Interview: “Elysium” Composer Ryan Amon

Posted on August 5, 2013 at 8:00 am

Elysium-Soundtrack-297x297Ryan Amon talked to me about the YouTube video that led to his first feature film score, in this week’s “Elysium,” directed by Neil Blomkamp (“District 9”) and starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster and how two notes create a mood.

How did you get involved with this project?

I had been doing trailers and before that I was an assistant on reality TV, so I had a lot of experience writing on deadline, but never anything like a film, which is a very different approach.  I was living in Bolivia, where my wife’s family is, on a different continent when I got the email from Neill Blomkamp, who was in Vancouver.  He had come across a YouTube video that a trailer music fan had posted.  Someone had taken one of my tracks and posted it.  Neill must have been searching through and found it somehow.  And I got a one-line email: “Is this you?”  I thought one of my friends was playing a prank on me.  I’ve got very funny friends who have done things like that in the past.  So I didn’t think too much about it until his assistant Victoria followed up, and I thought, “This is real.”  Then I got nervous.  He was still in the early stages but a few months later, he got in touch by Skype, with me still in Bolivia, and he talked about the film a little bit and his interests and my interests, and he offered me the job.  You can’t turn that down!  It was awesome.

When you have to write music for a story set in the future, how do you approach it?  Do you try to project ahead to what kinds of instruments or genres will be used?

That’s tricky.  I thought a lot about that one.  His approach on this was not letting me see much of the film.  I was working while they were filming.  He didn’t want to let me read the script or see any footage.  I had a few sketches of Matt Damon’s character in his exo-suit.  So I had a few images but basically knew nothing of what was going on.  My direction was to write something dark and then something light.  It was a huge blank canvas for me.  It was really hard but it was also very liberating and gave me a lot of room to experiment.

As for the future thing, who knows what music will sound like in 150 years?  I knew I wanted to keep it relevant.  Sometimes using too many synthetic elements, too many synthesizers, could backfire.  In the 80’s, all those synthesizers sounded cutting edge and futuristic, but now they sound dated.  So I wanted to steer away from that and bring in more orchestral elements.  I took some traditional instruments, even piano strings, violin strings, and I scraped them metallically, and tried to create a sound that wouldn’t feel dated, even if we watch the film 20 or 30 years from now.  We recorded in Abbey Road with the London Philarmonia.  My first picture, and I’m in Abbey Road with a full orchestra!

Did you take a picture like the cover of the Abbey Road album?

Yes, we had to do that!  It was freezing, in January, but it was still fun.

Before you were in Bolivia, where were you? What is your background in music?  

I never really had that much interest in the classical side of things.  I was classically trained and played piano and played the saxophone in a jazz band.  But I was more interested in science, in biology.  The music fell into my lap a little bit.  I promised myself I would not try to do music professionally.  But when I was in college I ended up enjoying coming back to my dorm room to play my guitar or I would write music on the piano instead of going to class.  And I said, “Why am I enjoying this more, when it used to be such a struggle?”  I think when you get older you are more comfortable embracing the areas where you have a gift, start to appreciate it more and want to explore it.  I went to the McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul to learn the technical things and got an associate degree.  It was very new, more of a guitar school than anything back then.  They only had a songwriting course at that time, so I studied film scores on my own, by ear, watching a ton of movies to see what worked and what didn’t.  That’s what I was trying to train myself to do, to be more cerebral.

I entered a competition through BMI called the Pete Carpenter fellowship that allows one or two students every year to go out and shadow Mike Post in his studio in Los Angeles.  He teaches us the way he approaches TV shows and we get to score a few scenes as practice.  That was invaluable.  And I knew that was what I wanted to do.  I went back home, packed up everything I had in my car — and it all fit — and went to LA.  I worked at IKEA and Virgin Records, and then through BMI I got a job as an assistant for a group that was doing reality TV.  So that was a fast and steep learning curve.  We had to produce at a very high level but also very, very quickly, two to three tracks a day for the show.  It goes into a library and the editors get to place it where they want to.  The most valuable thing was learning to use the software.

How do you begin to work on a movie score?

In writing a film score you have to be more of a psychologist than a musician.   I approach it a bit differently.  I sit at the keyboard and play intervals, just two notes at a time.  These two notes, played on one instrument, what emotions does that evoke for me?  I make a list of vocabulary words, as many as I could, of what these two notes felt like.  I realized that a lot of music can be written from our background in music theory.  But I felt it could be much open than that, a much wider spectrum of colors and instruments.  So I always try to write from someplace deep inside, not to sound cheesy, but I try to write from my heart and not my head.  In a way it’s cerebral, but I’m like channeling it.  For dark and light it’s almost like not having an image in front of you can help sometimes.  You can picture the whole world in your mind the way you do when you read a book.  It’s fun to do that musically — what would light sound like?  What would dark sound like?

So when you saw it with the footage, how did that go?

It was a little bit cringe-worthy to me.  The original idea was that I would do some of the music first and they would use what I wrote as a temp score, and then we were going to manipulate it and see what’s working and what’s not.  Sometimes Neill likes experimentation and wants you to go off and do your own thing, but sometimes he knows exactly what he is looking for and he will push you to search for it until it clicks.  So there was a lot of music written for this film.  I did over 200 tracks and they chose a handful.  When I saw the temps with my music I thought, “Oo, that’s completely different than what I thought it would be — it looks different or the editing is slower or faster than I thought.”  So that was terrifying at first, but as we went along I flew up to Vancouver to work with the post-production team for the last few months.  It was definitely a surprise to see some of the matches between the music and the visuals.

What are some of the movies that inspire you?

My favorite movie was always “Jurassic Park.” That film score by John Williams is perfect and Spielberg is such a great story-teller.  I love “Braveheart” and I would love to do a movie like that in the future, very raw and the power comes from traditional instruments.   I love that old sound from the old world, what it might have sounded like in those days.  I love hybrids, too.  That’s a little bit of what I became known for when I was doing trailers.

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Happy 70th Birthday Mick Jagger!

Posted on July 26, 2013 at 5:14 pm

Mick Jagger turns 70 today!  Happy birthday Mick — celebrate him by viewing two of this summer’s best documentaries, “Muscle Schoals” and “20 Feet from Stardom,” or some of these other great screen appearances:

Gimme Shelter The third in the rock concert trilogy that documented the late 1960’s journey from the innocence of “Monterey Pop” to the hope of “Woodstock” and then the Altamont, where a disastrous decision to have the Hells Angels provide security at a free Rolling Stones concert led to tragedy.

Ned Kelly: The True Story Of Australia’s Most Legendary Outlaw. Jagger plays the title character, the real-life Australian outlaw (also played by Heath Ledger in a later film).

Performance This trippy, non-linear crime drama was directed by Nicholas Roeg.

Shine a Light Martin Scorsese directed this documentary with sensational concert footage.

The Rolling Stones: Crossfire Hurricane Covering half a century of the Rolling Stones, this documentary has current interviews and archival footage to make it the definitive history — so far.

And I love this SNL skit with Jagger doing karaoke!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0osV7A3C5VU
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Interview: Heitor Pereira, Composer of “Despicable Me 2”

Posted on July 5, 2013 at 9:00 am

Heitor Pereira is a Brazilian musician and composer who has gone from Simply Red to Hollywood, creating movie scores for films like “Madagascar,” “The Holiday,” and “Bee Movie.”  He talked to me about the challenge of scoring a sequel with a very distinctive original theme, creating new themes for the new characters, which classic movie he’d like to have scored, and why it is important to “tease the ears.”

How did your conversation about this movie begin?

In the lines of, “Let’s not forget what we’ve done so far. Let’s pick it up from there and go with it. Musically, it means that the melodies for Gru and the girls that existed in the first one became slightly different because the emotions of those characters are different. That’s one of the beautiful things that fascinated me the most — you can keep creating new versions of the same thing. You can let the picture tell you what the style is, it will never end. And there were new characters. El Macho had the influence of Mexican music. Lucy had more of a tango. And the minions that become bad — their theme had to become more threatening and menacing.

I was glad to hear “Prettiest Girls” from the original again in the sequel. It’s perfect for the scene.

That’s how I got this movie. Pharrell had asked me to do an arrangement of the song to see how we could stretch it. This will be forever the melody of the girls. Every melody can be made different, kind of new to the ears, even though we are in the same movie, with the same notes. I love the way the melody can become so many different things.

Tell me more about creating new themes for the new characters.

ElMacho-Eduardo-BenjaminBratt-DespicableMe2El Macho being like a Mexican wrestler, definitely I had to bring all that Mexican music with a bravado, him being a villain, it had to be strong and powerful and big. When Gru means business, he means business, and the villain has to be very strong to fight him. The music had to give us that strength. Mexican music is so colorful. It can be sad and in one second it can be completely joyful. And animation — that’s one of the things it asks from you most as a musician. You have to be able to turn sadness into laughter and happiness into tears.  Characters like El Macho and Lucy give you enough emotional area to draw from because they change a lot in the story-telling.  All that has to be told with the same melody but several variations.  If you pick styles of music that have their essence — Mexican music you have mariachi, you have Veracruz, you have banda.  For Lucy, I chose a tango.  But a tango doesn’t necessarily have to be all serious, calculating.  It can be emotional, in love, comedic.

Is it a challenge to integrate songs into the score?

Unless there is a reason in the story, you don’t want it to be a surprise, so you have to tease the ears with what is going to come in the song before it begins.  That’s why I love collaborating with pop artists, like I did with Jack Johnson in “Curious George.”  It’s something I understand from my time with Simply Red and working as a session musician.  It’s such a beautiful thing, it just completes the movie in such a special way, a special moment in the story-telling, not just plugging an artist.  You have to feel that it is only that artist, only that song, that belongs in that moment and tells that part of the story.  I love my job!

If you could go back in time and write a score for any classic movie, what would you pick?Despicableme2-lucywilde-kristenwigg-300-01

I would pick a hard one.  I would like to rewrite “The Mission.”  It was from the perspective of the Jesuits and the conquistatdores.  I would love to do it from the perspective of the indigenous peoples, because I am Brazilian.  Or “The Third Man.”  It was so minimalistic.  What if it was done in another way?

How early do you get involved in a film like this?

Very early, I come in from the script onwards.  I love seeing the process and how it evolves.  We collaborate from the beginning on the score itself.  I really appreciate the comments and suggestions and the yeses and nos from the producer and directors.  I don’t fear comments.  I expect them to have an opinion about what I’ve done and how can I make it better. The great bands are the bands that if you close your eyes you can visualize the musicians listening to each other. If the director is very open and very “what if?” and open to whatever can make it better, that is like working with a band.

When I am performing, I am fascinated by looking at the audience, thinking, “How is it affecting them.” Now, when I write in my lonely chair, in my dark room, I’m thinking, “this chair right now is one of a thousand chairs in the movie theater. If I was to look to my side, I would see the audience who have gone to the theater to see the movie and listen to this music that I’m adding to it.” You never forget that you are there to be part of this entertaining moment, for a family or a romantic story or a drama or to scare the hell out of people in a horror movie. Then you’re not lonely. You think about who you are making the music for. You’re writing for those ears and eyes six months later in the audience, in the crowd. A person should never forget that because you never run out of ideas.

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