Alessandro Nivola Quotes

You have to be a really talented writer if you're trying to encapsulate a news story with a song and have it live after the event. I don't have the focus to do that, really.

When I watch films now, theres more of a musicality to the way the film are written.

I think I learned more about writing scores for Broadway by making mix tapes in the '90s than I did in college. You're learning about rise and fall and energy and tempo shifts. You're showing off your taste and your references. You're trying to be witty by - through placement of music you didn't write.

I love scoring. Putting music to picture is a rewarding challenge and one that relies on interpretation of emotion - as in, what is the pivotal feeling in a scene and which character's point of view is driving it at any given moment?

The exciting thing about doing art for someone else's story is how I can translate their world through pictures, and that's always a pretty big challenge.

I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.

With songs I almost see the images, see the action, and then all I have to do is describe it. It's almost like watching a scene from a film, and that's what I go about trying to catch in a song.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

Making an authentic film about anything is difficult.

I'm just looking to explore every medium to express my talent, but I think mostly it's going to be a focus on features.

There's just something creatively fulfilling about watching a movie and writing a song for it because it helps you put on another pair of shoes.

I am open to working with new directors as long as the script excites me.

I feel music-making is more like a psychological game; each film has its own colour that needs to be identified and addressed.

I'm asking questions that most people are asking, but just putting a melody or a song to it.

When you write comic books and when you are writing for television, you're not writing the end product, you are writing notes for someone else to make the end product essentially. My scripts are just directions for the artist to draw pages and the pages are what is seen. I kind of feel like it's a safety net, you're able to hide behind the art to a certain extent, and in television you're able to hide behind the actors and the production, but with novels, your words are it

I want to do film and TV. I want to make good stories. I want to write; I want to be more involved.

I like every part [of the film process ] except the business and admin stuff. The initial idea. Writing. Re-writing. Casting. Directing, Editing. If I had to chose I'd say writing, followed by putting music on the picture. That is magical.

It is hard to do a film that wants to say something because, unfortunately, most everything has been said.

As a musician, you write and make music as you go. It's definitely in a great sequence. When you release songs, you think, "Let me make sure this goes with this so it's like a story."

I think that being a film composer, someone that gets it and actually applies the music, it allows you to open up a spectrum of feeling. You're now allowed to approach the music from an audio visual perspective.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

I look at the film without any music or sound. I try to grasp the story from the screenplay. I try to write to the novel or book if there is one. I try to create music that's honest and true to my heart for the story.

It all depends on the directors. Working closely with a director is the main job of a film composer. Interpreting what he perceives as a color, an emotion or mood is very abstract. A director tells you something he wants and then you have to run back...

I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.