Interview: Composer David Benjamin Steinberg of “Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures”

Posted on February 16, 2016 at 2:32 pm

David Benjamin Steinberg is a composer who recently created the score for a documentary about photographer Robert Mapplethorpe called “Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures.” In an interview, he talked about finding sounds that would complement the striking images in the film.

The directors, Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey had been working on it and doing interviews for almost two years when I saw the first rough cut, which was in the spring of last year and the cut was long, it was like three hours when I saw it and eventually the film would be half as long as that. So I came on two years into their work and then started talking to the directors about what the score approach might be conceptually. We started sending each other ideas back and forth on MP3s and stuff like that. It sort of evolved as the edits got closer.

There were a few storylines that they wanted me to emphasize. There is a motif that goes through the film that sort of always reconnects to this sort of bittersweet piano and that cue accompanies sections where they have to deal with Robert’s relationship with his family, with his father. And then there was also a motif that the directors wanted to convey which was this idea that Robert, who would die very young at 42, that he was in a race against time to do as much work as he could before he died and a race against time to become famous. He was really ambitious, really really ambitious and liked making a lot of money and liked being famous and worked hard to be famous. So there is also this idea of this clock ticking motif — not literally but there is this undercurrent of a race against time. So that was one of the motifs and then another motif sort of evolves which ended up actually being Mozart’s Requiem which connected Robert’s upbringing in the Catholic church and how that played into his work and influenced his work. Ultimately that was a motif that was Mozart’s last symphony and ended up being sort of representing in the film when Robert dies and that is also a recurring theme that is woven through the score.

Patti Smith, who was Robert’s girlfriend in the late 60’s and 70’s, wrote a really great book called the Just Kids. I love her writing and that was really the first research that I did. They actually talked about the music that they used to sit around listening to in their loft in the Village and that started me thinking about what the tone might be even before the directors were giving me more specific ideas about what they thought the score should be.

Most of Robert’s adult life he was in New York City during the 70s and 80s and they wanted to convey the idea that New York was this percolating hotbed of creativity, almost as if there were vibes coming in from all over the place and that New York was really the center, the hub of creativity in that era. There was actually conversation about the idea that the score might sound as if in places when we’re changing the dial on the on a radio station and sort of sequencing the textures were coming in that felt like they were staticky influences. So a lot of the score is textural and ambience, and then as we fine-tuned it, it became wanting to drive the film a little bit more and we ended up focusing on some cues that help to create momentum and keep the film energetic and moving forward.

Steinberg also wrote scores for a documentary about Britney Spears and Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show.

I think I’ve done 20 documentaries and I don’t know that there is a typical sort of scenario. With the Carrie Fisher documentary, my job was to score what was happening in her autobiographical one-woman play, so that was dictated by the material. In the Britney Spears documentary there were like a dozen of her tracks in there, which was kind of nice because I like the balance in that film of score to her tracks. A lot of it was kind of chill pop music, a lot of it was kind of percussive and driving but there was a fair share of ambience stuff in that film as well. Her personality obviously comes through in those pop tunes that we’re familiar with so my job was to just be the fabric that sort of gets things going in between the pop songs.

And he has written music for television series, including the opening jingles. We shared reminiscences of some of our favorite classic television jingles from the days when the jingle was a full-length song.

I love “The Munsters” and “The Adams family.” And “Bonanza.” And I love the “Twilight Zone” theme and the score in the series which I came to find out as an adult was scored by Bernard Herrmann who is one of my heroes. Actually Bernard Herrmann even did some work on “Lost In Space.” I heard some of those scores when I was in New York at the Museum of Radio and Television and it’s kind of amazing to hear his score over the pretty cheesy “Lost In Space” but he was a working guy and I think in the 60s he was picking those kinds of gigs and was doing great work. I have done themes for 30 TV series and when I started doing them I don’t remember, some of them were like close to a minute long and then they got shorter and shorter and now it’s not uncommon for me to do a theme that’s just 7 to 10 seconds. What’s definitely nice about themes is that typically there is no narration.

Steinberg’s first instrument was drums. He played in bands and was a session musician before turning to composing.

I played through my teens and 20s in bands playing drums and then I was making my living really as a session drummer in a way and at the time when there were like these amazing drummers in LA in the session and I started to wonder how I was going to compete with guys like that that were just so unbelievable and that’s when I started thinking about shifting my focus to more writing. One of the big influences on me was Stewart Copeland, the drummer from The Police, who scored “Rumble Fish,” and that score just really knocked me out. That film was a big influence on me with the way that he used he used loops and how he really came up with his own vocabulary, lots of drums but really interesting textures. I still love that score.

Coming up, Steinberg has a new season of “Million Dollar Listing” and a documentary set in Iraq. “That was interesting because I got to use a palette I don’t typically do, with a lot of heavy stringed instruments and I had to really stock up on my sample library.”

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Interview: Roque Banos, Composer of “In the Heart of the Sea”

Posted on December 2, 2015 at 3:32 pm

Roque Baños composed the haunting score for Ron Howard’s new film, “In the Heart of the Sea,” based on the real-life whaling expedition that inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. “I got involved at the very beginning of the shooting,” he told me in an interview. “My first conversation with Ron was before he started to shoot. We talked about many things of course but the most important words were like, ‘Roque, the music in this movie was going to be more than 50 percent of it.’ The music for him is another character of the movie. He treated us as another actor and we had conversations about emotions, the power represented on the whale. He wanted also a dramatic but also a very, very modern sound;, you didn’t want like an old school classic score.” There is one moment in the film where a sailor plays a genuine 18th century song on his guitar, but the score is not based on historical themes.

To convey the peril and passion of the story, Baños used a wide variety of instruments, from ethnic flutes to touch on the force of nature and the low sound, ancestral sound of the didgeridoo to represent the whale. There is an electric cello and orchestral guitars, “but the most unusual one was the percussion. I didn’t want to use the traditional percussion on the action scene. I wanted to use something special so then I asked Ron Howard if I could have everything they used from the ship for the shooting. Then they brought me everything that they had on the ship, even the sails, the sails, ropes, and hull, so we spent two days of recording a pallette of sounds that come from the ship. The whole ship was an instrument. So every percussion you hear on the music comes from the ship that we are seeing the picture. So another one that I will tell you, I was recording the sounds from nature like air, like water, the flow of water, the sound of the sea.” Putting all of those sounds together required a lot of mixing. “The whole thing was a like huge experiment. I didn’t know at the beginning how it was going to come out. I think there is always a way to combine extremely different instruments. I also created a big library of sounds so then I convert them into notes so then it could be used as music.”

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Interview: Johann Johannsson, Composer of “Sicario”

Posted on November 8, 2015 at 7:14 pm

Jóhann Jóhannsson is an Icelandic composer who created the moody, evocative score for the intense law enforcement drama, “Sicario.” Previously, he wrote the score for the Stephen Hawking film, “The Theory of Everything.” It was a pleasure to speak with him about the way the bleak settings and the emotions of the characters influenced his composition and how he used the music to help build the tension of some of the most intense scenes.

This was his second collaboration with the director, Denis Villeneuve, after “Prisoners.” “He involved me very early o,n before he started shooting so I read the script and we had a discussion about the music and then he invited me to the set as well. I was able to go to the set in New Mexico and to sort of observe the locations and the environment of the landscape and to get a feel for the setting.” But it was not until he saw the first cut of the film, “I really started writing basically getting inspired by the images and creating a sound for the film. We talked about the need for the music to uphold the tension and the sort of sense of dread and the sense of moral ambiguity that the characters are facing with these serious moral questions. We see the moral universe fall apart, especially for Emily Blunt’s character. Denny talked a lot about kind of an analogy with a war film. He used this phrase which I liked a lot which was ‘subtle war music.’ It is an interesting contradiction. So we had these percussions on these sort of low tom-toms and those military steel drums as a very big part of the score, creating this kind of throbbing pulse that runs as a thread throughout the score. So that was one thing we talked about, we talked also about a lot of other music coming from below the earth in a way, coming from underground. So the sound of the tunnels and also about the melancholy of the border, the melancholy of the border areas, of the border fence and of the experience of the illegal immigrants and the sadness of the border, and the melancholy of some of the characters like the Alejandro character, the Benicio character, his tragic back story. So there’s a sort of melancholy and sadness also that we had to captured and communicated. So it’s kind of these two poles this sense of tension and melancholy.

He continued: “It is not a war with any heroes. It is kind of a desperate, hopeless war. The music communicates that and it is kind of deconstructive in a way, there are a lot of horns in the score they are just not playing fanfares. They are playing these sort of atonal burst of sounds, a sort of textural burst and flourishes that is the opposite a military flourish.”

When he was growing up, Jóhannsson watched a lot of American and European films and first noticed the scores that Bernard Herrmann wrote for Hitchcock and later for DePalma and Scorsese. “‘Vertigo’ is the best collaboration between a composer and director ever and his music really made me want to write film music. I think his influence can be felt in some way in ‘Sicario’ with my use of low woodwind and these kind of relentless low sounds are something that for me echoes Herrmann very much.”

He says that he drew a lot of inspiration from the landscape as well as the mood and atmosphere of the images. Cinematographer Roger Deakins “showed me a lot of the kind of amazing aerial footage that they had of the desert and of the border area and some of that ended up in the film. That was a huge inspiration for me. And I tend to draw a lot of inspiration from the landscape and from the atmosphere of the images.”

He prefers not to work with synthesizers. “There are electronic elements in there but they are all based on acoustic sources that are treated and processed through effects and through plug-ins and through digital manipulation. But all of it is based on acoustic recordings. So I recorded musicians in Los Angeles and in Berlin where I live. I recorded the orchestra also in Berlin and also in Budapest and it’s a 65 piece orchestra, full string and brass and woodwind and there are number of soloist and some feature players as well.”

One of the tensest moments in the film comes at a scene where a character finally approaches the man he has been waiting to kill when he is at dinner with his family. “Danny and I agreed that it needed something very minimal and something very subtle basically to underline the sense of dread and the sense of tension. And so Danny didn’t want anything complex or anything that was too manipulative. So it was all about scoring it in the most subtle but effective way possible. And I used recordings of a 32 foot organ pipe, the lowest notes on the pipe organ which I recorded in a cathedral in Copenhagen and I processed those sounds as well electronically and combined them with processed orchestra, like the orchestra playing drone, like a sustained note and processed electronically and manipulated. It’s a combination of the many, many elements to create the kind of complex texture textural drone. And a drone can be a very fascinating and complex sound. It’s not just playing one note on a keyboard and sustaining it, it is about creating this very complex sound world that is minimal but has this complexity when you sort of stay with it and when you give it your full attention.”

The music alternates with silence in the opening scene. “We had score right in the beginning when they were driving towards the house and when they burst through the wall and then the rest of the scene has no music and then the score comes back when they discover the bodies and it’s basically a reprise of the armored vehicle music which then develops through high and low strings. And so again it was about evoking dread and the kind of tension and the horror of finding these bodies without it being obvious.”

He will work with the director again on his next project, “Story Of Your Life,” with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker, a science fiction film. “It is a very strong script and really fascinating story which I have only just started working on couple weeks ago so it’s very early days but it’s a very strong project.”

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Interview: Dan Romer, Composer of the Score for “Beasts of No Nation”

Posted on October 18, 2015 at 3:42 pm

Dan Romer composed the score for Finders Keepers, a documentary about two men fighting over the ownership of a severed leg. “I saw the film and I mean I love it. You know I was laughing all the way through, well you know, laughing and crying ultimately in that film. There is a lot of heavy, sad stuff in that movie especially in the story of Shannon. It’s a really interesting story of where one guy who is addicted to drugs and he is able to recover from it and the other guy is addicted to celebrity and he does not recover. When I saw it I knew that it would be a really good project for me and my old friend Osei Essed. I used to be in a kind of bluegrass Americana band in college. I played the accordion in the band. We scored another film that actually just came out now called “The Last Season” which is a documentary about mushroom hunting.

He also wrote the score for the new Idris Elba film about child soldiers, “Beasts of No Nation.” The main character is Agu, played by Abraham Attah. Romer told me that he did not want the music to be too specifically connected to the usual sounds Western audiences associate with Africa. “Cary and I wanted the score to not feel like it had a specific region attached to it. I mean we didn’t want to do like an African percussion sound, we didn’t want to do anything that suggests colonialism instrumentally and we didn’t want to do orchestra. We felt like we kind of just wanted to do vintage 70’s or 80s synth score. We just felt like it didn’t connect to any typical region, it didn’t carry like specific group of people. It felt better that way in a way when you’re kind of are seeing things more from Agu’s point of view where they use a thing to more represent fear, anxiety as opposed to sound of the actual places. But that movie is scored from the point of view of Agu for the most part so we wanted to just kind of highlight what he was feeling as opposed to highlight the sounds that he might have grown up around.” Romer said that the sounds he used included samples he created, wine glasses, tambourines, even the sound of the coyotes that come into his back yard. “I would run out the balcony and start filming them and if you shift them down a few octaves they sound very, very cool. You just hear this kind of yipping. Once one start yipping, twenty start yipping so you just have this sound like going on and they’re very very loud. And they are just like down in this little valley behind our house.”

Romer started playing the piano when he was five “but I gave it up very quickly. Probably because it was so music reading focused. I kind of have a problem with the idea of having to learn to read music right away. It’s kind of like teaching kids how to read words before they can talk. I was seven when I learned to play the guitar. I was taught chord shapes and started playing songs immediately. So I stuck with guitar for a bunch of years and then when I was twelve or thirteen maybe I moved back to piano and I started teaching myself. And then because I was playing in a lot of bands I wanted to learn how to play bass and drums just so I could talk to bassists and drummers. So I learned bass and drum and one I got the guitar right I started playing accordion, mandolin, banjo and whatever I could put my hands on.”

At SUNY Purchase Romer studied music production. He worked with Ray Tintori, providing the score for a short film called Death to the Tinman. Tintori introduced him to Benh Zeitlin, saying that “he doesn’t really know much about music theory or how to play certain instruments but Benh kind of understands how music works in a movie.” Romer and Zeitlin worked together on that film, and then Romer scored Zeitlin’s short film. “And then couple years later he said he had another feature called ‘Beast of the Southern Wild’ and we ended up doing that score too.” He also worked with “Beasts of No Nation” director Fukunaga on a short film called “Sleepwalking in the Rift,” which he describes as “a visually stunning film.”

After Romer saw the rough cut from “Beasts of No Nation,” he worked closely with the team that was bringing it into final form. “We were a little family doing scores together. I did some of the score out in my studio in LA and then Cary and I talked on the phone and decided it would be better if I finished up the score in New York with him in the same place he was working with Pete, the editor. And then I spent maybe two weeks there and we just decided it would be best if I just stayed all the way through the final mix. I‘m from New York and so I was happy to stick around there for a long time and work with them.” He worked with a full orchestra. “I did a bunch of the percussion. I recorded all my samples in LA that I used that I was manipulating. And then I did a little bit of funky drum recording in New York and a little bit of trombone recording and I did some guitar recordings in LA also, some electric guitar. So there’s very few actual performances that just are persons playing music and then we are recording it and that’s that, it’s very manipulated. You can take any part of any sample and then stretch it across the keyboard and play it as a keyboard instrument and then use all different kind of parameters from the manipulations that you have been trying, distortion, reverb, and you can just put one note of a sample you made and it becomes many, many octaves of a new sound of an instrument you never heard before.”

Romer says he enjoys working in different genres. “What I want to do is work with people who I think are just amazingly creative.”

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Interview: Daniel Pemberton, Composer of the “Man from UNCLE” Score

Posted on August 18, 2015 at 6:58 pm

When director and co-screenwriter Guy Ritchie needed someone to write a cool, sexy, sophisticated score for “The Man from UNCLE,” he went to Daniel Pemberton. The soundtrack is one of the best of the year and I had a lot of fun talking to him about how it all came together.

At what stage of the process did you get involved?

I came on just before they started editing. So I normally try to get involved in films early on, kind of work alongside the film makers and actually kind of have an input and it means you write music that’s kind of a) more unique and b) you can experiment more, you can kind of come up with ideas that don’t work and you’ve got time to throw them out and start again and try to find a way through. It also means you can temp the movie with your own music that you write for that movie. And I think the biggest problem with film music is the fact that so many films are temped with music that that has been temped with other films. It’s all dog eating itself and I like to try and break out of that. It’s a lot more work, it takes up so much more time but I think the end result is worth it because you get something hopefully that people kind of listen and go, “Oh, it’s new, I haven’t heard this kind of thing before.”

How do you create something that feels like it fits in the 60’s but is appropriate for contemporary listeners?

The 60’s was one of the greatest eras of music that we’ve had. I think a lot of that was because there was so much experimentation at that time. The rules were still being written. You remember that at the start of the 60’s it was still three chords played on the guitar and by the end there was this explosion of ideas and I think everyone was influencing everyone else. Everyone would try to outdo each other.

Music was such a big part of the culture and it really pushed people to try out new ideas and so it was a very fertile time. And I think we’ve changed a bit from that and it was great to go back and just kind of pick up on all of those kinds of sounds and ways of writing music and ways of recording music that were around then. That’s how I approached the score. I tried to take the spirit of the 60’s. Everyone has got their own version of the 60’s but I got to try to capture what I liked of the 60s to work. Time generally erodes the bad things and the good stuff sticks around. So you want to find all of the stuff you like about those ideas and then try to put your own spin on that.

You have major characters from four different countries in the film: the US, Germany, the Soviet Union, and England. Do you think about that when you are working on the score?

I see it like a kaleidoscope of international color because you are taking all of these influences from different cultures and the style felt very international. Spy stuff is often international, just from traveling the world and seeing different cultures. They are all being experienced at the same time and that means you can have more fun and pinch from all of those cultures. If it was all set in a grimy London street it could have been amazing but it would be harder to pull off those kinds of sounds. At the London premiere I told Guy we should do the next one in China because I want to do crazy Chinese instruments. He was like, “I don’t want to do stuff in China. We could just do Istanbul.” And I’m like “We can do Istanbul. There are loads of great Turkish instruments like kanoon that I’ve worked with before. And I would have so much fun doing like kind of funky takes on that.”

It seems like spy movies always have to have a fancy party scene, and this movie has a great one.

That scene was hard work. I had to jump between Ilya’S story and Napoleon’s story and have it be a groove that everyone liked. It is really hard because you’ve got this beat and you can’t stop it midway through and jump to something else. Guy would want to do the opposite of what you would expect on these scenes normally: “What would be the normal way of doing that scene? Okay let’s not do that. Let’s do the opposite and try to find a different way of doing something you have seen before.”
Because in a lot of ways this film is sort of a homage to all the great 60’s spy films and action films. And one of the great ways to make it feel new is to take some of those ideas and put a new fresh spin on that and music is a great way to do that. I tried loads of different ideas it’s like, “Hush, this is boring. I have heard this like a million times before in other films” and you would be like, “Oh, okay. Let’s try something else if you don’t like it.” And you know what? He was right because we were doing stuff that was conventional and it was only when I started doing really crazy stuff, that’s when it really came to life. What was clear about this film is that I got pushed to write madder and madder music and I like that.

What was the first instrument you learned to play?

The piano. Badly. Technically I learned the violin when I was about five and then I didn’t like it; it was rubbish. I did about two days on it and then I decided I wasn’t musical. And then I became 10 and I found the piano and started writing songs on it and then I sort of went from there.

Were there any kinds of instruments or technology that you used that were kind of retro?

Oh yeah. I mean we did the whole score at Abbey Road, which was kind of the spiritual home of 60’s music. It was where all of the big music records were made. I worked with a guy who is the number one specialist on all of that stuff and all the antique gear. Abbey Road an amazing studio that is still used today and all the corridors are full of old pieces of equipment, literally like old 60’s things that the Beatles probably used. They are just lying in corridors because there was so much of it. We basically commandeered it all for a recording session. There was a tiny control room full of these old tape machines. There was not a lot of space to fit because these things were ginormous and we kind of nicked them all in the recording. So we had old mixing desks, looking something like a nuclear submarine, I mean they looked insane. They were ginormous and you’ve got the mixing knobs that are like these giant levers you pulled. We had old tape machines. We even used echo chambers studio too which is a room where they used to make echoes. That’s a room in the building where you sent sounds into and record the reverb of the room. The room is all tiled and we used that to create some drum echoes because that was how they used to do it in the 60s before reverb units existed. And then the same instruments, we got like vintage 60s harpsichords, guitars, bases. Everything like even the flute, the main flute, there is a really, really old flute.

I wanted to ask you about the flute because it had that great feathery sound.

That is a great flute player called Dave Heath. He normally plays more kind of classical concertos. A friend always says, “You’ve got to meet Dave, he’s crazy, you would get on with him.” I’m sort of like, “Yeah right, okay let’s meet Dave.” So I met Dave and he is crazy and I did get on with him. He would play some stuff and I would be like, “Okay, show me the sort of sounds you can make that no one asks you to make.” So he would play it and he would start making these crazy noises and I would be like, “Hang on, that, what was that?” He would play something and I would go, “Yeah you’re right, let me write something for that.” So I would go away and I would write some ideas and he would play it and I would be like, “Okay, that’s cool.” And we would work like that a bit and try to come up with how we get these unusual sounds for the score. A lot of that is just him playing. I mean we almost killed him during recording, perfectly intense. It’s like a guy running out of breath. Yeah, I wanted to get these bits where he was running out of breath and I would be like, “Keep playing, keep playing!” There would be someone in the control room saying, “Is he all right? Are you going to kill him?” I am like, “No, don’t worry, he likes this sort of thing.” Most of the effects are analog effects. Everything ended up in a computer but it all went through a bit of analog processing. And I’ve got to tell you, analog distortion on a red desk which is one of these old desks is phenomenal. It just sounds insane. It’s like something you never really heard. You are like, “Wow, what is that?”

Follow Daniel Pemberton on Twitter to get updates on his next big score — for “Steve Jobs.”

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