Jerry Goldsmith Panel Discussion Part Two

A London Film Festival Granada Carlton Masterclass at the National Film Theater 1998

Written and transcribed by the cellist and reviewer Richard Harwood
 

The Tamahori/Goldsmith working relationship

Jerry Goldsmith: ...I must say that...this was our first relationship on a film. We [Goldsmith and The Edge director Lee Tamahori] met prior to even being hired for the film. We discussed the film -- we had breakfast together and I think we talked about the film for about three minutes and an hour just about anything. I think that's really what it is. I mean, I think that one can talk something to death, but I think how two people react... you can say, "the time of day," how do you react to that statement? That's what's important. And there was one incident I knew that very early on in the working relationship -- Lee heard the theme I wrote for the picture. He was, he seemed very pleased with that, but then, when it got down actually to a certain scene...it was the Birdcage scene. I had written something and it was a little too intense. Lee suggested well, maybe you play a little bit then stop, then play a little bit more, and stop and so on, which was really a very good idea, I must say, and did not cause me any discomfort, really. I was quite impressed with that because not only was he able to say in polite words, "That doesn't work for me, but maybe if you do this," but it was a very creative suggestions and one that I thought was quite intelligent. That's just a little sample of the working relationship but I think that that made it easier for me to work with Lee, and I think it made him less nervous about suggesting a change for me -- if I'm receptive, he's going to feel freer to say something. And I don't want anybody to soft pedal me on this. This is serious business, let's not play games; I'm a big boy.

Lee Tamahori: Yeah, just to follow on from that. This was my third movie ever and it can be a little intimidating when you're coming in with someone like Jerry whose done 150 film scores, or whatever, and still counting. There is a tendency to come in there and it can be an intimidating process until you find out that, really, it's yet another block in the wall and everybody knows their place and what they're going to do. We found out very early on, as Jerry says, that this was going to work, but you know, I came into this...when we had the opportunity to put Jerry on this, I was overjoyed. Let me say, first and foremost, I've always loved Jerry's scores -- I go way back to when I was a film lover, without even ever getting into this business. I grew up on things like The Wind and the Lion and Chinatown, etc., and I was always astonished by these...certainly when you got to something like Alien, and the versatility of just those three tracks alone was astonishing. I'll just digress for a point -- I don't know how many [people] in this room know the relationship that Jerry and with Franklin Schaffner. The movies they made were extraordinary movies, a lot of them for Fox by the way. They were Planet of the Apes, Patton, you're talking about Papillon, as well as Boys From Brazil -- these were all extraordinary scores even in their own right, and I have always been fascinated with that relationship between directors and composers. So any opportunity to come along and have Jerry put a score on a film of mine was gonna be very welcome.

In the early days, when Jerry said he was going to come over and do this, I thought this whole exercise might be very illustrative of telling people here how the process goes of putting music on film -- maybe everyone here does know but I think there are some things that people don't know about because they surprised even me. I had made one film in New Zealand and I have only now made two films in the United States. Both those films in the United States had a certain amount of...they were kind of mid to high range budgets -- for me they were enormous, but they came with a full panoply of resources thrown at them. When it came to scoring; the first one I did with Dave Grusin, and that was an experience in itself, and the second one was with Jerry and these were both extraordinary experiences -- you're talking about some 80-piece orchestras, or 100-piece orchestra -- and I still say, to this day, that the best three days I had, certainly on this film The Edge, was sitting and listening to Jerry put this down for three days, this score, because I had virtually no influence at that stage which means I could just sit back and listen to this thing. Jerry's right, we had to work it out beforehand because you can't afford to lose time on the day when you're on the scoring stage. Every second, you know, there's money just being poured down a plug hole. So it is a little tenuous when you get over to, say, Jerry's place and score. However, he's right, technology has actually improved this. It doesn't just get tinkled out on the ivories anymore. Actually, he's able to play whole sections and create them and run them together on...and we were able to lock them up and do timecodes on video and see exactly how they are going to play. So, it's not quite as frightening anymore. I came in to Jerry and I said...He's right, in the early days, you meet for breakfast and you have no idea what you're going to talk about. I mean, I haven't shot the film, let alone...all we've both done is read the script. We both have a different take on it but I remember...that was our common language. The script was written by David Mamet and it was a real knockout script. Form my point of view, I could see that David was writing practically an old John Huston movie. It was like Treasure of the Sierre Madre or something, but he had reworked it up into something quite modern and so innovative that you almost didn't feel like you had seen it before. So, Jerry's take on it was probably different from mine but we both knew that there was a really superb piece of writing at work. From there, we just departed. There was no point in me saying, "Come up to the mountains and feel the grandeur," etc.; it was pointless. Jerry just says "No, no, show me the finished film and I'll score it." And that's essentially what we did.

[The story] is a two hander in the wilderness. This is a very simple story and it has just got effectively two characters in a vast landscape. When we both read the screenplay, in fact, when anyone read the screenplay, it didn't read that large and that opened out. I wanted to make the landscape kind of another character in this movie. In doing that, I wanted Jerry's score to reflect this vast Alaskan empty landscape which was supposed to be wearing these two characters down.

JG: You mentioned that during our breakfast.

LT: Right. Yes, I had sort of mentioned that but it was still such an ethereal thing you can't put your finger on it, and I guess that comes down to the relationship. I don't read music, I don't really know much about music. I listen to it, I've got an ear, I know what I like. For me it's much easier to sit down with someone like Jerry and yes, we can run a piece of film and then talk about it later but to talk in just basic conceptual terms about something, just like I'm doing now about landscape. Jerry will have his own view about what landscape is and so will I, but once I deliver him a set of images, then I'd rather give him carte blanche to come up with whatever he feels suits that movie. But there's a spanner in the works here which is both modern...it's a curse and it's also a bonus. I only found out about this by coming into the American film landscape -- you certainly don't find it in the independent film landscape where I came from. It was quite a shock to me but I'll talk about it a little...

The Notorious Temp Track

LT: I don't know how many of you know this but the cost of films has gone up so much now that the marketing of films is deemed so important that studios will not release a film without market researching them -- effectively testing them with an audience. So American shopping malls are full of films being tested all the time. Sometimes they're in a very rough state but they always have someone else's music on them. And it's quite horrifying because you can hardly send out a film to an audience with no dramatic music and no sound effects on it -- they can't watch a silent film -- they'll all go out of there and say "Well, that was a piece of shit, wasn't it?" So what you tend to do now is...in post production there's an inordinate amount of time spent on crashing out an effects track, as well as cobbling together music tracks form other people's scores...anybody, you pick John Williams, you pick Jerry, you pick anybody, you just use what you can to try and get a feeling for what this film is. But it's very, very dangerous at the same time for two reasons: it gives people a false sense of what the film's really about and also those people that see it -- executives at studios, and even the composer himself, because you are gonna end up showing...sometimes they don't want to see it like this but Jerry wanted to see where I was going when I stuck...heaven forbid, I stuck Trevor Jones' track from Last of the Mohicans on this for god sake, you know what I mean. It was almost...to me it's a great track but I didn't want to insult Jerry, I [didn't] really want [him] to watch this, but he wanted to see where I was going in terms of just what I was thinking.

We talked about this the other day -- he found that quite helpful and quite instructive that he had seen it in that way. But it's part of the modern panoply of making movies and it's very interesting, that whole procedure. I thought, aren't people going to get outraged by use of their tracks and copyright, etc., and people said, "No, no, we do this all the time, we steal other people's music." [audience laughing] I said "Oh, my god." It was truly horrifying, so what I attempted to do on this one was...I got every track that Jerry's ever done that's available on CD, which is fantastic -- there's a lot more of them now than you really might think -- so I had a box full of these things and I tried to temp them with as much of Jerry's music as possible. But that, in itself, was not necessarily a good thing. I found some great pieces but sometimes they were a little dated, they didn't work or whatever, and so I always then defaulted back to what I thought was something truly thematic and so I pinched this Mohicans piece, which was truly philistine to do but it had a sense of almost operatic grandeur. I plastered it on top of this mountainous survival picture, and that's where we started from. For Jerry to have composed the piece that he has done, I think it is breathtaking. What I always said to him -- I didn't really care for any electronics in this, I didn't want anything choral and I think, if I gave him anything [it was that] I wanted an old-fashioned score if you will, even though it's not, and it's very modern. By old-fashioned, I mean I just want a purely symphonic big film score like I had grown up with all those years. You go away and do whatever you think that is but make it fit this picture. Jerry's done an extraordinary job. We don't have time here today...if you see this movie, there's some astonishing work done by Jerry on this, notably what I call the bending and brutalizing of musical instruments to actually achieve a kind of musical sound effect which has helped amplify some of these action sequences in the film enormously. I am hugely impressed by that because I can never hear, or feel, or know anything about that going in. We had a kind of rampaging grizzly bear in this movie and Jerry quite cleverly crafted a musical signature for this bear. I can't remember the instrumentation but I know there was a battery of French horns and every horn imaginable was working on creating a sound that fit this grizzly bear so that the audience would be subliminally shrinking in their seat and being terrified by the sound that they would hear, but they weren't overtly aware of it. And I think that is one of the great tricks to film composition, this ability to not draw attention to itself but be working on these almost subconscious aspects of the psyche. So anyway, you have to see the film to see those pieces.

Temp Track Experience

JG: Let me just clarify this temp tracking, which is sometimes a curse and sometimes quite a valuable aid. I mean, I've had it backfire to the point...I remember when I did Alien they'd temp tracked a lot of that music from Freud. One scene in particular -- the opening of the pods after hypersleep -- they had this little lullaby from Freud which I thought was dreadful. They loved it and I kept saying, "Well, that doesn't work at all." When we actually did the score, I wrote something for it which was really terrific and they didn't like it and they bought the music from Freud and that went into the picture. I was starting to receive notes from former fans saying "What's the matter, can't you think of something new?" [audience laughing] And then on Basic Instinct, Paul had temp tracked the automobile chase and he temp tracked that with...and actually more than temp tracked, he cut it...

LT: Oh, Jesus...

JG: ...he cut it to a piece from Warlock of all things and I must say it because the film was actually designed around this piece of music, it worked very well. I spent a week. Everything I wrote on that, Paul had come over and I put it up and he said, "No, it doesn't work." He finally one day, in really the height of all naughty things, said "Maybe we should buy that other track." I said, "Don't be ridiculous." So I'm writing and I play something, which is really quite good, and he comes over and says "No, that's not it." This must have been about the ninth try at this. I go back, I'm sitting there and about an hour later, all of a sudden I hear someone clumping up the stairs, and he comes running in. He says "That last piece is terrific, it's that damn temp track. I'm sorry, that was great what you were doing." Sometimes this temp track gets so ingrained, because the film makers see this over and over again. I mean, you get used to a wart if you have it long enough [audience laughing] and even if it doesn't work like a bad relative or something, I guess.

LT: It's a real danger. It hangs around. Everyone gets used to it. Probably even more dangerously, studio executives get used to it and everyone falls in love with the damn thing. It's really putting the composer in a bad position because they've now got to overcome somebody else's famous, fabulous track and you've got to do better than that, or something. People are often kind of disappointed by what they hear a composer come up with because it hasn't come up to, you know, the theme from The Godfather or something that someone's dumped on their modern mobster picture. You know, it's just unfair.

JG: I got this wonderful complement. I beat my brains out on Air Force One. I finally finish the whole thing and one executive comes up and says, "Really like it a lot better than the temp track." [laughing all around] Three million dollars later, they like it better than the temp track. Gee, thanks a lot. I hope so. But there have been occasions... I remember, on this film, it was very useful because it confirmed what I felt -- I wanted a very big lyric canvas for the film and I thought you needed something very emotional and poignant that could be big at the same time. So that helped a great deal in this case. And I remember one other time where it really gave me a direction was when I did Under Fire, when they had temp tracked it with this indigenous Chilean music with the panpipes and all, which was totally wrong geographically and ethnically for Nicaragua, 'cause it's about two thousand miles south of it, but it still worked dramatically. I must say that I did... that sound stuck in my head and I did use that and that approach was very helpful to me. So sometimes it can be helpful and other times it can be...well, what it really does...some directors have said to me, 'Well, we're just doing this to show you what we don't want.' [pause] Course they've gotten used to it, they like it to [laughs]. I say, 'I agree with you, you don't want that.' [laughing all around]

I think the only one who holds off [temp tracks] today is [Fred] Schepisi -- he fights it off to the very end, and if he does, it's a quick...it's in and it's out. But Schaffner would never...well, in those days they weren't doing it so much, but I remember once the editor in Papillon put in a piece of music at the end of the picture. I knew Frank very well and he was a very mild-mannered person but the few times I saw him go through the ceiling -- 'Get that piece of shit out of there.' Anyway, that's temp track [audience laughing].

After explaining the procedure of 'spotting' a picture, Lee Tamahori demonstrated the various scoring stages by showing the opening to The Edge. Firstly, we saw the image only without any sound. Then he showed us the version which contained the temporary soundtrack (Trevor Jones' Last of the Mohicans track), and thirdly, the 35mm first reel was projected, the one which Goldsmith finally scored.

We later learned of how the theme's jazz version, found in the closing credits, came to fruition...

LT: [On the scoring stage] Jerry finished about three hours early on day three and he was sort of wrapping up most of the sections of the orchestra and sending them off home. There's this thing they always do that the end of a movie -- they roll the end credits and it's always a hash of the soundtrack of the movie. Some music editor cuts pieces together to fit the amount of time it takes for the end credits to run. Usually, people don't stay around. Everyone says 'Oh, forget about that, it's all pathetic.' No one hangs around for the end credits, but I always thought that if you could score a picture all the way through, right to the very end of the movie, it was always an added bonus and just gave a little more life to the film. We had these three hours up our sleeve and I said to Jerry, 'Why don't you just...' ...50 percent of the orchestra had already gone home. I just said, 'Just get whoever's left...let's just throw some jazz piece together based on the theme...do whatever you like. We can't lose because we can still...if it fails, we'll get the music editor to cut the usual piece.' We sent out for a drum kit, because we actually didn't have a conventional drum kit and it was just a bass, drum kit, brushes and a piano. It's a fabulous little piece of lounge music that now lives at the end of the movie which is based on this huge theme and it's beautiful -- I love it. When I listen to the CD, this little piece is now one of my favorite parts of the whole film. It's just a little, kind of perfectly timed out, almost two and a half minute, three minute little jazz variation.

JG: I do want to tell you, I normally used to write all the music for the end credits but because of our post production schedules these days, and I realized I was the last one doing that, I said 'To heck with it.' [laughing all around] I've got a very good music editor, I'll let him put it all together. In this case, with this picture, I recorded a certain amount of music to make one piece of music go in to the next piece of music a little bit more naturally.

To be concluded in the next Lost Issue...

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