Original subtitles

GENTLE ECHOEY PIANO

The piano we built for this movie, The Homesman,

the problem with this is that it's out in the elements

and it disintegrates...

..but I think it's a noble death for a piano.

The wind is a big feature in the movie,

and we thought that it'd be great to be able to tune the wind.

It sounds really amazing.

This is part of the fun of experimenting, you know.

You figure this stuff out. HE PLAYS

One interesting thing that happens is the sound travels

through the wire faster than it travels through the air,

so you get this reverse echo, which is really cool.

You don't even need to put any effect on the sound at all.

I mean, you can hear it all the way down in the valley.

It's more than just a concept of doing something cool that

nobody's done before. It's more fun.

Samurai's death, here, on the hill.

MUSIC: Gonna Fly Now (Rocky Theme) by Bill Conti

When you hear Rocky...

..everybody in the audience knows what's going on.

The composer is a storyteller.

Music has the ability to shape,

and in some cases alter or even subvert,

what the film-maker is communicating.

The score is the heart and the soul of the film.

Film music can make an exciting scene more exciting.

We call it emotion motion cos we can make you feel

anything we want you to feel.

It's being able to communicate on a level that they can't

tell in pictures.

Great film music can elevate.

# Getting strong now

# Coming on now

# Getting strong now... #

Music has always been a part of the cinema-going experience,

as far back as 1895 and when the Lumiere brothers were

experimenting in Paris.

In the earliest days, it is true,

music was thought of as something to cover up the noise of the projector.

ORGAN PLAYS

Silent films were never silent.

There was at least a pianist in the smallest nickelodeons,

and sometimes the bridge between them was a theatre organ.

There were many theatre organ makers,

but the one that produced the most organs

and is thought to be probably the best is the name Wurlitzer.

It showed how a person could bring to life the movies

that were otherwise quiet.

ORGAN PLAYS

They either did a score that was printed for them...

..or they improvised and created their own.

They were made part of the movie-going experience.

A number of people had toyed with the idea of scores in Hollywood.

Max Steiner's score for King Kong in 1933 was a landmark.

When King Kong came out, wait a second,

orchestra music in a movie?!

DRAMATIC MUSIC

The only reason he was able to do it is cos it wasn't...

The movie wasn't scary.

It looked kitschy and stupid, cos it was so...

It was kitschy and stupid,

but then he put that music in.

It completely changed the movie. It made it frightening.

DRAMATIC ORCHESTRA SCORE

People had not done that before.

It was really the first major score that demonstrated conclusively

the power of music in film.

Alfred Newman came from New Haven, Connecticut,

an iconic figure in the history of film music.

A sound that favours horns and woodwinds.

My father was Alfred Newman. In 1930, he came to LA.

MUSIC: 20th Century Fox Theme by Alfred Newman

He was at 20th Century Fox for 20 years.

The Fox logo, arguably the most famous logo ever written, it wasn't

written for Fox, it was written for Goldwin and it was rejected,

and then he used it for Fox and Darryl Zanuck love it.

There was nothing like that orchestra. I'm talking about rubato.

It means slowing down and speeding up

in an expressive way.

You would never read a line of text like...

ROBOTICALLY: "I went to the mark-et to-day."

SMOOTHLY: "I went to the market today."

You'd have a structure of a phrase.

That is so uber important in music.

They became expert at making that musical.

That helped define what we know as the classic Hollywood sound.

A spotting session is the

first time we all get together,

look at the movie, and decide where the music's going to go,

and what type of music it's going to be.

All movies, the first 20 minutes are too slow cos we're laying pipe,

so we want the music to be something, but not crazy.

The goal with a spotting session is to have a dialogue with

the composer that you've probably been postponing!

I've done my work.

I've done my design.

I've cast the movie. I've shot it.

We've done all our beautiful photography.

We've done all our super-brilliant editing.

Now, it's going through and trying to communicate

what I've heard in my mind.

GENTLE MUSIC STARTS

All mothers. Mothers are our rocks.

So, it says Open Road Pictures,

then we're going to cut to possibly not the front door,

but a shot before the front door that establishes the house. Got it.

Spotting, to me, is really important because it gives me an idea

of what the director's looking at and what he's looking for.

Something that's peppy... Peppy. ..right away. Yeah.

And then we come here, we kind of... You're collaborating with people.

I want them to feel like a film-maker like them

has come into the process.

I'm the one that specialises in this one thing

that they're uncomfortable with.

You're trying to come up with music that supports the scene

and complements it in an unobtrusive way.

You spend as much time as you can immersing yourself in the backstory.

As a film composer, you're part of the storytelling team.

You want to spin forward to the next cue?

Yeah. This one sort of ends when she comes round the corner.

I try to get a sense of what their insecurities are.

The more time you spend with them, the more you get those answers.

Most directors don't know how to convert emotions into musical...

..into music.

So, the composer has to kind of, you know,

act almost like a therapist and go through all this

mishmash of what the director's saying and get the essence of it.

What if we kind of tailed right into that?

Yeah, right, you don't need it going... Don't score him.

Maybe don't score, just put a nice little transition

that kind of just spills over,

and then he comes up. Yeah.

Something like that, maybe?

Yeah, OK. We've got the gist of it.

Sort of in that first conversation with the director,

I have glimpses of what it could be.

Every project starts roughly the same way.

Somebody comes into the room and says,

"I've got this idea and it'll be fun to do."

"It'll be a fun adventure," etc.

You know, and they tell you the idea and you get drawn in and you get

excited and you're flattered that they're even considering you.

"Whoa! Me?" You know, I get to go on this ride.

And then they leave the room, and then you have

a moment of reflection, and you go, "I have no idea how to do this!

"Oh, my God!"

And then, after a while, you think, should you be

phoning them and saying, you know,

"Hey, you know, I think you'd better phone John Williams.

"I have no idea how to do this."

You know, the blank page is always the blank page.

Plus, I have no idea where music comes from.

So, yeah, there's always the fear that somebody's going to

switch off the tap.

This is a film called Race.

I've been working on it for a week, so I'm just beginning.

I'm just, sort of, getting into my process with it.

Where I'm thinking it should start is just coming up

and, you know, I mean, I'll start with it coming in

really, really quietly.

SHE STARTS PLAYING QUIETLY

You want to win a gold medal?

Sure. Want to do it in Berlin?

Well, I mean, unless you were planning on waiting...

There's a change of direction in the scene,

and that's often a prompt for where music will come in.

I hear they don't care much for coloured folk over there.

Well, they don't care for them much here in Columbus, either.

Is that going to be a problem? MUSIC GETTING LOUDER

No, sir. I just came here to run.

Well, then, for the next 28 months,

you're either in a classroom or you're on that track -

every hour, every day.

As a composer, when you're sitting there watching a film,

it's not like watching a play or real life.

There's camera positions. There's cuts...

It's an incredibly artificial medium, in a way,

and it's really nothing like real life.

We have to find clever ways to introduce something familiar.

MUSIC: Close Encounters Theme by John Williams

A motif is a group of notes that might

highlight what a film score is.

A good example would be Close Encounters.

MOTIF REPEATED LOWER

# Duh duh duh duh duh! #

SAME MOTIF PLAYED BY ORCHESTRA

Beethoven was one of the first composers to really take

a theme or a motif and spin it out in a huge way.

MUSIC: Symphony No 5 by Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony -

the entire piece is based on that yah-tah-tah-tah rhythm.

Simple hooks, just like a pop song,

but you're then casting them in different lights.

MUSIC: Motif from Lord Of The Rings by Howard Shore

By using motifs,

it helps you to understand the relationships in the story.

Dear Bilbo...

When you hear a certain motif, you connect it...

..and it actually helps you follow the story.

Nine companions...

By the time we get to the end of the film, when you play that

music in its full glory, it's already familiar to the audience.

We're kind of building things up to that main course.

The director is not a huge fan of strictly orchestral elements,

so we're exploring.

In here is Buck, and he's working on a movie now called The Gunman.

We're working on it together.

We're a little bit under the gun, and that's nerve-racking.

One of the things we were working at was processing these kalimbas.

Just a simple African instrument.

And next week we'll be here quite a bit.

I'm pretty relaxed about it.

Buck's not! There's a lot of work to do.

TENSE MUSIC PLAYS

That's the kalimba you hear.

He's following a mystery to find out what happened.

The music needs to have a bit of intrigue.

MUSIC CONTINUES LOUDER

MUSIC FADES OUT

I think we've cracked the puzzle in this pretty quick.

As film grew up, in terms of the subjects that they were tackling and

what the film-makers themselves were seeking,

film music itself changed.

It became more modern in style.

It embraced jazz.

A Streetcar Named Desire was Alex North's first film score,

and he comes in with a history of having written ballets

and concert works in New York, and tackles his first film

assignment, and writes the most revolutionary score of all time.

DRAMATIC AND JAZZY MUSIC PLAYS

It's the first film score incorporating jazz

in the writing structure.

Jerry Goldsmith said, when he heard the score for the first time,

he knew that film music had changed and would never be the same.

MUSIC: The Pink Panther Theme By Henry Mancini

Bond.

James Bond.

John Barry came from his own band...

MUSIC: James Bond Theme

..performing music that sounded like early James Bond music.

MUSIC: Hit And Miss by The John Barry Seven

By the time he wrote James Bond music,

he was bringing a band sensibility...to movies.

MUSIC: James Bond Theme

The thing about big band was that it was cool and it swung.

It felt like this was a guy who could do anything.

You will not hear any film which is to do with spying or secret services

without a reference to Bond.

I mean, it's become the thing to go to

in the same way that Morricone was for spaghetti westerns.

MUSIC: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly Main Theme by Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone...

..he's not going to hit you with music that makes you go,

"Whoa, what is that instrument? Whoa, how did he make that sound?"

But what he will do is just kill you with a melody.

MUSIC: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly Main Theme by Ennio Morricone

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly is such an iconic piece of music.

You know, he just took that sound of the guitar and then just put

it into that western environment.

That is the sounds of, you know, the spaghetti western still,

50, 60 years after the fact,

and I think that's quite an achievement.

By the 1960s, you had this great period where you had incredibly

well-trained musicians.

Bernard Herrmann had come out of dramatic radio and his ability to

take a sound and create a specific kind of unique orchestra

that was specific to each film was ground-breaking.

The main title for Vertigo - that is the textbook perfect example.

It's a score which says, "Mystery...

"Something's not right here. Stay away.

"But please come. Come running."

That was different than other writers at the time.

These are not melodic ideas.

These are little phrases that had circular madness to them

that worked really well in Alfred Hitchcock movies.

It felt like everything was driving forward

in a sick, inevitably disastrous way.

MUSIC: Vertigo Theme by Bernard Herrmann

Bernard Herrmann, he had balls.

So just to do what he did with Psycho in the shower scene...

MUSIC: The Murder by Bernard Herrmann

Without music, it's not that scary.

You notice the cuts. You notice the process.

But as soon as you put the music there...

..you're stuck in the mind-set of this psychotic killer.

Outside of the context of that movie people would probably just wonder,

"What the hell is the noise? Turn it off."

But it was so effective in that moment,

it really tricked you into believing you saw way more of the violent act

in that scene than really occurred.

When you read a book and it says, "There is this great forest,"

everybody pictures a forest.

None of these forests will be the same.

It's exactly the same with music.

You can ask 15 other composers to read that same script,

and they will all have different musical ideas.

One of the things that I find so liberating about film music

is the fact that any instrument is valid,

as long as it makes the movie better.

I have about five storage areas

that are all filled with musical equipment.

At a certain point I collect enough stuff that, when it starts

to look like a junk store, then the people here do

an intervention and they take everything, they scrape it clean

and we start over again.

I just start over collecting things again.

HE PLAYS RUGRATS THEME

There's a piano, something like that.

I bought it at a toy store at the Beverly Center and I played

the theme song for Rugrats because I thought I'd never

need to play the toy piano again.

It was like 60 bucks.

I thought, "What a lot of money to spend on a toy piano."

MUSIC: Rugrats Theme by Mark Mothersbaugh

So I bought it, brought it to my studio and recorded it.

Then I took it back and got my money back and now I...I always wonder,

"Where is that toy piano that I wrote the theme song for Rugrats on?"

Many times I start a cue from playing other things,

not the computer.

These are tuned sleigh bells.

They're very rare.

There's music in everything. I'll be taking an elevator,

you'll be in the thing and then all of a sudden the door will be like...

And you're just like, "What was that? That was cool." You know?

And you come back to the studio and you try to recreate that sound,

and what would that sound like in musical form?

So that's why I'm always trying to distil what the world

sounds like into music.

There is no such thing as the wrong way to do something.

You've just got to keep trying, and the wrong way is the wrong way

until it's the right way.

It's a bit of a dinosaur in that it went extinct and gave

birth to the violin and the guitar and a lot of other things.

The construction is pretty simple.

You have a two drones and then, in this case, one melodic string.

It's kind of suggestive-looking, at least, yeah.

They sound kind of like when a seal plays musical horns

in a circus or something.

HE PLAYS WALTZ

MUSIC: Potter Waltz by Patrick Doyle

HE LAUGHS

I haven't played that for years!

Now that I've got the groove,

I can...I can imagine, like, "What could be a good melody on top?"

Right, so...

HE HUMS TUNEFULLY

It's a paradise.

I try to find a general rhythm in a scene.

Mad Max, I spend at least seven months producing the score,

trying this, trying that, different types of drums...

DRUMMING

MUSIC: Blood Bag by Tom Holkenborg

The drums that were uniquely recorded for Mad Max, erm...

Just playing one...

DRUMMING

If you combine all these multiple tracks together, then you can get

a really, really interesting quality of these...of these drums playing

together and pretty aggressive, which I'm a big fan of.

RHYTHMIC DRUMMING

That actually makes, you know, quite a difference.

Some directors want the music to constantly hit the shots.

Other directors want really long pieces of music that go

over multiple, multiple shots at the same time.

These are things that you constantly struggle with

when you work the picture.

MUSIC: Brothers In Arms by Tom Holkenborg

I don't care what music it is, but if I make a track,

it has to give me goose bumps myself.

I don't say that to be arrogant, but if it doesn't hit me

in the stomach as being a great piece of music, I cannot expect

the audience, anybody out there,

to have a feeling that it hits the stomach.

If it gives me goose bumps,

it's pretty likely it'll give someone else goose bumps,

because I think goose bumps come

for everyone from similar places.

When we're looking at emotion and other kinds

of responses to music,

there are many structures in the brain that are involved.

Music is so multifaceted. It's so multidimensional.

Different aspects of music are processed by different systems

in the brain.

So when you're looking at something like melody and pitch,

that's processed by one system in the brain.

When you're looking at the time-based aspects,

like tempo and rhythm,

that's processed by another system.

We are having some sort of a physiological response

that the body is showing, and the goose bumps is actually

just a sign of what's happening inside your body.

There's a system in the brain, ventral striatum and

nucleus accumbens, in particular, it's our reward centre.

Things like chocolate or sex,

these are reactions that we can see involve these structures.

So it's interesting because the same kinds of pleasurable feelings we get

from chocolate, dopamine release,

we could see some of the same kinds of activations

in the brain to music.

It's the one art form that technically doesn't exist.

You know, you can touch musical instruments,

you can touch CDs or cassettes

or vinyl that contain the music,

but you can never actually put your finger on music.

It's just air moving a little bit differently.

All music is doing is providing some structure to these air molecules.

So if a truck goes by, it's pushing air molecules against our inner ear.

If someone's playing cello, it's pushing the exact same air

molecules against our ear just in a different, structured way.

And there's something...

..odd but really, really interesting and powerful about that.

But they'll never take our freedom!

It makes armies march into battle.

Alba gu brath!

It makes people cry.

MUSIC: I Could Have Done More by John Williams

It can really increase the overall emotion in a way that will make

a movie stay with its audience long after the last frame of film.

We are doing something here -

we're harnessing something from the ether.

Film music and orchestral music, in general, is of great interest

to neuroscientists and to scientists because of its great power to emote.

Film music is usually something that we're not paying

conscious attention to

and, yet, it has such a powerful impact on us.

On Remember The Titans, the music, for me, was written

so specifically for that.

MUSIC: Remember The Titans Theme by Trevor Rabin

What's very interesting about using music in film,

it's providing a very specific context for the music.

There is a permanent linkage,

so when you hear it again, the experiences

you had in the theatre are evoked.

I never even thought about whether it could be used elsewhere.

Thank you.

God bless you and may God bless the United States of America.

MUSIC: Remember The Titans Theme by Trevor Rabin

The phone rang.

A friend of mine said, "I'm at the convention.

"Remember The Titans is playing as loud as a Kiss concert."

I wasn't asked, which I'm not happy about, but it's quite interesting

watching it being used for something completely different.

We live in a world that things are underscored.

It's actually interesting how the music of Remember The Titans...

..evokes what Obama wanted to be as the man walking out as

the new president.

And whatever the audience felt in the theatre...

..it was resonant again.

The power of the score in and of itself is amazing.

When we're watching a 90-minute standard film,

we make about 21,000 or more eye movements,

and even though we feel like we have full control

and freedom of where to look,

many studies on eye tracking have shown that actually a film audience

is usually looking at about the same place on a screen

at about the same time.

One way that the eye can be directed to a specific spot on a screen

is when there's something about the music that matches

some characteristic on the screen.

For example, a rising pitch with something that is rising.

And a great example of this comes from the married-life montage

from the film Up.

The first time that we see the balloons that are tied

to Carl's cart,

that's really important because the balloons

are going to be an important visual motif, an important theme

for the entire film.

We see Karl and then we see Ellie

walking out with a parrot,

and then the balloon cart rises up and comes back down.

So it's very interesting to see that music can be part of

the choreography of the dance of our eye movements

during a film sequence.

There used to be representative scoring,

where everything you see, you hear.

Walk up the step...

Romantic kiss, and so forth.

So the eyes doing the same thing the ear is doing.

There's so many decisions to make in movies.

Hollywood was going through an odd transition

in the '60s, especially the mid '60s to the early '70s.

One of the things that got thrown out was the idea of

the old-fashioned orchestral score.

# In restless dreams I walked alone... #

Now there was a movement toward source music...

# Narrow streets of cobblestone... #

..folk music...

FOLK MUSIC PLAYS

..and more intimate types of musical groupings.

# Take a load off, Fanny

# Take a load for free... #

It was just different.

In the '60s there were a lot of composers who really knew

what they were doing, who didn't want to do it the old way.

Jerry Goldsmith - he was absolutely the most innovative composer to work

on mainstream movies on a regular basis.

What's amazing about Planet Of The Apes is he's using all

these modern techniques,

he reapplied it and put it into drama.

Metal mixing bowls and rubber balls being bounced into a bowl.

Just kind of screwing with the orchestra the way he did

and just being so ballsy in his choices

and it being so on point for that movie.

It'll always be one of the all time great science fiction scores.

Chinatown was written in ten days after an earlier score

had been written, recorded and thrown out.

And it's very interesting that, you know, Jerry comes in

and he looks at the film, and he immediately decides he needs

four harps, four pianos, strings, percussion and a solo trumpet.

Why four pianos?

I mean, Jerry was just sort of the godfather of all of this, wasn't he?

It's such an interesting musical choice, but that's Jerry.

If you ask musicians, they might think he's the best ever.

MUSIC: The Reivers Theme by John Williams

When I heard The Reivers, I said,

"My God, this guy must be 80 years old."

I really thought... Nearly!

I thought, "Maybe here's some guy, who's 80 years old,

"who maybe wrote his greatest scores of his life."

And I went and found out who this guy was and I met this young man

named John Williams and I was amazed.

John Williams did not start as a classical composer -

he started as a jazz pianist.

John Williams played piano on West Side Story...

..and he played piano on The Apartment.

Born and bred in the Fox system.

Him and Jerry Goldsmith - that's where they learned.

Nobody knew that that that the whole field would change.

MUSIC: Main Title (Theme From Jaws) By John Williams

When we saw Jaws, if it didn't have that ba-dum-ba-dum,

none of us would have known what was happening.

Dun-dun...

Dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun...

It was pretty brilliant,

and it was almost like a crazy experiment.

He was an engine - ba-dum, ba-dum -

accelerating - ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum -

like a train moving forward.

This is an eating machine.

He is as simple as "I move forward to kill."

MUSIC REACHES CLIMAX

That shark didn't need more.

He needed two notes.

The first day when Steven said,

"What are you going to play for Jaws?", I went...

HE PLAYS JAWS THEME

He said, "You're kidding."

I said, "You're crazy - it's a serious movie!"

I thought he was going to say, "Oh, no, I'm only kidding,

and here's...", and he was about to play this very poetic pastoral

symphony, and John said, "No, no, no,

"you've made a very primal movie."

Part of the genius of John Williams is how he spots music,

and how he places music in a movie.

John did not want music to celebrate a red herring.

He only wanted music to signal the actual arrival of the shark.

Everybody goes, "Oh, Jaws, it's just these two notes."

It's not. It's this amazing, orchestral symphonic piece

that takes place, and is just being triggered by these two notes.

Just the artistic imagination is phenomenal.

We are not worthy.

I said, "Oh, my God."

You know, it's a rebirth.

Film music is back - it's alive!

MUSIC: Star Wars Theme by John Williams

Star Wars made such an incredible splash when it came out.

Everything about it was so exciting and thrilling for an 11-year-old

growing up at that time...

Here they come.

..and it spoke to a whole generation of people.

I was, I think, 12 when that thing came out,

so it had a massive impact on my youth.

We had the theme for Star Wars, like, locked in our head as a kid,

as soon as we walked out of that theatre.

MUSIC: Ben Kenobi's Theme by John Williams

Musically, yes, it is a symphonic score,

but, I mean, it is one of the best scores probably ever written.

It's impossible to think of Star Wars without Williams' music.

The score he did helped the audience rediscover

the classical orchestral films.

Spielberg and Lucas can lay claim to many things, and one of them

is helping to reintroduce audiences to that kind of

movie-going experience.

Star Wars turned the scene upside-down.

It was John Williams that made me first of all realise that film music

can be of a quality and distinction that is as great as any of

the classical composers I grew up with.

There's the traditional idea of good and bad,

and how they were exemplified in music.

I like to always go to Star Wars because, you know,

there's those beautiful themes - John's main theme,

and then there is the love theme.

MUSIC: Princess Leia's Theme by John Williams

But then there's the Darth Vader theme.

MUSIC: The Imperial March by John Williams

Dun, dun, dun, dun, da-dun...

It just...it's so martial and so broad that you go,

"Oh, boy, there's something not good here."

The right score for the right movie at the right time...

That '70s era,

that is absolutely the era of John Williams.

MUSIC: Superman Theme by John Williams

Without his music, Superman's powers are greatly diminished.

Believe me, if you try to fly without that theme, you go nowhere.

One step, two steps, and down.

Everyone knows the Superman theme, but the Krypton theme that

comes right before it...

MUSIC: The Planet Krypton by John Williams

..that overture, it's mysterious.

It's almost, like, avant-garde.

That sets up this really tuneful double chorus melody.

It almost makes it, to me, ten times more in the piece.

So it's his way of surrounding pieces with other pieces.

Most of the world, if you were to play the music from Jaws,

or Star Wars or Raiders Of The Lost Ark,

most folks would know exactly what that was.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark -

if you hear the melody without the rhythm, you can recognise it.

# Ba da-da-da, da-da-da. #

But if you just do the rhythm...

# Ta, ta-ta-ta, ta, ta-ta. #

..with no melody, you recognise it either way.

MUSIC: The Raiders March by John Williams

HE HUMS THE THEME

A very simple little sequence of notes.

But I spend more time on those little bits of musical grammar,

to get them just right so that they seem inevitable.

There's a hooky, tuneful, well orchestrated theme,

but I think that's only half of it.

There's always the bravura part of the John Williams composition,

you know, the first 8, 16, 32 bars,

you know, the great Raiders Of The Lost Ark theme, or....

And then comes the B part.

MUSIC: To Cairo by John Williams

It's less well known but it's so beautifully crafted.

And I always think, "That's the part he writes for himself."

I think he's as brilliant as people feel he is, and as popular

as his music is, he's even better than that.

MUSIC: Flying Theme (ET Soundtrack) by John Williams

If it would be convenient to go into the call...

# Da-da da-da, da... #

Yeah.

I like that.

As a matter of fact, it seems like a very natural transition.

Up or down?

Up.

Maybe once down.

It could go down once and then go up.

What a score needs to do has changed because of how

film-making has changed.

Let's take John Williams - let's take the end of ET.

MUSIC: Adventure On Earth by John Williams

Here we go!

To the forest!

It is just a wide open space for music.

Follow me!

When was the last time that somebody left a space that open and said,

"I want this to be a music moment

"where you just bring that tune home"?

I'll...be...right...here.

Bye.

We had this vast, expansive music, with the taking off

of the spaceship.

John Williams and Steven Spielberg decide that we're going to go from

big music to reminding us who's going into that spaceship.

We could look at what is happening in the story as being very sad.

These are farewells.

And at the very end, we hear this coda,

this fanfare, that's very triumphant.

That is saying that we're looking at this from Elliott's viewpoint.

That it's not a loss, but it's almost like saying,

"Mission accomplished. We got ET home."

In the orchestra, one of the things we love is the ten-minute break,

but on tens, when you have been inspired by the music,

there's an electricity.

GUTTURAL CALL

On Jurassic Park, you could tell by the look in your colleagues' eyes

that you were not mistaken, that you had just played something

that was going to almost live eternally.

Almost anything we do with John Williams is...

We know it's going to be unbelievable.

We always leave the sessions, like, feeling,

"Why can't all the sessions be like this?"

DINOSAUR CRIES OUT

RISING STRINGS

A lot of the time, you will pick a studio because it's appropriate

to the sort of sound that you want to make.

It used to be a church, obviously.

It's a building that's been here for a couple of hundred years,

you know, as a church, and I suppose everyone thinks that

all churches are haunted, somehow.

We have had engineers who've been in here who have just...

..seen that happen - you know, chairs just start spinning round.

It would be a great way to excuse yourself, wouldn't it,

if you've made a terrible mistake?

"It was the ghost that did that."

But, no, you know, all the terrible things that happen here

are always based on people.

Usually me.

I've sort of lived in this building since about 1994.

Morning. Hi, David. Morning, David.

It was pretty derelict when George Martin, in the late '80s,

sort of came upon it and decided that this would be the place to

convert into a studio.

If you've ever been in a small room with a gang of people and shouted

a lot, it sort of chokes the room out.

You know, it's like you can't really hear anything because the sound

has got nowhere to go, so everything piles in on itself.

That's the same in an acoustic space.

If we have 110 people in a room,

we've got this movable roof panel,

you lift the roof up and it gives you

an extra second and a half of reverb,

and so, you know, the sound can sort of swim around this gorgeous space

with all these amazing reflective surfaces.

PUNCHY, DRAMATIC BRASS

We use up to 100 mics on a session.

That all gives you the choice as to how close or how far away

we want to feel from the music.

It's a very different acoustic to Abbey Road.

86 players total today, so it's a good-size orchestra.

We're here in Abbey Road studio number one, which is the big

orchestral room at Abbey Road.

Check, check. One, two, three, test. Check, one, two, three.

There doesn't appear to be a great deal of sort of absorbent material

on the walls, so it still has a bit of a live sound to it.

When the orchestra cuts off, you get a really great bit of reverb.

ORCHESTRA BUILDS AND STOPS

TONE RINGS OUT

The Beatles recorded their orchestral stuff in here.

And then, in the '80s, it became frequently used for film scores.

So, Return of the Jedi. was mostly recorded here.

Chorus people, thank you for coming.

Welcome to this process of making Star Wars.

The Star Wars prequels were recorded here.

Just winds, please. 33.

One, two, three...

JAUNTY WINDS

The first three Lord of the Rings movies were recorded here.

PEACEFUL STRINGS

I know when Williams did, like, his films here,

he tended to set up over here

and throw this way, the long way, so that the choir

for like Duel of the Fates was up against that wall.

# Kor-ah

# Mah-tah

# Kor-ah

# Rah-tah-mah... #

Our sound engineer on this film,

he asked for this layout because he prefers it in terms

of getting the sound that he wants.

TENSE STRINGS

When you're a film composer, part of the gig is you're giving

the director and the producers the music they want. But, at the end

of the day, if they don't like it, it's not in the movie.

My crew in the mixing room consists of the engineer, who in this case

is a guy named Casey Stone.

He's sitting behind the board and he's operating all the faders.

He's the one who set up all the microphones in here, laid out

the plan for how we were going to record everything.

Next to him is a gentleman named Lewis,

and Lewis is operating the Pro Tools.

So he's controlling the clicks that I hear in my headphones

and that all the musicians hear in their headphones.

METRONOME CLICKS

And then he's also recording all the takes, making sure

they're all labelled correctly.

There's a gentleman named John Finklea - he's the music editor.

He is the person who will take all the takes and assemble not only

the version that we use in the film but also the version that we

end up making the soundtrack album from.

Next to him is the orchestrator,

who in this film is Matt Dunkley.

I do all my writing in a computer.

The orchestrator takes that file and converts

it into an orchestral score.

A score that I can conduct from.

And from which parts can be generated and given

to all the musicians.

And they don't have to see all the other parts.

PLAYING STOPS

Great. Really, really good.

Moving on?

Yeah.

Different cities, different influences, different rooms.

In London, usually, they play with a gentle sound.

In Los Angeles, they play with a stronger sound.

I do work very hard, you know, and I have a team that also

works hard with me.

It takes a lot to get to this point.

This really is like your life story is in the picture

as a vehicle to show the human that you are.

FLUTTERY ARRANGEMENT

That was amazing.

Conducting a score is something that everybody USED to do.

It's not so much that the composer doesn't have the chops to go out

there and conduct an orchestra -

many of them do - but it's often more important for them

to be in the booth, listening to what the orchestra is playing

and sitting right there with the director to know

how the director is feeling about what he's hearing.

GENTLE STRINGS

Let it play.

You know, if you speak to John Powell or Hans Zimmer, they'll say

they prefer to be in the control room, not conducting, because that's

where everything's fed through. They have more control.

I mean, basically, we're all going after the same thing -

we want the best result,

the best performance...

..for the film.

A lot of composers like to be in the booth

so that they can be closer to the director.

But I personally feel I get the best performance when I'm

conducting my own music.

Good morning!

This is the film for Paramount.

It's lots of fun. You've been great.

Oh, my God. What a score.

So, without further ado, our composer and conductor, John Debney.

APPLAUSE

Good morning. We're going to start off with 5MI v3.

Let's make some sound.

One. Two. Two.

POUNDING ARRANGEMENT

Good read. Good read.

The sight-reading musicians,

the studio musicians, really are an incredible breed.

Producers or film-makers, they say, "Oh, how many days do

"they have to rehearse this?"

And I say, "None. That was it."

"They never saw it before." And they go, "What?! WHAT?!"

There is a technique to being able to sight-read, to being able

to congeal as a section, as a studio sight-reading orchestra.

24. We are faster, right away.

When you're writing music, you're writing a letter

to the performers.

You're giving them a set of instructions

on what they're supposed to do.

And if you do it right it should be a love letter.

You should show again, "I know your instrument.

"I know who you are."

You have many, many players

trying to play the same note,

but no-one can.

Everyone is off by microns of a percentage,

which gives it that chorusing effect.

If everything was consonant and perfect...

..music would...

..it would be terrible.

I mean, it would be like putting autotune on Etta James.

You know, you just would take all the soul out of it

and, honestly, that's why we have...why orchestras sound beautiful.

If there's ever a time where I'm not able to get on a scoring stage

and work with 90 musicians,

I'll probably do something else.

And one...

VOICEOVER: Working with the live musicians,

that's what I live for.

ADVENTUROUS ARRANGEMENT

Standing on the podium and giving a downbeat to a piece of music

that you spent a long time crafting...

..and hearing it for the first time, I guess it's like seeing your child

for the first time, being born.

The joy of the emotion of what that is...

..it's really everything to me.

Pretty darn good take.

That's the real power of the orchestra.

I think that's why... That's why I think it will never disappear.

Certainly, it's been transformed and will continue to be transformed,

but I think, at the heart, it's kind of the most human element

and the most emotional element we have.

Let's go from 20 to the end of 48.

This film has a lot of music.

It's an action film,

it's a tent-pole movie, so they tend to be more wall-to-wall.

You know, Jack Reacher had about 60 minutes of music -

this has about 110.

You do see the billboards up before you've finished

doing the film.

You drive past it thinking, "But the music's not written yet."

The scary thing is going down in the subway in New York

and I'm halfway done and seeing your name on a poster and saying,

"Oh," you know, "It's... I have a long way to go.

"in two-and-a-half weeks."

The more expensive the movies get...

You know, I mean, they do let you know this.

You know, the occasional...

..you know, hint gets dropped by the studio that, you know,

everything is riding on this and you better, you know, whatever.

So this is not necessarily inspirational, it's just terrifying.

The complexity of putting these things together is immense now,

and the pressure is immense.

Our studio, we're rolling close to a half-a-billion dollar roll

every time we take out a single movie.

Do you know how much you have to make? Every movie you're making

has to be in the top 20 of all-time box office!

It's insane.

I just think the complexity of the business overall

has brought a complexity to the art form.

On the movie Armageddon which I did,

I literally got a clock from Jerry Bruckheimer -

a countdown clock - counting down to the day we finish.

And that was in front of me at all times.

Deadlines can be terrifying.

The schedule on this film is so accelerated.

It's on a whole other level of professionality.

It's been about six hours so far.

We've got another three hours to go.

This one's six clicks in the bar. 29.

Yeah, you should go up a half-step, I think.

Think this kind of situation is so expensive and so hard

to organise,

but there's always more than one way to solve a problem.

And you can solve this problem by changing the music at this cut,

or you could solve it by changing the music at that cut.

TENSE ARRANGEMENT

Great.

As film-making styles have changed,

film music itself has changed.

And as film-makers have realised

that over the decades, they've asked for different things

and gotten different things.

What happened in 1978/79? Somebody flipped on a synthesiser.

# Weird science... #

When the synth came in, actually, punk also happened

and you had this incredible new, extroverted

musical intelligence going on.

# From my heart and from my hand

# Why don't people understand my intentions?

# Ooh, weird

# Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh Ooh-ooh, weird science... #

Danny Elfman, he was a performer.

You know, Tim Burton - one day, he gets to make a movie.

Who's he going to have score it?

Hey, how about his favourite band? "Yeah, I love Oingo Boingo.

"Who's in Oingo Boingo? Who's really the principal songwriter?

"who's really doing...? Oh, it's this guy Danny...? Bingo-bango!"

# Weird science... #

I was starting to write weird but elaborate compositions.

I wrote a thing called the Oingo Boingo Piano Concerto No. 1½.

Without having written that, I never would have taken

Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

Since he was a kid, more or less just a really curious person who's

been amusing himself, you know? At first, it was, you know,

just the antics of Oingo Boingo, and then the whole

Tim Burton, Pee-wee.

There's nothing bland about Danny.

Thanks a lot, dudes.

Danny is the composer who grabs you by the collar during the main

title of the movie and says, "I'm about to take you into a world,

"and here's what it's about."

Danny's biggest strength is, I think he comes up with the most amazing

little short musical ideas

that then become big musical ideas.

When he fully, like, exploded with Batman,

everyone's mind was blown.

Batman. It was like there was only one template -

John Williams - and we didn't want to do that...again.

I had nothing to go on.

There's no model of what kind of chords.

How do you do, like, a darker score that's still fun and has energy?

RESONANT ARRANGEMENT

Then, I realised what I tried to learn from Bernard Herrmann

years earlier, which was, there is only one rule.

There are no rules.

POUNDING ARRANGMENT

Boo!

He can broach the big orchestral world

with the very uber-contemporary world.

And he does it really seamlessly.

Well, you can hear his sound, his personality.

AIRY ARRANGMENT

TINKLING PIANO

Thomas Newman is one of those composers that it's very difficult

to sort of describe what the sound is like.

Like Danny Elfman, Thomas has developed his own sound.

RISING STRINGS

The first score I worked with him on was Shawshank Redemption.

His music is extremely edgy and unique

and he has an unmistakable mark.

It's like a watermark on anything that he does.

That's the lasting piece of art - Shawshank.

MUSIC: Dead Already by Thomas Newman

My name is Lester Burnham.

When I saw American Beauty and I heard Thomas Newman's

first notes in the first frames of the movie -

I think it's a marimba that you hear -

it absolutely sets the tone of the film...

..puts you a little off balance, lets you know

that you're in for a somewhat odd,

offbeat take on American life.

MUTED, PLINKING ARRANGEMENT

The great thing about Thomas Newman is, he's managed to capture a way

of doing uncertainty so it's never...it's never too committed

but it's musically kind of got this great character to it.

He will generally, in a cue, he'll establish a key centre.

Things will start to weave in and out

around that...around that baseline.

MUSIC: Any Other Name by Thomas Newman

SPARSE, MELANCHOLIC ARRANGEMENT

That creates a kind of a texture that lives behind the orchestra.

When the orchestra comes in, it becomes part of that texture.

ORCHESTRA THICKENS SCORE

Well, that particular language just didn't exist.

It just came out of Thomas Newman's brain.

Thomas Newman is Alfred Newman's youngest son.

Yes, he is orchestrally trained and he could write

a great orchestral score,

but sometimes the movies he was working on required

something more intimate.

WOODWIND OVER PIANO

A lot of times, you can get a mood

a prevailing mood, and just slap

it onto an image and let it sit for two minutes.

Everybody rips it off. Everybody.

And they don't realise. They're thinking, "This is film music.

"This is how I do film music. This is how I do that thing."

MULTIPLE INSTRUMENTS TINKLE

And, of course, it's been imitated and copied,

but he was he was there at that moment to introduce something new.

It's so difficult to sit down and do that cold, emotive solo piano

thing, cos he's perfected it.

MTV is going on the air. What video are they first going to play?

A song called Video Killed the Radio Star?!

# Video killed the radio star

# Video killed... #

If you look closely, you can see Hans Zimmer in the background.

# Video killed the radio star

# Video killed the radio star... #

Hans brought an unconventional rock swagger...

..OK? To film scoring.

POUNDING ARRANGEMENT

There's a brutality about the way that the orchestra plays.

There's a...there's a violence, if you will - an aggression.

There is an intensity about it.

Intensity about how it's written, intensity about how it's played.

The single female voice of Lisa Gerrard in that film,

on top of the visceral power of the orchestra...

..really had an impact on the audience.

I will see you again.

# Anol shalom... #

..but not yet.

Not yet.

# Anol sheh lay konnud de ne um... #

We had this idea it had to be...

..a woman's voice.

# Flavum Nom de leesh... #

Why do you want a woman's voice in a gladiator movie?

The next day, we came in and there was the hand

on the wheat field, and that shot holds for a minute.

If you had written that in the script - I mean,

that wouldn't even have made it to being shot.

You know, why would you hold hand on the wheat field...?

You know, the only way that shot can work was because of the music,

because of Lisa's voice. But it sort of gave license for the rest

of the movie to be a little bit more practical, to be a little

bit more expansive.

Really, I think elevated the whole experience and it shaped the sound

in Hollywood for years afterwards.

Now, we're in the Hans Zimmer era. It just balloons over everything.

This is why he's revolutionary. Hans took the string section and made

them like a guitar.

They're playing rhythm. # Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun

# Da-da-da-da, dun, dun... #

And that's a really interesting thing.

I don't think anybody had really done that.

UPBEAT, POUNDING ARRANGEMENT

Pirates - it's like Led Zeppelin!

OK?

It's like frickin' Led Zeppelin, played by an orchestra!

What Hans has certainly...you know, has done on Dark Knight,

is obviously blur this line between

this giant symphonic sound and electronics,

and you're not quite sure where one ends and the other begins.

The sort of light, repetitive string ostinatos,

you hear that so often.

STRINGS OVER POUNDING BEAT

It's just all about this constant pulse going on.

Terribly powerful.

Terribly exciting.

Hans Zimmer is still...

..he's a legend that's still becoming more legendary.

MUSIC: Time by Hans Zimmer

The end of Inception,

it's like a new morning.

SOARING STRINGS

When he gets home and he's going to be reunited with his family

for real, in reality...

..you're led in one direction, like it's going to be OK.

Hans Zimmer's score really washes over you in waves.

CLIMACTIC STRINGS

The music just piles it on.

The camera pans down, and you're left with a big question.

SPARSE STRINGS AND PIANO

You're like, "Wow.

"Music adds quite a bit here."

We've seen over the last five, six years where people that are not

film composers were asked by a director to do something unique.

Like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

# Got your chin held high and you... #

And I think these are really good examples where people

just really love that people that have an artist career

in the world outside of film-scoring can bring so much authenticity

in music and sound to the picture.

# Will you bite the hand that feeds? #

BUZZING STRINGS AND PIANO

The sounds they're using were extremely contemporary.

Their score for Social Network,

it's an emotional palette.

It's a very disturbing kind of lyrical piano.

It's human but it's technical, it's emotionally dark

but it's got some feeling to it.

When David Fincher called and, "Hey, I want you to score my next film."

"Yeah." It's a movie about Facebook.

I'd be hard pressed

to think of something that sounded less sexy, you know?

And we were shuffling the deck, trying things that didn't...

..that didn't feel intuitive.

SYNTHESISERS CLASH

Talking about changing the temperature of a movie

and the emotional response of the audience, radically different.

The whole movie feels different after that.

I think it feels like a much more important film

than a kind of,

"Ah, college life tomfoolery,"

that it could have been misled

into feeling with the wrong music in there.

And ever since that point, you know, there are a lot more electronic

artists doing film scores.

Electronic production and engineering

and a whole different way of looking at music that is often

much more visceral.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, The Social Network.

I think it's totally deserved that, you know, Trent Reznor

not only, you know, got nominated, but also won an Oscar for score.

It's completely deserved.

When you have an unconventional image with unconventional sound,

like with a lot of the things that Trent and Atticus are doing,

the results can really be so much greater than the sum of their parts.

What the net result of that is,

you know, in some ways, a sort of beautiful chaos.

Film music has changed...

..fairly radically.

TENSE, RISING ARRANGEMENT

There's far more experimentation.

There's far more freedom and inviting artists who would never

have thought of doing a film score, and nobody you would have thought

of doing a film score before.

And, to me, that's really exciting.

Technology has made it possible for every composer

to be a producer as well.

At the core of it, though, is the tune.

For this one, it's the only cue that I feel that we still

need to work a little bit.

It happens to be the opening of the movie.

So if we can get like this kind of...

..orchestral ukulele... Mm-hm.

..so to speak, in a very simple, very like...

HE IMITATES PLUCKING

You know?

For everybody, yeah? For everybody.

Yeah, very kind of sweet.

One, two, three, and...

Can we do it...?

OK. Can we be like...so your nails go on top of the string?

So it's kind of...

So, clenk, clenk, clenk.

Yes, yes.

The cello as well.

Amazing sound.

Happy?

I'm more than happy, man.

I'm, like, hypnotised.

DRAMATIC ARRANGEMENT

SCORE FADES AND BUILDS

Woohoo!

Yeah, that's some powerful stuff.

It's beautiful.

I just want to thank you again, because you are amazing

and what a privilege it is for a musician like myself

to have you guys playing my music.

So, thank you very much. LAUGHTER

Thank you.

Film music is essentially a recorded art.

Once you have the recording, then you're into mixing

the more technological part of the production.

Before the music leaves my studio, I just give it one last final mix

to make sure everything that I want to be heard is heard.

Every element needs some amount of attention to create the overall

feel that you want.

SYNTHESISED STRINGS

So that's...

That's his main little melody.

Very simple, because he's a big, simple, evil dude.

So there's a point where it's a really dramatic moment in the film.

Up until this point in the music, I didn't have any French horns

so I introduced them.

INSTRUMENTS OVER POUNDING BEAT

You probably can't even hear them.

I can hear them because I know what they're playing, but...

OK. So...now simply mixing them up a bit.

HORNS DOMINATE

Every time I played that just then, they were there. When I turn

the horns down,

I don't feel that emotional peak.

There's 50-foot robots running down the highway - that line better

be mixed up loud - otherwise, you're not going to hear it.

You want your intention to be clear.

HORNS DOMINATE

The horns just give it kind of more of an emotional weight.

That's a part of mixing, is just making sure the elements

that you want to grab hold of the audience are loud enough

to make a statement.

You can't really be wishy washy.

You have to make bold statements.

I think, you know, with Furious 7, people really reacted to that film

on an emotional level.

Paul and his character say goodbye.

That's probably one of the most powerful theatre experiences

I've had watching a film that I had worked on.

And it kind of crossed over to his real life.

You can feel when a cue is working the audience.

That's what I love about film music - it's all emotion.

I think seeing audience reaction to films that you worked

on is really helpful.

It doesn't help you for the film that you just did,

cos it's already out in the theatre, but it certainly will help

you for the next film.

Seeing, literally, the reaction

of how people respond to your music...

..that's really cool.

Now, often, I'll cruise up to the front

and creepily turn back and look at the audience

watching the movie.

Very rarely am I spotted doing that. Every once in a while,

I will look through the audience and I'm enjoying everyone watching it.

And then there's one head like the tennis match

with the one person, like,

looking right at you looking at them.

And that's uncomfortable, and then I leave.

You want to get a sense of, how did this work?

Especially in the scenes that are really musical.

Did they move people?

And then I do something that's...

..slightly embarrassing.

I will run into a bathroom stall.

Erm, and...

..see if they're humming or whistling the theme.

And it is amazing how many times that's actually happened.

It's like the ultimate pat on the back.

To me, I feel like I affected

them on a level that they're not aware of.

It's cool to be able to witness people experiencing

what I experienced when I was watching films

growing up. And to think that it lives

on beyond you is a crazy thing.

I mean, it's definitely going to outlive me.

You know, these movies will be continued to be watched.

And that's really cool.

One of the responsibilities we have as film composers is

we are the last people on earth who, on a daily basis,

commission orchestral music.

Without us, the orchestras might just disappear.

And I think that will create a rift in, you know, human culture.

I think it'll be such a loss to...humanity.

We all have this fragility.

We can chat for hours and, in a funny way -

I'm very secure about this because I hide behind the work -

you'll never really figure me out.

But when I play you a piece of music,

I completely expose myself.

And that's a really scary moment.

I love, I love, I love what I do.

Even when I sit there driven by paranoia, fear, neurosis and,

you know, pulling my hair out...

..I still wouldn't trade it for anything else.

Very few people can be inspired every day to write something

brilliant.

Whether or not you're aware of it,

music plays such an important role in how you respond to a film.

All your other work on a film can come to nothing if you don't

get the music right.

You constantly have to reinvent yourself and you have to adapt

to very, very difficult psyches.

It's quite a lot of weight to carry on your shoulders.

You're just struggling and you have self-doubts.

And sometimes, yeah, sometimes you crash into a wall.

The satisfaction of succeeding,

yeah, it's really something.

Film music is one of the great art forms

of the 20th and 21st centuries.

There is something about what the film composer brings in

by their intuition.

That unique ecology, that unique combination, is what makes

film music so powerful, so...

..mysterious, and probably uncapturable to us as scientists.

When we were cutting Titanic, James was sending over music

as he was... Cos what he would do is sketch out on synthesiser

with his synthesist what he intended to do with the orchestra.

So I was used to getting sort of new ideas coming in.

So I was sitting there cutting one day and a disc came

in that said "sketch".

I thought, "Oh, OK, this goes for the sketching scene."

I just kind of slid it around

until I found a place where it seemed

to sync with the scene nicely.

GENTLE PIANO

So serious.

There's a kind of piano downbeat that I just put on Leonardo's eyes

coming up and looking directly, you know, at the camera.

A critical moment of eye contact between the two of them

while he's drawing her. And then, boy, it just really flowed.

PIANO PLAYS "MY HEART WILL GO ON"

So, I was so excited about it I called him up and I said,

"This...this is working so well.

"I put it up to the sketching scene and it's working fantastically."

He said, "Oh, no, no, that's just a piano sketch of a melody.

"We can drop it in anywhere." And I said,

"But it works beautifully on this scene."

He said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah!

"Get your ass over here." So he came over.

He said, "Oh, that works pretty well. OK."

He said, "All right, I'll orchestrate it."

I said, "No, no, no, no - just the piano."

He said, "All right.

"I know the best pianist in the world.

"He's out of London. I'll..."

I said, "No. It's you, buddy. It's you."