Alan Silvestri is perhaps best known for his bold symphonic themes to the “Back to the Future” series of films (1985-90). However, he is one of the most prolific and diverse film composers working today, and his music, as varied as the films he scores, transcends stylistic labeling. His scores range from the dark, rhythmic, heavily electronic music of “Predator 2” (1990) to the lighthearted, sweeping themes of “Forrest Gump” (1994) to the western-flavored melodies of “The Quick and the Dead” (1995) to the wall-to-wall sonic explosion of “Van Helsing” (2004). There is no simple way to describe Silvestri’s talents other than to say that he can do it all. One of Silvestri’s most fruitful professional relationships has been with director and producer Robert Zemeckis. Their collaborations have produced numerous memorable films with memorable scores, including “Romancing the Stone’ (1984), the aforementioned “Back to the Future” series, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” (1988), “Death Becomes Her” (1992), “Forrest Gump”, “Contact” (1997), “Cast Away” (2000), “What Lies Beneath” (2000), and “The Polar Express” (2004). I find it interesting how some musicians accidentally fall into the world of film music. You have a wonderful rags-to-riches story. What were your early aspirations, and how did that change? My earliest aspiration had to do with wanting to be a bebop guitar player. One kind of serendipitous event followed another and, to make the long story short, a call came along with an opportunity to score a film. With the tremendous assistance of Earle Hagen, who wrote the book Scoring for Films, which was the only such manual in existence then, I actually had a meeting with the film producer and scored a film and found myself being a film composer. Then one thing led to another and here we are. In your home, growing up, what kind of music was played? There was basically no music to speak of in the house. Of course, in an Italian family, usually the oldest child bears the responsibility of being the accordion player, so that fell upon my sister. I started to play drums when I was very young, three or four years old, and did so all through my younger years. But there wasn’t any real musical influence around me. My mom and dad were not musical. They didn’t have record collections. So it all came from who-knows-where. There was no real musical connection that I know of, certainly not through my grandparents and not my great grandparents. So it’s just one of those things. Have there been particular musical influences in your career? When you’re called upon to do this job, the first thing you do is look around and go, “Who does this and what are they doing?” Back when I started doing this over thirty years ago, and it continues on today, you’d turn around and the first two people you saw were John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. Unfortunately we’ve lost Jerry now, but that’s after a lifetime of spectacular creativity. John Williams continues to do just amazing work. Those two men really raised the bar and carried the standard for film composing for all of those years. They’ve been a tremendous influence not to just composer, but to filmmakers and audiences for a long time. From one film composer to the next, does there tend to be friendship or is there a competitive feeling? I have a very dear friendship with David Newman. We’ve gotten to know each other very well over the years. Our wives are very dear friends. We spend a lot of social time together. I don’t feel anything competitive between David and myself. I think the choice of a composer by a filmmaker is a very personal creative choice. I may be speaking from the point of view having enjoyed a certain amount of good fortune over the year, but I don’t feel that I need to be competitive to the exclusion of a friendship with somebody really great over business. There are a lot of films being made. There are a lot of opportunities for both of us and many other composers. So I don’t really look at it like that. During your hiatus from the hit television series “ChiPs”, a phone conversation with Robert Zemeckis ultimately paved your way to success in feature films. There was a line of demarcation between writing for television and writing for film. It was often difficult to cross. I had been involved in a very successful television series, but it ultimately didn’t mean anything in terms of working on the film side. I did that show for your years. But there was never and long-term or short-term agreement. You went and recorded a show on Monday morning. You saw the next one Monday afternoon. It was always a weekly phone call as to whether or not you were going to do this. And after four years, there was a regime change on the show, and that phone didn’t ring on Friday afternoon. So, then you go, “Wow, there must be something wrong with the phone service!” And, when the phone doesn’t ring the next week, then you start to get the picture: There’s nothing wrong with your phone. After having this twenty-eight-week season of a hit television show for four years, you potentially can get lulled into thinking that this is how life is going to be now. So you really enjoy your time off and then that phone rings after ten weeks or whatever it is and there you go again. When that stops, it can stop cold, which it did in my case. When Bob Zemeckis called, I don’t think I had worked for a year in television, and it was very difficult to get anything going. It wasn’t like I was working on this successful television show and then the phone rang and it was Bob Zemeckis and I went and did “Romancing the Stone’ and that was the start of the film side of my career. It wasn’t like that at all. I had been out of work for a good while. Right at that time came the real emergence of electronic instruments. The first really good electronic drum machine had just come out. There had been a few electronic keyboards that had been out for a period of time, but great strides and great revolutions were occurring in that world, and the Yamaha DX-7 had just appeared. What I came to early on in that gap was, if you’re going to be in this business, somehow you need to find a way to get your work out before the people who need your work, i.e., the producers and directors. Before this electronic renaissance, if you wanted to get music to play for a director or producer, you had to have recorded it with an orchestra, which was, of course, very costly. There was now this possibility for someone with very limited means to at least find a way to put their ideas together and have something to play in order to try to get work as a film composer. So that’s what I chose to do. So I went out and bought a LinnDrum. We really didn’t have the money to do this, but we seemed to have no choice. My wife was behind the business plan a thousand percent. I then went and bought a Yamaha DX-7 and there was a Japanese manual and a power converter. I bought a small board and I started to put this little group of components together and, literally, at the very beginning of that process, that phone call came in for “Romancing the Stone”. In that phone conversation, Bob introduced himself and explained a scene in the movie, which was the gorge scene, where they’re running away. He said, “Al, here’s the deal, this guy and this girl, they’re running through this jungle. It’s raining. They have machetes. They’re being chased by the Federales. It’s a nightmare. It’s this big chase in the jungle. Can you do about three minutes of something like that and come see me tomorrow morning?” I was actually able to say yes. So I wound up going in with these boxes of things that I newly purchased and stuck them all together and stayed up all night and I put together this little three-minute demo based on what Bob Zemeckis had just described to me. I got in my car at eight-thirty in the morning and drove to Warner Hollywood and played it for him. The following night, the phone rang, and it was Michael Douglas, who was the producer of the movie, talking to me about hiring me to score “Romancing the Stone”. So it was kind of a miracle story. “Romancing the Stone” was a unique set of circumstances and an amazing opportunity. I think it’s not eleven films and twenty years later with Bob, who has become a very dear friend and the most amazing creative collaboration for me. When we think of Alan Silvestri and Robert Zemeckis together, it becomes more than a collaboration, but a friendship that has sustained for almost thirty years. Talk about how this developed and what has kept this bond inseparable. When a film director develops a project, shoots it, endures all of the obstacles that a filmmaker has to endure in order to bring a piece of film to the screen, he or she is carrying a tremendous amount. Like anyone who bears the full responsibility on that level, in the end, directors look for help, and they look for people who can be part of the solution, as opposed to part of the problem. I think Bob was bearing this tremendous responsibility for this film. It was a very important film for him. It was very important for Michael Douglas as a producer. It was very important for both Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito as artists. A lot of folks had a lot of stake in this film. I entered late in the game, and Bob was just an amazing person to work with. I worked very hard on that film, and what I brought to the film seemed to really work for him – it seemed to feed back to him his vision and his direction for the music of the film. I think our personal relationship was born at that point through our professional creative relationship, because one of the things I think that underlies any kind of strong ongoing personal relationship is a feeling that you’re really communicating. The person that you have that relationship with sees a lot of the world the way you do and express they see the way you do. We both have grown over the years. Bob has always been a very challenging filmmaker for music. It really just comes from the fact that he is always challenging himself first. So you’re happy to get in his wake and try to do your best. When one talks about memorable themes in film music, the first two names that come to mind are John Williams and Alan Silvestri. From “Back to the Future” to “Forrest Gump”, your themes come to mind at the mere mention of the titles. Would you talk about your process for developing main melodies? And are they where you begin on your canvas, before adding color and other details? First of all, it’s supreme compliment that you even mentioned my name with that other name. His name comes to my mind first with regard to what you speak of. I have always felt the amazing power that a theme, a clearly definable theme, can bring to a film. I have been greatly influenced by John Williams, and have aspired to learn from that and try to, when it’s appropriate, find a very clearly definable theme that captures either the essence of an entire film or an aspect of it. It is absolutely, when that is the mission, where I start. The theme for “Back to the Future” is used in all kinds of forms and aspects everywhere, front to back, in the movie. I wrote the feather theme for “Forrest Gump” after a meeting with Bob. There was no feather to be seen yet. It was very early on in the film’s life. There was only a camera-move in that town square, no feather. Bob described the feather to me in terms of what it would ultimately be, and I went back and I wrote that theme for that movie. Bob seemed to take to it immediately, so I knew I was on the right track. I said to myself, “Wow, I’ve just found a key to this film! It will guide me as I go ahead and score the film.” I scored “Forrest Gump” front to back in sequence. I got to the first piece of music that we had to have for the film, and I thought, “Here we go, now I’ll use the theme.” But it didn’t work. So I had to write a new theme. Then I got to the next place for music in the film, and it didn’t work. I went through the whole movie looking for a way to use that theme, and I didn’t even use three notes of it until the very end of the film, when this feather appears again. It seemed to be the most appropriate bookending for the film. With both the “Forrest Gump” and the “Back to the Future” themes, the attempt was to really “essentialize” in music the feeling of the films. One had a very limited use in the film and one had a very wide and expansive use. You just never know until you try and bring these things together. How do you know when it’s appropriate to start thematically? Very often, I’ll go to a very key dramatic moment in the film. For instance, my entry into the ultimate score to “Polar Express” came through the scene in the last third of the film where the kids are all in the town square and the bell breaks loose from the sleigh and winds up at the feet of our hero, who says, “I do believe, I do believe.” And all of a sudden he can hear the bell for the first time. I just knew that whatever I would write for this film had to really work and capture this whole event we’re about to see – Santa talking to the boy – and it had to be somehow connected to this bell. So that was the place that the score really started. To answer your question, this now becomes a resource for you as the composer of the score. As you move through the film, you make the determination whether it is appropriate at a given instance or not. And if it isn’t, you need another resource. For instance, there may have been for or five independent themes in “Forrest Gump”. Some of them recur periodically through the film. Some of them don’t. In each instance, I faced that piece of music that needed to be written from the point of view of: This is thematic material that we’ve already heard. Is any of this appropriate to use here, in terms of how it resonates with the film? If not, I need to go back to the drawing board, begin again, and find out what is appropriate for this film. Writing great themes – is this something that can be taught, or is this a strength that’s developed from within? I don’t know if it can be pigeonholed one way or the other, and I don’t mean to be evasive about it. It’s always a very difficult question. Obviously, many things can be learned in music and in many other disciplines, and need to be learned. There is the craft of putting notes together. That is undeniable. However, on the other side of the coin, there is one’s sense of taste, which comes from one’s experience with music, one’s experience with living, one’s likes and dislikes. And there may be this inherited genetic propensity to prefer this note following that note as opposed to another. I don’t think anyone would say that anybody writes a memorable theme for a movie if they just work hard enough. I wouldn’t say that, and I don’t think anyone else would. I also don’t think you can say that, anyone, if they work hard enough, can go out and pitch a no-hitter in major-league baseball. At some point, there are other attributes and factors beyond one’s hard work that enter the mix. Although I think of the main body of your work as melodic and orchestral, you use synth rhythms and sounds in “Predator 2” or, more recently, “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life”, for example. Let’s use painting as the analogy. If you’re painting in color, why not have this vast array of color? So you have this amazingly powerful orchestra, but you also have this very amazing palette of new sounds, new colors, new ways to combine things. I love all of it – it’s all part of the creative process to use the tools at hand, whatever tools they may be. I love the technology. I love how it has progressed. I’ve always been involved with it in some way, shape, or form. I love the orchestra, also, and what it can accomplish. As you know from my list of films, I traditionally use very large, powerful orchestras. But, that doesn’t exclude the fact that there are amazing colors available through the electronic side of life. “Blown Away” opens with a solo soprano voice and choir. Why did you use voices instead of a full orchestra or perhaps bagpipes and a fiddle, for example? How do you pick a sound palette? That film had a very dramatic opening. It was this long tracking shot. It was a very rugged coastline, but it was beautiful at the same time. The arrival of all this beauty was basically hell. It was this terrible prison. So it seemed like there was the possibility to do something very beautiful, and its contrast with where we wound up would ultimately be as powerful as what the filmmaker was doing in his shot. That was one aspect. The other thing was that this was a story about a man who had, in the name of doing something right, lost touch with his innocence and something childlike in himself and has become basically a monster. There was something very pure about the idea of this solo voice that I thought could be a very interesting tone and layer to what would ultimately unfold in the film. So that’s kind of where I went. What is being sung? Does it impact the story? It comes from an old song called ‘The Prince’s Day’. I don’t have the lyrics here in front of me, but they had a tremendous kind of relevance for the subject content of the film. So, all in all, it just seemed to be a really wonderful choice to begin the film. “Cast Away” is a captivating, profoundly emotional score, yet it was used so sparsely in the film. Once again, Bob went to a very unique place in his creation of that film. When you sit, as a film composer, and confront a film like that, a lot of things go through your mind. You know you’re working on a movie, but there’s the sense that anything cliché would just devastating to everything that both Bob and Tom Hanks were trying to create. As I saw the film, I was just salivating, waiting to jump in there and make my contribution, but I keep watching and watching and I just keep saying, “There’s nothing I could do that would be right, that would add anything to what I’m seeing.” It was a very strange experience, actually, to keep watching and watching and watching and have Bob looking at me, saying, “Nothing yet, Alan?” I answer, “I don’t think so, Bob.” “Nothing yet?” “I don’t think so.” Now we’re over halfway through this movie and his composer hasn’t heard any music yet. Bob’s like, “Okay, Al, nothing yet?” The first time I felt that there might be a place for something was when Tom left the island. What ultimately came to me was that, as terrible as that island was, it was known to him. He was very proactive or could potentially be proactive. And basically that’s what we saw through that whole time on the island. But, when he broken over that wave, all of a sudden it was a new game. He had made a choice, and now he had to count on forces beyond himself for the outcome. That was, to me, what that whole movie was really about. That was the point where I felt that that character had really transformed, had really come to this focal point of his arc – and that was the first time I heard music, that I felt music might have a place there. It was a very simple musical statement. From there on out, we hear the same simple theme played in a number of settings. It was always exactly the same, and I used very simple, very pure orchestration. The oboe is notoriously one of the purest sounds in the orchestra. It’s the instrument used to tune the orchestra. The strings also have a very simple, organic feeling and sense. So there are the only two timbres that we hear. I didn’t want to complicate even the timbre palette because I felt that, if we start feeling like the music is doing something here, we will just destroy everything that everybody worked so hard to create. It was a very interesting process for me to restrain myself. If you hear other things that I’ve done, you know that I’m not shy about going out there and making a ruckus. “Cast Away”, to me, is a masterpiece. That’s fantastic. I will pass that on to Bob. He would love to hear that. He cares very deeply about what he does, and no comment like that is wasted on someone who works that hard. Outside of writing music, what are your passions in life? I have a number of different things that I love to do. I love to fly airplanes. I’ve been doing that for a good while. I’m het-type rated and have flown alone in a jet at 41,000 feet. That’s a great passion. I continue to fly. About eight years ago, we started a vineyard here [in Carmel, California] from absolutely nothing. That’s been an amazing experience for me and for the whole family. We’re drinking our wine, which comes from our land, which we all have been a part of. We are just about to release our first wines. The chardonnay and the pinot noir are bottled and labeled. The syrah is being bottled in about a week. The website, silvestrivineyards.com, is up and running. As a film composer, you marry sound and picture. Do you ever just want to write music to life or freely express from within without film images in front of you? So far, and that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be different once I hang this phone up, I have really enjoyed and been inspired by watching film. That’s been the motivating factor in my sitting down and putting notes together. But, like I said, that could change at any time.
Both films that you mention, “Back to the Future” and “Forrest Gump”, had themes that were the first things created in all the music for those films. They both served something for me creatively – they musically kind of “essentialized” the feelings of the entire films. But they each had very different lives in the films that they were a part of.