Hackers (Iain Softley, directly/music supervisor)

The majority of the music in “Hackers” is trance and rave.  The New York and U.K. club scene is really into cyber fashion right now.  I really believe that a new wave of ambient and dance music is about to experience a huge commercial break through in the U.S.  The bands that I am using Leftfield, Massive Attack, the Prodigy, Orbital, and Underworld are already stars within this subculture.  They provide a driving dance beat, which is fun to cut scenes to.  It was very different from “Backbeat,” which I also worked on.  Classic rock would not have worked well with this subject matter.  The music has to have a trippy feel to it, because surfing the Internet can be a very hallucinogenic experience for kids.  Both the computer and rave music cultures are looking for reality outside the mainstream.  They both revert to the hippy culture of the ’60s by trying to seek out unexplored territories and parallel realities.  For that reason, the music on this soundtrack is entirely appropriate.

Seven (Howard Shore, composer)

It’s hard to put into words the creative process that I go through in composing a piece of music.  It's kind of like asking a painter why they work with the color red.  I don't intellectualize about it too much.  It's an intuitive process.  I do know that I have to feel something creative about a film before I agree to be a part of it.  I dream about the music that I think would fit into the film, and then I begin a sort of free form process of composing what I hear in my head.  It starts as a very broad palette, but then it gets narrowed down as the film is further edited.  The frustration is in trying to translate the sounds I hear in my head to reality.  “Seven” looks and sounds beautiful.  I thought it would be very tantalizing to compose music for it.  It's an orchestral score, mixed with electronic and environmental sounds.  I'll let the music speak for itself.

GoldenEye (Marsha Gleeman, president, MGM/UA Music)

When it became clear that John Barry would not be available for “Golden Eye,” we decided to take the James Bond theme in an entirely new direction.  After talking to about 20 different people in the industry about who would be appropriate to approach for the score, we decided on [French musician] Eric Serra.  He did some amazing music for “La Femme Nikita” which convinced us that he could update the Bond sound into the ’90s.  We temped many of his previous pieces to rough footage from “GoldenEye”, and it really seemed to match the pace and emotion of the film.  Eric's music is predominantly electronic, but this work is a balanced mix of [electronic music] and orchestral music.  The two musical approaches blend together beautifully.  Still, we have not completely discarded the classic Bond theme that John Barry created.  It is still very much present in this film.  We will also have a title song with a major artist that will run over the opening credits.

The Fantasticks (Harvey Schmidt, composer and screenwriter)

There were several times on location in Arizona when I just burst into tears because each evening at dusk; they would shoot part of 'I Can See It,' the song the boy sings with El Gallo while he's being lured forward by the bright, hypnotic carnival lights.  If you didn't have the ear phones on, you just hear Matt's [Joe Mclntyre, formerly of New Kids on the Block] voice, singing a capella, out in the middle of the darkness, where you felt the land stretched for thousands of miles in all directions and all the stars were breaking through above the faint glow of the sun still in the sky and this lone figure walking across the prairie singing.  And it just moved me so deeply, thinking this is something we wrote many years ago in our youth and now we're hearing this distant, youthful voice sing it....  There was something so timeless and ancient and plaintive about it.

How To Make an American Quilt (Thomas Newman, composer)

“How To Make an American Quilt” is a movie that is very much reflective of a woman's point of view, and the score stays true to that.  [The film] is made by a woman about women.  The challenge I faced was to really do this film justice.  I don't want to characterize this score as more delicate than other pieces that I have worked on, but it does contain smaller, more ambient sounds.  This film has a rare beauty to it, and it just felt right to use certain types of instruments to capture its spirit.  There are double reed instalments, solo winds, and strings throughout most of the orchestral score.  Another challenge was the episodic nature of the storyline.  The film required several different musical themes, rather than one overall piece.  There is a theme of alienation in the film, and this approach seemed to musically reflect that.