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What’s your favorite movie score?
The music is a big factor in almost all of my favorite movies. The score for Requiem for a Dream alternates between the Clint Mansell’s sonic equivalent of panic and Kronos Quartet’s minimalist chord progressions. Jon Brion and Amy Mann’s Magnolia soundtrack is so fused into that core of of the film that the characters actually sing “Wise Up” at one point like they’re in a music video. Yann Tiersen’s instrumentations — accordions and tubas and such — give Amelie so much of its romantic whimsy.
“If you wanna know how important a score is to a film, try watching it with the sound turned down,” director James Cameron says in Score: A Film Music Documentary. “The score is the heartbeat of the film.”
Cameron’s Titanic is a perfect example. James Horner’s Celtic-inspired orchestrations set Titanic within its period and provide a base layer for its emotional trajectory. Celine Dion’s lungs account for several of the film’s goosebump-y peaks.
Director Matt Schrader includes many of his own favorites in Score — like Bill Conti’s Rocky and Hans Zimmer’s Gladiator — and he has both a deep respect for film music’s classical origins and a curious eye for its evolutions into pop music, electronic music, alternative instruments and deeper integration with what’s happening on the screen. The film goes behind the scenes into several film scores as the composers were writing them.
Schrader sat down with Decider to talk about Score, which is just out for rental on Amazon, iTunes and other VOD and PPV platform.
DECIDER: Do you come to film scores more from an interest in film or classical music?
MATT SCHRADER: I’ve always been a fan of film and thought music was an important emotional element of almost every film, so it’s almost common sense that it’s a hugely important art form. I was surprised that no one had made a documentary about the topic because there are so many places you could go with it in a documentary.
You include Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in the film, and their score for The Social Network was almost entirely electronic. Did you see their winning the Oscar for original score changing the universe of the possible for film scores?
That’s what I think is so exciting about the modern era of film music. There are still issues of representation and diversity in every branch of Hollywood, but that’s changing in film scores because of electronic music and because of a concerted effort to bring in new styles. In the past, people have thought about the score as mainly coming from a European classical tradition. Now we’re seeing the orchestra as one of many tools that composers can use.
Has there been a film since The Social Network that shows that broadening into different kinds of music?
Mad Max: Fury Road is an interesting example. Tom Holkenborg comes from an electronic, DJ background. He recorded everything electronically and then added strings or other instruments where he wanted them. The score for Mad Max has so much more production value than you see in most films.
With the way you’re seeing drums and guitar incorporated directly into that film, he had to have been involved very early.
He was involved much earlier than most film composers are, and that’s where you get your best collaboration. A Hollywood composer usually comes in last, and Holkenborg watched the dailies on Mad Max for six or eight months as he worked on the score. He embraced the visuals with the music, and it made for a powerful film score.
You mention in the film that filmmakers in the 1960s started to incorporate pop music on their soundtracks. How did that affect the composer’s job?
Film music got lost a little bit in the 1960s and into the 1970s. A lot of movies tried to rely on popular artists to infuse films with some energy, and some of them overdid it. The orchestra came back — mostly because of John Williams — and artists of a lot of different backgrounds have embraced the orchestra.
The major orchestras have mostly relegated film composers to pops performances even though a lot of the Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky and other composers they’re playing were essentially scoring ballets. Do you think the classical canon will eventually include more film scores?
I think so. John Williams, Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer wrote scores that will live on for hundreds of years, and I think you’ll eventually see them considered alongside some of those earlier composers. Films today represent the same thing in the culture today that classical concerts or ballets represented 100 or 200 years ago. There’s a definite through line from Beethoven to Wagner to composers today.
You have a lot of footage in the film from composers early in their creative process. Is there one of those that gave you any particular insight to how they work?
Every composer we talked to seemed to have a slightly different approach, and it’s a little bit different on every film. Marco Beltrami talks in the film about using a kalimba — which is an African instrument that’s like a miniature piano — in one of his scores. For another of his scores, he went on Ebay and found a pig’s skull to use as a percussion instrument. When you start with crazy ideas like that you can come up with really different kinds of music, and part of the fun of going to a movie is seeing that kind of creative vision.
There are docuseries like Chef’s Table and Abstract that approach big macro topics from many different perspectives. Why did you want to cover something as big and expansive as film music in a 90-minute documentary instead of a series?
We’re exploring the idea of expanding it already. Score is sort of a highlight reel into a bigger world, and we could have done a hundred episodes about individual composers, or sports movie scores or different ways or how different composers score a moment of heartbreak in a film. We set out to make a definitive documentary about film scores so that someone who’s interested in the subject matter could come away from it with some appreciation of film scores. We have a half-hour interview with director James Cameron on the iTunes and Blu-ray bonus features. We’re also putting some extra material out on social media and exploring some possible mini-episodes that would include some additional material.
The licensing you need to make a music documentary can get ridiculously expensive. Did you have a list of scores you wanted to be able to include even if they were expensive? Did you get studios to give you a break given the nature of the film?
That was one of the big challenges of the film before we had even shot the first interview, and the studios have been pretty supportive of the film. We had to really think about what we were going to be able to include, so we had a media-rights attorney working with us to navigate all of that from the very beginning of the process.
You have an archival clip of John Williams and Steven Spielberg working on the E.T. score that I had never seen before. Where did you find that?
A Japanese television station had done that interview years ago with Steven Spielberg and John Williams years ago, and it was very interesting. They talk about working together on Jaws too, and Spielberg thought at first that the two-note dah-dum was a joke. When you have a composer and director trying to find common ground to tell a story, you can see some interesting moments.
Has your distributor committed to campaign Score for awards season?
They have. We’re going to campaign the film for an Academy Award and also for the Grammys, which has an award for Best Music Film. It’s exciting and definitely a new thing for me, and it would be incredibly cool to get a nomination for the film.
Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.
