First-person accounts from some of 1999’s Best Original Score hopefuls
Randy Newman
“Toy Story 2”
“Having done the first ‘Toy Story’, it was a case where the more you can repeat yourself, the better off you are. The more you can remind people of the fun you had when we all made $500 million, that’s fine. But there were no more than five or six minutes when I could repeat myself.
“I talked to director John Lasseter and the folks at Pixar about what they wanted. Usually on a movie, you get in at the end, but this was done in segments. I’d get 20 minutes of film and do 15 minutes of music. A month later, I’d get another part. This director has good instincts. When we do have a difference of opinion, sometimes he’s right. If they tell me what they want, and I agree, I can generally give it to them. We get along very well.
“It was sort of an epic, calling for Western music and space music. I did two new songs, one called ‘When She Loved Me,’ which Sarah McLachlan sings. Then, the character Woody was (supposed to be) a TV star in the ’50s, and he’s stolen by a toy collector who wants to sell him. I wrote the theme for his TV show, called ‘Woody’s Roundup’. It’s a funny thing with that stuff. I can remember sax solos from old ’50s hits. There are old ABBA tracks that I know the guitar tracks to. It takes up brain space. Sometimes I can’t remember someone’s name. I stole from the ‘Maverick’ TV theme when I did the movie.
“I wrote a ton of music for this one, over 70 minutes. The movie’s maybe 90 minutes. The orchestra numbered 112 in spots. The film was all outdoors, and to a little toy, everything has epic dimensions. To do space music means at least eight horns. Pixar likes Sony very much so I recorded at Sony. I will try out that Newman sound stage at Fox – I’d like to try it at some point.”
Alberto Iglesias
“All About My Mother”
“This was the third film in a row that I’ve worked on with Pedro Almodovar. The first was ‘Flor de mi Secreto’ and then ‘Came Tnimula.’ I read the script and I was paying attention to how Pedro was shooting the film. But I didn’t really start writing until the first editing. It was already in postproduction. I had two-and-half months to work on the score.
“With Pedro, it’s always better to work after the film has been shot, because in the beginning, he’s very attentive to the actors. The ideal time to start is during postproduction. Certain parts of the film can inspire you. It depends on what kind of film it is. I think for music the ideal time to start and to really understand the film is in postproduction.
“Pedro always sees a number of possibilities for the music and he communicates them all to me. Sometimes he also has doubts, but he opens the film up completely to me to contribute with all kinds of possibilities. Despite the fact that Almodovar’s films are very much his products, I achieve a lot of freedom when it comes to the music. I write at the piano or at a table, and in order to adjust the music to the images we do a draft, a kind of recording on the synthesizer or other instruments.
“The biggest difficulty was avoiding music that made the film even more dramatic. The music had to play a role that didn’t darken the film. The most difficult was to find, within the proper places, a color that wasn’t pessimistic – something that gave a breath of fresh air.
“Primarily it’s orchestral, although it does have jazz elements. I would say orchestral with multiple references. The choice of instrumentation is mine. The director doesn’t usually decide, although that doesn’t mean that Almodovar doesn’t have instruments that he clearly prefers. I recall a section I wrote that has trumpet and he got very excited. He hadn’t told me to do it that way, but he loves trumpet with a mute. But he also likes the bandoneon, an Argentine instrument like an accordion. We used Dino Saluzi as the soloist on the bandoneon.
“The orchestra numbered about 50. We recorded the woodwinds in Madrid at Red Led, and the strings in Prague at Smecky Recording Studios. I’ve recorded before in Prague. It’s a very musical city; the musicians are used to working for films.
“The greatest pleasure for a film composer is to see that the music is very integrated into the story. It’s not just a satisfaction in the accomplishment, but in how it works on-screen – that it is a part of the story.”
Don Davis
“The Matrix”
“I scored ‘Bound’, which was a low-budget lesbian gangster thriller. It was an amazing experience. These two directors, Larry and Andy Wachowski, had never directed before, but it was a remarkable film.
“They actually gave me the script to ‘The Matrix’ right after we finished ‘Bound,’ about three years ago. They had some ideas about the music, but pretty deeply in the abstract. They knew they would have a use for songs, but not huge, as they did in ‘Bound.’ I trusted that their use of songs would be tasteful. They knew the music had to be exciting but it had to be as different and creative as the other aspects of the movie would be. That’s a pretty tall order. They gave me a good year-and-a-half.
“I’ve done some work in concert writing and I’ve followed that scene pretty closely. Concert music has been changing quite a bit in the last 10 years. It’s always been my opinion that the best film music has drawn on the best concert music of the day. Jerry Goldsmith drew from Stravinsky. John Corigliano did a remarkable score for ‘Altered States’.
“I was trying to combine minimalism and modernism, going from highly atonal to postmodern. Minimalism was diametrically opposed to the modernism of 20 years ago. Now, composers are incorporating elements of both styles. The result is something very new.
“One of the main goals in researching music is to discover what you cannot do. One of the best features of ‘The Matrix’ cinematically is its nod toward different movie genres. There’s action and sci-fi, but also kung fu. There’s a nod to ‘High Noon’, but also some blaxploitation. There’s a real cognizance of styles we’ve seen in the last 50 years and they wanted that in the music as well. I wanted a new sound, something not readily recognizable as typical film music, but I also wanted to recognize the genres.
“I used a 90-piece orchestra with 40-voice choir, scoring at Fox’s Newman stage. I supplemented that with some synth and sampling elements created in my home studio. There were 100 minutes of music spotted for the picture. The film got shortened a little bit, to maybe 95 minutes, but it’s loaded with music.
“I had a year-and-a-half to think about it and two months to write the score. That’s a healthy timetable, but the problem I had was they wanted my mocked-up score in the picture for the previews. We spotted it in the first part of December last year and the temp dub was due in January. I had about three weeks to dub and mock it up for test screenings and then a little over a month to orchestrate it.
“Often on a film there’s a mind-set of ‘we’ve gotta rush to get this done,’ and you sometimes put up something that’s not the best. That’s anathema to the Wachowski way. Until I actually see the picture, it’s in the abstract. They did give me an opportunity to see a first rough-cut fairly early, about a month before we spotted.
“The Wachowski way of making films is not to rush the project. Their real success is that they somehow maintain the integrity in their work process in a town where that’s hard to maintain. They made very few compromises and I was a beneficiary of that, as were the other creative members of the team.”
Gabriel Yared
“The Talented Mr. Ripley”
“When Anthony Minghella started writing, he sent me a draft to get me into the atmosphere of his writing. It’s full of musical ideas. When Anthony writes a script based on a book, I never read the book. I’d rather stick to his writing. He said there were these two people, one in love with classical music, the other involved in jazz.
“We have all the material from Fantasy Records, so we had a huge catalog to choose from. We knew we had Bach and Beethoven, but the music has to sit on Ripley’s character. The music follows him throughout the picture.
“I threw out some ideas, and did a demo with a sampler and synthesizer to get his opinion. This was long before the shooting, like six months before. We had to record some source music before the shooting.
“Anthony knows me so well that he knows what I need. I never worked with a director who gives more respect. It’s like a soul mate. He never brings me existing music to show what he wants. He talks in adjectives. This opens my mind. And he knows I don’t want to work on the picture after it’s finished. I was on from the beginning and I went to the shooting to see the actors, to meet the cinematographer, to feel the project.
“I’m a great admirer of the jazz of the period although I’m not a jazzman. As the film was filled with this kind of source material, I had to find something completely different from classics and jazz. First, I thought, ‘Let’s find the theme of Mr. Ripley,’ and I wrote a theme in D-minor, like an Italia from the ’50s. For the main theme, I used only acoustic orchestral instruments – the best form of music to reflect Ripley’s doubts and feelings. Those two were the main themes.
“Anthony wanted something that he said had mischief. Anthony was saying that Ripley, when he’s cheating or lying, is really being mischievous. I used a bass phrase and over that a soprano sax, which sounds like an oboe or English horn.
“There’s very little underscore in the film. The music is not there to illustrate what’s going on in a scene, it’s going somewhere else.
“Usually I record in London. The source music was recorded at Lansdowne Recording Studios and the symphony orchestra at Abbey Road. Harry Rabinowitz was the conductor. He’s 84 years old, but still sometimes he conducts three sessions a day. I’m very shy in front of an orchestra, so I stay in the booth and work it out with Anthony.”
Michael Kamen
“The Iron Giant”
“I recall 25 years ago, discovering this story, an old Scandinavian legend. I was making ballet scores in New York for Alvin Ailey and the Joffrey. I always wanted to make a ballet about the boy’s story.
“Later, in London, I met Leonard Baskin, who was finishing the illustrations for Ted Hughes’ book, ‘The Iron Man,’ which was based on the legend. Pete Towashend also had a musical called ‘Iron Giant.’ And so when (director) Brad Bird called me to do this film score, I was tickled. Brad is an extraordinary guy.
“This was my first animated film and I started working on it knowing how vital music is to animation – how it breathes not just emotions into a character but real feelings.
“Brad used a lot of (Bernard) Herrmann scores to temp the picture. Ordinarily I don’t pay attention to temp scores, but I loved the texture of it, the old-fashionedness of it.
“Bird set the story in the heyday of the Cold War – the McCarthy era, Sputnik and American politicos fanning the flames of people’s fear. I grew up in New York in a very left-wing family, and so the issues ‘Iron Giant’ dealt with were very real. When Sputnik went up, I was the same age as Hogarth, the kid in the story.
“The opportunity to work in an old-fashioned way was beautiful. I found myself looking at the picture and forgetting to write music, it was so beautiful.
“I decided to use a European orchestra for the picture. I went to see Vladimir Ashkenazy, a classical pianist and conductor, doing an epic symphony by Strauss with the Czech Philharmonic. It sounded like a ‘60s sci-fi orchestra – nice and thick with grace and beauty. A lot of composers go to the Czech Republic because it is possible to save a great deal of money, but it cost me more money to take all the equipment and people. The huge concert hall there added such a breadth and depth to the sound of the music. We spent nearly a week in Prague, a city that enchants the heart.
“I wrote a little under an hour’s music. Usually animation is wall-to-wall music. Modern animation is jet-propelled by music. I decided to write sparsely, because the story is so good. I didn’t use any of the standard devices like clicks or streamers; we recorded it in real time. We played along with the film. We had a video monitor imported, so I could see the film while I conducted the orchestra.
“Bird is a great combination of someone who professes not to have the language but is wise enough to voice opinions, and he was spot on. He also trusted me. He was one of the more articulate directors I’ve ever worked with. This film will be around for 75 years. It’s an evergreen.”
Jocelyn Pook
“Eyes Wide Shut”
“This came completely out of the blue in the summer of 1997 when I got a phone call from Stanley Kubrick. He’d heard my CD in one of the rehearsals for the film. The choreographer was using it in a scene. I didn’t have an agent, but I had done quite a lot of TV and my own recordings.
“I started off just working on the film’s orgy scene and masked ball scene, being commissioned to do just that. But then I ended up doing other things that were needed.
“The music for the masked ball scene was based on the piece he originally heard on my CD. He filmed it to the music and edited the film to the music in the orgy scene. When I started on the film I didn’t know anything about it except the orgy scene, which he described to me. The music for the orgy and the masked ball is very ceremonial, very formal.
“In the sort of work I’ve done, the music is fairly foreground. It’s very geared toward film rather than being incidental TV music. Kubrick knew what he wanted. He had lots of ideas, lots of references. Our meetings were very stimulating. He was very excited about music and very infectious about it. The whole experience was positive. The only stress was worrying about doing the right thing. But Stanley and his family were very lovely and down to earth.
“The work was spread over two years, but there was a year when I didn’t do anything. There was a lot of work in the first six months and the last six months. We recorded at Abbey Road with 27 strings and voices, and I had never recorded anywhere like that before.
“It has given me a great deal more confidence, because he had such confidence in me. It’s been a huge thing for me. I was aware of how he used music in his films. I really do admire the way he’s used it in original kinds of ways and really bold ways.
“It has all been very surreal, even down to just being nominated at the Golden Globes. I am afraid of being a little bit spoiled. Nothing’s been good enough yet that I’ve been offered since.”
John Debney
“End of Days”
“I had done ‘Sudden Death’, a Van Damme picture, and ‘The Relic’, with Peter Hyams. We’ve had a long relationship. He called me about this quite early, about six months before the completion of the movie. I find him very articulate. I have an advantage because I’ve worked with him, but the tricky part the first time is trying to understand what he wants.
“I work on themes and submit them to him. We usually come to a consensus. Once he likes something, it’s usually something I quite like also. We find the same wavelength.
“Arnold Schwarzenegger and I had a couple of discussions. I found him wonderful in terms of his vision of what the music should be. He had very strong opinions and was very clear. What he was hearing was what I was hearing.
“I thought it should be a rather large score in scope. I tried to encompass as many elements of world music -- where we are as a world at the end of the century. With the backdrop of a large orchestra, I saw vocalizations, and ethnic and primitive instruments and a lot of electronic and sampled sounds. I used back ward vocals, murmurings and whisperings, to give it a pastiche of colors in order not to make it typically scary-movieish.
“There are certain things you have to do in a scary movie. With this kind of film you always compare yourself to ‘The Omen’, one of Jerry Goldsmith’s finest scores. And you have Carl Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’ in mind. I did utilize some Latin choral stuff. I used a boy soprano, Theo Lebow, who’s 12, from L.A.
“The orchestra was not mammoth – about 75 strong – augmented with a lot of synthesized and choral textures. I recorded in L.A. at Todd-AO on Radford.
“There’s never enough time, what with making all kinds of last-minute changes. I got a head start, but there’s always a mad dash to finish. Sometimes time is a luxury, but it can hurt you; it gives filmmakers time to think things through. I hope I came away with something that might haunt audiences a little bit. They might latch onto some of the thematic material I created.”
Ludovico Einaudi
“Not of this Work!”
“I had not worked with director Giuseppe Piccioni before. They gave me the script of the film. I read it and loved it. Piccioni and I were immediately on the same wavelength. I started to work on it in a very free way. I was doing my own work at the piano. It was like working for myself, inspired by the script but without any strict indication from him. It seemed as if I had plenty of time, but the film editor, Esmeralda Calabria, told me she wanted to edit the film with the music.
“Sometimes the risk is that the director uses a temp track and gets affection for it. That’s very difficult. I proposed to start using previous music I’ve done, just to define the atmosphere, so I could understand what could be better for the movie. Meanwhile, I performed a concert of my music including the new themes I was writing for the film. I recorded it so we had a recording to use for the editing. Esmeralda had a very good sensibility for the music and the relationship of timing between images and music. We very easily found a way to develop the work together. Giuseppe had worked with her before and gave her complete freedom, although he was present all the time. The music was very well respected, never used as a carpet. Many times the rhythm of the film was built on the rhythm of the music, so there were some scenes changed from the original script. The music became an organic part of the film. In a way, you hear it immediately, when something is wrong with the music. It has its own breath and can ke ep the images together.
“In the end I was very happy. The union of things was very satisfying for us. For the main themes I used piano with strings. It was a very small ensemble – piano and five strings. I used another theme at the beginning when [the lead character] finds the baby and at the end, with a larger orchestra of strings and three female voices. There were a couple of scenes with percussion. For a bingo scene at the convent, there is a connection with the bowl of numbers inside and the percussion. In another scene in a supermarket, the sound of cash connected with the percussion. I used a soprano voice at one point, and I had a harp solo piece. There’s a church scene that was very difficult, a long scene starting with music, a choir in the church, connecting to another scene with a solo violin part.
“I recorded in Milan in two different studios, some at Next, and the main part in Extra Productions Studio. To write, I use both piano and computer. I use the computer a lot when I work on bigger scores. Recently, I find I use the piano a lot. I get tired of computers and I can write in a more direct way and am less involved with technology and more with music. In the studio, I like to experiment with technology. I like to mix the sounds together. For strings, I like the real instruments. It’s very difficult to get the same expression and sound with electronics.”
Patrick Doyle
“East-West”
“I had worked with director Regis Wargnier on two pictures, ‘Indochine’ and then ‘Un Femme Francaise’. This one has fairly epic sweeps. Not as much as ‘Indochine’, but on a broader canvas than ‘Femme’. It’s about a small family that goes back to Russia with utopian aspirations, only to realize that it’s an oppressive regime even after the fall of the Soviet Union. The story follows a wife and her young son on their escape and eventual return to France, where she falls in love with a Russian boy. It’s very French and very Russian, and I tried to fuse the two together.
“There are scenes of a swimmer planning for a swimming competition but also planning to escape. When I saw the sequences in rehearsals, I heard a driving piano motor theme. I thought it would be an opportunity to write in the traditional Russian concerto style. We used Emanuel Ax, recording at Clinton Studios in New York. The director was very keen to use a Slavic orchestra and singers, as he had filmed a lot of the movie in Sofia and really liked the location. We prerecorded the National Symphony Orchestra and the Bulgarian National Choir in Sofia. I also used the former Red Army choir, now the Ukrainian Army choir, and wrote an end-title solo piece for Russian baritone Anatoly Fokanov. I had heard him with the Hungarian National Opera and he was exactly the voice I wanted. He came to London, according to his schedule, and overdubbed his solo at Air-Edel Studios.
“We recorded at the Bulgarian National Radio, Studio 1, in Sofia, designed immediately after World War II. It’s very art deco, all in wood. The sound is fantastic. I used upwards of 70 players. The choir – when they sang – there’s something unique about the Slavic voices. The singers were completely overwhelming. This was the biggest ensemble over four or five days that they’d had.
“They’re not in the EC yet, so they can’t travel freely in order to work. We used a young horn player, Yasen Enchev Teodosiev. On the very last cue, he doubles the cellos playing the main heroic theme, but he’s featured throughout.
“Wargnier is such a good laugh and very classy. He’s very articulate, but he leaves it pretty much to me. But (if) he falls in love with a theme and wants to use it over and over. I say, ‘I’ll write you another.”’
Jan Kaczmarek
“Aimee and Jaguar”
“This was a new adventure and quite unusual. Director Max Faerberboeck had found one of my albums in Germany through a friend. Thinking I was American, instead he found a Polish composer living in the U.S.
“The film is a love story between two women m Germany; one the wife of a Nazi officer and the other a young Jewish woman. She’s hiding as secretary to the chief of a prominent Nazi newspaper.
“They flew me to Berlin and I saw one of the first cuts, almost three hours long. I found it interesting and exciting. It’s a very unusual story and very challenging to portray the love story of two women in Berlin being bombed by the Allies with the last Jews there being threatened by the Nazis. It’s a difficult subject.
“Faerberboeck was fascinated by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as conducted by Fechwanger, one of Germany’s biggest conductors from the ‘40s. When he shot the key love scene, he used that music to set the environment. It became the most difficult scene for me to write – when the two women first meet in an erotic situation. It’s the first time for one of them, although it stops at the first kiss. I went the opposite way from Fechwanger. I did not want his epic approach. I used a very personal touch, digging for something unusual for these two people and this extreme intimacy. He liked it.
“Our entire relationship was full of nice surprises. He looks at everything with such an interesting perspective, unique and old-fashioned in a way, with zero corruptibility.
“I had around two months to write a score of about 50 minutes. I recorded in Warsaw, where I usually go. They have excellent strings in Warsaw. There were a few cues that presented the opportunity to describe the surrounding world, using around 60 players from the Polish Radio Orchestra, which is very young and ambitious. It was almost exclusively strings with some woodwinds and one piano as a counterpoint for scenes of drama. For the smaller pieces, I used maybe 30 players from Symphonia Varsovia, which is the best orchestra there.
“The process was interesting. The director was in Germany and I was in Los Angeles. I used the computer for a lot of samples of the important themes.
“He wanted to know the main ideas; he didn’t want the entire concept. He wanted the basic emotions and the concept behind it.”
Mason Daring
“Music of the Heart”
“I had not worked with Wes Craven before. It was serendipitous. We got together on the suggestion of the music supervisor. Wes and I got on like a house on fire. Wes used to be an English professor, and I did too, so we played word games. We’d place bets on the meanings of obscure words. He’s also a terrific musician. In meetings, he and I would pass a guitar back and forth.
“I spent a year and three months on the picture overall, because I had to do all the prerecords for the concert scenes and classroom scenes. Madonna was on the picture at first but then she left and Meryl Streep came on. She came with some very specific requests about tempos, having to do with the cadence of her dialogue. She wanted the playing underneath her dialogue to have a certain tempo.
“We did all the scenes at Carnegie Hall on a three-day shoot with legendary violinists Mark O’Connor, Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman and 4,000 extras. It was my privilege to record them for the Bach Double, which is the finale.
“After that, I had to score the film and it was a substantial score. A couple of orchestraters told me that I am pandiatonic, which refers to someone who uses all the notes in the scale as conveniently as possible. That’s a nice way of saying I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I did adopt a musical style that was a little modern, flirting with jazz occasionally but rooted in classical voices. It’s very string oriented; not atonal, perhaps a bit traditional. Somehow it seemed to fit up against those classical pieces without a problem. No one will confuse me with Bach, but it did seem to work.
“I did the prerecords mostly Los Angeles with the L.A. Youth Orchestra. We did the Bach Double onstage in Carnegie, at a lunch hour. It took 45 minutes. I thought, ‘The next 45 minutes will work, or I will find a new way to make a living.’ I did the score at Todd-AO with 77 players. There’s nothing like firepower.”
Elmer Bernstein
“Bringing Out the Dead”
‘I had done ‘Cape Fear’ and ‘The Age of Innocence’ with Martin Scorsese, so this was my third with him as director. He is a joy to work with – using with advisedly, because you don’t for him. He’s one of the greatest – if not the greatest – living film artist and he relates to other artists. The discussions are useful and illuminating. He’s articulate about music, and he has photographic memory for scores.
“He needs music when he’s editing the film; he gets inspiration from it. He had the music or some indications of the music during the entire time he was cutting the film.
“I came on board, in this instance, rather late. At first, he thought he was going to do it with popular music of the time, Van Morrison and so on. But as he went through the editing process, he realized he needed another element in the music.
“It’s a score of atmosphere, not a score where each character has a melodic theme. It’s an extraordinary movie in my opinion. It’s a very strange score. In a curious way it sounds as if it were gently done with electronics, but it was done with acoustic instruments mostly. The sounds themselves tend to be kind of clinical. As a matter of great surprise on my part, this score, which is not very long, has attracted incredible attention. Perhaps because it’s woven between these very loud rock records, it comes as a relief and provides a new insight into the situation. For some reason, people are noticing it. I recorded it in London over about nine days with the London Symphony Orchestra.”
Lesley Barber
“Mansfield Park”
“I had worked with director Patricia Rozema three times before, including my first feature, ‘When Night Is Falling.’ There’s a lot of music, and it’s more electronica than symphony. It’s the Renaissance meets electronica.
“I came on board as she finished the script, as she needed some music prerecords – the balkoom piece, a piece for harp, a piece for glass harmonica and a piece for hurdy-gurdy. Mozart and Handel wrote for glass harmonica. It was a fad at the time. It can rock, and you can write some pretty hectic pieces for it. I worked with Allisdair Malloy, the king of the glass harmonica, and Nigel Eaton on the hurdy-gurdy.
“For the ballroom piece, Patricia had the idea that Fanny Price, the protagonist, would become tipsy. She wanted the piano to have a grand scale accelerando and I had to change the tempo a few times.
“We looked at other period films and a lot of them use Mozartian music. We wanted to avoid seeming fussy, priggish and tight. We wanted a modern sensibility. Early music interests me, so I wanted to see if we could get some early instruments. Any music from the high baroque would be appropriate. This was incredibly freeing to me – Haydn, Handel, Bach. It let me create quite intuitively.
“I wrote about 70 minutes of music over about seven weeks. Composing for film is the original extreme sport. We recorded at Air Lyndhurst, with a 50-piece orchestra.”
Howard Shore
Dogma”
“I had not worked with director Kevin Smith before but he was familiar with other films I’d done. I went to see the film at his offices in New Jersey. I didn’t really understand much of it, not knowing much about Catholic dogma. My wife had to do a lot of explaining. I had to understand the references to Catholicism and the references to other films. Once I understood the references, then it was a great collaboration.
“I wrote it like a mock religious epic. I had done Al Pacino’s ‘Looking for Richard’ and the way I approached that was, I read the play and wrote a lot of music based on the characters. Then, having expressed myself musically, I went about the task of using that music and working with it. This was very similar.
“Everyone has studied religion, been affected by it, or inspired by it. I thought of ‘The Ten Commandments’ and ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, and all the clichés. Then I kind of closed my eyes and came up with my version of all of that. This was like Shakespeare, except it was God. In Shakespeare, I was aware of the Walton music of the 19th century. He has inspired composers enormously, as we know, so here was my chance to do something with God and religion.
“I used quite a small group. I wanted the feeling of a small group sounding big, like Monty Python attacking the castle. A small force, but so brave. It’s composed for huge forces and recorded for creative reasons with 30 violins. It’s interesting, the smallness of it trying to sound large.
“We recorded at Air Lyndhurst. I tried to match the acoustic – the right space for the movie. The church aspect of the studio felt perfectly right. I did ‘Ed Wood’ there and the gothic quality was perfect for him, too.”
Rachel Portman
“The Cider House Rules”
“I hadn’t worked with director Lasse Hallstrom before, but (he’d) used my score of ‘Emma’ in the temp. It’s hard to follow something that people like and are used to, so I started from scratch and never took that into account. I had to look at the film and let it speak to me. It was set at a different place, at a different time. This was set in Maine in World War II, a long way from Britain and Englishness and Jane Austen. Lasse told me he liked the simplicity of ‘Emma,’ and I let that sit and came up with what I needed.
“The film had been shot and was nearing fine cut when I came on. I actually wrote the whole score in a very short time, but then they discovered they had more time, and I rewrote 50% of the score with a new theme. I went more deeply into it. I had one major theme that covered the whole film with different offshoots, but when I went back I wrote two more major themes.
“It was a different approach. You discover things. There are so many rushes these days, last-minute picture changes, horrible deadlines. You lose the creative process, the actual composition of the themes. I’d have a five-week burst, then a four-week burst.
“The film begins in an orphanage with kids who’ve been forgotten, run by a very charismatic, quite eccentric doctor, and that’s where it ends up.
“I needed something that rattled around the orphanage so I used quite a lot of solo piano (John Lenehan) and then mainly orchestra with a lot of woodwind. Then there are scenes in the cider house, and there I had a much more rural feel to the music, more expressively orchestral.
“We recorded at CTS studios in Wembley – it’s fantastic, a beautiful big studio – with up to 70 players.”
John Corigliano
“The Red Violin”
“I had not worked with director Francois Girard before but we had a really good relationship for two reasons. He’s not only musical but reasonable, and he has a good jazz background. I composed a piece for violin and orchestra while they were filming. I composed all the violin music in the film.
“The film is about a violin created in the 16th century and now being auctioned in Montreal. It travels through five different countries over 300 years, so the story of the violin goes through the ages. Francois wanted to use source music such as Bach and Paganini. I said, ‘No, you need a musical thread that goes through the whole thing, or it will be too fragmented.’ I said I could write it in the earlier worlds, but it would have a thread.
“I had the time to develop ‘The Red Violin’ theme, a chaconne for violin and orchestra. The biggest amount of time was at the beginning when we recorded all the gypsy stuff and the caprices. Then there was a hiatus until we had the picture finished -- six months in which I could write the orchestral pieces. We recorded around Christmastime at Abbey Road with the Philharmonia Orchestra and violin soloist Joshua Bell, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, with some additional recording at Manhattan Center Studios.
“For me, writing for film has everything to do with the project. If I’m commissioned, then the performers have to realize my vision. Film composers write for all sorts of film, while I will occasionally do a film if I can contribute to it.
“If you listen to film music from back in the ’30s and ’40s, there was a higher degree of melodrama. Movies are hyper-real, and so the question is how to be real and still serve the drama. Movies are really about nostalgia. We like to eat and drink and be lost in a movie and so we do want to hearken back to symphonic sound. You want to make the experience enjoyable. But how do you make something fresh? How do you make the experience new? New is tough.”
John Powell
“Endurance”
“Hans Zimmer was talking to Terrence Malick about this idea many years ago before they did ‘The Thin Red Line’ together. Malick is a producer of this film and Hans recommended me.
“For the film, the producers made deals with four runners in the 10,000 meters Olympics who they thought would win, and one of them did. That was Haile Gebrselassie, who has gone on to win everything ever since and has become the foremost long-distance runner in the world. They shot footage of the race and had their winner, and then they went back to Ethiopia to shoot his story.
“While they were in Ethiopia, I talked with Terrence, and he told me what his hopes for the movie were: a young boy growing up in poverty whose running proved to be his big chance. I met him on Friday, and over a weekend wrote probably half the music for the movie -- the basic themes and some of the underscore. I met him again on the Monday. This was before I did ‘Face/Off.’ I worked on it for over 18 months, while they did bits and pieces and came back. It was a very flexible arrangement.
“A couple of things I had to create were a feeling of stoicism and of being very much of the earth. Terrence wanted universality in the suffering the film described.
“When the film opens, Gebrselassie is running on the bank of a river in a helicopter shot. It looks so easy, but it’s not. They miked him, so you could hear him breathing. We looped that sound into the music. It was very rhythmic, obviously, and it floats out into the music.
“The score is littered with different techniques. I found an old Ethiopian folk song and found some Ethiopian musicians in Los Angeles. I wrote new words to the tune, a children’s flirting song. I orchestrated it with lots of percussion and electronics to make it as large as possible.
“One problem was that some Ethiopian music is very complex and aggressive, strange and alien. So I played around with some western tuning and then added some eastern European strings. The difficult thing about world music is not to be patronizing toward the music of the country we’re writing about. We’re all tired of Hollywood music telling us where we are in the world through stereotypes.
“A year ago last May, we did the final orchestral parts in England, at Air Lyndhurst with about 60 players. It was a low-budget picture. I had the orchestra for a day and recorded 41 minutes (of music).”
Elliot Goldenthal
“Titus”
“Working with director Julie Taymor on the stage version of ‘Titus’ was a real gift. Whenever you’re in a theatrical situation, you’re there for eight or 10 weeks of rehearsal when you have to work out the music. The gift is that you really get to understand the text in a very deep way. It was like going to a Shakespeare camp and learning one play over 10 weeks. At the end, I absolutely knew the play. I knew where to avoid stomping on the language.
“The film’s design reflects many eras from ancient Rome to the ’30s and to the present day. The music had to reflect that, so it’s a mix of big orchestral themes, big band jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. I found that amalgam more natural than contrived. You only have to go to Rome today to find it. You’ve got the whole picture right there. It’s not contrived; it really exists.
“We recorded at Abbey Road with 80 players from the London Metropolitan Orchestra and 40 singers from the English Chamber Choir conducted by Steven Mercurio from New York. I suppose I would be more pleased if I’d had two more days to fix things, but I always feel that way. I think it’s my most substantial work for a long, long time. It has such a huge emotional appeal, and there are so many layers in the storytelling that forced me to discover and rediscover areas in the music. The acting performances are on such a high level that you wanted to live up to it.”