All language subtitles for 131 - Music And Scoring

the very best composers um are

they're like another screenwriter

they key in on little things

camera moves um

an actors um

you know flickering eye um um um

a glance down

that suggests an emotional state of mind

that may not have anything to do with the dialogue

or the plot

and they often pick up on those things

and begin to build cues around that emotion in

in very surprising ways

um but music

is such a challenge for me

oh I can play the guitar a little bit

but I can't read music

I'm not a musician

um and yet I understand how powerful it is

and I Learned early on to talk to composers

the way I would talk to an actor or a screenwriter

just talk about the ideas

talk about the feelings

talk about the reason that I shot or staged

seen in a particular way

what I love about a performance

what I hope it conveys

and very often they're able to really reinforce that

music is written to be what listen to

um you know

experienced

um now sometimes a piece of music um

always written with themes and ideas

that the composer has that you know

aren't specifically articulated

but you're meant to feel on some primal level

some intuitive level

sometimes it works great for a movie

but there are

in my opinion

there's nothing like score

score is music that is written specifically for a scene

for a movie

themes that

represent something of a character

um sometimes movies have two or three different uh

themes of representing two or three different feelings

or characters

characters who fall into

the category of a certain kind of feeling

um maybe representing

you know oppositional sides and conflict

sometimes there are no themes

sometimes there are only feelings

sort of sound beds

beats tempo

and sometimes there's

sometimes they're both

so again in the world of working with composers

or making decisions on your own

it's a it's so much about asking yourself the question

what should the music be

and you'll have probably

um you know an instinctive answer and then maybe right

but it's always worth saying what else

the development of the musical score for Frost Nixon

was one of the most surprising

creative experiences that I've ever had

because I was so certain I wanted

I wanted a rock and roll score

this took place in 77

I I I wanted to evoke that here

I thought here this is

I love those

I love those movies that do that

this is a chance to do one of those

and we kept trying songs

I had lengthy meetings with Hans Zimmer

who was going to

you know do some

some some score

but I told him

I thought Hans

it's probably only gonna be

seven or eight minutes of score

I really want a lot of songs

Peter Morgan

the writer and and and

and one of the producers on the movie

he was okay with it

I think he was a little suspicious of that idea

but when we started putting songs in

audiences said they kind of liked it

because they like those songs

but both Peter and Hans said

I think you're selling the movie short

because those songs remind us of the period

and they may reflect the characters

but when they do reflect the characters

it's a little bit reductive

it's almost like irony um

or it's heavy handed

um and the performances and the camera work

are so much more sophisticated than that run

and they really had to talk me out of that

and into a score that was much more a suspense score

it was much closer to the heartbeat of those characters

and it invited the audience to

to really lean in and

and feel a sense of

of um pressure

and it became a really very contemporary

minimalistic in some places

and then sort of full and emotional in other places

but a very modern um

psychological score

and it was hmm

maybe not 180 degrees

but a solid 90 degrees

away from anything that I ever expected for the movie

and I'm very

very happy that I always coerced

you know out of that first

that first choice that I was so certain of

there were a number of challenges with Beautiful Mind

uh Musically and uh um

James Horner did a brilliant job tackling it but it it

he thought about it for a long

a long time

he was inspired to some extent by Philip Glass

um very modern

contemporary

um and in a lot of Philip Glass's work

there's a sense of um

of a of a kind of an ongoing search

a kind of yearning for something and an inevitability

it's kind of nature meeting

man's need to go forward and understand something

I somehow it's pretty magical

but it's very evocative

and so he didn't want to borrow that orchestrally

and but he but he took some inspiration from it

and he wrote some piano pieces that were

you know amazing

and sort of celebrated that drive that John Nash

as a genius felt

and then he had to

write counter themes that were oppressive

that represented

like the kind of the evil

the danger of the mental illness

and at first

um because that movie has

plays a trick with the audience that

that music was meant to sound sort of like movie music

kind of like

um you know

bad guy music from you know

the 40s or the 50s

but with this undercurrent of John Nash's particular

um need to be able to express himself

in the beginning

you just feel like it's a genius

wanting to get his ideas out there

by the end you begin to understand that he was hampered

by the mental illness

and that that

that feeling of being trapped

and that need

to try to be able to work through something that

that James's music sort of seems to suggest I think

suggest something on a more sort of metaphorical level

later and and

and that same dark music that we thought was about

cloak and dagger stuff and spies

winds up being the sound of the disease

the two exciting ways to use music

um one is um

you know you you

you stage your

your scenes

you shoot the shots that you want

you piece them together

you you share them with a composer

composer is inspired by it

um you begin a conversation

and begin to experiment with what the music could be

and you come to a you know

an understanding that is satisfying

there's another very um

interesting approach

which is you can take a piece of music and

in the way that you might use temp score

uh while you're editing as a

as a way of sort of understanding what

you know the kind of music that might work in a

in a in a scene the pace

the nature of the

of that piece of music

there are a lot of interesting directors

that do all of that before they begin shooting

and they often shoot and edit with a tempo and a rhythm

already in their minds

now again I'm not that musical

I've never actually you know

tried that strategy

but I hear about it all the time

and I sometimes hear about it

from actors

who really love it

because when a

when a director has chosen a piece of music

or a song that's meant to inspire

might not even be used in the final movie

but it suggests something

and it is also an acknowledgement that we're

you know yes

we're creating a kind of reality

the reality of this story

but we are using the tools of the medium

including music

and you the actor

are gonna be reinforced and supported in this way

and sometimes actors are really inspired by that