Ryan Shore, following in the footsteps of his uncle, Howard Shore, adds a new, talented voice to the motion-picture community. As his career began gaining momentum, Ryan wrote thought-provoking music for the Student Academy Award-winning films “Shadowplay” (2002) and the animated short epic “Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher” (2004). He has also done major motion pictures, including the notoriously sordid film “Vulgar” (2002), for which he supplied a sultry jazz/avant-garde score that is truly unique, and “Prime” (2005), a film that stars Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep. Ryan Shore has the ability and confidence and passion to undertake any musical project, and he gives nothing short of 110 percent of himself in his work – which alone speaks volumes about who he is as an artist. How much of a role has your uncle, Howard Shore, played in your career choice? Howard has played a great role in my interest in film-scoring. I first became aware of film-scoring through Howard. I started getting into music around age twelve, and he gave me a keyboard for my thirteenth birthday. I began playing around on it, finding new harmonies and sounds on my own. It was the absolute beginning for me, and the discovery part of it – finding things for the first time – was fantastic. I remember thinking that I invented the major chord when I found it! Then the same for suspended chords and minor chords. It was a lot of fun. My first instrument, which is still my primary instrument today, is the saxophone. It was Howard’s primary instrument as well. I remember taking an interest in it after seeing the movie “The Blues Brothers” and watching Lou Martini playing the sax on the bar behind Aretha Franklin. I also really liked the way Zoot looked while playing the saxophone on “The Muppet Show”. It’s funny how the instruments we play today we chose as kids, and then we stayed with them. It would almost be like asking a twelve-year-old what they think we should do for a living… and then doing it. I grew up in Florida. Howard was in New York, so I didn’t see him very often. But he did recommend the Berklee College of Music, and I went there for their summer program when I was in high school. While I was there, they offered me a scholarship to come back for college, which I did. I majored in film-music composition and saxophone and woodwind performance. After graduating from Berklee, Howard offered me one day of employment, which I accepted. It turned into four years of invaluable hands-on experiences in film-scoring. When Howard offered me that one-day opportunity, he said, “Why don’t you come up to my office and see how you like it?” I knew what he really meant was, “Why don’t you come up to my office and I’ll see how I like you?” Since this was right after graduating, the four years I worked with Howard were almost like getting a masters degree. One of the best parts of working with Howard was that he never asked me to get coffee or do non-musical things. He hired me on his films to do things that, if I weren’t doing them, then someone else who does the job for a living would be doing them. It began with music preparation and evolved into orchestrating and some music producing. It was a great way of getting into the business because, even though I wasn’t writing music, I was processing the entire score, getting a feeling for what forty minutes or fifty minutes of music feels like in a very practical way. Especially great was going to the recording sessions and hearing the way it was translating from the page to a live orchestra or large ensembles. It was a truly invaluable experience that I’m extremely grateful for. There was a point, though, when I had gained as much knowledge as I could about working in those capacities, and it was time for me to move on and pursue my own music. Has following in the footsteps of an established composer made it difficult for you to be your own composer without doubting your abilities? Not at all. Creating music is a process of personal discovery and growth, and that is something that happens regardless of whether you are related to another composer. I do find it interesting, though, that there are two film composers in the same family, since it is such a unique profession, but there are other instances of that in the business. Can you talk about how you approach scoring for film? I usually like to watch a film a few times before writing anything, and then I walk away from the film so I can let it sink in. It’s almost like when you go see a movie in the theater and then you talk about it with your friends at dinner afterwards. It’s in that time that you find deeper ideas and feelings about it. I like to take time away from it and think about the overall feelings I have for the film: the characters, the performances, the storyline, the writing, the locations, the colors, the pacing, the individual scenes, and the overall impact of the filmmaking. The film needs to get inside of me and then work itself through. Then I begin sketching ideas and improvising music for it, much like I would do when improvising on my saxophone, although I usually do it on the piano or without being in front of any instruments at all, just composing in my mind. Composing is exactly like improvising a solo, but you don’t have to do it in real time. You have the luxury of being able to go back and make revisions to get your improvisations the way you want them. Once I start actually composing, I may work for twelve or fourteen hours in a day. But I find that I often come up with my best ideas at the end of the day, when I’m lying in bed and I’m about to go to sleep, because that’s when I’m not thinking about any of the technical aspects of creating music for film. I’m not thinking about the physicality of the buttons and the keyboards and the machines and the computers. And I’m not tied up with having to look at the film or anything at all. I’m just thinking about human emotions, musical gestures, musical settings, sounds and colors, et cetera. It can be very abstract. There is something about that time that is so freeing. Then, of course, I have to get up and write down and ideas that I have, or I’ll never remember them in the morning. Sometimes people ask how many days it takes to score a film. For me, it’s almost more of a question of how many night I have to score it. I have found that when you are truly open and honest with the film, the movie will actually tell you what to write. And when I try to force music onto a scene, it usually never works for me. I’ve also found that my first reactions to a film are usually my best; and, oddly enough, the less time it takes me to composer, the more cohesive and unified the music seems to be. What do you look for in a storyline? I generally choose films based on the collaborators rather than storylines. Given that, one of the most important things I look for in a movie is that all of its elements are working. I think for a film to be a great film, it has to be great in every aspect. I don’t think that you’ll ever get a great film by having any one aspect of the film pulling too much weight or making up for other aspects. Everything needs to work together in order to achieve the common goal. You have orchestrated and conducted your own music. From the moment you sit at the piano, sketching your thoughts, to the point where you are waving your arms in front of the orchestra, what moment most excites you? The part that excites me the most is not even the recording sessions, although those are an extremely close second. The part that excites me the most is the very moment that you hear an idea in your head during the composing process. At that very instant when you have an idea and hear it in your head, the music is in the most pure form that you’ll ever hear it. The rest of the process is mostly about the work that it takes to realize that idea. You have this idea in your mind, and then you have to go through the mechanical process of figuring out what notes need to be played to hear those ideas – how do they need to be performed to achieve this same feeling or gesture? – and then writing that down. It’s all part of the mechanical process of translating music from your mind, in the abstract, to a written, concrete form. After you find those notes and performance markings, you go through many processes: You orchestrate it. You perform and record the music. You mix the music. And it’s all to realize that one idea that maybe came to you in a split second. It maybe took you a hair of a second to think of it, and then took you twenty hours of work to realize it. So it is that first inspiration that is the most pure and exciting part for me. Let’s talk about “Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher”. This is an animated short. What led to your involvement on this project? This project came through filmmakers I had worked with before. Prior to this film, I scored an animation called “A Letter from the Western Front”, which was directed and animated by Dan Kanemoto. I met Dan through a mentor of his, Cynthia Allen, whom I had met at an industry dinner many years ago, when I was just starting out. For “A Letter from the Western Front”, I put together a twenty-five-piece orchestra and recorded it live. The film went on to win a Student Academy Award and an Emmy Award, which are the two highest awards that a student film can receive. Based on my work on that film, I was asked by filmmaker Dan Blank to score his animated film “Shadowplay”, which is a very unique Claymation about the aftermath of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. I put together a similar live orchestra and experimented by adding traditional Japanese instruments – shakuhachi, koto, and Japanese percussion. This film went on to win the same two honors. And from this film, Alex Woo asked me to score “Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher”. Dan Blank, who voiced many of the main characters in “Rex Steele”, recommended me for it. When I met the “Rex Steele” filmmakers (Alex Woo, Bill Presing, and Matt Peters), we agreed that we really wanted to go all out for the score. So, instead of using a small orchestra, which we felt wouldn’t be able to provide the sounds that we were looking for, we decided to record it with a 110-member orchestra and choir, and we found a way to do it. “Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher” went on to win the same two awards as well. “Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher” is a melodic score that opens with a heavy Americana spirit and superheroish sound. What prompted the big orchestral sound for a small animated film? We all saw the film as small only in its length. We had larges sights for what he hoped we could do within ten minutes. The animators spent about three years created the film, which is inspired by serial comics and propaganda reels from the 1940s. I love scoring animated films because it takes so much work to create the animation and the visuals that it is immensely inspiring for me when I score it. Scoring the film was truly a labor of love. When I first watched the movie with the director and creators, we were already thinking about a very large orchestral sound. The score I wrote for “Shadowplay” was a much more introspective score for strings and woodwinds and ethnic instruments. A small orchestra was appropriate. But “Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher” was just the opposite. With a brash, bold, exciting, action-driven, superhero film, we knew that a small orchestra would not be able to create the size of sound that we needed to match the visuals. We also wanted to explore all the sections of the orchestra in the score. So, using an orchestra was an idea we all had right from the beginning. “Rex Steele” is a clever piece of satire, yet your music plays a boldly serious role. That is an approach I first became aware of through Elmer Bernstein’s great score for “Airplane!”, which is a hysterical comedy, but the music plays the situation completely straight, as if it were a serious drama. By doing it that way, the film is even funnier because the music isn’t trying to make it funny. It’s as though the music is not in on the joke. We followed the same approach for “Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher”. With superhero animation of this kind, you just can’t write large enough. Particularly with this film, in contrast to some of the other animations I’ve scored, the role of the music was largely to heighten the energy of the film. I was really captivated by the choir in your score. What role did it play? I recorded in a large concert hall, where there was a beautiful pipe organ. But, instead of utilizing the organ, we decided to use the choir, since it can, through lyrics, provide an even greater sense of impending doom with a consequence of finality. The thought is that if you were facing a torturous death, you would naturally hear the coming of the Messiah, and once you heard the choir begin, you’d know you were finished. I chose to use only the choir’s female because, when the entire orchestra is playing at its height, you really only hear the women anyway. The choir is used only in the scenes with Eval Schnitzler, the evil Nazi warlord. Tell me a little about the story of “Shadowplay”, a claymation, and your choice for its intimate setting with the ethnic flutes and strings. The story of “Shadowplay” is about the dropping of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and its aftermath. It tells it through metaphor. It’s a very emotional story to tell in the context of a short film. Dan Blank, the director/animator, and I knew that the film was a many-layered dramatic story that just happened to be told in animation. The main character is a little boy, who is only a shadow, and he must discover his fate in the aftermath of the bombing. After the bomb dropped, in many instances there were shadows of people emblazoned on the walls of the buildings, because the flash of the light was so strong. It is fascinating, and horrifying. After the city was in total annihilation, you could actually see shadows permanently emblazoned on walls of the people in the same positions they were in when it happened. So Dan used that as a metaphor for the little boy who is only a shadow and doesn’t know what happened to his family. Through exploration of the city and self-discovery, he eventually reunites with his family at the end. I composed one main theme for it, and we had the idea, from the beginning, of utilizing traditional Japanese instruments. So I researched the instruments quite a bit before writing for them. I studied traditional Japanese music composition, and I learned about the shakuhachi, the koto, Japanese percussion, and how the traditional music for them is notated, since it does not employ the western methods of notation. I also spoke beforehand with the musicians who were to perform the score and learned from them as well. For the score, I combined them with traditional western orchestral instrumentations of strings, harp, and woodwinds to create a larger sound. It was a very rewarding film to score both from a research perspective and in the collaboration with Dan. There’s a little-known movie entitled “Vulgar”, for which the title says it all. Talk a little about this film and tell us what compelled you to get involved in this bizarre story. Bizarre is a good way of putting it. I like to explain to people who haven’t seen it that it’s not a family film. The film came about because Kevin Smith’s company, View Askew, has a mascot-design logo of a party clown who is dressed with high-heels, a garter belt, and a clapper for making movies. Although it stemmed from a simple drawing, Kevin had the idea that maybe he would make a movie about who this character was someday. The character had no story – it was just a friend’s drawing that Kevin liked and started using. But Bryan Johnson, who works for Kevin, said to him, “While you’re tied up making these other movies, do you mind if I take a crack at writing a screenplay for this character?” Kevin said, “Sure, give it a shot.” So Bryan wrote a screenplay about a clown named Flappy, a kid’s party clown. When things got really slow for Flappy business-wise and times were rough, he had this wonderful idea to hire himself out to bachelor parties dressed like a trashy clown stripper. Everyone would be expecting strippers to come in, but he would show up dressed like a clown and do a little strip-tease and everyone would get a laugh out of it. Then the real entertainment would show up. For these jobs he would take on the new moniker Vulgar the Clown. At the very first job that he goes to, everything goes about as horribly wrong as you can possibly imagine. Instead of it being a bachelor party, it turns out to be only a father and his two delinquent sons, who basically beat the crap out of Vulgar and rape him as well. Here’s where most people probably stop watching the movie. The movie was sent over to Howard Stern, who watched it and hated it. He watched like the first ten minutes or so and then threw it away. One of the people on his sown, however, told him, “You’ve got to watch this movie. You’ve got to check it out.” So, eventually, Howard did watch the whole movie, and it became a running joke-line on his show. Howard talked about it over and over again. He referenced it against other stories, like, “Well, I guess that’s not as bad as getting raped while being dressed as a clown.” Howard gave it great publicity. He even offered the best quote ever: “”Go see the movie that grossed out even Howard Stern.” Musically, after viewing the film, I had the idea of writing a jazz score as a way of providing some levity and humor to the movie. But, because it is such a dark movie, I decided to write a very dark jazz score. I chose an instrumentation of an extended rhythm section of piano, organ, vibraphone, electric guitars, both electric and acoustic basses, and drums, coupled with a four-horn ensemble of trumpet, trombone, and tenor and baritone saxes. The score starts out optimistically – structured and light – and progresses into a very dark, free-jazz score. The idea was to have the instruments essentially take Flappy’s same journey and disintegrate with him. I had only two days to record roughly forty minutes of music, but the sessions went quite smoothly. In the rape scene – which is the scene – that the film is probably most known for – I used a recording technique that I had never tried before. I didn’t give any of the musicians any written sheet music at all. Instead, I recorded them individually as overdubs, and only gave them musical directions through their headphones based on pacing, volume, and intensity. We didn’t use a click track. I started with drums, and, while I watched the movie, I had him play completely free, giving him directions only about the emotions and the arc of the piece, but with nothing specific to play. The cue was about seven minutes long, and after those seven minutes were done, I did the exact same thing with the bass player. However, I didn’t let the bass player hear what the drummer had done. The bass player heard only his own instrument and created his own little musical story based on my same directions over the seven minutes. I did the same with each of the instruments. Nobody heard each other’s performances because I didn’t want them to play off each other, which is what jazz musicians are used to doing – one musician does one thing, and another responds to it. In this case, I didn’t want any of that type of interplay because I wanted the sound to be as free and disoriented as possible. The only common thread among the musicians was the arc of their performance, how their intensity was shaped throughout the scene. It seemed like an appropriate way to score the raping of a clown. By the way, at the end of the story, Flappy prevailed, although he sure didn’t prevail in that scene. Many talented young musicians want to write music for films, yet they cannot find a way to get a foot in the door. Since you traveled this road not too long ago, what bits of wisdom about it can you share? My advice is to first make sure that film music is something that you really love to do, because it is a very long road. Learn your craft in every aspect you can, and to the fullest that you can. Meet the next generation of filmmakers and work and grow with them. A teacher of mine at the Berklee College of Music, Michael Rendish, told me the following, which I thought was great, and it has always stuck with me. He said, “You’re going to get out there and meet some young filmmakers, and you’re going to say, ‘I want to score your film.’ And they might say, ‘Well, what have you done before?’ And you haven’t done anything yet. So if it applies to the situation, you can say, ‘Well, I haven’t done anything before, but neither have you. So why don’t we give this a shot together?’” There’s the saying that the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, which definitely applies to film-scoring. Sometimes the journey can seem long, particularly when you’re living it, but it is made one step at a time. My advice is to start by learning the craft as best as you can – always do your best – and begin building a reel. Through that you will gain experience and meet people and things will evolve. I think that’s the best way to get started.
The Americana approach is a natural direction for the main character, Rex, because he is a confident, heroic, and strong leader who works to serve the United States.