As composer Brian Tyler and I sat down in his Los Angeles studio, discussing his experiences as a relatively new addition to the film-music industry, I found fascinating his intoxicating excitement for what he does. Film-scoring seems amazingly natural for him, as if he were meant to walk down that artistic road from day one. Tyler’s scoring opportunities have been spread across an array of genres, from the introspective “Panic” (2000) to the sci-fi epic “Children of Dune” (2002) to the dark, haunting thriller “Darkness Falls” (2003). His score for the epic “Timeline” (2003) is overwhelmingly powerful. His chameleon-like ability to tell a film’s inner story without imposing his musical personality on the picture is evident in each score he writes. Let’s first talk about your musical upbringing and how it led to film music. I suppose it all started with my grandparents. My grandfather was an art director for films and my grandmother was a pianist. That’s where the actual collision of film and music first happened. My grandfather [Walter Tyler] was a really wonderful, Academy Award-winning art director who did films for Cecil B. DeMille, like “The Ten Commandments” and those types of epic features. He’d tell me about his experiences. Then I would hear my grandmother playing Chopin. I took to music, playing piano and drums, very young. After a few years, I would play music that I composed more often than not. That led to an early mini-career as a composer. I composed concertos and things and ended up touring Europe and all around by my teens, playing the piano. I think my last gig was when I performed at the Moscow Radio Hall for Gorbachev when I was probably sixteen or seventeen. Meanwhile, my parents were influencing me with rock and jazz from Led Zeppelin to Cole Porter. So the music industry came to me early. It was my life. Film music always interested me. I think the first record that I bought was either “Midway” or “Star Wars” by John Williams. I would actually watch videos with the volume off and re-score the movies for fun. I never formally studied film-scoring in school, however. My trial by fire was my first movie. I dove into the deep end. I didn’t know what timecode or spotting was. That came much later. When I had started my film-music career, I was still in a band. I crossed over to scoring because a song that I had written was going to be used for an end title to a movie called “Bartender”. I told the movie’s director, Gabe Torres, that I wanted to score it, but he wanted to use someone more established. So I convinced the producer to give me the director’s address, and I went over to his house with a DAT player with some of my music on it. We sat down and watched the movie as I plopped in this music that somehow fit the scene that we happened to be watching. I got the gig. It was one of those flukes. That was pretty gutsy. It was one of those calculated risks. I guess I had nothing to lose. I thought that the worst he could do was throw me out of his house, crushing me ego. Other than that, I had nothing to lose. What is your approach to a score? There’s a process that I go through every time. I’ll watch the movie for the first time either with the temp music or without. Then I’ll watch it silent or just with dialogue. During this second viewing, the first thing I think of is the thematic material. During this early stage, themes somehow emerge, and they are almost always melodic. I’ll be driving in the car or I’ll be in the shower when a theme occurs. Then I’ll have to find a piece of paper and write it down. If I don’t write it down, it might be gone. Then I go through the project and get more specific: I watch the film again and begin jotting down where the different motifs and themes go and the style that I want for each cue. From that point on, I can launch into writing specifically. In today’s film industry, as you know, the post-production process has become shorter and shorter. One of the main components in film-scoring is, of course, speed. Writing comes fairly quickly to me. Does a temp track become a hindrance? It can. The number-one thing that the temp track does is act as a placeholder for me. It shows me where a director wants music. I’ve done movies where there was no temp track. At first it was a bit scary, but now that I have scored a few films like that, I actually prefer it, because it’s just wide-open – you can do what your natural instincts tell you to do, which is, I think, why they hire you. The first twenty movies I did were temped with all sorts of famous scores. But in the last year or so, I think every film I’ve done has been temped exclusively with my music, with the exception of maybe three or four cues. That’s even weirder, because I know exactly what I did. I almost know it too well. There’s no mystery. It’s potentially more dangerous. The danger is repeating your own music? Yeah, because you know it so well. I try to flee the temp track so I don’t become unduly influenced by it. I’m still perplexed why the filmmakers don’t bring the composer in on the early stages of production. With “Children of Dune”, for instance, I got the script and I started composing. Then the director, Greg Taitanes, would send me dailies of the film. This is really great because you can just sit with the themes and let them percolate over time, even if you’re doing other films at the same time. I’ve been anxious to hear about your brilliant epic score to “Children of Dune”, which displays all your strengths as a composer. It was a challenge. My first reaction was that I couldn’t believe I was going to write a “Dune” score, because when I saw the original “Dune” in 1984, I just loved it. I watched it many times. I have the score for the original one. I got really sucked into the “Dune” universe. I read all the books and I became this kind of “Dune” nerd. Early on, I re-scored “Dune” for myself. No one ever heard it. Coincidentally enough, the very first thematic motif on the soundtrack was something that I wrote for “Dune” all those years ago and has stuck with me ever since. It was like one of those great serendipitous things. It was a dream that I was able to score something that I had read beforehand. That was the first time that ever happened. I knew that the score would primarily be orchestra, but there would be voices and all sorts of percussion in it as well. It needed something that isn’t typically associated with something shot for television, so I took my budget and put it director into recording the orchestra. I needed massive percussion and string ensembles aside from the orchestra to achieve what I was writing on paper. I wasn’t going to use samples. I wouldn’t abide by that in terms of this earthy percussion and eastern-stringed-instrument vibe, so I was lucky that I played most of those instruments. I ended up tracking about eighty-three different Brian Tylers playing all sorts of weird instruments. It was probably the most complex thing that I had to do in terms of instrumentation and orchestration. Luckily, the process started very early and I was able to write all the way through the filming of the movie. “Four Dogs Playing Poker” has a diverse sound. Yeah, it was a really interesting project because the storyline starts in Argentina, then it goes to Los Angeles and then New York. Right when you think everything is going smoothly, the plan goes horribly wrong and the film progresses from a lighthearted heist movie to this really dark, intense nightmare. You can see why the music took a complete turn. It starts off with an Argentine guitar over the orchestrated motifs. Then it goes into that cold, industrial, rhythmic electronic score. The only thing remaining from the heist part of the movie is that there’s an Argentine guitar over it. Then the score just completely loses all of the orchestra. There’s none of it left except for the very last piece, ‘Insomnia’, which is orchestra combined with beats. That might be my most eclectic score, and it’s exactly reflective of this intentionally disorienting movie’s changing scenery. There is a little bit of a red herring at the beginning, where you feel that you are in more of a “Catch Me if You Can” vibe, and then it just throttles you. “Panic” is probably your coldest-feeling score, but in the same breath, it’s melodic and passionate. Talk about your approach to this film. “Panic” was a huge revelation for me. I actually saw the film before I scored it. I had another movie, “Shadow Horse”, that was in dramatic competition against “Panic” at Sundance. I went to see “Panic” because I wanted to see the competition, and I loved it. It was one of my favorite movies immediately when I saw it. I just had to do this movie, so I immediately went out into the parking lot and called my agent and called around: “Who’s directing this?” “Is the director here?” “I’ve got to find this guy. I must score this movie.” Talking to the filmmakers, I expressed that it should be really wide and sparse and kind of minimalist, but I also wanted it to have emotion. It could be cold in the way the orchestra played, but in the way the music was written it could be really emotional, because this main character in this movie, played by Bill Macy, was this guy who completely suppresses everything. He really feels it under the surface, but you don’t see anything on his face that would be a sign that there’s actually emotion underneath that skin. But you know it’s there. I wrote a very emotional score, but I had the orchestra play with no vibrato and completely cold and stark. I had never really done this combination on another movie. It’s kind of unique unto itself and somehow it’s heartbreaking in a way. You perform, including vocals, on most of your scores. Yes. I’m on almost all of my scores. If you go through “Children of Dune”, my voice is all over that. It’s a go-to thing for me. Some composers have a synth patch that they always like to go to or something like that. For me, it’s about three or four layers of my voice. And I’ll bring in a female vocalist for a different part. So it’s a combination of things. I also love using large choirs when a film calls for it. I’ve been a singer most of my life. But I’m not in there belting out a tune or something in the score. I don’t want to do that. Tell me about “Timeline”. Boy, it’s a massive tapestry! That’s for sure. The idea behind it is to create a really intense score that has a lot of scope – a very wide, kind of epic quality to it. Although the film partly takes place in the present, it really is about futuristic technology. We’re dealing with contained wormholes and the ability to travel back and forth between the fourteenth century and the present. The music does something similar in that it constantly weaves from a more ancient sound to a more modern musical sound. In the present, there is always orchestra, but it’s complemented by other things, such as electronics. But when the story travels back to the fourteenth century, the music has a purely orchestral sound with medieval percussion. During this time, the score has a really rough, warlike feel and is contrasted with a new love theme. It’s very melancholy. So there are three elements to this score that are in sharp contrast with each other. I would say that ninety percent of the movie is in the fourteenth century. So the majority of the score was played by a ninety-one-piece orchestra with a fourteen-piece medieval percussion ensemble and a choir. It is relentless. In fact, one cue in the movie is probably the most relentless thing I have ever had to write because there are these giant, epic battles between the French and the English armies that are just unbelievable. The French developed this weapon called the trebuchet, which has this amazing ability to launch objects through the air. I was told that it could launch a piano four football fields. When the people from the present went back in time, they brought knowledge of modern technology. They aided the English with things like “Greek fire”. So there’s this battle in medieval times, but it’s got explosions that you wouldn’t see in “Braveheart”. The music has to create this hyper sense of reality and war. But these scenes are very long. I think the longest stretch of music that I had toward the end of the movie is fifteen and a half minutes. To keep up a solid piece of action music for fifteen minutes, keeping the energy building up and getting bigger and faster, is practically impossible. When I just watched the scene last night at the scoring stage it occurred to me how long it was. I don’t know if I could do it again. But it was really a lot of fun.