Original subtitles

There are two different styles, right?

One is, you know, I become the benign dictator

and I have written all the tunes

and I have done an arrangement of everything

and I've picked the sounds, and I go,

"Okay, now I know exactly what I want to say, now come and add to it," right?

And then interesting things start happening that way,

but I still keep complete control.

And then sometimes, on other projects, I just go...

I mean, we did a Spider-Man movie and it was sort of an interesting thing.

I had Johnny Marr, I had Pharrell Williams, Junkie XL, Mike Einziger.

And I said, "Let's do it like a band, but let's do it like this:

let's go and see the movie the night before."

So, Sony let us in their screening room,

and the next morning we came in with nothing

other than we knew the story we wanted to tell,

and I think it was Johnny... I said, "What key?"

And, you know, Johnny is a guitarist, so it would be E, right?

"Okay, we'll start in E."

And it was just like a band, you know? It was really nice.

Somebody would have a phrase, and then there would be a hole to be filled,

and it would be filled by whoever had the best idea.

And because, you know, we're all pretty secure or insecure musicians,

I don't know, we're musicians.

So, we would go, "Oh yeah, no, no, his idea is much better than mine,

let's try that," you know?

So that was a very organic way of sort of making something.

It's like kids sitting there with Legos.

It always is, you know?

I mean, the most important word about music is the word "play."

And you have to have a playfulness if you do these situations.

And when music sounds good it's because it's playful,

because it's playing, you know?

I always think, you know, Beethoven's Fifth,

everybody knows the 'duh, duh, duh, duh,' right?

Every kid walks past the piano and goes, 'duh, duh, duh, duh,'

but how did he know that the possibilities existed in those humble little notes?

There has to be...

To be inventive there has to be a playfulness,

and I think, you know...

I suppose there are two types of kids, those that got stuck playing with Legos

and then stopped playing with Legos,

and those that started playing with tape machines, or, you know...

GarageBand or pianos or guitars or whatever, you know?

But it's all maintaining a certain level of playfulness.

There is only one director,

and I will listen to the director and we will discuss

and we will improve things and we will try to get it closer to his vision.

He is the director.

Anybody else is not the director.

So it's my duty to make a pact with the director,

and work towards his vision.

And if the producer disagrees,

it's the director and myself who have to go and convince the producer

that where we're going is the right way of going.

It has to be that way because music is a scary thing for a director

because a director has control of pretty much everything in the process.

I mean, he's not illiterate, so he can write a bit of dialog.

He can look through a camera and pick a lens.

He can probably talk about acting with great authority.

But when it comes to music, it gets a little bit more complicated,

so he has to hand over control to a certain degree.

And I shouldn't abuse that privilege.

The conversations aren't ever about,

"Oh, you should write a piece of music like this."

The conversations are always about the story,

and ultimately, what you're supposed to do

is you're supposed to figure out what the director's vision is and push it further.

So it's not serving the film, it's trying to elevate the film.

And sometimes that gets pretty experimental,

and sometimes it takes people a little while to get used to something new.

I mean, you're always being asked to do something new,

but at the same time, as soon as you do new,

everybody gets a little nervous about that

because who knows?

You know? It's like, I don't know.

So, you know, you work it out together.

But it is the director and you, it has to be just the two of us,

and everybody else can become... yeah, they will be our audience,

and they can... you know, the producer can be an audience as well in this case,

and if they have a feeling about something, I want to hear it.

But if it goes directly against the concept or the ideas

that the director and I came up with, then...

I'm sorry, I have to stick with the vision that the director and I have.

What I've found is the way I work is whereby I work from an idea,

and the intellectual framework of that idea usually is pretty solid.

And to go back to what John Powell said about not having it under your fingers,

sometimes the first version of a piece or the second version or the third version,

you know, I'm not that good at doing my own idea yet

because it's an intellectual construct.

It's not instinctive yet, it doesn't flow as music.

My problem about music is, you cannot explain to somebody

why they should love the piece of music you write.

It either resonates with them or it doesn't resonate with them.

And the context of why it resonates in a film is very specific.

It's about telling that story in a particular way.

And so, you know, a piece of music that might be a beautiful piece of music

might be completely wrong for this movie or for the scene.

And I have written pieces of music that are perfectly good pieces of music

but needed to be thrown into the toilet as quickly as possible

because they were just wrong for the movie.

So, ultimately it's not about the director's wishes so much or whatever.

It's something we work on together and suddenly you find that the images

and the music become one thing, you know?

And it becomes undeniable that this piece of music

and this piece of film fit together,

and so you just work at it until you get there.

It might be one note, it might be one sound, it might be one thing.

You know, you can get there.

I don't think Chris will hate me for saying this,

I mean, I remember in "The Dark Knight" there was a scene and he,

like, from day one he kept saying, "This has to be a fast action scene.

This has to be a fast action scene."

And I kept looking and I'm going, "I don't think so. I don't think so."

So I wrote the slowest piece

and just sat him down with everybody in the room,

and just said, "Look, it's not what you thought it should be,

and it's not what you asked for, but let me just show you this."

And we played it, and everybody else knew

that Chris had asked for this fast action piece,

so there was a long silence at the end of it,

and then Chris went, "Hm. I suppose that works as well."

It's as simple as that.

I mean, I had an idea,

and I wanted to end up in the same place as what Chris wanted,

which was he wanted it to stand out and he wanted it to feel tense and dangerous.

Sometimes by saying, "Oh, it needs to be fast, and frantic and actiony,"

the words don't necessarily lead you to the conclusion.

But the only way you can actually have the conversation

is you have to write the thing, you have to perform it,

and you have to get a reaction.

An honest reaction.

I don't know what realism is in recording, in music, in samples, in anything.

Look, we think that if you take something as simple as an orchestral mock-up,

I mean, our idea of how one orchestra sounds like

comes from the records we've been listening to

which were recorded in recording studios like Abbey Road,

which is a completely fake acoustic.

Abbey Road, the studio itself was not designed by any great acoustician,

it was designed by the guys, by the architects

who built the Hoover vacuum company in London, you know?

It was one of the first studios, but we all grew up with that sound.

We loved that sound, so we think that's what an orchestra sounds like.

You have to start off by realizing that a computer is a musical instrument

that needs just as much practice

as when you practice piano or the violin or the cello

or whatever, you know?

You have to become fairly virtuoistic at programming.

And look, I've been doing this for a very long time,

since literally sampling was invented.

So I was working on 8-bit samplers

and managed to get directors

to feel the intention of the music behind the mock-up,

which is what it's all about, right?

I mean, you're supposed to go and let them know what the piece of music is about,

what the emotional intent is.

And, you know, and we went to 12-bit samplers, then we went to, you know,

16, 24-bit samplers, then I had a stack of samplers, and I started to do my own.

In '94 we started to do our own samples.

But it wasn't about making the music sound better

or making it easier to get the job.

It was just for me because I didn't want to sit there all day long

listening to shit sounds, you know?

I wanted to spend all day listening to slightly better sounds

and I wanted to listen to my favorite players.

I mean, one of the things I did back then was,

because sampling was seen by an orchestra as sort of the enemy,

and I went to all my favorite musicians in London, and I said,

"Look, here's the experiment. I'm going to try...

If you let me sample you,

I will make it so that directors will want more orchestral music

and you will actually get more work out of it

because I'm going to be able to present something where they go,

'Wow! Orchestra! Orchestra is cool'", right?

Because there was actually a time where orchestra was thought of as not cool.

And that's pretty much... Actually, it worked out better than that

because it meant that the people who started here as assistants,

like Harry Gregson-Williams, or Ramin Djawadi, or John Powell, etc.,

had access to the same tools that I had access to

and could sound just as fabulous or whatever,

as grand as my samples sounded,

and then get jobs and go and use real orchestras to record them with.

But yes, I was always a good programmer.

I mean, I started out as a programmer.

You know, I'm definitely a better programmer than I am a player.

If you ask me honestly what my instrument is,

I will tell you it's the computer.

You need to protect the orchestras because if the orchestras go away, pfff!

You know, it's going to be a huge cultural shift in a bad way.

And I think the first thing you need to do is you need to stop thinking of them

in these catch-phrases, "the orchestra."

For instance, let's just talk about strings.

You need to think of the string section as individuals that come together

and give you their everything

and so you need to go and pick each individual player

because each individual player's technique, the sound of their instrument,

I mean, you know, if you go to London or if you go to Paris,

if you go to Berlin, blah, blah, blah,

they will have different quality instruments.

They will have different-sounding instruments.

I mean, guitarists go mad about pickups and strings and amps, etc.

And that's just one guitarist.

You should treat every member of the orchestra the same way,

and you should treat the orchestras the same way.

I will write very differently stylistically here in America

because I have a different room to record in

with different players with different instruments

than I will write for somebody in London or somebody in Paris

or somebody in Vienna,

because, just like anything, study who the individuals are,

that are actually going to make this performance.

There are constantly reasons why music shifts, and part of it is just...

There are "new" interesting players. There are "new" interesting orchestras.

There are new interesting spaces to record in.

So at the end of the day, it's not about the technology so much, as opposed to,

there are constantly new young players that have an amazing tone

that you want to capture, that you want to work with.

You know, look, right now there's stuff coming out of Berlin or out of Iceland

which sounds completely different

to anything that's coming out of America or out of London.

And the sound is created by the individuals, and they are very different.

And when I write a cello line, I know who I write it for,

and literally as I program, as I write it, I see that person in front of me,

so I'm going to write something which is very much with them in mind.

So I always write... It's like a constant conversation I have with each player.

I used to, I used to. But I stopped going

when Chris Nolan sort of was taking over

because I know Ron Howard or any of the directors I work with,

I know they're going to protect my music better than I do.

I'm usually the one sitting on the dub stage going,

"Turn it down, it's too loud."

Because I'm still trying to hide a little bit,

because it's never quite finished.

You know, nothing is ever perfect.

So, you know,

I always think the music is too loud, but no,

I mean, it's like,

once it leaves here, I give it to the other team,

and I expect them to treat it kindly

and to treat it with respect

and work very hard at making it work.