While the right score can enhance the emotional impact of a film like no other single element in filmmaking, the process is often fraught with uncertainty and miscommunication. It’s no wonder, then, that when composers and directors discover that they work well together, it’s likely they will collaborate as often as they can. In a business of tight budgets and unforgiving schedules, composers and filmmakers put a high value on working relationships that are enduring and inspiring.
“I try to pick my directors more than my scripts,” composer Hans Zimmer says. “And what I’m looking for is someone that I can enjoy spending a lot of time with.”
Zimmer recently completed some quality time with director Ed Zwick, scoring the forthcoming feature “The Last Samurai”. But over the course of his career, the director Zimmer has most often teamed with is Ridley Scott. Their collaborations stretch across 15 years and 7 films, from “Black Rain” to the recent “Matchstick Men”, and Zimmer foresees many more films together in the future.
“We know each other so well at this point that we talk in a creative shorthand,” says the composer. “And we’ve also gotten in the habit of talking about our next film while we’re still working on a current film. We know we’re going to bring great work out of each other when we’re on a film together.”
“It’s very important that a composer and director have a common goal, and it’s great when you can establish that over a series of pictures,” adds Howard Shore. Among his many credits, Shore has 25 years’ worth of collaborations with director David Cronenberg, and has spent the last three years working closely with director Peter Jackson on “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. “The key is creating a great working environment where the composer and director are working together to create something that they individually could not have created on their own,” says Shore. “Peter invited me to join his creative team essentially as another writer – I’m writing the story in music. He’s worked with me very closely, and I could not do what I’ve been doing without that level of collaboration. I couldn’t just be set loose in Middle Earth. I needed a great guide like Peter.”
Danny Elfman has just completed a score for “Big Fish”, the tenth film he’s done with Tim Burton. He says that despite that shared history, the process of music making remains the same. “The way you approach writing the score is no different, even when you work with someone repeatedly, but you do learn how to deal with a particular director – and sometimes figuring out a director is actually a harder part of the job than writing the music. The process with Tim is no different now than the first time we worked – he talks generally about the movie and I try to interpret it musically. But we’ve spent enough time together that we know how to get things done so that both of us are satisfied.”
The forthcoming “Cold Mountain” will mark the third time that composer Gabriel Yared has scored a film for director Anthony Minghella. “It’s the difference between a great marriage and a series of girlfriends,” laughs Yared, who won an Academy Award for the score to their first collaboration, “The English Patient”. “The Oscar was great, but then I was getting request after request to score the same kind of film with the same kind of music – romantic soapy stuff with somebody who dies at the end. The only person who let me get away from that was Anthony, on ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’. Now he’s taking me somewhere else entirely different with the new film. I have found in him all ideal working partner, and, to be honest, I think of Anthony as a soulmate – and we renew our bond to each other with every new piece of work.”
Minghella thinks enough of the composer that he will not use temp music while assembling his films – only music that Yared supplies. And, in the case of “Cold Mountain”, he and Yared got together to begin writing the screenplay and the score simultaneously. “It’s hard to imagine working with anyone else,” says the director. “We have such a shorthand now and such an enormous level of confidence in each other. It’s quite clear to me that my films would be much less interesting and much less good without Gabriel to help me.”
Trust, confidence and friendship don’t necessarily make a composer’s job any easier, according to Thomas Newman, whose estimable list of credits include both of Sam Mendes’s films, “American Beauty” and “Road to Perdition”. “You still have to prove yourself every time out,” Newman says. “You can get a job because you worked well before, but if you don’t deliver, it’s a big problem because the stakes are so high in this field. The key is to always have an open interchange of ideas, and I actually try to find ways to encourage rejection so that it doesn’t become such a big formal thing – it’s really part of the give and take. A lot of good collaboration is about understanding the psychology of acceptance and rejection as part of the process.”
A crucial bit of psychology takes place at the beginning of any collaboration, according to composer Christophe Beck, who has scored three films for Shawn Levy, including the forthcoming “Cheaper by the Dozen”, and two for Audrey Wells, including the recent “Under the Tuscan Sun”.
“The big moment of truth is the first moment you play your music for the director,” Beck says. “How they react and how you react to their reaction is going to tell you a lot. Sometime it’s a perfect match, sometimes it takes work.”
Director Wells says she has felt particularly well-matched with Beck. “I can work with Chris the same way I’d work with an actor, discussing the emotional content of any given scene and the transitions that have to be made. I’m not talking to him in musical terms, but I know he can interpret what I’m saying perfectly into music. It takes trust, and that trust only grew stronger the second time working with him.”
Ideally, the speed and quality of communication between a director and composer gets easier with repeat collaborations. “If you think of yourself as a restaurant, it’s nice to have someone come back and check out the rest of the menu,” says composer John Frizzell, who has worked at least twice with directors Steven Beck, Mike Judge, and Mark Rydell. “The first time you walk around each other carefully trying to figure out how the other person thinks and works. In the second round, a language has already been established. It’s fun to jump in and start working without worrying what a particular look on the director’s face means.”
Oddly, many composers find that by working with the same directors, they enjoy more opportunity to express themselves musically than they would otherwise. “On the one hand you can relax a little because you know you’re valued enough to be working with this person again,” says Marco Beltrami, who has scored the “Scream” series for Wes Craven and recently completed “Hellboy”, his second feature for director Guillermo del Toro. “On the other hand, you also feel free to play around a little more and to come up with things that you probably wouldn’t present to a person you were working with the first time. At least in my case, the directors I’ve worked with more than once don’t want me to repeat myself – they always expect something very new, which is great.”
Composer Elliot Goldenthal recently received Composer of the Year honors at the Flanders Film Festival, and that award was presented to him there by Neil Jordan, a close friend and a director he has worked with on 5 films. Goldenthal, who has also scored three films with his partner Julie Taymor and three for Joel Schumacher, says that while such collaborations are deeply satisfying, the blending of personal and professional relationships can be tricky. “It can be hard to balance work and friendship – you don’t want an artistic impasse to spoil your next dinner together. But it’s not different from the strains that might be a part of any friendship. If it’s a bad artistic impasse, you just make sure you go to dinner with a larger group, so that the negativity is evenly dispersed.”
According to Zimmer, those moments of impasse can actually be one of the attractions of long-term collaborations.
“Ridley and I do see things very similarly, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have loud nasty discussion about the tiniest details,” he says. “During ‘Hannibal’ we were up against some crazy deadline trying to get things finished. We were talking about a scene where a single tear is running down Julianne Moore’s face. We started discussing what the tear meant--what precise emotion was behind it – and we ended up shouting at each other. We were really fighting, not surrendering a bit, each passionately defending our position about this one little tear. And I remember thinking, ‘This is what I love about my work.’“