I think every film is made better by having smart music supervision that's really in tune with the spirit of the visual content.
Whenever I'm writing a script, I'm scoring myself by playing the right kind of music.
I enjoy scenes in films, which do not have the pressure of the story so much... and it flows. I've tried to go in that direction.
When I was composing for 'The Villain,' I looked at it as a fan and came up with tunes accordingly.
With 'Opening Credit,' we were trying to establish a certain tone and put people in a specific mood.
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.
I don't enter into particulars with [Ennio Morricone]. I give him the feeling and the suggestions of the characters.
The thing I don't want to do as a film composer is reiterate. I prefer to subtextualize or to underline rather than to say, 'This is what you should be feeling.'
The tone is so important to a film, and that tone can really make something fall or succeed.
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...
Every movie has three things you have to do - you have to have a compelling story that keeps people on the edge of their seats; you have to populate that story with memorable and appealing characters; and you have to put that story and those characters in a believable world. Those three things are so vitally important.
I try to turn a place on film into a mental state. I always have three or four locations that I repeat and return to in a film, to make it more mythic. But my fiction films are relatively subjective stories, experienced though one character. And that always justifies a little stylisation in terms of landscape.
I do love a dark movie.
The experience of a film is immersive, and music is supposed to underline and help that experience.
To me, one of the main things that a director does is create the tone of his movie.
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.
On 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' I must insist that the sounds of the instrumentation are crucial to reflect what the movie should convey in terms of energy and emotion. It's not just the melody or the tune.
Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.
The background score plays an important role in black comedies.
I certainly don't feel like I am desperate to run away from a film set. I love the hustle and bustle. Everything is sort of mad right before a take, and then it just settles, and you've got these two minutes of a bit of magic. I just love that in film.
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.
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.
In the '90s movies were so serious, and so stylistic and slick that I could not identify with them.
Whenever I start writing, I try to put together songs that feed the feeling of the movie.
You want to say as little as you can and get the most punch out of it, always with the knowledge that people are not in the theater to listen to your music so much as to respond to the movie. You're a part of that experience.
