Mr. Morricone was a boldly adventurous composer who saw himself as a full partner in telling stories on-screen. He thrived with directors known for their visual excess, including Tarantino, Sergio Leone and Brian De Palma.
But Mr. Morricone, whose scores could be gritty, unsettling or exquisitely gentle, was impossible to categorize. His portfolio seemed to span every conceivable mainstream genre, including comedy, drama, romance, horror, political satire and historical epic.
Some examples:
And to understand better the embrace of film and score, see this very knowledgeable essay by Bilge Ebiri about the best pieces as they were used within the context of individual scenes in the films themselves. For example:
Though much of A Fistful of Dollars’ score is quite spare, for the final showdown, Morricone gives us something altogether more melodic and traditional. This ornate trumpet dirge popped up earlier in the film as well, but here, it fits perfectly — as the clouds of dynamite smoke and dust blow away to reveal Clint Eastwood’s character, seemingly back from the dead to exact retribution on Ramon Rojo and his gang. This has become established as one of Morricone’s signature pieces, which is somewhat ironic, as it’s also an homage to Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for Howard Hawks’s John Wayne Western Rio Bravo.
Morricone was a giant in the history of film. May his memory be a blessing.
One of the reasons I wanted to do this film was the opportunity to write an almost-classic score. I love electronic, but I really saw this as the kind of opportunity that does not come up too much, to do a hugely thematic traditional orchestral score. This is exactly the sort of movie where theme and virtuoso orchestration and a big symphonic orchestra is to be celebrated all the way and not dumbed down at all. He’s very comfortable with that and it turned out we had the same idea. It’s slightly more modern, but the classic adventure film lineage is there and to be celebrated. It’s a heartwarming film about four misfit teenagers in these avatar bodies going on an epic adventure being chased by rhinos and panthers. If you can’t pull a big symphonic score out of the cupboard for that, when are you ever going to do it?
Musically it was a wonderful experience to work so closely with John and Valerie. We spent months together while they were editing the movie. I came up with a series of musical theme ideas and we mapped it out over the course of the film. There is a Bobby Riggs personal theme which is scored for a small jazz group with an upright piano and a double bass and a drum kit and then there are a few woodwinds here and there. And then there is a Billie Jean personal theme that reflects the changes she experiences. The colors of that theme change over the course of the film, so in the beginning it is more of an ambient soundscape and by the end it’s actually a full 79-piece orchestra. Her theme evolves until it finally reaches its full scope where there is a big cello in the match with her theme and then at the moment of her victory, there is a full orchestra taking it over. So it was exciting to see the way in which the geography of the musical ideas could live in parallel to the story.
And one of the things we really utilized throughout the film was the evolution of instrumentation. We thought a lot about the musical colors themselves. One of the first things we talked about was how this is a big story set in 1973, so what should the music actually sound like? We used some old-style equipment to try to have the music feel like it might have been recorded in the 1970s. One of our first ideas was: what if I were to write classical style music but written for 1970’s rock band instrumentation, electric guitars and electric bass and drums and an electric rock organ that is woven in through the whole movie. In the beginning, it’s very quiet in the background and in the tennis match you really hear it and it gets focused on. We started with the 70’s band instrumentation and as we explored the film and worked on it together, we started saying, “What if we had woodwinds here?” and “What if we have strings?” The movie responded so immediately to those experiments. The movie wanted the largest scope as the story unfolded.
The crowd was especially excited to hear from Ludwig Göransson, who is scoring Black Panther. He met director Ryan Coogler at USC and worked on his student film, and then again on “Creed.” For “Black Panther” he spent a month in Senegal and South Africa, recording rhythms and instruments, and played some of what he recorded for the film score.
A highlight of the panel was the discussion of rejection. Tyler said it was an chance to hold onto a rejected idea and use it again later, and Isham quoted director Robert Altman: “Any time someone rejects something, its an opportunity to make it better.”
Daniel Pemberton is one of my favorite composers (“The Man from Uncle,” “Steve Jobs”) and I was delighted to catch up with him to talk about the score for the new Matthew McConaughey film “Gold,” inspired by the true story of the rise and fall of a gold miner.
“Gold is a pretty remarkable movie about this character called Kenny Wells who comes from a family of gold prospectors,” Pemberton said. “He is down on his luck, down to his last few bucks but he still believes and dreams he can make it big. So he goes on one last splurge to try and find a gold mine in the Indonesian jungle which he does, remarkably, and then it’s kind of rise with him and what he has to battle with having found that gold mine.” Former Sexiest Man Alive Matthew McConaughey is almost unrecognizable in the film, “with a massive pot belly and balding.”
Pemberton came to the project later than usual, “but it was really great to work with Stephen Gaghan, who I hadn’t worked with before. He was a really great collaborator to work with, really enthusiastic and great at trying to push unusual ideas into the score. It is a quite complicated film to score in the sense that it’s not really like a film you can describe in one line. It’s got everything. There are aspect of the relationship between Kenny and his wife played by Bryce Dallas Howard, there is this kind of caper of trying to find the gold mine, there are two major locations which are the jungle and New York. What I really wanted to do with the soundtrack is take New York to the jungle and take the jungle to New York. Even though they are vastly different there were still similarities. The mountains of Indonesia were not that different to skyscrapers in New York and there are predators in the jungle and we have predators of Wall Street who try and take over what Kenny’s built. And so musically it’s trying to find a way to put all these story strands together and try and do it in an unusual fashion.”
Wall Street is famous for a sound that is musical but not usually heard in music. “I always try to find a way into every film I do. I was watching it again and again and there was a noise that came in the film, that I’ve heard many times before but I don’t think it has been used musically and I was suddenly struck by this sound. It was perfect for the film. It’s the sort of sound of the American dream, of modern capitalism, of making it rich, of New York City and it’s a bell and it has a pitch I like as well. It’s bare metal and shiny and it’s the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. We started trying these ideas, taking that bell and looping it and building beats underneath it and rhythms and throwing that into these early adventures in Indonesia and it was just amazing to have just the right pace for the film and his relentless drive. Kenny won’t stop even if he’s down to his last dime. He always keep going. And that bell has got a sound like someone just hitting away which is like a casino paying out or like people smashing rocks. So, it was a really great sound. So I end up manipulating that a lot, using it like straight, looped, then I speed it up or slow it down. Slow it down and it sounds like this incredible death bell. That is all peppered through the score. It was a really interesting starting block and then I went into using different kinds of bell and gongs as well and then there’s like a real variety of instrumentation, more synthetic for the relationship moments. It’s quite a broad canvas musically on this film.”
