Thomas Newman Quotes

I wake up every morning and I feel like I'm juggling glass balls. I live in Los Angeles, my business is run out of London, and most evenings I'm cuddled up in front of Skype, in my dressing gown, speaking with my studio in London. I travel a lot, my team travel a lot, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Unfortunately, teatime in London is when people in Los Angeles arrive in their offices and pick up the phone.

I met Paul in 1967, Ringo in 1985, and I saw George Harrison in a nightclub somewhere in L. A. I never met John.

I always wanted to be a film composer. So very early on I started collecting soundtracks and paying attention to how movie music works. Actually I'd like to have the opportunity to conduct for the rest of my life.

I studied music all the way through college, but as soon as I graduated from university, I got straight into London and got straight into film music. So really my experiences have been being around the orchestras in London and being around the people who work in film music.

I've worked with 'Dream Girls' here in Los Angeles and have done 'La Cage Aux Folles' in Vegas, traveled to London in 1999 and South America in 2001.

I equate composing with orchestrating. I think my music in terms of an orchestra.

It is hard work composing a song for a film and showing it to makers: 50% of the tune remains the same, and the remaining 50% is changed to suit the script.

I spend a part of the year in New York when based in L.A. and vice versa. It's the only way I feel balanced. Outside of theater and my community of friends out there, my family is still in N.Y., so I have a lot of reasons to spend time out there as well. I guess I'm bi-coastal.

So the first thing I do when I get out of bed, I will check my phone real quick because I live in Korea, but my stuff is split between L.A. and Korea.

When I compose for any film, I always work with the story in mind.

Anytime that you get a chance to go from Washington to L.A., I think it's really just getting used to the three-hour time difference.

I'm used to music as a tool, taking the various elements and then making something completely new out of them. And writing film music is the perfect opportunity to do that, because you can look at the film and then just let your imagination soar.

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.

I just think I started off like many composers, just in different fields of music I was doing. I started doing a lot of commercials and jingles, and then that led to doing TV and then films and games and TV.

I don't like to surprise anyone with the music I compose for a film. That way, there is less trouble later on.

Some producers hang-on to that old cliche that if the audience hears the music, it is no good. I say this is so much talk. Music gives the film another dimension, if it's done with the story in mind.

I'm a hip hop dude who loves scoring for film.

I studied film scoring and orchestration and conducting and arranging in my twenties, and I scored a lot of television shows and other things.

'Rock Bottom Riser' by Smog - I was just in Europe, and my jet lag never really went away. I wasn't sleeping very much. Then one night, my girlfriend saw a Bill Callahan show in L.A. and took a video of that song and sent it to me. I was just listening to it over and over - it was comforting.

The day I signed for Chelsea, I had to go around the world - from Los Angeles to Singapore, through London - and I trained. Difficult.

I tried to score a few films with this composer Brian Reitzell here in L.A. We made a bunch of music we really loved, but we got fired from the film for being too weird.

For an artist, there's nothing better than working with an orchestra.

Bernstein was everywhere - Vienna, London - and everyone admired him. Of course he loved Boston, and he did so many great things at Tanglewood. He was the best example of what a conductor should be.

My first flight was in my early 20s, from New York City to Los Angeles, to shoot a Cherry 7-UP commercial.