking and then they were fine, then F and F, and… oh my God, is there something in there?! At first I thought it was a mouse, a dead mouse. It must have been in there and died and it’s just flopping around now from key to key. Then I could hear the sound of scratching, that unmistakable sound of a mouse in the wall. So I open the piano and, sure enough, there’s a tail – the biggest tail you ever saw. So the mouse became a rat. But then it stuck its nose down and I realized that this was no rat. There’s some nuclear animal in there! An exterminator came over, put on this big old glove, and stuck his hand in the piano – and out comes this possum, which he holds upside down, its arms and legs spread out in terror. It must have been living on top of the hammers in there for two or three days, the poor thing. I was holding the top of the piano and I only saw the reflection in the piano, and then I had to get right back to work. That was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever come across in a piano.
Sometimes, it’s frustrating having someone who is very hands-on and controlling about the music, but in Rob’s case, I’ve learned to accept it as something that makes the job a little easier: Someone is telling you, “I like that.” “I don’t like that.” “This is what I want.” That can be much better than someone who is going, “I don’t know, I don’t know what I mean,” while you’re just floating and floating, trying to figure out what’s going to make him or her happy.