"The hardest thing in film scoring is to know when to start and when to stop" with author Tim Greiving | The Movie Racket

24:46Michael Phillips:And pure movie magic. Pretty flattering. Think things like this make us look pretty good in the public eye. Beep, beep. Coyote vs. Acme. In theaters August 28th. Tickets on sale now. Rated PG. Here's what Jerry Goldsmith has said Sparing judicious music is really what makes it effective Look at Nolan and composers like Hans Zimmer And Ludwig Goranson working with Nolan As kind of, I guess, the extension The logical contemporary edition Of Max Steiner on King Kong Korngold on Robin Hood Okay, I will meet the challenge of just a lot of music certainly Williams with Star Wars and other franchises he's worked on but especially that and I think there's something I'm not buying with particularly in the score like Oppenheimer which you know won the Oscar Goranson's already won three Oscars but that's a film that is the whole point is to kind of just kinesthetically keep this thing twirling forward moving forward and the score is there for two and a half hours of that three-hour film.

25:59Michael Phillips:Oppenheimer wanted to own the atomic bomb. He wanted to be the man who moved the earth. He talks about putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle. Well, I'm here to tell you that I know J. Robert Oppenheimer, and if he could do it all over, he'd do it all the same. You know he's never once said that he regrets Hiroshima. He'd do it all over. Why? Why? Because it made him the most important man who ever lived. Is that really the only way you can score a film like that? Oh, of course not. I mean, to point to something like Chinatown. I mean, I'll actually tell you, since you mentioned King Kong, the first, I think, 20 minutes of King Kong has no music.

26:38Right, right. Takes us time. There are plenty of examples of even scores we think of as being wall to wall or all over the place that there's lots of empty space on those films. there's lots of moments in the first Star Wars that aren't scored as well actually strangely enough.

26:52Michael Phillips:I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough. What is it? Your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age. So there's not one right way to do it I think people like Nolan and his composers like to overwhelm the audience in every way, overwhelm them visually, overwhelm them musically. And that's something a lot of audiences sign up for and want to have that experience. Right. That's not the intention of Patton or Chinatown. That's a much more austere, realistic kind of social drama approach.

27:43And so many of those directors from that era came out of either television or the stage. A lot of early television really was just an extension of plays. And you don't have music just pounding away all the time. You use it very judiciously and sparsely. so I think some of my favorite movies from that year are like The Conversation, the Coppola movie. David Shire, beautiful score, my gosh. Solo piano.

28:16I mean, it's not just small in terms of how much music there is, but it's only one instrument. I love the scores by Michael Small for Pecula, like Clute and the Parallax View, and you mentioned Goldsmith and during that year he was doing a lot of the same thing. It wasn't just that there was less music. It was like really quirky, small ensembles performing the music. It wasn't a big 90-piece symphony orchestra. Right, right. So you weren't overwhelming the audience in either way, either with the amount of music, the volume of music and the tonnage of instruments performing the music. And you could point to John Williams as sort of the reason that went away with Jaws and Star Wars, and you could blame him for ending that era.

29:02Because at that point, a lot of directors just thought, I need music all throughout my movie. Otherwise, it feels naked. It feels awkward. Music's going to help kind of keep the thing moving along. And it does. I mean, music, it performs all these functions. Part of it is just kind of guiding the watcher, giving this sort of current underneath the images to just make it move. a lot of times movies or scenes without music will feel 10 times slower than if you put music in there so there's all these reasons for putting a lot of music on your movie and some of them i think are not healthy or are based out of fear or based out of like an inability to trust your audience to hang with you and hang with this scene without being kind of goosed along by score yeah

29:47Michael Phillips:and frankly i think to half the time to just energize a scene that lacks energy and you just have to kind of I think what I found reading up on this a little bit for this talk is it's a pretty interesting debate about as a composer am I dramatizing what is happening and what that person's primary emotion at the moment is or the or just or kind of finding a corollary to the actual action we're seeing or maybe and but Or are we talking about something that is underneath all this and, you know, the subject these two people are avoiding or the thoughts they cannot express? And a lot of the best film composers seem to be drawn to that more elusive task of like, how do I deepen this a little bit?

30:43Michael Phillips:It's not really like just covering up what might not be there in terms of filmmaking. It's really more about like, let's take this seriously enough to kind of get in there. And I think Williams and many others knew that, knew that, and took that challenge on. Agreed. And I, you know, it's not a binary thing where it has to be one or the other. The music is sort of commenting on the action or it's telling us something that we're not seeing. And the best scores are probably a mixture of both elements happening together. Right. You mentioned Bernard Herrmann, who I think was really the first composer to explore subtext and psychology and neurosis and all the things that the people are not saying in Hitchcock films and things like that and making an art out of subtext.

31:36And Williams, I think, struck a really brilliant balance between the kind of Steiner Korngold operatic, here's what's happening in this scene, here's a kind of musical definition of who this character is, but giving us depths as well, and what he calls under-dialogue, these kind of unspoken things that maybe only music can touch on.

32:11Michael Phillips:I'd like to go through a couple of categories, if you don't mind. Let's do it. I'd love to kind of just hear like a favorite or two of your picks for kind of those big and tall music foreground scores that you may have heard more recent or way back. So, I mean, I think the masterpiece in maybe the magnum opus of the Spielberg-Williams collaboration is E.T. It's not my personal favorite, but it is their, I think, their masterpiece. And that is just a essential example of what we're talking about. big operatic music forward, music leading the emotions, telling you what to feel and when to feel it and all that.

32:49And I think it's a perfect example of that.

32:59We talk about Goldsmith, who talked about Spare and Judicious, and yet, and partly because of Williams, he also went the full opera route himself, starting on things like Star Trek the motion picture. Yeah. Which I think is an absolutely gorgeous, masterful score. And it's him sort of responding to the Star Wars phenomenon, but in his own unique Jerry Goldsmith way. He's using this thing called the blaster beam. It doesn't sound like a Star Wars knockoff, but it's this big, grand, romantic, operatic score.

33:38that he then did a bunch more in that vein in the 80s. And I think he did them as well as anybody. So those are some examples of that approach that I love.

33:47Michael Phillips:How about a couple scores that are very different, work more in the goldsmith dictum of spare and do just, and just, you know, whoever they're from. But just so you know, like maybe less, but also just a very different kind of like maybe intention. Well, I brought up the conversation earlier, the David Shire score, and I would nominate that Because I just think what you can do with a solo piano and judiciously spotting where to put the music, and it conveys the loneliness of the main character, Gene Hackman's character in that, and the melancholy without it being really on the nose. And I just think that's such a perfect example of that kind of scoring.

34:36One more recent one I thought of is the movie Jackie, with a score by Mika Levy. Fantastic, yeah. I love that movie, and I love that score, and it comes in funny ways, and I think a lot of that was actually the director's choice of where to put music, as a lot of these things can be. It's not always the composer's choice, but it comes in and out the way I perceived it as these kind of unpredictable waves of grief. So sometimes there's just this heavy surge of music, and then it just goes away. So it's not scored to wall to wall, and it's a quirky kind of ensemble playing the music, but it's a great more contemporary example for me.

35:13Michael Phillips:Yeah, yeah, I want to revisit that. And also the score for Under the Skin, which is just as sort of out there and I don't want to call it non-linear because it's not trying to be linear or non, but it's a very challenging score for a very narratively challenging picture, Jonathan Glaze's film. A handsome face. Aye. That's gorgeous. Do you think I'm pretty? Aye, you're gorgeous. Do you? Aye, definitely. Good. I've never heard sounds like that. And really, just to say that, I think is, you don't get to say that too often. The movies, I've literally never quite heard that sort of, in her case, just that sort of manipulation of sound before.

35:57Michael Phillips:And it's perfect for what's going on in that science fiction film. But yeah, love it.

36:06Michael Phillips:I would mention, I think for the big, I can never find anything to equal or crowd up my affections for Alex North's Spartacus.

36:28Michael Phillips:when you listen to the you know the overture the whole opening credit sequence all of it and then the main love theme which is god the most devastating love theme i think

36:53Michael Phillips:I don't know. That's my feeling about Spartacus. I can't talk about it rationally. It's a great nominee. Okay, I love that. And for small, yeah. I also think Goldsmith's work on Chinatown is fascinating in that he was brought in late because they threw out the Philip Lambrose score to Chinatown, which if you ever hear any of that, have you heard that original score? I have, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, different, you know, kind of a cheesy, melodramatic. And Goldsmith had 10 days and resisted the producer, Robert Evans, one suggestion to like, well, make sure it's period, 1937. And Goldsmith just sort of said, why?

37:30Michael Phillips:Why do I have to stress the time it's set in when we can see it in every frame of this film? So it's not like he scored it with an aggressively contemporary sound, i.e. early 70s. But it's timeless, and boy, that's stuck. I mean, that to me feels maybe like William's achievement with Star Wars. Maybe Goldsmith made Chinatown better than it is.

38:12Absolutely. And Chinatown is such a perfect example for less is more. And also that maybe overthinking a score can hurt it. And if you only have 10 or 11 days to write it, you might actually come up with something brilliant. But it's a great film and a great score.

38:29Michael Phillips:John Williams, as your most recent sort of and sort of most conspicuous project in this realm of film scoring, this biography that you wrote that was based on many hours with Williams that you did not even know you were going to get originally, right? Yeah. I mean, the short version of the long saga is that I worked on it for about two years before he even agreed to speak to me. So it started out with no access, and then I ended up getting a kind of unprecedented access to him, which transformed the book, obviously. But it's kind of interesting doing it as a purely archival research project to start with and sort of building an oral history around him and going back to quotes and interviews he'd given over the years and then sort of turning at 180 and inviting him into the story and getting all this rich insight and amazing stories and quotes and personality that came right from the source.

39:30Michael Phillips:So why did it take that long to get his approval to, I mean, I can imagine he's a private man, Right. In many ways. He's very private. And he'd always resisted any attempts by anyone who wanted to write any kind of personal life story, biography, documentary, anything of the sort. So, I mean, I think there's different reasons for that. But basically, he's a very private person is the answer. and I think the timing of it I he started talking to me the year he turned 90 which was a year that a lot of people were sort of making him look at his legacy and he was sort of accepting that that was the natural course of things by that time of your life and his talking to me also coincided with Steven Spielberg producing a documentary about him and Spielberg's the only person he would have said yes to for that.

40:19So it was a real luck of timing and confluence of events, I think, that led him to acquiesce. So what exactly got Williams to say yes to your request? Well, I initially approached his management, kind of went through the proper channels, and was given a very pretty immediate no, thanks, but no thanks. He doesn't want to do that. And my other strategy, though, was I just kept working on the book. I had a contract from the publisher, Oxford University Press. I was interviewing people around him, so colleagues, musicians, directors. And I think he was hearing back from those people to some extent and not, I guess, not anything too worrying.

41:01And I also wrote, because I never actually asked him directly about this, I had his home address and I wrote him not one, but two actual letters a year apart from each other while in the midst of working on the book. And I think it was just, like I say, him turning 90, Spielberg doing this documentary, other things sort of, the thing he said to me the first time we met was, I realized you were going to write this book regardless, so I figured we should get to know each other a little bit.

41:31Michael Phillips:Was it a Williams score that got you interested in this whole idea of film music being a component of the moviegoing experience that like was, you know maybe a gateway drug or something for you yes it was so this is will age me young wise but i i heard the score for jurassic park before i saw the movie as a child and it was the music that really like turned me on and then it was my cousin who explained to me who john williams was and i realized i had sort of been unconsciously aware of him via star wars indiana jones jaws all this other stuff i just wasn't cognizant of the fact that there was some person out there writing this music.

42:12And so I started collecting his scores and started paying attention, you know, developing this awareness of what film music was doing in every film I watched and slowly sort of grew in my appreciation of other composers and just have been kind of monomaniacally obsessed with film music most of my life. But it's all because of John Williams.

42:33Michael Phillips:Tell me where you think you'd like to see film scoring as a key component to why we go to the movies, whether we know it or not. Where would you like to see it go in the next 10, 20 years? It's interesting. You talked about this coming in cycles. And I think there was a reaction to the kind of Steiner, big orchestral operatic approach in the 60s and 70s. And then there was a revival of something akin to that with Williams and others. And then there was a reaction against that. And Hans Zimmer sort of represented a reaction against that in terms of moving towards a more synthetic kind of pop sensibility.

43:14Right. And then we've had this other kind of reaction to that. And people like Johnny Greenwood, Trent Reznor, Mika Levy, kind of people outside of the box in terms of traditional film scoring. And they don't come out of film scoring programs in school. They're rock musicians or recording musicians who are bringing a different kind of offbeat approach, which I like. I mean, of late, I've just enjoyed being surprised by a score and not feeling like it's on autopilot or it's something that's, you know, I've heard a million times before. I don't know where we're going. I mean, Ludwig Goranson is sort of, I don't know if he's the bellwether, but he is sort of at the top of the heap right now in terms of the demand, the Oscars, the attention.

44:01however you feel about his score for the odyssey or oppenheimer or tenet or any other films he's done people really respond to his scores and they they talk about them and they they listen to them on their own so he's he's definitely touching a nerve right and i really like him a lot but he's an interesting heir to the williams philosophy the williams sort of tradition and yet he comes out of hip hop and he has all these other influences and there's so much kind of sound design as part of the Odyssey score that you would never hear in a Williams score. So it's this interesting mix of old and new.

44:39As far as where we're going, the trend that I really like is directors like Nolan or Damien Chazelle or Ryan Coogler with Gloranson who want music to be part of the movie from the ground up. and the music starts getting written before the film's even shot and they're playing it on the set and the music's informing how certain scenes are constructed. We've sort of been moving in that direction with certain directors and composers. And I love that. I think that's, that is the evolution of film scoring, where you're not just bringing someone in at the last minute and they're sort of painting on a layer of music to this thing that already lives and exists and might even have kind of a reference soundtrack that you're sort of having to work around or imitate or something, but rather music is sort of being written as the film's being written, essentially.

45:29Michael Phillips:Right, right. Which I think leads to more idiosyncratic scoring approach. If the music's not just coming in late and having to deal with other reference points, it gets to just evolve with the creation of the film. I think that's a great way forward for the art of film scoring. I also think this is an unusually good time for film scoring when you look at everybody you've mentioned so far. Johnny Greenwood, I don't think there's a more beautiful score in the last 20 years than Phantom Thread. And there will be blood before that for Paul Thomas Anderson as well. I think Michael Ables is a stunning new, not new anymore, but a rival.

46:09Michael Phillips:He couldn't get arrested for years. And then Jordan Peele found a little YouTube clip of his music and hired him for Get Out. And then at the Oscars that year, Spielberg came over, shook Jordan Peele's hand and said, that composer, that's your John Williams. You know, you stick with that guy.

46:34Yeah, and they are in some ways the modern version, some of these different, like Paul Thomas Anderson and Johnny Greenwood, Ryan Cougar and Louis deGornson, Peel and Ables. They are sort of the heirs to the Spielberg-Williams or the Herman Hitchcock kind of duo where you associate one's aesthetic and style with the other. They're kind of inseparable and they work in tandem so well together. and the composer is invited to be part of the creative process in an outsized way. That's an old tradition, but I just want to see more of that where music is not an afterthought and music is not you kind of bringing in a gun for hire to try to do your best imitation of what's on the temp track.

47:22That's where film music has gotten really dull and boring. But you have these two really creative people coming together to make this third thing in a way that it's not going to sound like John Williams or Max Steiner or anybody else. It's going to be its own animal, but it's the result of these two powerful artists working together. So that's the way forward. But it's always been the best way that films have been scored, I think.

47:50Thank you for joining us today. Oh, it's such a fun thing to talk about this with you.

47:59Michael Phillips:The Movie Racket is produced by Joe Dessau and Michael Phillips, Adam Kempinar and Sam Van Halgren, executive suite producers. Thanks to Tim Grieving for his time and insights. His book, John Williams, A Composer's Life, is available everywhere. And you can find out what else Tim is up to on his website, timgrieving.com. That's T-I-M-G-R-E-I-V-I-N-G dot com.

48:30Michael Phillips:I'd love to get your thoughts on your favorite film scores. Write me at movieracket at filmspotting.net. I'm waiting. Do it! We're going out today with the last few bars of The Bad and the Beautiful Theme by David Raxon. I'm Michael Phillips, and this is a Film Spotting production.

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