When you first started out, how aware were you of film music, and what scores have stuck in your mind> I was very much involved with music all the way through my career. I realized that the marriage between music and the motion picture is the most powerful visual communication we have. When I was working in television, I found that you could take almost any edited sequence and change its emotion with the use of music. Many of the composers in my films have been nominated for Academy Awards, which shows that the score splayed an important part in the films, whether it’s Georges Delerue in “Agnes of God” or whether it’s John Williams, who won the Academy Award for “Fiddler on the Roof”. Look at Bernard Herrmann. “Psycho” without the music would be nothing. Everybody talks about the suspense and Hitchcock’s brilliant designed editing, but what they don’t talk about enough is the tremendous power of the musical scores in Hitchcock’s films – and a lot of them were Bernie Herrmann’s scores. Music in your films has a wide range of flavors. You seem to seek different talents for each picture. How does this approach work for you? Most artists think that they can do everything, and a lot of them can – just like I make musicals, comedies, and strong dramas. So I, too, like to think that whatever the story is, I can tell it well. But all of us, every single artist, has a strength in a certain area. Every artist has his or her own milieu. Every composer has an identifiable original sound. There are some composers who, in my opinion, have a great sense of a lyrical line. They are total romantics, and most of their strongest scores are ones that have soft, romantic feelings. So this is what I think about when I cast a composer for a film. What inspired the jazzy tempo with a dramatic undertone for “The Hurricane”? It was a matter of finding the right sounds and the right tempos. I think it was a matter of experimentation. What was your input on that score, for instance? Chris Young did a lot of temp cues that we would sort through. Then we would discuss which ones were working. I think that there is a very close collaboration between directors and composers, especially in the early stages, but once the theme is kind of established, then it becomes less of a collaboration. What is your process for discovering the right music for your vision? I work with a lot of temp music. Out of that, I usually find certain things that work and certain things that don’t work. Some composers consider temp music a hindrance. A lot of composers hate it. There are certain composers I’ve worked with who won’t listen to the film with the temp score. There are other composers who like it because they can see what works and what doesn’t work. I actually get a little embarrassed when I show a composer someone else’s music behind the film. I explain to the composer why it works – because of the orchestration or instrumentation or because of the lyrical quality and so on. That’s what you have to do.