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Randy Newman:
The Bluerailroad Interview
page 4
Is eight weeks a sufficient time to do a good score?
It's a sufficient amount of time to hope for if you've got forty minutes to write music for. I think James must have had an hour and a half, an hour and 45 minutes or more to do. It's a three hour movie. He plays very well. And he can do synth stuff with real facility and write five to seven minutes a day. I can't write five minutes a day. I have written two minutes a day.
Do you work on a film score all day long?
Yeah. I can't do that with songs. But film scores, from morning till night.
Do you always work on individual scenes, or do you ever come up with melodic ideas separate from a scene?
If you've got time beforehand, you might come up with melodic ideas. But it usually gets down to a scramble, where you're writing specific scenes. You have to. And that's what you've got. You've got to do a certain amount every day. You can't have too many bad days. It isn't like, oh no, I'll throw that out.
Do you have any say about where music goes in a film?
Yeah. Starts and stops. Not like what composers used to have, where you'd decide yourself. The director often wasn't there when you spotted a film. I don't think [Milos] Forman was there when I did Ragtime. But when Al used to do a picture, sometimes the director didn't even show up. And now they come from rock & roll. They've listened to it all their lives, and they know what they like. And the problem with that is that it's a very arcane business. I'm not saying it's exalted. It's not like small particle physics. But it's odd. I once saw a scene from a Cary Grant movie without music. And he was moving around, and there he was. And then the put the music in. And they would have music for little things that he did - not like a cartoon, it didn't catch everything - and it made him look graceful. It did something for him. You can give somebody more intelligence than they might be indicating they've got. Jerry Goldsmith has said this before, that in Basic Instinct, that Sharon Stone was supposed to be a writer. And she's really a good actress and everything, but there's nothing to indicate she's a writer. The fact that she's a writer is a little odd. [Laughs] But [Goldsmith] wrote her a kind of sophisticated, slinky, nasty tune that did it a little bit, and made it seem she could be a writer. And you can do that. I mean, if you're Goldsmith or Johnny Williams. And you can do lots of stuff for action. But it's like they want to hold it still sometimes. There's a very big difference between the kind of action music that Johnny Williams write and the kind that Howard Shore writes. And maybe they both work, but they're very different.
Scorsese has said how he'll edit movies to the rhythms of songs. Do you try to match editing or rhythms in the movie?
Yeah. Oh yeah. Cuts. Not ostentatiously. But you try. It's movement, or the end of lines, the end of dialogue. On the cue sheet, they give you EAL, so you might start something there, rather than play right over a line.
It's changed a bit, in that a lot of time in action movies, they'll just dial you down. It used to be that you'd get down, and then people would say stuff, and you'd come up again.
Yeah, there's a hundred little things you can do for a picture. That makes the picture better. It's all supposed to do that. That's all that music is for in a movie. Pride and Prejudice, if it's supposed to make you tear up a little bit, music can help do it. Or make someone look smoother than they are, or cooler than they are, or just as cool as you possibly can. You can't make a bad movie look like a good movie, but you can make a good movie look like a really classy, great movie.
Do you write to match a character, or are you thinking more of action and emotion?
All of it. But often it's movement rather than words, what they're saying, where things will work. Little things. Little stops, little starts. There's no way that a director's gonna know that kind of odd stuff. He shouldn't have to. You hire someone who's sort of an expert, who's watching for that his whole life, that sort of stuff. And you kind of let him do it. And you can tell from what their temp track is, kind of what they want. It's their medium, it's their picture. And if I write something that the director doesn't like, I change it.
Does that happen a lot, where you have to rewrite stuff?
Not a lot, but it happens, yeah. And stuff gets thrown out, moved around. The odds are that the music guy will be right more often than the director will be right. But [the director] is right because it's their picture, so they know presumably exactly what they want it to be like.
Do you choose your projects based on scripts that you read?
Who I'm gonna be working with. And, I haven't done it lately, because of the nature of things, but I think of what kind of musical opportunity it is. Like Seabiscuit. That looked like a big opportunity for music to really help something out, to do something. Certainly Avalon did, and things way back. The things I've been doing lately, the Pixar things, Bug's Life needed things - I could help it. Monsters, too, with the kid and some of the other stuff. And maybe I helped them all. But doing comedy - Meet The Fockers, Meet The Parents - I mean, maybe I made them $320 extra. [Laughs] I don't know what I did for them. But the second thing I look for is who I'm gonna be working for, to see if I can deal with the guy. Lot of composers can't be that fussy about it, and if they're offered something, they take it. But I don't want to work for someone whose gonna make me write things four different times, and not know why.
You mentioned Seabiscuit, and you said once that you weren't happy with that score, because you weren't allowed to do what you knew to be right.
No. I wasn't. I didn't think. But I'm not sure what [Gary Ross, the director] wanted it to do. I did what I thought was right, and also what I thought he wanted. He ended up changing what I did in lots of cases, after the fact, and brought someone else in to adapt things. That kind of hurt my feelings, and I think it hurt the picture. I think the picture will seem a little short if I'm not allowed to do it at the pace I wanted. Horses are racing. You don't necessarily do the horse race, but you do the doubt about the horse race. And I think he felt that everyone knew what was gonna happen. But it isn't like everyone knows the history of Seabiscuit. Not the whole world read that book. Even if they had, you play fair with them. You don't give away surprises with music. I hate it when that happens. When you know that, Oh Jesus Christ, this is gonna happen now.
Like when you suddenly hear spooky music.
Yeah. You know, those are the kind of movies that get helped most by music. Think of some of that stuff without the spooky music. James Newton Howard really helped those Night Shimalyan movies to be scary.
I saw this movie on TV the other night - I don't know who did it - it was The Crush with Alicia Silverstone. And some of it was synth, where you hear the cheap synth. But they did a good job, it spooked you out. And music's really important in films [laughs], it's amazing.
In a movie like Monsters, Inc., which is computer animation, your music adds so much depth.
If you can do that, you've done what you're supposed to do. I don't want them listening to me instead of looking at the movie ever. But you want to count for something. When they're running down the hallway, write something that runs them down the hallway and increases the heartbeat of someone in the audience.
But you never want your music to draw attention to itself?
No. No, no.
In Monsters, just for an example, I have noticed certain melodies you've used, because they're so nice, but it doesn't take away from the image.
Yeah, I don't think that takes away from the image. That brings up an interesting point. I told you how temp tracks often don't go anywhere. I had a composer, a friend of mine, who said, "[Directors] don't want it to go anywhere. They don't want anyone to shine, but what they're doing." But I can't believe that. It's such a miniscule part of the whole, the music. They've actually succeeded in making music more important than it actually is, by having people rewrite things and throwing out scores. They turn it down to a level where you can't hear it anyway. Like in Bug's Life, the dragonfly and all that stuff sounds like a B-29. I can't hear what I did. But they're giving it too much credit. So I feel if you can go somewhere, you might as well go somewhere. You might as well write a melody. Sometimes you don't want it. But in most cases, like the scenes with Boo, she's got a little tune for her that isn't just aimless wandering. You know, why not do it?
It seems that might be why people come to you - to bring the kind of melodic movement a songwriter would compose.
Yeah, but you know, I've been offered nothing but comedies. It's like I've been typecast. Five Pixar movies, and Meet The Fockers, and Meet The Parents. You know what I do best, probably, would be a movie like Pride and Prejudice or Brokeback Mountain or Cinderella Man, something where if they want that kind of stuff, I can do it. But in doing this other action kind of stuff, which is goddamn hard, these Pixar movies. When Tommy [Newman], my cousin did a Disney film, he said, "I don't know how you did four of those." I think he's gonna do another one. But he said he would never do another one. I think he will. But I don't know if I will. Man, they're hard. The last one wasn't quite so hard, Cars, because they didn't have feet. Like Tommy lucked out in that his [Finding Nemo] was underwater. Monsters was really hard because they're running around. And Bug's Life was like three times the size of the average score, because they're really moving. And it doesn't look right if you don't move with them.
There's a school of thought that says, no, you don't have to [move with them]. But in an animated picture, you do. I don't think there's any way around it. You don't always have to move when a grasshopper is flying after an ant, or something. But it doesn't look right to me if you don't.
With Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story, your music brings a human warmth to a movie which has no humans on the screen. Is that a challenge?
That's exactly what they wanted when they did Toy Story. And exactly what they were worried about. I don't think [their worry] is justified, because even if you'd done it and it sounded computer-like, I don't think it would look that way. Maybe the early one would have. But that's what you always try to do. The characters in those pictures are adults. It's a kid's movie, but their emotions, you take them seriously, all their stuff. When Woody feels left out. They're grown-ups. So you take it seriously. All of them.
You've said it's easy for you to write scores on deadline-
Not scores, movie songs. I show up for the scores, but I find it difficult. Very difficult. Oh yeah. Because it's writing for orchestra, and it's being in the right place at the right time, and doing the right thing. It's very different from songwriting, though I don't find it easy. You just have to do it. There's no way out. The only easy part about it is writing the songs for assignments.
When you are writing a score on deadline, are there times when you find you can't move forward, and nothing's coming?
Yeah. For as long as you can afford it. I do.
How do you make it happen?
You just do. You have to. You can't have bad days, too many of them. You can't have two in a row, so you just don't. And maybe what you end up with is not the best thing that you could have thought of. Maybe you're never satisfied with it completely. But most of the time it turns out okay.
Did your Uncle Alfred ever give you any advice on how best to score a film?
He did say never be afraid of melody. But nowadays I think you have to be wary of them because [directors] might not want it.
[Alfred] said not to worry about things going too slow musically. But I do. Sometimes you can't. I'm not sure in what context he said that. He said don't work at night. But he said that, mainly, because he was loaded, and he'd go in there and look at it, and not like it. But I try not to [work at night.]
Do you take the weekends off?
No. Not usually. Unless I've got time. And the Pixar people are good about time. They give me enough, to where I can take Sundays off.
By working every day, does it help you get on a creative roll that makes it any easier?
Yes. It makes it easier to get in there and work. It's the beginnings that are the most difficult. Getting started, knowing what to do. Cars is a movie about cars. That's who populates the world. So you go out there and you start. And that NASCAR, it's always rock & roll. 100% metal. When they show NASCAR races. But [Pixar] didn't want that. They had a temp track from Pirates of the Caribbean taking the guy around the track in the first race. Yeah, because it repeats over and over and over. They knew didn't want that. So they wanted orchestra. I might have done it the way they do the NASCAR races, with straight rock & roll the whole way. For about a third of it, I did do rock & roll. But the NASCAR highlights, they look good with Heavy Metal. There's a song by Sheryl Crow that runs them around for a little while. Then I come in with guitars. But I didn't exactly know what to do.
(continued ...)
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