Color, Melody and ... Perfume
An Interview with Composer Thomas Newman
Thomas Newman received an Oscar nomination for 'Little Women', and both Oscar and Grammy Award nominations for 'The Shawshank Redemption'. Other features he has scored include 'Unstrung Heroes', 'Scent of a Woman', 'The Player' and 'Fried Green Tomatoes'. He talked to the Newsletter about his work and his relationships with editors of all kinds.
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I have one music editor whom I've used exclusively for the last 8 or 9 years. And in fact, my relationship with him becomes really critical. His name is Bill Bernstein. He'll come over, I'll play him things, he'll encourage me about ideas maybe I need encouragement on. He's been a great creative source for me. It's much less about cutting music and watching over it on stage as it is about understanding my aesthetic goals and representing them.
My approach normally is to start from a point of color, meaning do I hear woodwind sounds or do I hear plucking sounds or bell sounds, and I try to build up. I normally start from a point of color as opposed to a point of melody, and that's probably because I figure at some point I'll have to write melody anyway, so it's kind of a given, whereas color is just fun to think about. What would happen if I did this or that, and what would happen if I used this kind of instrument?
I think the idea of hearing ten seconds of a song so we can put it on an album is a real eye-roller for me after a while. I do feel like I'm being manipulated and I do sense the marketing behind it and that's never fun. The other side of it, if it's good, it's great. There are some great songs and they certainly work great in movies. Woody Allen has always used source music very well and you get a sense that it's a comfortable kind of musical backdrop for the territory that he wants to occupy.
In a case like the Hank Williams' song in 'The Shawshank Redemption' - you know, one of the prisoners loves Hank Williams - you hear the song and it brings a smile to your face. It's really wonderful and there are moments like that where I think the source music in 'The Shawshank Redemption' is beautiful. I thought it was utterly appropriate, and I had nothing to do with it.
I've often thought it's not how creative you are, it's how well you perform creatively. It really ends up being how are you going to do this morning, how are you going to do this afternoon. Do you have the energy to work another two hours and if you do, is that going to be time that would have been better spent sleeping so that you could have a fresher start in the morning? It's all about that. That can actually be inspiring though. You know, we all deal with the notion of procrastination and what that means. I think that procrastination is nothing more than incubation and that an idea is not simply born, it's thought out. Whether or not it's conscious or unconscious, you just need time.
You could argue that sometimes more time is not better time. If you have six months to do something or six weeks, it would be interesting to see how much better you did in the six months. It's all a very chaotic process and I think that's what's awful for a composer about presenting ideas; the ideas are born in chaos and the organization starts with chaos. A lot of times I'm forced to present ideas as if they're more organized than I feel they are in my head, and then backtrack. I guess what I'm saying is that it's nice to have time, but time is not necessarily always your friend.
They're going to do everything they can to make the movie as presentable, as close to their vision as they can make it. The terrible thing is, it's a half-way point. It's a non-finished product that's presented as if it's finished so that the studio hopefully can get behind it or they can get high numbers or whatever. What happens after a preview, if it's gone well, is you can definitely feel a narrowing of creative scope or possibilities. All of a sudden a director will say, Well now look, here's why this temp music works so well and this is what we need. It's a little dismaying. You feel a little bit like you're already forced into a direction as opposed to being more initially creative. And that's the most fun time, sitting down with a movie with no music in it and saying, Wow, anything goes, I can do anything. It's fun to do that for three or four days before you realize, well, it's a job and such and such a person is going to want this from me and I have to start curtailing my sense of the process.
If I work on a movie that has my music in the temp then I feel like I'm taking a bite out of my own elbow in a way. At the same time, I'm kind of relieved - Ah well, they like my music already, isn't this great - then, What do I do now, I don't want to repeat myself. It's a bad situation that way because all of us who are creative want to open different creative doors and sometimes we can and sometimes we can't. And certainly previewing movies puts you much more in the category of, O.K., let's go through this door again. It's a tender time for all, the preview time.
There are two or three weeks of pre-dubbing where a director and/or an editor gets very used to these sumptuous and lovely sounds that the sound editor put in. Now a composer comes in for the final dub, and it's a bit like who's going to give up what and, you know, the whole issue of territory.
I love sound. I think sound is evocative and wonderful. There have been times on certain movies where there has been really good interaction between sound and music, and those are great moments where I actually feel like we're working together and not at odds. I did a movie called 'Flesh and Bone' directed by Steve Kloves, the sound editor was Scott Hecker. It was a very quiet movie. It took place in Texas so there were all kinds of just little sounds and the score was very small and eerie. I remember when we started dubbing everyone was a little lost because the movie's content didn't dictate a clear stylistic approach. Was music going to be loud or were effects going to be loud? What was more important, effects or music? And it was interesting to start saying, If we start with a bird sound and then we hear a bell sound, what kind of interplay could take place? It worked out great. But normally, because sound editors don't work with composers, everyone comes to the table not knowing and, to a degree, it's unfortunate.
I think the cause of sound effects and music sparring and fighting is a director who may be wanting to hear it all. It's a big issue of subtraction - the best dub you can have is always subtractive - meaning that if you want to hear sound effects, take out the music. If you want to hear music, subdue some of the sound effects. Find the balance, but don't say, Well I love the music and I love the sound effects and therefore I want them both in. If music sometimes is written to be big, with big bass drums and low contra-basses, and suddenly it's subdued, it loses the very essence of its design. And you think, Well, why is it there at all? In some sequences you have an obligation, if a bus explodes there's an obligation for the sound to follow. So if a composer puts a big musical moment on an explosion, well he's not thinking really about what is probably going to happen - unless you're dealing in a much more subjective filmic realm where you're not going to hear the explosion. And that's where it really boils down to the director. If you have a director who doesn't understand what dubbing is, you can be in big trouble.
A lot of times, directors are more comfortable with sound effects, I think, because sound effects are more neutral creative elements, whereas a composer can come in with either a good or a bad score and really 'perfume up' something. And that can be scary. We tie a bit of a creative ribbon around the package and sometimes that's a nice thing and sometimes that's not a nice thing. Sometimes it's just not good at all.
One of the notions of the job of writing music is - this scene is not working, can you help us. Can you give it a sense of more urgency, more excitement? And sometimes we're forced to do that beyond the realm of our own taste - you say, Well, I don't want to have to sell something that doesn't exist. And yet sometimes that's the nature of the job. A certain music brings a quality to the film that makes it more itself and I think that's always our goal.
What is a melody? It becomes a very abstract thing. What am I trying to do here? What makes something beautiful, what makes something sad? I remember a teacher once asked me, what makes music sad? What a brilliant question. His answer was, it takes on the physical qualities of something sad. Meaning if it's sad, a melody will move in step-wise manner. It will tend to be slower as you are when you're sad; it takes on the physical characteristics of an emotional state. Something in the music rings and carries you back to a memory you have that elicits a feeling. I guess what's wonderful about music is that it's utterly abstract and yet has a great kind of sinuous, subjective emotional reaction.
I like the idea that music can be dimensional, that it's not necessarily playing what's there. And that's fun. Like Jack Nitzche's music for 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' where it's just a weird kind of lifted space, those wine glasses - the glass harmonica - and it just lifts you, you think whoa. It's not beating you over the head and saying this is a weird psycho place, but it's just a kind of lifting, whistling kind of place, and what a neat thing.
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 17, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 1996
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