Composers are always going back to the past. |
Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously. |
I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme. |
I had actually always wanted to be a film composer, but when I was at college there didn't seem to be any easy route into it-or any route into it at all. I found myself in this pop world and arranging things for people and dealing with orchestras and string sections, and I suppose I thought I ought to be doing this myself. |
I like to start at the beginning and make the music develop in line with the drama developing. I've talked to other composers about this, and they don't all do it this way. Some people like to find the emotional center of it and work from the climax and then work backward and work forward, so I'm still experimenting with the actual way of doing it. |
I prefer to see a rough cut of the film rather than read a script. I find it difficult to get the feeling of the atmosphere of a film from a script. |
I think being studio-literate helps, because obviously I'm not intimidated by the studio, and I never have been. I've always thought it was another part of the creative process. |
I think that music has an endless life. |
I think the thing about being a film composer is that you have to be pretty eclectic-be able to turn your hand to all sorts of different styles and genres and be familiar with the latest rhythms and the range of an obscure instrument. |
I wanted to do something that had a purely musical inspiration, and I was inspired by the sound of choirs and the English pastoral music I used to hear when growing up. I was also inspired by the textures and rhythmic vitality of the so-called minimalists, Philip Glass and John Adams, and I'm always intrigued by the sound of the recording studio. |
I wanted to make a classical piece that was actually designed to be a CD, not designed for performance. |
I'm very interested in the color of sound. And I'm very interested in the juxtaposition of different things, ethnic instruments juxtaposed with symphonic instruments, and I'm interested in the ancient and the modern. I don't know why, but it has always been something that's fascinated me, from when I first heard a symphony orchestra I wanted to know how those sounds were made. |
It was only ironically by being in the Art of Noise that people started being interested in me to do film scores. |
It's really the sound of the voices, the sound of the words, the sound of the sound that we're interested in. |
My favorite work is The Full Monty because I got an Oscar for it. But it was really hard work at the time. Sometimes comedy is not a bundle of laughs to actually do. |