We spoke to composers from 15 of the year's biggest films and asked them how they discussed music with their directors, the toughest or most inspiring sequences in the films they scored, their primary themes and orchestration approaches and the biggest job their music had to accomplish.
“The Hurt Locker”
COMPOSERS: Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders
DIRECTOR’S ORDERS: Beltrami: The film was supposed to be a quasi-documentary and the music shouldn't call attention to itself. (Kathryn Bigelow) wanted us to work hand in hand with the sound department and create this kind of manipulated world. Even though it was supposed to have a documentary feel, she wanted to have the music and sound work in tandem to provide a powerful experience for the viewer. But she didn't want it to point any fingers at itself.
KEY SCENE: Sanders: In the sniper scene in the desert, that's the first spot where the theme comes in where the firefight has settled down and they're waiting for the snipers to pop up. A lot of that was string stuff that we recorded here and then manipulated and tried to fit in (with) the environment that the sound designer had set up in the film the wind and the interesting textures he'd come up with. (It was about) figuring out ways to blend in with that, without being too dramatic.
BIG THEME: Beltrami: There are elements we integrate, but it's not authentic Iraqi music. The experience is of the American troops that we are with and it's their perception and what they're going into emotionally. You do hear calls to prayer and some Iraqi-ethnic overtones, but it's not meant to be any sort of classical realism in the score. The movie's about this guy's job and what he has to go through.
“A Serious Man”
COMPOSER: Carter Burwell
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: The only thing we really discussed was the opening section, the Yiddish scene. It takes place in some other place and time and we talked about how much the music needed to pay attention to that: Should we treat it like a piece of Yiddish theater and be very melodramatic, or something else. Finally we decided to play it as a ghost story.
KEY SCENE: I used the scene where Larry Gopnik goes up onto the roof of his house. It's a good scene to work with because there's no dialogue and if the score worked there it would probably work elsewhere in the film.
BIG THEME: The idea of having this repetitive harp motif might suggest something about the inevitability of the events you're seeing, but other than that, none of us were able to describe why the music seemed right but somehow, to us, it did.
“The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”
COMPOSERS: Jeff Danna and Mychael Danna
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: Jeff: We knew in advance we were going to be working on “Parnassus” because we worked on “Tideland” three years ago. So we had a little bit of a lead-up to it we read the script and we were working with Terry (Gilliam) on songs that are part of the production, that were part of the live shoot. So there was actually more of a pre-discussion and conversations and lead -up to this film than most films I've worked on.
Mychael: We had Terry's vivid acting out and description filling us in. But when we went to see the finished product, our collective jaws dropped at how far it had come. It's the first time Terry's had that very unique style of his with 3D technology at his fingertips.
BIG THEME: Jeff: We wanted it to sound archaic; the doctor has this extremely long life, he makes a deal with the devil, so it had to sound like something that could have existed through centuries. We also wanted it to sound very memorable and be a theme (where) you would welcome its return as we revisit it over and over.
“Julie & Julia”
COMPOSER: Alexandre Desplat
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: Paris and France of the '50s was a big element we talked about and the fact that it was a love story, that we had a love story between Julie and her husband and Julia Child and her husband. That was the main thing, even more important than cooking.
KEY SCENE: It was tricky to find the level of emotion that would be required in the end scene without being too sweet, too sugary. There again, I always try and restrain myself, being emotional without being sentimental. That's the tricky part.
BIG THEME: They had individual melodies, but the love theme is more of a generic theme like a main title, and that does help make all these connections. It's two different stories, but they say the same thing: That love is crucial in the relationship between a man and a woman and each must support the other in their passions.
“The Young Victoria”
COMPOSER: Ilan Eshkeri
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: Jean -Marc Vallee had this idea that the emotional core of the film was somehow captured by this band Sigur Ros, an Icelandic band. In the end, not to anyone's surprise, we weren't going to use Sigur Ros because they're a bass guitar and drums band with vocals and that's not what you'd expect. But emotionally, some of the early inspiration came from Sigur Ros.
KEY SCENE: For the love theme, I wrote it at the end of the film when you see Victoria and Albert walking into the room just before the end credits, because I thought if I can get that right I can work backward and fill in all the other love scenes.
“Up”
COMPOSER: Michael Giacchino
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: Pete Docter called me and we had this great meeting. I really wanted to do the movie so badly, but I was also afraid because it was so emotional and I didn't want to screw it up. Pete's main thing was he wanted the music to feel somewhat nostalgic.
KEY SCENE: The married life sequence was absolutely the first thing we did. I knew if we could get this right, it would inform everything else that was done on the film because the first time you hear her theme is the first time you meet her, and it's done simply on the piano and it grows throughout the film so by the end it's a huge heroic melody. But it starts out small, just like they did. I remember just crying after it was over.
BIG THEME: Ellie's theme came about because Pete said it should sound like something you could play on a little wind-up music box. We looked at Muntz's theme and thought: Wouldn't it be fun if it sounded like some tune from the '30s, if this big adventurer had little fan clubs around the world and people wrote songs about him, if maybe Cole Porter wrote a song about him.
“Public Enemies”
COMPOSER: Elliot Goldenthal
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: Music is very important to (director Michael Mann) and it's part of his makeup, so he has his own choices of music apart from my score placed very early on. He very much wanted an orchestral, acoustic sound but not something period because that was going to come out of other recordings, things by Billie Hobday and Otis Taylor.
KEY SCENE: There's a scene when Dillinger's brought from a plane into Chicago and he's in shackles, and we go from the feeling of being in shackles to him looking out at the crowd gathered there and him realizing that he's become an overnight star. He handled the press conference with a lot of swagger, a lot of bravado, and there was no dialogue so it was a great opportunity to weave some grand themes in.
“The Informant!”
COMPOSER: Marvin Hamlisch
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: (Steven Soderbergh) wanted people to know this was a comedy. We spotted the film and he was helpful in terms of pointing me in a certain direction. After two weeks, it struck me that if this guy's a bipolar guy, then the way he's seeing the world and what he's showing the world are two different things. He thinks everything's fine and everyone else is nuts. So the music became a character: the character of what's going on inside his brain. I tried it lots of different ways and every day my wife would say, “Well, you haven't written one note.” And I'd say, “Yes, but I figured out what not to write.”
BIG THEME: There are two themes: The one I call the happy-go-lucky theme that he puts out to the world, and there's one I use at the very beginning of the film that I call the misdirection cue. It's supposed to be very melodramatic and you think, oh, my God, we're going to go into a spy mystery here. And that theme becomes the love theme for him and his wife.
“Avatar”
COMPOSER: James Horner
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: The main thing was I needed to find a wonderful orchestral color or vocal color or instrumental color that was unlike anything people had really heard before. There would be orchestra in the score, but there would be colors in the score that would be completely new and luminous that would match his visuals.
KEY SCENE: There's a sequence in the middle of the film where one of the main characters learns how to fly for the first time, and it was a key sequence for me because it needed to have the wondrousness of flight conveyed to the audience. I had to use a lot of different colors in a very beautiful way, and it was a good testing vehicle for my theories about how I was going to orchestrate the film and how my themes were going to work.
BIG THEME: There were three or four themes primarily that are used and broken up in many different ways and the primary one of those is a love theme, because at the center of the film is a love relationship that drives the story in many ways. It's a very simple theme but it is very powerful and it's always present right through to the end.
“Broken Embraces”
COMPOSER: Alberto Iglesias
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: (Pedro Almodovar) asked me, like he always does, to come to some of the shooting, and in the film he also suggested that he wanted the score to reflect three different aspects or styles of the film that he saw.
KEY SCENE: In the final scene, there's a moment where the blind man, the director, discovers the face of his love on the screen, and I used the kora there to express that. The idea is that the music should always sound like it was easy to create, even when it might be difficult.
BIG THEME: I tried to work so all the aspects of the film and the music are in balance and nothing is predominant. Of course, I cannot deny that the theme that we call “Broken Embraces” itself is my favorite that is used in the scene where the director touches his lover's face on the screen and all the images are broken like pieces of a puzzle on the floor.
“Up in the Air”
COMPOSER: Rolfe Kent
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: Jason (Reitman) likes score to tread very lightly. It was a question of figuring out that it's a guy who goes about the country firing people, but the energy is very much about his attitude and the music is about his attitude. He has a certain amount of momentum, he has a very clean, linear way of living and the music reflects that.
KEY SCENE: Natalie's arrival was difficult because she's sort of a death knell to Ryan's way of being and his way of life. Originally, I wanted to make her arrival somewhat ominous and dark, but that would have been overstating it.
BIG THEME: The main theme came about from a moment in the film when someone has been fired and it's just this idea that there's this momentum in his life as he goes from place to place and it's business as usual even though it has colossal effects on other people. There's this little harp motif that came up and Jason latched onto it and said, “That is working so well.” (It) became a major theme.
“A Single Man”
COMPOSER: Abel Korzeniowski
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: It was really vague at the beginning, but as we worked on the score it turned out Tom (Ford) is very detailed and able to speak precisely about many aspects of music, which frankly I didn't expect. He really liked a much more classical approach that would reflect that this movie is first and fore most about emotions, the emotions of Professor Falconer, and less about the plot.
BIG THEME: I really wanted to make it as pure in a classical sense as possible and to stay away from any unnecessary embellishments, any kind of makeup that you can usually put on top of things, especially in film music. You can cover many things by sound design, use of electronics, etc. and what works in this theme is basically only a melody. There's not even a lot of counterpoint in the background and this theme is carried through solo violin, which is connected to a single man.
“Brothers”
COMPOSER: Thomas Newman
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: The first question was: Who are these people and where do they come from and what kind of music approximated that? So the idea of having a Stratocaster guitar with some kind of melody seemed an interesting thing to do and, in a simple way, lent some heart to the characters.
KEY SCENE: There are intense scenes in Afghanistan, and you want to play up emotions like paranoia and brute fear rather than comment on those situations. You want to say that this is a very, very tough situation and how do I intensify that as opposed to telling the audience what they are Kinesis and adrenaline was the idea and a kind of brute fear. So I tried to play that much more than any real evocation of the landscape. Even at the climax of the movie, I didn't score that scene so much as score the end of it the music acts as a transition to a sort of post-lude. You hear it boiling up and the temperature rising a bit at the very end.
“District 9”
COMPOSER: Clinton Shorter
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: Neill (Blomkamp) wanted it to maintain as much of an African sound as possible, which ended up being a bit of a feat because we were having a tough time instrumentally getting as big and edgy and dark as he wanted, using the African instruments that we had.
KEY SCENE: The scene where Wikus is escaping from the operating table that's where I figured out what he was looking for for the earlier parts of the film. When I did the early version of that cue, I hit on everything that happened when he would start and stop running and I dropped out and left space for dialogue and did what film composers do: I really scored the scene and it really wasn't working for him. So I said, “You know what, why don't I try putting one piece of music over this whole sequence that barely breaks down and doesn't really frame it much?” And he said, “That's exactly what I'm looking for.”
“It's Complicated”
COMPOSERS: Hans Zimmer and Heitor Pereira
DIRECTOR'S ORDERS: Zimmer: It's very much (about) spending evenings with Nancy (Meyers) talking about the script, but talking about it with instruments in our hands. She comes over and we try to sneak up on the tunes together. So much of Nancy's movies is about Nancy's writing and so much is about the way they look as well.
KEY SCENE: Pereira: Hans, Jim Brooks and Nancy, they all have an affinity for film music that has a bit of the Latin thing the French, Cotton Club kind of thing and (for) this particular movie, Nancy wanted something that mixed a little bit of the ethnic elements, the kind of thing going on in California now, the Spanish and Mexican influence and Brazilian music (that) has been an influence for a long time.
BIG THEME: Zimmer: Part of the idea of the movie is, it's very much set in California, which is different from any other place on Earth. I started off thinking about the Beach Boys and things like that, but that would have been too obvious. It's an Americana sound, but a bit more Latin and culturally diverse.