Original subtitles

This is the only bit of masterclass

that's going to be important coming out of my mouth.

When you start on a project,

you are working with the director.

Everybody else is secondary. Nice.

You and the director make a pact that you're going

to do this movie together, and you're going to do your utmost

and your best to go and make his film great.

Even if it means you have to kill him sometimes. But

you're a lot of allegiance,

as with the director and yes, what the producers say and what the studio says

and and they're great comments, the amazing comments usually.

And you have to take them on board and you want to take them on board,

but you have to filter them and transform them into, is this

helpful to the film?

The director is trying to make?

Because

I don't know how else to do it.

It's a film sound made by committee.

it seems like it sometimes, but.

Not really.

If you take Ron Howard, Ridley Scott, Chris Nolan

and Terry Malick, I mean, the directors are working very different styles.

But really at the end, at the end of the day, we've all come

together at the same sort of place.

I have to get into his head and,

you know, and that's part of the process, because what I want to do is

I want to make the movie that he wants to make.

That's what I signed on for.

You know, I want to have a bit of his vision.

So I worked I worked really very hard at trying to understand and

have conversations about

what this movie is about.

And of course, the weird thing is that we don't really talk about the movie.

We talk about everything else.

We're trying to sneak up on the subject because ultimately

he has to hand over the job of directing in a funny way.

To me.

and the best directors and,

you know, the people I work with time and time again,

I mean, they do it with,

the they sort of hand it over with great joy, you know,

they get excited about something new coming, you know, somebody

new coming into the party, you know, with Tariq Malik.

I mean, I spent a year before Terry went off to shoot thin Red line.

We were we're just talking about art.

We were talking about philosophy, and we're talking about paintings.

the thing we sort of agreed on really early on.

I had read the script and it was

there was

198 pages, which is a lot of script sucks.

So I said to him, Terry, you know, might not be a really good idea

if we never talked about the script any more.

We just talked about what we want to do with this script.

Well, you know, what's the subtext?

What are the other things we want to do?

And we oh, God, we talked about, you know, it was a year long conversation.

We talked a lot about,

such paintings, you know, the way, the light, you know, in baroque painting,

you know, hit through the clouds, you know that, you know, that ray of light.

I mean, I think I think that's really what those conversations are.

That's what all those directors have in common,

that the the conversation is one where we are trying

to learn from each other and we're trying to learn from the movie.

We're trying to get the movie to tell us

how to make it.

There's certain questions you don't ask the director and you ask the producer.

Like, so, we just had this conversation which involved the largest

symphony orchestra and three choirs working for, you know, seven weeks.

what's our budget on this?

Oh, it's only one day of a string quartet.

Okay, fine.

Good that I know that now, because you don't want to go and narrow

the director's dreams by asking some of those hard core questions.

Just like he doesn't want to go and stop me by going, you know something?

We are basically some miserable little low

budget production with with a lack of imagination.

Our producer is terrible.

The studio doesn't care about us.

But, you know, can you just crank something out?

so that's not the conversation to have.

So reality is, reality is the enemy of,

you know, of imagination of,

you know, the dream we have.

I mean, here's the thing.

Nobody sets out to make a bad movie.

You know, some movies, it doesn't matter how much talent

and how many talented people are involved in it.

you know, they just derailed themselves a bit

because once, once you're working, once the movie is,

you know what?

Once you on that first day of shooting, it just propels itself forward

and you just hang on for dear life most of the time.

Everybody still has

this image of the film composer who's waiting for the film

to be shot, and then the director invites them into a screening room

and shows them his masterpiece, and they discuss music.

That was before we got all digital

and all fancy, and everybody can go and cut a movie basically on an iPhone.

so the idea that you have a finished picture that you can work with

has gone, and the whole mechanisms of how we work has been turned around.

And actually, I think to, to an advantage

where suddenly you get to collaborate before the movie's even made

for instance, on on both Russian Frost Nixon with Ron Howard.

I mean,

it originally started we were supposed to be talking about songs

that we might have in the movie before he went to shoot the movie,

and it turned into two weeks of us actually talking about

what the music can do with some of these songs,

and that was actually really exciting,

seeing shots come in on dailies

that actually were informed by this conversation about the music.

It was, on the one hand and exciting, and on the other hand

it was terrifying because now I had to actually deliver on this,

you know, the grand idea, you know, oh,

I can do this with this shot, you know,

so the whole mechanism of filmmaking

and film composing has shifted because of the way we edit things.

And that the idea of a locked picture and the 12 months you have at the end

has changed.

I mean, we we work hand in hand in tandem.

They're cutting picked, I'm writing music.

I get to head in in that direction

autonomously with an autonomous voice

because otherwise they would be doing it themselves, you know?

So that's the thing.

That's that's the thing you're always hoping for.

That's the thing that you're aiming for.

that you're adding something to the conversation

that wasn't there before.

You know,

I know a couple of directors who go, you know, sometimes it's quite nice.

You know, after everybody's asked me a thousand questions,

I just put the headphones on and I get a bit of Zima.

You know, it's like I'm not.

It's not like I'm answering a question, but I reset the mood

because there's a mood in the piece.

All this a mood and the writing that

just informs the way things can happen.

You know, I'm not I'm not trying to

make more off the contribution than just it's just,

a reflection of just a shadow falling across the light.

Sometimes that informs things in a certain way.

I work away from picture, but at the same time, I've seen the drawings.

I've spoken to the DP.

You know, I before I read the script,

I sort of know where we are heading, but the timeline has shifted off.

How we make movies, how the music becomes part of it, and,

you know, more than one director I work with, you know,

I mean, I really like from Peter Weir, who told me that he used to

always play music on the set and always play music to his actors.

It sets the mood until a certain tempo.

Peter sort of got me into this idea that it's actually quite

nice to have music early so that he can play it on the set.

And for instance, the way I work with Ron Howard as we,

you know, Frost Nixon, for instance,

we met for two weeks before he even shot a single frame.

we're just talking about the music.

And we were coming up with things, and it sort of informs the

the way he gets to make a picture, even though he's the director

and he knows what he wants to do.

And it's quite nice sometimes to be able to just put a set of headphones

on and go, oh, what was that crazy little thing

Hans was trying to work on?

it's nice if a little of that

turns up on the set and it influences things a little bit.