Where did your interest in films begin? Probably at an extraordinary local movie theater called the Everyman Theater, which played classics and world cinema. I think that’s where I first got to sort of love movies. Loving directing movies is a whole different thing. I didn’t decide I wanted to be a film director until I was about thirty-eight. You also have a musical background. Tell me about that. There were three specific times when I almost did music for a living, and I’m deeply glad I didn’t because, quite frankly, I just didn’t have the talent. First, when I was about seventeen, I was offered a scholarship to do classical guitar at the London College of Music. I ended up declining that in order to go to Cambridge, where I wrote a lot of music for theater – which is the main reason I got into theater and television and finally into film. When I was twenty-one, I went to India for six months to study Indian classical music and was told that with another two years of work I could become the foremost Western exponent of the sitar. For reasons that must be fairly obvious, I decided that that probably wasn’t the direction my life lay in. When I was twenty-eight, I went through a particularly painful period of divorce and ended up writing a whole swathe of pained personal songs and got off a publishing deal, which I finally declined in order to go on with a career in theater at that time. How much of a role does music play in your films, especially given the fact that you have developed such a strong relationship with Christopher Young in your latest works? I think it’s fairly obvious that it’s enormous. I mean, it’s automatic that film music changes the way we perceive an image. You can take an image, for example, of a man walking, smiling, toward a child who’s in the foreground. If you put cheerful music to it, you know that that man is the child’s father. If you put melancholy music to it, you start to see that the smile on the man’s face is, in fact, deeply sad and he knows he’s dying of cancer. If you put sinister and menacing music to it, the smile on the man’s face will suddenly have a curiously twisted and sinister look, and you’ll immediately start to believe that the man is a child-abductor. That’s a simplistic example I can give you of the way in which music changes the significance of the image you have seen. I love an abundant use of music in all my movies. I think “The Core” is a total of 125 minutes, of which at least 105 minutes are music. That’s a very high percentage for an average movie. “Sommersby” is a remarkable film. How did you come to choose Danny Elfman for that project? I like to cast creative people to do something they have never done before, because I always think that the results are a lot fresher. It was obvious that he was a brilliant, charismatic, and inventive composer, but he’d never done anything that was romantic. I really enjoyed the idea of working with somebody brilliant on something they’ve never done before. And why did he not carry on to your next projects? It was one simple reason, actually: The company that I was working with on my next project, “Copycat”, felt that Danny was too expensive for a low-budget film. Out of all the film composers, how did Christopher Young come into the picture, and what is It that you took to versus other composers? The story goes as follows: James Newton Howard was slated to write the score for “Copycat”. Several weeks into the process, he unceremoniously dumped our movie because he had been offered a large sum of money to do the score for “Waterworld”. I was suddenly put in a very difficult position. I had to find a composer very quickly. As you know, in every movie, when you’re editing it and indeed sometimes when you’re previewing it, you put a temp score on it. A temp score is a thing of shreds and patches. It’s music snatched from other movies from all over the place very often. I had temped “Sommersby” with a score from a movie called Bat 21 which, to this day, I’ve still not seen. During the editing of “Copycat”, I absolutely smothered it with a temp score from a film called “Jennifer 8”. These are two very different scores from two very different films. But I suddenly realized that they had one thing in common – they were both composed by a guy named Christopher Young. It was very obvious to me that I loved this guy’s work and that he had immensely diverse talent. That was the point at which I contacted Chris. From that point on, the primary question was, Were we going to be compatible personally? And that very quickly became obvious that we were. Chris has incredible energy and, I believe, the most prodigious talent of any composer working on Hollywood today. And he has a complete lack of what I call an ‘intervening ego’, the kind of ego that’s more about his ego than the work itself. Chris is one of the most humble and amenable composers whom I have ever worked with. With “Copycat”, you have this temp score, but what sort of direction did you give him to support the music used? I said that I want to make things very scary, very creepy. I want to use natural sound – the drip of a tap, the tick of a clock, the creek of a floorboard – to really heighten the tension. I’d like to create a score that’s got great transparency and will allow those sounds to come through. So let’s use high-frequency strings and sustained strings and low-frequency pads and pulses, but leave enormous transparency in the middle-frequency range to let all of those other small sounds come through. This has really a lot to do with areas where we particularly tried to create tension. There are also passages of enormous lyricism in “Copycat”. Chris ended up using piano with a small string section to create very simple, very lyrical counterpoint to the electronics – the more psychotic sounds of the serial killer’s mind. I need a director’s point of view on the temp track. I think that the temp track is an absolutely essential tool. Firstly, a director can’t judge the effectiveness of a sequence without music on it if he or she believes that they are going to have music on it. Sometimes you absolutely have to put music onto your image in order to know whether it’s working or not. Again, a very simply example: If you take “Copycat”, there are a series of very long tracking shots, as, for example, Holly Hunter moves through the apartment. Until you put the right music on those shots, they are empty, devoid of tension, and unquestionably overlong. The moment you put the right music onto them, they become almost unbearable as each corner she turns becomes a sort of hiding place for the killer. Equally, a romantic scene very often has a turning point. There is a moment when suddenly, after they put the teacups down, his eyes catch hers and suddenly in comes the music and we know that something intensely emotional has begun. Without the music, the moment is dead. With it, it’s suddenly full of significance. So you have to have music in order to gauge the effectiveness of your moment. When you come to the composer with a film that has a temp track on it, that track serves several functions. Firstly, it tells you where essentially you want to spot the music, where you want it to start, and where you want it to finish. The music then serves as a point of reference. You can say, ‘I think this music is shit. I don’t want the final music to be anything like it.’ You can say, ‘I like the way the strings come in at this particular moment.’ So, in other words, you can use the music as various reference points for the writer. If it’s somebody else’s music or if it’s his or her own music, immediately there is a certain invitation to the dull-minded to plagiarize or to self-plagiarize. I think for a really creative composer, who can simply take the temp as a reference point and as a discussion point and go on and build from there, it works. In my conversations with composers, the temp track comes up a lot as a hindrance to their work, mainly because the filmmakers become so tied to the temp. I think very often that the problem is that the director or the studio gets very used to hearing a certain score against a certain scene, and they get very locked into it. But I think, provided that the director enfranchises the composer to take the intention of the music rather than the notes of the music, all is well. What do you look for in film music, and how do you know what sound you want by viewing a scene? Music is entirely emotion. Essentially, I look for the music to enhance and reinforce the emotion of any given scene at any given moment. That’s a very simply answer to a very complex issue. There are various ways different pieces of music can invoke similar emotions. So, obviously, there is a question of style and scale. If the movie is a gritty, spare, melancholy piece of work you’re not going to want Mahler, even though Mahler is deeply melancholy. You’re not going to want 120 swooping strings, even though the emotionality may be appropriate. It’s a combination of emotionality and stylistic confluences that I look for in music, to put it very simply. “Copycat” and “Entrapment” were amazing scores that fit those movies like gloves. I find it wonderful that you have so much faith in Chris Young’s music. You missed out on “The Man Who Knew Too Little”, which is one of the most delightful, syncopated and jazzy, swinging scores you’re ever likely to hear. That’s a score that I’m incredible proud of, and so is Chris. So basically look at the quadrangle that’s formed by those four movies – “Copycat”, a psycho thriller; “The Man Who Knew Too Little”, a kind of Mancini swing score; “Entrapment”, a techno-heist thriller; and “The Core”, an epic end-of-the-world movie – and tell me that Chris Young cannot write any damn movie he chooses. Quite simply put, there isn’t a movie that I wouldn’t make without Chris Young. As far as I’m concerned, he can do anything he chooses in any genre. So many reviewers seem to think that they have this answer, but in your opinion, what makes the extraordinary score versus one that is simply in the film? That’s as an elusive and impossible question as ‘What makes a great novel?’. It’s a synthesis of many things. The first is that it has to fit the movie like a glove. A film score, however extraordinary, that doesn’t work with the image will not work. The first time I ever understood what a great film score was was actually long before I ever thought I might end up directing movies. I saw “Chinatown”. I loved the film. Was that a great score? I have no idea. I can simply tell you that it was a great movie. I’m not even sure, although I’m a musical kind of a fellow, but I think the music was great. It must have been great because the movie was great and the music never intrude. But I could not have told you specifically much about the music. Ten years later I went and saw the movie again. I sat in the movie theater. The opening credits started. The opening theme music started, and I started to cry because everything – every mood, every feeling that the movie had evoked in me – back in an instant. That was the moment in which I finally understood the power of great film music. It’s sometimes almost invisible. Sometimes when it’s not invisible it’s not right. That’s one of the paradoxes of great music. And yet it is like the wind that fills the sails of the ship at sea. Can you see it? No. Is it moving the ship? Definitely. There’s no simple definition of great music. Is a great score one that you come out of the movie theater humming? Actually not. There’s a fashion in movies currently. I’ll take “The Last of the Mohicans” as an example. I personally do not think this was great movie music. It was one theme repeated over and over and over and over again. Did it become a hit? Absolutely. Did people come out of the movie thinking they heard great theme music? Yes, probably because they could come out of the movie theater humming the tune. Do I think it was great movie music? No, not at all. Do you come out of ‘Psycho” humming Herrmann’s score? No. But you remember it. You’ll never forget the movie. Listening to the music, you’ll understand how it worked on you. But when you see the shower scene for the first time, do you remember what the music was? No. You only remember what the overwhelming emotion effect was of those screening, syncopated high strings. Great movie music should be expertly camouflaged within the texture of the image. At the same time, in my opinion, it is at least fifty percent of the image that you see. The only way you’ll ever know that is to see the image without the music. You’ll suddenly feel it’s half-empty. Do you listen to film music outside of films or do you feel that this is a craft that should be strictly meant for the film? I don’t tend to listen to music outside of films, no. Funnily enough, I don’t tend to listen to opera outside of an opera. I have incredibly wide range and taste in music. I listen to everything from acid house to techno and hip-hop through to medieval choral music with pretty much everything in between. But I don’t instinctively put on a movie-music album. Movie music is an applied art. It’s like looking through the clothes without looking at the person who’s wearing the suit of clothes. At its crudest, put a Versace outfit on a supermodel and it’s a luscious thing to behold. Hang it on a hanger and who cares? The person wearing the outfit fives it meaning, context, personality, and image. Without the person, it’s clothes. So what are your views on someone like me, who does enjoy film music outside of a film? I think it’s great. Maybe it’s because I work in film that I just don’t listen to film music as my entertainment. I don’t watch a huge number of films either. One of the great problems with filmmakers today is that the only experience they’ve ever really had in life are inside movie theaters. So they end up making movies that are actually not about their own lives or their own experiences. They end up making movies about other movies. I love movies that bring a sense of a life lived – that bring a sense of kind of world that the filmmaker has experienced. I love film music that brings with it a sense of other worlds and other lives too, outside of the movie theaters. Which isn’t to say that I have anything against anybody who clings to film music. In fact, I wish more people listened to film music and bought more film-score records. I’m really glad that people are buying all of those Varèse Sarabande issues and so on because it’s an enormous help to film composers. It helps to keep them away from taking jobs they don’t want.