Score Creation Quotes

In the film work, I love to work mainly from the script and from talking to the directors, so a lot of the music, big portions of the scores that I've made, have been composed before the movies were even shot.

When I was working on the music for this I didn't want to just use pop songs as the score - most movies do it and I've done it before.

One of the first things I want do when I start writing music for a film is to create its own sound world, its own music world.

There's been a great development with scale on TV, but my approach is always the same across projects, whether it's a video game, a movie, or a TV show: I always try to set up my sounds and my themes. I really try to stay with the characters and do the storytelling through the music.

With 'Hannibal,' it's like reactive scoring so I don't get ahead. I don't read a script; I don't want to know what's going to happen until its happening in front of me and I'm able to have an instrument in my hands that I'm playing to make some kind of a map, some sort of tonal map, that I can then build on.

What I do is give Ennio Morricone suggestions and describe to him my characters, and then, quite often, he'll possibly write five themes for one character. And five themes for another. And then I'll take one piece of one of them and put it with a piece of another one for that character or take another theme from another character and move it into this character.... And when I have my characters finally dressed, then he composes.

I would do the occasional score. I thought it was the most thrilling thing. It was instant. You made the music and they played it right away to millions of people. I found it thrilling.

When someone asks me to do a score, I look at the picture two or three times. I never watch the rushes to pick up the mood as quickly as I can. If it's something I want to do, just watching the film will start the wheels turning.

When I don't know what the music is going to be for a scene, I imagine some sort of orchestration going on and damned if they don't usually come up with a similar kind of thing.

I've been extremely lucky to work with Elmer Bernstein, Howard Shore over the years, but I've always imagined films with my own scores, because I don't come from that world or that period of filmmaking. And so how could I make up my own score on a film like this where it isn't necessarily made up of popular music from the radio or the period; it isn't necessarily classical music. But what if it's modern symphonic music?

I score everything by hand on manuscript paper and then make copies.

I think after everything in the whole process of filmmaking, temp scores are great if you use them for what they're good for, if you use them for that early stage of support for things.

I tend to spend quite a lot of time on the film scores that I do.