Jon Hopkins Quotes

When you're working on film music, you're only working on 20, 30-minute sections at a time.

I'll probably always write film scores. It's the one place where a composer has almost unlimited resources at his beck and call. When music you have written works well in a film, nothing can beat it.

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

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

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.

I always begin to compose the melody first.

I usually have an idea of how I want a song to sound, but I don't always know how to get there.

When I have to score a film, I watch the movie first and then start thinking about it. And from that moment on, it is as if I were pregnant. I then have to deliver the child, so from that moment on, I think always about the music - even when I go to the grocery store, I think about it.

In any musician's career, a film like 'Manikarnika' becomes a landmark dream project, which is challenging and musically enriching at the same time.

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

I really feel like I've written my most effective music in the instrumental realms.

Composing music for 'Mungaru Male 2' is a big responsibility and challenge.

I would spend about eight months on a song, leaving it alone and going back to it later on. I just kept layering things on, building them up in to epic songs. I let the songs evolve - it's really daunting.

I didn't just sit down and write 'Summer In Kingston' from scratch; it came about from a bunch of songs I already had.

I've held onto little musical sketches that I thought could be useful, and the more time that I spend doing them for each film, then the more I have to draw on.

I've always worked on all different types of music, some with specific project goals and deadlines and some not. Sometimes I would write a piece of music that is almost like a film score or weird electro pieces, wherever the muse took me, and I still do that.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

When I write a tune - and it's been like this for many years - I always hear in the back of my head some sort of vague, orchestrated, fully fleshed-out big-band version of the song with other parts going on.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don't understand why this happens in the movie industry.

We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics are and what you want to say and go from there.

Music is really all about experimentation and lots of trial and error. It's just mind-numbingly boring until you hit on something that works well.

Well mostly in song writing my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes.

I'm definitely responsible for coming in with some basic chord changes, or ideas. Everybody in the band looks to me to come up with the basic seed, so it's not very productive to come in with nothing.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.