Thomas Newman Quotes

Sometimes you write music to a script or while a film is being edited. Sometimes I write without seeing any images, but that's rare. The approach is often based on practical decisions, but I'm interested in the narrative and physical space that music can occupy in a film or play.

So I prefer to do the entire music for a film. And when I'm doing the background score, I can weave the whole film together in terms of themes and songs for a good cinematic feel.

When I was composing for 'The Villain,' I looked at it as a fan and came up with tunes accordingly.

Thrillers rely on certain archetypes and our familiarity with them is quietly driving all of the tension. So it becomes an interesting challenge from the score perspective, to enhance that tension without being noticed, just like those archetypes.

The process of composing the film score for each movie is completely different. They all have their own personality and their own completely different life, but there's never been a formula. Each time, it's a new thing.

Drama seems to kind of surround me.

I had come from an orchestral background, but I didn't really have any orchestral pieces for film.

I have done songs here and there. But I have never scored a film. That is something I would like to do at some point.

Normally, when people compose for film, you give them the film, and they look at it, and they compose it.

I've done some music for films and I really enjoy doing it.

The great composers I worked with along the way, I always felt they were filmmakers more than composers. They would talk about the story rather than the music.

Nothing bores me more than books where you read two pages and you know exactly how it's going to come out. I want twists and turns that surprise me, characters that have a difficult time and that I don't know if they're going to live or die.

I had a talent for scoring films. I just developed it.

When I do the music, I make the musicians listen to what's happening in the film. That way they treat the dialogue as if it was a singer.

In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers.

Every time I see a film or TV show, I think about how that composer made those choices and how that director envisioned music and how that could work onstage or in a film and how you could support that even further by putting lyrics to it.

There's a lot of money in doing score music. You can get a chance to get nominated for an Oscar; I would love to get nominated again.

I don't know - music in film, for me, is not another part of a soundtrack; it is something that also helps to approach a character, to foresee the type of image - you see what I mean - it's like a part of the process.

And I think that I'd be a natural for scoring horror movies.

I start with the music before I start writing the movie. It's such an important part for me, emotionally, to set up the tone for the movie.

I would really love to do the score for movies. Pick the music and work with composers. I don't know if I'd be any good at it, but I love music.

I really wanna get my paws on scoring a film.

I think a melody is a melody. And the way I usually start is I start writing my themes without even writing to picture to just try to find the tone for the movie or the TV show.

I never dreamed of writing for concert or opera. I always dreamed, if I was a composer, to write music for films.

In my films, I either want the music to be very subtle and very buried or just put it right out in front and be super blunt with it.