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?
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.”
Middleburg Film Festival: Salute to Composer Henry Jackman
Posted on October 24, 2016 at 9:14 pm
The Middleburg Film Festival had an outstanding line-up of films, many with filmmakers present to answer questions. But unquestionably the highlight of the festival was the concert tribute to composer Henry Jackman. Middleburg is unique in its annual recognition of film scores with its Distinguished Film Composer award, and they do it right. The Shenandoah Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of maestro Jan Wagner, performed the world premiere of suites from films scored by Jackman. The finale included the Freedom Choir singing with the orchestra the haunting score from “The Birth of a Nation.” Hearing the music without the sound effects and dialogue demonstrated powerfully how essential the score is to establishing the mood, direction, and character of the story.
In between clips from Jackman-scored films that ranged from “Monsters vs. Aliens” to “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and Seth Rogen’s “The Interview,” Jackman spoke with Middleburg Film Festival Advisory Board member John Horn about the “weird and nasty noises” he includes in some of his compositions. He said that the first film that made him think about the contribution made by the music was, of all things, “Predator.” He was still in school, studying music, and was captivated to hear that the “Predator” score was “very harmonically sophisticated music with tritone chord changes.” He laughed that years later, when he told composer Alan Silvestri how much that music had inspired him, Silvestri responded, “I didn’t even try with that one!”
Despite the fact that his music teacher told him that “Film music isn’t real music, dear boy,” he decided to pursue it.
He said that one advantage to working on animated films is the longer lead time. He often has a couple of years with updates on storyboards and character designs, while with live-action features, he hopes for as much as three months. He is happy when the director has a sophisticated understanding of music (Edward Zwick impressed him by asking whether “the da capo should start here”), what he really appreciates is a director who will be clear about the mood and story. He is glad to have direction with terms like “stress, kinetic, and narrative.” He emphasized more than once that a film composer has to understand story as well as music.
A composer can help a movie’s problems, but can’t fix them, he told us. “Music can sneak you past things” and “when characters are off the screen you can add some narrative.” He said that Hans Zimmer told director Ron Howard that he could convey all of the dense historical background for “The Da Vinci Code” by writing music that “will make the audience feel devastated and know that what happened was really unfair,” and that would be enough.
He talked about working in different genres and with different directors. Paul Greengrass like “ruthless realism.” But in a movie like “Puss in Boots,” there is “no point in trying to be subtle. It’s not often you get to see an egg sword fight with a cat.” And for the provocative satire, ‘The Interview,” instead of going for the comedy, he created a big, pompous classical score, “something Kim Jong-un might approve.” And for “The Birth of a Nation,” he asked “Why wouldn’t Nat Turner get the same compositional and orchestral accompaniment” that Mel Gibson had in “Braveheart?”
He said that matching the score to the film can be “chess-like problem-solving.” The festival’s award, then, was the equivalent of designating him a grand master.
Copyright Pieter Schlosser 2016Pieter Schlosser is a versatile composer who has created scores for the retro fact-based drama “The Astronaut Wives Club” and the heightened comic surreal “You, Me, and the Apocalypse.” His multi-cultural outlook is based in part on his heritage, born in Guatemala, raised in Austria, and currently a dual citizen of the US and the Netherlands.
He began playing the piano when he was 9 or 10. “It was my mother’s instrument. we had a piano at the house so it was only logical and practical that that would be the first instrument that I learned. Initially it was me just being curious. This was in Guatemala where I was born and when we moved to Austria, that’s when I started singing in a couple of choirs at school. Music is very much a part of the curriculum there, and I began taking formal piano lessons with a teacher. I was surrounded by music all the time and there was a point that I was singing so much that I seriously considered joining the Vienna boys choir. I was sort of an unusual kid in that sense where I wanted to do things that ‘normal kids’ didn’t necessarily think of. My parents always had music around the house and of course living just outside of Vienna and Austria being the Mecca of music, it was very much a factor.” He was also influenced by the Disney movies he saw, especially “101 Dalmatians,” because “one of the main characters writes jazz tunes so there was always jazz in my life. Roger was essentially scoring his life so that was pretty fascinating to me to have all those elements combined, the guy actually writing jazz tunes and writing about this horrible woman who is in his life. So that is incredibly interesting and it was one of the first things that grabbed me. And then after that the next thing I remember was “The Little Mermaid,” which also sparked my love of redheads in my life.” (He is married to a redhead.)Copyright Disney 1961
Schlosser has also composed the music for games. “What’s interesting about games is that they are very much nonlinear. They are linear only when you get to what is called cut scenes. So as a player to get to a certain point of the story, it’s basically the scene of the movie, to tell part of the story from a to b. So that one works very much like a film. As far as the gameplay it’s very much interactive and the score is really dependent on what the player does and what’s going on during the game which can vary, there can be nothing going on for 30 minutes and then all of a sudden a monster jumps out at the screen and you have got to find him and the music has to kick in. And so when you are scoring for a game all that has to be kept in mind and what’s interesting about the way that game consoles work now is that you can trigger all these different elements as things happens on screen. So you can write a piece of music that is pretty intense and full on from the beginning but you deliver it to the game company in such a way that they are able to then trigger these different tracks as the game play happens. Now with a film you have an entire arc of about an hour and a half that happened so you’re able to develop themes throughout the entire film and develop your music as the story develops. And in TV it’s a different. When you’re talking about the ‘normal’ TV channels that are dependent on advertisers like ABC, NBC, Fox, whatever, you have a TV show that’s broken up into maybe six or seven acts and those acts are about maybe eight minutes, maybe 10 minutes, maybe they have commercials in between so you have to build your music so that you keep your audience entertained and intrigued so when you cut for commercial they go ‘Oh my God what’s going to happen next?’ so they don’t switch the channel. And that’s changing a little bit now with Netflix and Amazon and Google where you have an arc of an hour or 45 minutes when there aren’t any commercials.”
This was a factor with “You, Me, and the Apocalypse,” which is a joint US/UK production. “So what Steve Jablonsky and I scored was the UK version which does not have commercials in between. So we scored it as a continuous 45 minutes thing sort of the way that maybe a NetFlix show works. And the acting and the story very much informed the way that we were going to approach the scoring of it. There are a lot of comedic moments but still it is about the end of the world. Steve had already discussed a lot of these topics with the producers so he called me and said, ‘Hey, I have this TV show. Do you want to do it with me?’ He had established certain themes and certain sounds like using the banjo for some of the characters and there was an organ also. Certainly tempo and instrumentation were very much a key factor in determining how we were going to score and what was interesting was that in the middle that changed quite a bit and we went a lot more electronic and left a lot of the acoustic instruments behind.”
He is currently working on “What About Love,” starring Sharon Stone and Andy Garcia, who play the parents of a girl who is injured on a trip to Europe. “The relationship between Andy Garcia and Sharon Stone’s characters is really on the rocks and their daughter being in mortal danger in a hospital makes them question everything and kind of go, ‘What is really important here?’ It is a Spanish and German co-production this time. And so they came to me, I scored a couple of scenes for them and somehow it resonated with Klaus the director and I ended up getting the job.” Whether it is television, a movie, or a game, he says, “ultimately it’s about story. So what is important to me that the story resonates.”
Composer Christopher Lennertz on “Horrible Bosses 2”
Posted on December 1, 2014 at 7:00 am
Copyright 2014 New Line
I am usually so busy taking notes when I am at a movie screening that I don’t have time to pay much attention to the score, but at “Horrible Bosses 2” I took a moment to scrawl “great music!” Not a surprise. As I explained in our last interview, Christopher Lennertz is tops when it comes to movie comedy. And this one was coming home for him — not his first sequel, but the first where he worked on the first one.
I loved the variety and selection of songs in the film, from classics to some surprises. How do you work on a score that is so song-driven?
Honestly, the first thing I have to do as somebody who is writing the underscore is to make sure that I don’t get into the way of any of the songs, the big songs, in any way that would take away how effective they’re going to be. And then also making sure that I know that what I write is going to fit with all their sounds, so the audience gets the feeling that they’re in the right world. But this one actually turned out to be more interesting because there’s is a part towards the end of the movie where they actually took scenes from my score from the first film and we did a matchup with Straight Outta Compton by NWA. And that just worked perfectly. I didn’t know that was actually going to work but it actually fit together really well. To me it was a nice way to take the character scenes from the first “Horrible Bosses” and then infuse it with this new energy with this new kidnapping that they were doing. It’s kind of like an iPod on crack in a way because it’s got such range.
What my score had to do was bring in bits and pieces that would then make all those work together. Because in my score I have got big guitars much more in the way that they would be in “How You Like Me Now,” from The Heavy and some a little more in the rock world but then I have hip-hop beats that would make more sense and there is a big Macklemore moment right in the middle. And so had a little modern pop and I had some little classic hip-hop beats and we tried to keep all of that mix together because the songs were so all over the place, in a good way. In a way to keep it really interesting and to make people feel that they’re having a really fun ride.
When you were growing up, did you ever think you would be called upon to write a song called . None of the three credited to you have titles that I can use when I write about this.
I know, unfortunately not. Well we did the same thing on the soundtrack with the first album. They are actually all lines from the movie. As soon as Julia walked out and said that line I was like, “Yup, that’s the song title.” I knew right away. I was like “Yup, that’s the one.”
You seem to gravitate to movies that combine comedy and action.
I love when they do that because when I even think back about some of my early favorite movies, they’re not just comedies. I loved “The Blues Brothers” growing up. That car chase was so fantastic and huge and I think they wrecked like 197 cars or something to do that.
I love it and I think it makes the comedy funnier when you do have moments of actions or moments of stuff where things are actually little serious. And then when the comedy pops up to take the edge off, there’s a bigger contrast, you know what I mean? And I think that’s what we try to do here. For example there was the spot when Chris Pines first, he started beating himself up to show how he would do it if he was kidnapping himself. So he was in their office and he started beating the daylights out of himself and so I was like, “All right, we should actually go extra serious on this so that by the end of it he’s got blood dripping down his nose. And then you cut back to the guys and you cut to Charlie Day and he’s got his jaw open. He’s like, “Oh my God what the hell is he doing?” And then I brought in a little funny kind of quirky guitar thing and it becomes more humorous because it was book ended by a lot more serious stuff and I think that kind of contrast is what makes it really pop.
Do you have character themes in the score?
Well, the three guys don’t have separate themes. They have their theme as a group, and that’s back from the first movie. And then there is a new theme for Chris Pine and there’s a new theme for Christoph Waltz which is mostly when he just first appears, because by the time he gets intermingled in their craziness their story is taking over. It’s really about them and Chris more than it’s about Christoph Waltz. And then of course Aniston got her theme which is back from the first movie but in different ways. And I think it’s even raunchier once we have gotten into the sex addicts meeting and then at the end when she walks in the hotel room. We kind of ramped it up to a lot of saxophones and then some low base and things like that and really try to sell that all the way home. It’s not like you need a lot of help by the way.
In the same way you’re mixing action with comedy, you’re mixing sex with comedy. And it’s very funny when we see the outtakes in the end. It is clear it was not easy for Jennifer Aniston to say some of those lines.
Yes and you can see that she’s trying to keep a straight face. And then she’s dying because she knows that’s totally against what people think her type is. And that’s probably that’s why she had so much fun doing the role.
Is it easier or harder to do a sequel?
I have done “Cats and Dogs 2” and a couple of others but I didn’t do the original for those. So it was nice to be able to do this and be able to go but to some of my thematic material after a year or two away from it, three years away from it, to be able to go back and say, “Yes, I remember what I like about that and I also remember what I didn’t get to do that last time that I wanted to but it didn’t fit the movie. And so it was it was kind of fun to be able to go back, and then revisit and change it in the new ways with the guys in new situations and the new characters that are in this movie. It made it feel fresh to me at least, and made it feel like I wasn’t just going back to the exact same thing. It was sort of a new interpretation but I’m such a huge fan of being respectful to movie series that everyone loves. When you see Indiana Jones, you want to hear Indiana Jones music. And when you see James Bond you want to hear James Bond music. So I feel like when people saw Charlie and Jason and Jason, they want to hear “Horrible Bosses,” and so to not let that happen would also be a big mistake. Same thing when Julia first walks into the dentist office, we all know what’s supposed to go there, let’s do it. That’s kind of my approach, a lot of love and respect.
I didn’t count, but it seemed to me there were more songs in the sequel.
I think there were more songs in this one than the first one. Not by a lot but by a few. I think there was more action in this one than the first one. And I think that it’s a lot easier to put songs over an action sequence than to put it underneath a lot of dialogue because inevitably nobody wants to have a really big song and then turn it down so you can actually hear what they’re saying. So I think because there were some more big action moments in this one that made it possible to put in more songs. And quite honestly I think the budget was a little bit bigger because the first movie did so well. And there was different director. But I would say there is about the same amount of score as there was in the first movie. And then there were just a couple more songs. So there is actually more music overall than the first one but I think was really fun and it really helped to have the right energy.
Did you ever have a horrible boss?
Of course, I had many. I think that the worst boss I’ve ever had, I wouldn’t even call it a boss because it was an internship. I wasn’t even being paid. It was literally right out of the movie “Swimming with the Sharks,” with Kevin Spacey. He would say, “Go down the street and pick me up a hot dog”, and I would bring it to him and he would open up the back and he would literally look at me and say “What the f*** is this?” And I’d be like, “What the… what do you mean what is this? You told me to get hot dogs”, and he’d be like, “I don’t want that anymore” and I would be like, “Are you kidding?” He would forget what he asked me to do and he would forget he never told me that he changed his mind.
It would be very hard to find anyone in this country who hasn’t at one point or the other had a boss that they didn’t like or have a job that they didn’t like. These three guys are idiots and if they can get out of their horrible situations that means you can do it. Or even if you can’t, there is something about that fantasy that makes people want to vicariously live through them and be like, “Wow, what if I kidnapped my boss.” Once that magic thing happens, I think that’s why people love it. Plus it was also so crazy and funny that people really wanted to see it and that’s why they came back for the second one.
