Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I was working on a movie called "Milk" with Gus Van

Zandt, and his first impulses was

Harvey Milk was an opera fan, and we

should do, in the score, something operatic.

It's got drama.

It's got all the stuff.

And I wrote, like, 12 minutes of music that was very operatic.

I was listening to opera, and I wrote all this stuff.

And I was doing a big playback, his first big playback,

and I had about a dozen scenes and bits laid out.

But the operatic ones--

I could feel it myself while we were listening to it.

It's just not really working.

It's just not working.

And he finished it, and he said, I

think the opera idea was just a bad idea,

and I couldn't argue with him.

So what I ended up with, in "Milk,"

was actually the antithesis of where I began,

the structured feeling, operatic,

because it was actually a semi improvisational moment.

And it was a little bit jazzy, and it had

kind of a loose underpinning.

There was a bit of a tune.

There was a saxophone.

It couldn't have been farther from the initial intent,

but when I started thinking along that line, something

looser, something more--

feeling a little more improvisational,

something that has less structured feel to it--

it started feeling right for the tone of the film.

Gus and I started with the character.

Analytically, it's like opera because he listened to opera.

Opera was a big part of his life.

We should make opera.

That's analytical.

It didn't work.

What it came down to was, I looked again

at the tone of the film.

It had a very dreamy feel to it.

It had a very kind of loose, easy quality to it-- the way

he went in and out of scenes, and Harvey's love scenes,

and they were done in a very expressionistic kind of way.

I just rethought it from the ground up.

Harmonically, I started thinking of, like,

more dissonance in the harmony and in the structure

of the harmonies.

And I still came up with the tune

because I wanted there to still be a theme, a tune,

but I didn't play it a lot.

Rather than the kind of film where you're constantly

alluding-- that's the Korngold process, of like,

it's there all the time.

You're, like, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here,

and all the clever ways you can do that.

This score didn't ask for that, and you

have to constantly adjust yourself

to the needs of the film.

I only needed to play it three times in the whole movie,

so it didn't even barely feel like his theme.

[MUSIC - "GIVE 'EM HOPE"]

I don't like to bring in something

at the end of the movie that you never hear earlier,

that's out of the blue.

I'd like to, at least, go back and implant enough

seeds thematically that when it comes back, it feels--

OK, I'm comfortable.

Yeah, OK, I get it.

This is where you started here earlier,

and you used it again here, and I'm coming back to this place.

But I definitely didn't want to overdo it either,

which in a different kind of score,

you would approach it very different.

Really minimal use of melody.

Use only where you need to get a bit of a tune, a bit of a tune,

and then let it pay off at the end

when you actually now have, like, a big long sequence

to play your thing.

And the sounds I found were as far from opera as you could do.

I found a sound of just strings playing.

There was this weird sound I found in just

improvising with an orchestra.

And literally, when I have 10 minutes

at the end of a session, or sometimes I'll

even have an hour at the end of a session,

I'm not going to ever let the musicians go home early.

Unfortunately, if you're working for me on my sessions,

that just isn't going to happen because I'm

going to run in there, and I'm going to improvise,

and I'm going to try stuff.

And this was the result of that improvisation.

I was basically saying, everybody, we're

just going to center around this note,

but I don't care how dissonant it get.

You're just going to play overtones harmonics randomly,

and you're going to hold.

And every time I point to a section,

you're going to change your overtone, change your harmonic.

So it just started with a big open chord, and then I started,

point to the violas.

They shift.

Point to the second violins.

They shift.

Point to the celli.

They shift.

And so there was a shifting of overtones within the sound.

And I go, god, I don't know what this is,

but I'm really loving it.

It sounds really interesting.

Now, the problem with that--

it's impossible to write down.

It's really hard to recreate because it's a thing that

happened at the moment.

And-- but that kind of became, in a weird way,

the heart of the score.

But the beauty of orchestra, of a live orchestra,

is just this thing-- the surprises

that they come up with.

They play something that's not the way you intended it,

but wow, whatever they did, that was cool.

Play that back again.

Yeah, that's good.

Going to keep that.

And it's a random thing that happens with real musicians.

Sometimes, [INAUDIBLE] bit of a misinterpret something.

Do it a bit wrong, but it's good.

It's cool.

That's one of the reasons I still love orchestra.