Film music historian and journalist Tim Greiving, author of John Williams: A Composer's Life, joins Michael Phillips to explore one of the foundational dilemmas of movie music, courtesy of legendary composer Max Steiner: "The hardest thing in scoring is to know when to start and when to stop." From King Kong and The Adventures of Robin Hood to Jaws and Star Wars, Michael and Tim trace the history of film scoring through competing philosophies: wall-to-wall music versus strategic restraint, foreground versus background, spectacle versus psychology. And yes, even The Odyssey enters the conversation They discuss Williams's lasting influence, memorable director-composer partnerships, and whether the best movie music tells us what we're seeing or reveals what the characters themselves cannot say. Join the conversation by emailing movieracket@filmspotting.net.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
This is the Movie Racket, and the voice you hear
is Michael Phillips, talking to you. I'm talking to you.
And I'm talking with our extraordinarily special guest this week,
Tim Grieving, who knows a lot about a film subject
that means probably too much, to me, if anything, or
maybe just enough. Maybe it means just enough to be
(00:35):
the secret ingredient of the film-going experience I was thrilled
to discover as an adolescent. I mean, you hear stuff
like this when you're starting to take movies seriously, and
your ears just want more. ¶ ¶ That's music by
(01:26):
Bernard Herrmann, David Shire, and Nino Rota. And believe me,
if we played excerpts of all the film music I
love attached to or separate from the films Psycho or
All the President's Men or Amar Kord, well... This week's
movie racket would run approximately a year and a half.
But we have to remember, not all music composed for
(01:48):
the screen works the same way or works at all.
A lot of it just exhausts itself and the audience
through overwork, which leads to this question. When is intense,
nerve-wracking music a thing of beauty? Thank you, Bernard Herrmann.
And when is it just a kind of a second-rate
tension additive? That's like enough already. When is a main
(02:12):
title theme and its variations irresistible? And why do some
attempts at writing something you're going to remember more like
second-rate film noir dialogue? You're going to take this theme
and you're going to like it, see? And here's a
reprise for you. You didn't ask for it, but it's
just for good measure. Today's guest, Tim Grieving, published an
(02:35):
excellent book last year on the best-known film composer not
just of our time, but of all time. It's called
John Williams, A Composer's Life. And for Tim, when he
was just a kid, there was one particular Williams score
that basically changed his life.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Welcome to Jurassic.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Park.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I heard the score for Jurassic Park before I saw
the movie as a child. And it was the music
that really like turned me on. And then it was
my cousin who explained to me who John Williams was.
And I realized I had sort of been unconsciously aware
of him via Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jaws, all this
other stuff. I just wasn't cognizant of the fact that
(03:19):
there was some person out there writing this music. And
so I started collecting his scores and started paying attention,
developing this awareness of what film music was doing in
every film I watched and slowly sort of grew in
my appreciation of other composers and just have been kind
of monomaniacally obsessed with film music most of my life.
(03:40):
But it's all because of John Williams.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
In this week's Movie Racket, Tim and I talk about Williams, yes,
but we also take a wider view of where he
fits into the entire timeline of film music, the trends
and traditions across the last 95 or more years. This
is going back to King Kong and Max Steiner, 1933.
And we're also going to talk about where we are now.
(04:06):
And we look at the latest score, for example, of
the three-time Oscar winner Ludwig Göransson, courtesy of Christopher Nolan's
The Odyssey. That's about two hours of music in that film,
which runs a tick less than three hours. And that
is a very different approach to the art and craft
of film scoring than you get in a movie like Patton,
which runs nearly three hours. And for those three hours,
(04:30):
Jerry Goldsmith wrote 32 minutes of music. The unofficial movie
law we're looking at this week, our law of motion pictures,
belongs to composer Max Steiner, and it's a simple one.
He said this, the hardest thing in writing a film
score is to know when to start and when to stop.
(04:52):
Tim Grieving, thank you so much for joining us on
the Movie Racket to talk about film music and also
your book, John Williams, A Composer's Life, which is excellent.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure and honor to
be here, and no one can shut me up about
film music.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
We're going to go back to the beginning of the
early sound era, and we're not going to grind through
this whole chronological history of film scoring because, I don't know,
very few of us would even listen to that. Maybe
even you and I would tune out around it. hour
40 on that. But I do like this Max Steiner quote.
He was an early legendary influence on the whole rest
(05:31):
of the history of film scoring. And he said, the
hardest thing in scoring is to know when to start
and when to stop. When you go back and watch
some of those early landmark films from the early 30s,
certainly one of the biggest, King Kong in 1933. That
(05:56):
Max Steiner score changed everything and is still kind of
a reference point. And I wonder if you feel the
same way about that. You know, neither one of us
saw it in 1933, but it is a shriekishly sort
of present score that is all over that movie, which
is already kind of a really freakishly intense film for
(06:16):
the time and a huge hit.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Well, Denham, the airplanes got him. Oh, no, it wasn't
the airplanes. It was beauty.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Killed the beast.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
King Kong has become sort of the textbook definition of
the beginning of modern film scoring. I think it's a
little bit inaccurate in that there were attempts before that,
even by Steiner, that introduced a lot of the same
concepts and approaches. And of course, he and people like
Eric Wolfgang Korngold and their contemporaries were kind of borrowing
(06:51):
ideas from opera and And the whole idea of having
a character theme or a leitmotif attached to different characters
in the story. And sort of this aria, recitative approach
where there's big music moments that really, you know, sing out.
And then others that are more like just connective tissue
or glue underneath scenes. But King Kong announced a lot
(07:14):
of these ideas and the philosophy and the sound of like,
you know, European romantic opera type scoring. in a big
way that had effects on people like Danny Elfman and
Jerry Goldsmith. And a lot of people that came after
point to King Kong as like the dawn of their
awareness of what film music could do and how exciting
(07:35):
it could be. So it's definitely like a staple, a
very early staple of what we think of as film
scoring in Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I do think it feels, as you say, I mean,
Steiner had done several scores by then, but this was
the one that sort of seemed to almost tip the
balance of attention, I think, toward the music. Oscar Levant
had his quote that sort of has become kind of
like lore. The film is really a concert of Steiner's
music with accompanying pictures on the screen. So from his
(08:05):
point of view, it was like music in the foreground.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, and there had been this debate among studios and
film executives before this of what even is the point
of music Should there just be a little at the
beginning and a little at the end? Kind of just bookends.
Is this a stage play on camera? And Steiner and
others kind of pushed it towards this. No, it's actually
(08:28):
an opera where the images are the libretto. And there's,
you know, music and pictures are going to go hand
in hand from beginning to end. And that's been maybe
this debate about is that the right way to score films?
Is that the best use of music in movies? And
I think John Williams represents, in a lot of ways,
(08:49):
that philosophy because people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas
ascribe to that philosophy. But then you have lots of
other directors and composers who are adamantly against that. But
that's kind of how things got kicked off in Hollywood.
And they stayed that way for a good 20 plus years,
for the most part, until people started rethinking, wait a second,
(09:09):
why are we treating movies like opera? Right.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
And then the movies sort of became... A different kind
of more varied outgrowth of that sort of operatic tradition,
I think, just in terms of the scores. I mean,
the Korngold thing is worth talking about because I think
what happened with Korngold a few years after Steiner with
The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938, Korngold had already
(09:33):
scored Captain Blood with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Helen, great,
you know, swashbuckling, you know, just absolutely kind of clicked
in every way. Went back to Vienna and then initially
turned down the offer of I think I have this right,
turned down the offer in 38 or late 37 to
score The Adventures of Robin Hood because he said he
(09:54):
read the script and he didn't understand why this... relentless
action picture with, by his standards, very little dialogue or,
or character interest was worth paying attention to musically. He said, uh,
I am not an illustrator for a 90% action picture,
but he then Thank God for his surviving relatives at all.
(10:17):
He got his family out of Austria just in time
after the Nazi annexation. And, you know, because he had
taken this job, brought them along and had a glorious career.
And in my view, just you can call it snark
or just, you know, preference or whatever. I think he's
like a higher, higher, higher grade Max Steiner. You know,
so I'm glad he's got his name on as many
(10:38):
films as he does. But all that makes me think
of exactly what Williams was doing with Star Wars. it's
a very similar assignment. And it's not a film that
recalls for moody, introspective film scoring. It's not, you know,
I mean, Williams could do with just about anything at
that point. But that's where I sort of see it, though.
(10:58):
The key linchpins in that style of film scoring, Tim,
would be like, you know, King Kong, Steiner, Korngold, Adventures
of Robin Hood, and then, you know, many other major, major,
major composers in between. But then somehow when Star Wars
came along, And John Williams made it what it was
(11:19):
in many ways. That was a kind of reclaiming of
a tradition. That's my view. What's your view of it?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Very much so. It was an anomaly in the 1970s
to score a film that way. It was very much
a throwback to an old way of scoring. Lucas very
explicitly referenced Korngold, as well as like the old Buck
Rogers serials and things like that. But his whole conception
was this is basically a silent film and the music
(11:46):
has to do the same kind of heavy lifting and
also kind of narrating, very explicit narrating of the action
and who is this character and what's the relationship to
that character that you got in opera and you got
in those early Hollywood films. And people are inclined to
impose that choice on John Williams. And Williams met the
(12:10):
assignment pretty well, I think, but It wasn't his idea
per se. It was him responding to Lucas saying, I
want classical sounding music and I want it scored like
an old Errol Flynn swashbuckling adventure movie. And so Williams
gave him that, I think did better than Korngold, but
it was very much reviving this classical Hollywood classical approach
(12:34):
that then sort of kicked off this wave of similar
style and similar approach to scores throughout the 70s and
80s and beyond. But it was a total kind of
going back in time to something that had been kind
of outdated by that point.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah. You know what I wrestle with a little bit?
Was it really best for his artistic career to have
done every one of the Star Wars pictures, scores?
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I've asked myself that question as well. I mean, I
think he clearly cares about it. He could have walked
away at any time. And so it means something to him.
He wasn't locked into a contract and did these additional
seven feature films under duress or something. He wanted to
do it. And I think for him, it was this
opportunity that's pretty rare in any capacity, Hollywood or otherwise,
(13:25):
to have this gigantic canvas for big, operatic, extroverted music
where you can write all these different character themes and
develop things like a symphony, like an opera. And it's
something he built over the course of almost 50 years.
So I can see the appeal from a composer's standpoint
of what this gave him that other things wouldn't. And
(13:47):
Disney and everyone else who's taken over Star Wars sort
of bending over backwards to accommodate John Williams and the
way he writes and the way he, kind of the
old-fashioned way he does his craft. So it was a
unique opportunity that I certainly appreciate. However, would his gifts
have been better served doing something completely different after a
(14:08):
certain point. I would have loved to have seen him
go elsewhere outside of Star Wars at least after the prequels,
maybe before.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, and around that time of the prequels, I think
around the time of The Phantom Menace, he gave an
interview and he straightforwardly said, it is remarkable to me
that George Lucas' films have required almost constant music. Williams
did so much before Star Wars that is so various
and a composer who could meet almost any genre and
(14:40):
find something in it. But it is not music. We
don't really sit around and listen to Earthquake or The
Towering Inferno the same way, or The Poseidon Adventure, which
is probably maybe the best of those three scores that
he did. That was my adolescence, the disaster movie cycle, right?
But at the same time, Williams was doing Westerns and
(15:02):
two films for Robert Altman. He was a busy, busy man.
There's something about that moment when he met up with
Spielberg and Jaws came about particularly. That marked the arrival
of somebody who just knew exactly how to meet the
(15:22):
challenges of that film, I think. Also, I love that film.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Jaws is a masterpiece. ¶ ¶ Yeah, and I refer
to Jaws as the Big Bang of his career. Like,
he was 43. He'd done all these other things. He'd
had all these other director relationships before that. And there's
some great stuff before 1975. And you can hear him
(15:51):
developing his voice and building his muscles and trying all
kinds of different things. He does avant-garde. He does westerns,
like you say. He does kind of light 60s jazz
romantic comedies and big movie musicals like Fiddler on the Roof.
So he's doing all this different stuff before Spielberg finds him.
(16:12):
But I think Jaws is the culmination of everything he'd
been sort of working towards. I mean, it's the first
perfect canvas he'd been given, in my opinion, up to
that point. And not just a canvas of a great
movie and a great thriller and a great director, but
a movie that was begging for music to just go
(16:32):
hog wild and music to take the wheel so much
of the time, which a lot of movies up to
that point didn't ask for that. Music was much more
in the background or just kind of nestled in here
and there. And Jaws was this just, I have this
Spielberg quote that he gave me for the book about
John Williams was this thoroughbred just waiting for someone to
(16:52):
open the gate and let him loose. And I got
to be the guy that let him loose with my movies.
And I love that analogy. I think that's exactly right.
Which is not to discount the stuff that he did
before Spielberg. But I think Spielberg was the first person
to unleash him in that way. Ah!
Speaker 1 (17:27):
If you go back to this Max Steiner, you know,
the question, the question of the hardest thing being in scoring,
you know, when to start and when to stop. Do you,
as just a movie-going temperament, like a whole hell of
a lot of music on your movies? Or is the
answer more complex for you?
Speaker 2 (17:45):
It's certainly complex. And there's plenty of exceptions to the rule.
But I do have Spielberg's aesthetic taste for my movies
to be slathered in score.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Assuming it's good and assuming it's well slathered, I love
the alchemy of music and celluloid. I love the magic
that happens when you apply music to images and story
and acting and drama and all this stuff. So I
love a lot of it. And a lot of my
taste has been shaped by the Spielberg Williams project over
(18:19):
the last 50 plus years. But there are plenty of exceptions.
And there's these eras of film, like in the 60s
and 70s in particular, where there was a lot less score.
And it was a lot more powerful in a way because,
you know, there's all this white space. And when the
music comes in, it makes a real difference as opposed
(18:39):
to just as it can be pejoratively described as wallpaper,
where you just have music just smothering the film. Right.
It has to be done tastefully. I would argue John
Williams does it as tastefully as anybody, but I do
like a lot of music in my movie.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, yeah. But I'm glad you brought up that era
because that's, again, partly it's just kind of when you
come into the world and come into your own sort
of movie going, you know, sort of early peak, right?
And here's two quotes to kind of illustrate this maybe
oppositional viewpoint, right? Jerry Goldsmith, who you mentioned earlier, Planet
of the Apes, and then to our purposes here, Patton
(19:21):
and Chinatown. Okay. These are films. Patton is a nearly
three hour film with less than 37 minutes of music
in it. And Chinatown is like, it's a tick over
(19:44):
two hours and it's like a little less than 30.
And those are... themes and scores you remember, in my view.
And maybe we just don't make the movies often enough
to actually invite that sort of moody, introspective thing.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
¶ ¶.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Here's what Jerry Goldsmith has said. Sparing judicious music is
really what makes an effective score. Speaking for his own
personal taste there, of course. And that would sort of
contrast what we found this the other day on a
video on Classic FM, interview with Christopher Nolan regarding the Odyssey.
And this is Ludwig Gorenson's latest score. And Nolan just
(20:38):
sort of straight up acknowledged, he says, pounding music layered
over most of the film. That's what I do. Yes,
he does. And I agree. He does that. And you
have to look at Nolan and composers like Hans Zimmer
and Ludwig Gorenson working with Nolan as kind of, I guess,
(20:58):
the extension, the logical contemporary edition of Max Steiner on
King Kong, Korngold on Robin Hood. Okay, I will meet
the challenge of just a lot of music. Certainly Williams
with Star Wars and other franchises he's worked on, but
especially that. And I think there's something I'm not buying with,
(21:22):
particularly in the score like Oppenheimer, which, you know, won
the Oscar. Goranson's already won three Oscars, but that's a
film that is, the whole point is to kind of
just kinesthetically keep this thing twirling forward, moving forward. And
the score is there for two and a half hours
(21:44):
of that three-hour film. Oppenheimer wanted to own the atomic bomb.
He wanted to be the man who moved the Earth.
He talks about putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle. Well,
I'm here to tell you that I know. Gee, Robert Oppenheimer,
if he could do it all over, he'd do it
all the same.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
You know he's never once said that he regrets Hiroshima?
He'd do it all over. Why?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Because it made him the most important man who ever lived.
Is that really the only way you can score a
film like that?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Oh, of course not. I mean, to point to something
like Chinatown, I mean, I'll actually tell you, since you
mentioned King Kong, the first, I think, 20 minutes of
King Kong has no music.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Right, right. Takes its time.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
There are plenty of examples of even scores we think
of as being wall-to-wall or all over the place, that
there's lots of empty space on those films. There's lots
of moments in the first Star Wars that aren't scored
as well, actually, strangely enough.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
I have something here for you. Your father wanted you
to have this when you were old enough.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi knight.
Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant
weapon for a more civilized age.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
So there's not one right way to do it. I
think people like Nolan... and his composers like to overwhelm
the audience in every way, overwhelm them visually, overwhelm them musically.
And that's something a lot of audiences sign up for
and want to have that experience. That's not the intention
of Patton or Chinatown. That's a much more austere, realistic
(23:27):
kind of social drama approach. And so many of those
directors from that era came out of either television or
or the stage. A lot of early television really was
just an extension of plays. And you don't have music
just pounding away all the time. You use it very
judiciously and sparsely. So I think some of my favorite
(23:49):
movies from that era, like The Conversation, the Coppola movie.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
David Shire, beautiful score, my guy.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Solo piano. I mean, it's, It's not just small in
terms of how much music there is, but it's only
one instrument. I love the scores by Michael Small for Pecula,
like Clute and the Parallax View. And you mentioned Goldsmith.
(24:15):
And during that year, he was doing a lot of
the same thing. It wasn't just that there was less music.
It was like really quirky, small ensembles performing the music.
It wasn't a big 90-piece symphony orchestra. So you weren't
overwhelming the audience in either way, either with the amount
of music, the volume of music, and the tonnage of
(24:37):
instruments performing the music. And you could point to John
Williams as sort of the reason that went away with
Jaws and Star Wars, and you could blame him for
ending that era. Because at that point, a lot of
directors just thought, I need music all throughout my movie,
otherwise it feels naked, it feels awkward.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Music's going to help kind of keep the thing moving along.
And it does. I mean, music, it performs all these functions.
Part of it is just kind of guiding the watcher,
giving this sort of current underneath the images to just
make it move. A lot of times movies or scenes
without music will feel 10 times slower than if you
put music in there. So there's all these reasons for
(25:19):
putting a lot of music on your movie. And some
of them I think are not healthy or are based
out of fear or based out of like an inability
to trust your audience to hang with you and hang
with this scene without being kind of goosed along by score. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
And frankly, I think to half the time to just
energize a scene that lacks energy and you just have
to kind of establish. And I think what I found
reading up on this a little bit for this talk
is it's a pretty interesting debate about, as a composer,
am I dramatizing what is happening and what that person's
(25:57):
primary emotion at the moment is, or just kind of
finding a corollary to the actual action we're seeing? Or,
maybe and, but or, are we talking about something that
is underneath all this? And, you know, the subject these
(26:17):
two people are avoiding or the thoughts they cannot express.
And a lot of the best film composers seem to
be drawn to that more elusive task of like, how
do I deepen this a little bit? It's not really
like just covering up what might not be there in
terms of filmmaking. It's really more about like, let's take
this seriously enough to kind of get in there. And
(26:38):
I think William's And many others knew that, knew that
and took that challenge on.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Agreed. And I, you know, it's not a binary thing
where it has to be one or the other. The
music is sort of commenting on the action or it's
telling us something that we're not seeing. And the best
scores are probably a mixture of both elements happening together. Right.
You mentioned Bernard Herrmann, who I think was really the
first composer to explore subtext and psychology properly. and neurosis
(27:05):
and all the things that the people are not saying
in Hitchcock films and things like that and making an
art out of subtext. And Williams, I think, struck a
really brilliant balance between the kind of Steiner-Korngold operatic style
(27:31):
here's what's happening in this scene, here's a kind of
musical definition of who this character is, but giving us
a depth as well, and what he calls under-dialogue, these
kind of unspoken things that maybe only music can touch on. ¶ ¶.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
I like to go through a couple of categories, if
you don't mind.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
I'd love to kind of just hear like a favorite
or two of your picks for kind of those big
and tall music foreground scores that you may have heard
more recent or way back.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
So, I mean, I think the masterpiece in maybe the
magnum opus of the Spielberg-Williams collaboration is E.T. It's not
my personal favorite, but it is, I think, their masterpiece.
And that is just a essential example of what we're
talking about. Big, operatic, music forward, music leading the emotions,
telling you what to feel and when to feel it
(28:35):
and all that. And I think it's a perfect example
of that. We talk about Goldsmith, who talked about Spare
and Judicious, and yet, and partly because of Williams, he
also went the full opera route himself. starting on things
like Star Trek The Motion Picture.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Which I think is an absolutely gorgeous, masterful score, and
it's him sort of responding to the Star Wars phenomenon,
but in his own unique Jerry Goldsmith way. He's using
this thing called the blaster beam. It doesn't sound like
a Star Wars knockoff, but it's this big, grand, romantic,
(29:21):
operatic score that.
That he then did a bunch more in that vein
in the 80s. And I think he did them as
well as anybody. So those are some examples of that
approach that I love.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
How about a couple of scores that are very different,
work more in the goldsmith dictum of spare and judicious
and just, you know, whoever they're from, but just so
you know, like maybe less, but also just a very
different kind of like maybe intention.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Well, I brought up the conversation earlier, the David Shire score,
and I would nominate that because I just think what
you can do with a solo piano and judiciously spotting
where to put the music And it conveys the loneliness
of the main character, Gene Hackman's character in that, and
the melancholy without it being really on the nose. And
(30:09):
I just think that's such a perfect example of that
kind of scoring. One more recent one I thought of
is the movie Jackie. with a score by Mika Levy.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Fantastic, yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I love that movie, and I love that score, and
it comes in funny ways, and I think a lot
of that was actually the director's choice of where to
put music, as a lot of these things can be.
It's not always the composer's choice, but it comes in
and out the way I perceived it as these kind
of unpredictable waves of grief. So sometimes there's just this
heavy surge of music, and then it just goes away.
(30:52):
So it's not scored to wall-to-wall, and it's a quirky
kind of ensemble playing the music, but it's a great,
more contemporary example for me.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah, yeah, I want to revisit that. And also, the
score for Under the Skin, which is just as sort
of out there and, I don't want to call it non-linear,
because it's not trying to be linear or non, but
it's a very challenging score for a very narratively challenging picture.
Jonathan Glazer's film. Have some face.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Thanks a lot, Jessica.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
I've never heard sounds like that. And really, just to
say that, I think is, you don't get to say
that too often at the movies. I've literally never quite
heard that sort of, in her case, that sort of
manipulation of sound before. And it's perfect for what's going
on in that science fiction film. But yeah, love it.
(31:53):
I would mention, I think, for the big, I can
never find anything to equal or crowd out my affections
for Alex North's Spartacus. When you listen to the overture,
(32:18):
The whole opening credit sequence, all of it. And then
the main love theme, which is, God, the most devastating
love theme, I think. I don't know. That's my feeling
(32:41):
about Spartan. I can't talk about it rationally.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
It's a great nominee.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
I love that. And for small, yeah. I also think
Goldsmith's work on Chinatown is fascinating in that he was
brought in late because they threw out the Philip Lambrose
score to Chinatown, which if you ever hear any of that,
have you heard that, that original score? I have, yeah. Yeah, different,
you know, kind of a cheesy, melodramatic. And Goldsmith had
(33:06):
10 days and resisted the producer Robert Evans' one suggestion
to like, well, make sure it's period, 1937. And Goldsmith
just sort of said, why? Why do I have to
stress the time it's set in when we can see
it in every frame of this film? So it's not
like he scored it with an aggressively contemporary sound, i.e.
(33:27):
early 70s, but it's timeless. And boy, that stuck. I mean,
that to me feels maybe like Williams' achievement with Star Wars.
Maybe Goldsmith made Chinatown better than it is.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Absolutely. And Chinatown is such a perfect example for less
is more. And also that maybe overthinking a score can
hurt it. And if you only have 10 or 11
days to write it, you might actually come up with
something brilliant. But it's a great film and a great score.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
John Williams, as your most recent sort of and sort
of most conspicuous project in this realm of film scoring,
this biography that you wrote, it was based on many
hours with Williams that you did not even know you
were going to get originally, right?
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah. I mean, the short version of the long saga
is that I worked on it for about two years
before he even agreed to speak to me, so... It
started out with no access, and then I ended up
getting kind of unprecedented access to him, which transformed the book, obviously.
But it's kind of interesting doing it as a purely
archival research project to start with and sort of building
(34:57):
an oral history around him and going back to quotes
and interviews he'd given over the years and then sort
of turning at 180 and inviting him into the story
and getting all this Rich insight and amazing stories and
quotes and personality that came right from the source.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
So why did it take that long to get his approval?
I mean, I can imagine he's a private man, right,
in many ways.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
He's very private, and he'd always resisted any attempts by
anyone who wanted to write any kind of personal life. story, biography, documentary,
anything of the sort. So, I mean, I think there's
different reasons for that, but basically he's a very private
person is the answer. And I think the timing of it,
(35:45):
he started talking to me the year he turned 90,
which was a year that a lot of people were
sort of making him look at his legacy. And he
was sort of accepting that that was the natural course
of things by that time of your life. And his
talking to me also coincided with Steven Spielberg producing a
documentary about him. And Spielberg's the only person he would
have said yes to for that. So it was a
(36:07):
real luck of timing and confluence of events, I think,
that led him to acquiesce.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
So what exactly got Williams to say yes to your request?
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Well, I initially approached his management that kind of went
through the proper channels and was given a very pretty immediate, no, thanks,
but no thanks. He doesn't want to do that. And
my other strategy, though, was I just kept working on
the book. I had a contract from the publisher, Oxford
University Press. I was interviewing people around him. So colleagues, musicians, directors.
(36:41):
And I think he was hearing back from those people
to some extent and not, I guess, not anything too worrying.
And I also wrote, because I never actually asked him
directly about this, I had his home address, and I
wrote him not one, but two actual letters a year
apart from each other while in the midst of working
(37:02):
on the book. And I think it was just, like
I say, him turning 90, Spielberg doing this documentary, other
things sort of... The thing he said to me the
first time we met was, I realized you were going
to write this book regardless, so I figured we should
get to know each other a little bit.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Was it a Williams score that got you interested in
this whole idea of film music being a component of
the movie going experience that like was, you know, maybe
a gateway drug or something for you?
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yes, it was. So this will age me young wise,
but I heard the score for Jurassic Park before I
saw the movie as a child. And it was the
music that really like turned me on. And then it
was my cousin who explained to me who John Williams was.
And I realized I had sort of been unconsciously aware
of him via Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jaws, all this
(37:53):
other stuff. I just wasn't cognizant of the fact that
there was some person out there writing this music. And
so I started collecting his scores and started paying attention,
you know, developing this awareness of what film music was
doing in every film I watched and slowly sort of
grew in my appreciation of other composers and just have
(38:13):
been kind of monomaniacally obsessed with film music. most of
my life, but it's all because of John Williams.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Tell me where you think you'd like to see film
scoring as a key component to why we go to
the movies, whether we know it or not. Where would
you like to see it go in the next 10,
20 years?
Speaker 2 (38:33):
It's interesting. You talked about this coming in cycles, and
I think there was a reaction to the kind of Steiner,
big orchestral operatic approach in the 60s and 70s. And
then there was a revival of something akin to that
with Williams and others. And then there was a reaction
against that. And Hans Zimmer sort of represented a reaction
(38:54):
against that in terms of moving towards a more synthetic
kind of pop sensibility. And then we've had this other
kind of reaction to that. And people like Johnny Greenwood,
Trent Reznor, Mika Levy, kind of people outside of the
box in terms of traditional film scoring. And they don't
come out of film scoring programs in school. There are
(39:17):
rock musicians or recording musicians who are bringing a different
kind of offbeat approach, which I like. I mean, of late,
I've just enjoyed being surprised by a score and not
feeling like it's on autopilot or it's something that's, you know,
I've heard a million times before. I don't know where
we're going. I mean, Ludwig Gorenson is sort of, I
(39:38):
don't know if he's the bellwether, but he is sort
of at the top of the heap right now in
terms of the demand, the Oscars, the attention. however you
feel about his score for The Odyssey or Oppenheimer or
Tenet or any other films he's done, people really respond
to his scores and they talk about them and they
(40:00):
listen to them on their own. So he's definitely touching
a nerve. And I really like him a lot, but
he's an interesting heir to the Williams philosophy, the Williams
sort of tradition. And yet he comes out of hip
hop and he has all these other influences. And there's
so much kind of sound design as part of the
(40:20):
Odyssey score that you would never hear in a Williams score.
So it's this interesting mix of old and new. As
far as where we're going, the trend that I really
like is directors like Nolan or Damien Chazelle or Ryan
Coogler with Goranson who want music to be part of
the movie from the ground up. And the music starts
(40:41):
getting written before the film's even shot and they're playing
it on the set. and the music's informing how certain
scenes are constructed. We've sort of been moving in that
direction with certain directors and composers, and I love that.
I think that is the evolution of film scoring, where
you're not just bringing someone in at the last minute
and they're sort of painting on a layer of music
(41:02):
to this thing that already lives and exists and might
even have kind of a reference soundtrack that you're sort
of having to work around or imitate or something. but
rather music is sort of being written as the film's
being written, essentially.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Right, right.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Which I think leads to more idiosyncratic scoring approach. If
the music's not just coming in late and having to
deal with other reference points, it gets to just evolve
with the creation of the film. I think that's a
great way forward for the art of film scoring.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
I also think this is an unusually good time for
film scoring when you look at everybody you've mentioned so far.
Johnny Greenwood, I don't think There's a more beautiful score
in the last 20 years than Phantom Thread. And there
will be blood before that for Paul Thomas Anderson as well.
I think Michael Ables is a stunning new, not new anymore,
(41:55):
but a rival. He couldn't get arrested, you know, for years.
And then Jordan Peele found a little YouTube clip of
his music and hired him for Get Out. And then
at the Oscars that year, Spielberg, came over or shook
Jordan Peele's hand and said, that composer, that's your John Williams.
You know, you stick with that guy.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Yeah, and they are in some ways the modern version,
some of these different, like Paul Thomas Anderson and Johnny Greenwood,
Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Warrenson, Peele and Ables, they are
sort of the heirs to the Spielberg-Williams or the Herman
Hitchcock kind of duo. where you associate one's aesthetic and
(42:42):
style with the other. They're kind of inseparable and they
work in tandem so well together. And the composer is
invited to be part of the creative process in an
outsized way. That's an old tradition, but I just want
to see more of that where music is not an
afterthought and music is not you kind of bringing in
a gun for hire to try to do something your
(43:06):
best imitation of what's on the temp track. That's where
film music has gotten really dull and boring. But you
have these two really creative people coming together to make
this third thing in a way that it's not going
to sound like John Williams or Max Steiner or anybody else.
It's going to be its own animal, but it's the
result of these two powerful artists working together. So that's
(43:30):
the way forward. But it's always been the best way
that films have been scored, I think.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Oh, it's such a fun thing to talk about this
with you.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
The Movie Racket is produced by Joe DeSoto and Michael Phillips,
Adam Kempinar and Sam VanHalgren, executive suite producers. Thanks to
Tim Grieving for his time and insights. His book, John Williams,
A Composer's Life, is available everywhere. And you can find
out what else Tim is up to on his website, timgrieving.com.
That's T-I-M-G-R-E-I-V-I-N-G dot com. I'd love to get your thoughts
(44:18):
on your favorite film scores. Write me at movieracket at filmspotting.net.
I'm waiting.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
Do it!
Speaker 1 (44:26):
We're going out today with the last few bars of
The Bad and the Beautiful theme by David Raxson. I'm
Michael Phillips, and this is a FilmSpotting production.
This is the Movie Racket, and the voice you hear
is Michael Phillips, talking to you. I'm talking to you.
And I'm talking with our extraordinarily special guest this week,
Tim Grieving, who knows a lot about a film subject
that means probably too much, to me, if anything, or
maybe just enough. Maybe it means just enough to be
(00:35):
the secret ingredient of the film-going experience I was thrilled
to discover as an adolescent. I mean, you hear stuff
like this when you're starting to take movies seriously, and
your ears just want more. ¶ ¶ That's music by
(01:26):
Bernard Herrmann, David Shire, and Nino Rota. And believe me,
if we played excerpts of all the film music I
love attached to or separate from the films Psycho or
All the President's Men or Amar Kord, well... This week's
movie racket would run approximately a year and a half.
But we have to remember, not all music composed for
(01:48):
the screen works the same way or works at all.
A lot of it just exhausts itself and the audience
through overwork, which leads to this question. When is intense,
nerve-wracking music a thing of beauty? Thank you, Bernard Herrmann.
And when is it just a kind of a second-rate
tension additive? That's like enough already. When is a main
(02:12):
title theme and its variations irresistible? And why do some
attempts at writing something you're going to remember more like
second-rate film noir dialogue? You're going to take this theme
and you're going to like it, see? And here's a
reprise for you. You didn't ask for it, but it's
just for good measure. Today's guest, Tim Grieving, published an
(02:35):
excellent book last year on the best-known film composer not
just of our time, but of all time. It's called
John Williams, A Composer's Life. And for Tim, when he
was just a kid, there was one particular Williams score
that basically changed his life.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Welcome to Jurassic.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Park.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I heard the score for Jurassic Park before I saw
the movie as a child. And it was the music
that really like turned me on. And then it was
my cousin who explained to me who John Williams was.
And I realized I had sort of been unconsciously aware
of him via Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jaws, all this
other stuff. I just wasn't cognizant of the fact that
(03:19):
there was some person out there writing this music. And
so I started collecting his scores and started paying attention,
developing this awareness of what film music was doing in
every film I watched and slowly sort of grew in
my appreciation of other composers and just have been kind
of monomaniacally obsessed with film music most of my life.
(03:40):
But it's all because of John Williams.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
In this week's Movie Racket, Tim and I talk about Williams, yes,
but we also take a wider view of where he
fits into the entire timeline of film music, the trends
and traditions across the last 95 or more years. This
is going back to King Kong and Max Steiner, 1933.
And we're also going to talk about where we are now.
(04:06):
And we look at the latest score, for example, of
the three-time Oscar winner Ludwig Göransson, courtesy of Christopher Nolan's
The Odyssey. That's about two hours of music in that film,
which runs a tick less than three hours. And that
is a very different approach to the art and craft
of film scoring than you get in a movie like Patton,
which runs nearly three hours. And for those three hours,
(04:30):
Jerry Goldsmith wrote 32 minutes of music. The unofficial movie
law we're looking at this week, our law of motion pictures,
belongs to composer Max Steiner, and it's a simple one.
He said this, the hardest thing in writing a film
score is to know when to start and when to stop.
(04:52):
Tim Grieving, thank you so much for joining us on
the Movie Racket to talk about film music and also
your book, John Williams, A Composer's Life, which is excellent.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure and honor to
be here, and no one can shut me up about
film music.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
We're going to go back to the beginning of the
early sound era, and we're not going to grind through
this whole chronological history of film scoring because, I don't know,
very few of us would even listen to that. Maybe
even you and I would tune out around it. hour
40 on that. But I do like this Max Steiner quote.
He was an early legendary influence on the whole rest
(05:31):
of the history of film scoring. And he said, the
hardest thing in scoring is to know when to start
and when to stop. When you go back and watch
some of those early landmark films from the early 30s,
certainly one of the biggest, King Kong in 1933. That
(05:56):
Max Steiner score changed everything and is still kind of
a reference point. And I wonder if you feel the
same way about that. You know, neither one of us
saw it in 1933, but it is a shriekishly sort
of present score that is all over that movie, which
is already kind of a really freakishly intense film for
(06:16):
the time and a huge hit.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Well, Denham, the airplanes got him. Oh, no, it wasn't
the airplanes. It was beauty.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Killed the beast.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
King Kong has become sort of the textbook definition of
the beginning of modern film scoring. I think it's a
little bit inaccurate in that there were attempts before that,
even by Steiner, that introduced a lot of the same
concepts and approaches. And of course, he and people like
Eric Wolfgang Korngold and their contemporaries were kind of borrowing
(06:51):
ideas from opera and And the whole idea of having
a character theme or a leitmotif attached to different characters
in the story. And sort of this aria, recitative approach
where there's big music moments that really, you know, sing out.
And then others that are more like just connective tissue
or glue underneath scenes. But King Kong announced a lot
(07:14):
of these ideas and the philosophy and the sound of like,
you know, European romantic opera type scoring. in a big
way that had effects on people like Danny Elfman and
Jerry Goldsmith. And a lot of people that came after
point to King Kong as like the dawn of their
awareness of what film music could do and how exciting
(07:35):
it could be. So it's definitely like a staple, a
very early staple of what we think of as film
scoring in Hollywood.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I do think it feels, as you say, I mean,
Steiner had done several scores by then, but this was
the one that sort of seemed to almost tip the
balance of attention, I think, toward the music. Oscar Levant
had his quote that sort of has become kind of
like lore. The film is really a concert of Steiner's
music with accompanying pictures on the screen. So from his
(08:05):
point of view, it was like music in the foreground.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, and there had been this debate among studios and
film executives before this of what even is the point
of music Should there just be a little at the
beginning and a little at the end? Kind of just bookends.
Is this a stage play on camera? And Steiner and
others kind of pushed it towards this. No, it's actually
(08:28):
an opera where the images are the libretto. And there's,
you know, music and pictures are going to go hand
in hand from beginning to end. And that's been maybe
this debate about is that the right way to score films?
Is that the best use of music in movies? And
I think John Williams represents, in a lot of ways,
(08:49):
that philosophy because people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas
ascribe to that philosophy. But then you have lots of
other directors and composers who are adamantly against that. But
that's kind of how things got kicked off in Hollywood.
And they stayed that way for a good 20 plus years,
for the most part, until people started rethinking, wait a second,
(09:09):
why are we treating movies like opera? Right.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
And then the movies sort of became... A different kind
of more varied outgrowth of that sort of operatic tradition,
I think, just in terms of the scores. I mean,
the Korngold thing is worth talking about because I think
what happened with Korngold a few years after Steiner with
The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938, Korngold had already
(09:33):
scored Captain Blood with Errol Flynn, Olivia de Helen, great,
you know, swashbuckling, you know, just absolutely kind of clicked
in every way. Went back to Vienna and then initially
turned down the offer of I think I have this right,
turned down the offer in 38 or late 37 to
score The Adventures of Robin Hood because he said he
(09:54):
read the script and he didn't understand why this... relentless
action picture with, by his standards, very little dialogue or,
or character interest was worth paying attention to musically. He said, uh,
I am not an illustrator for a 90% action picture,
but he then Thank God for his surviving relatives at all.
(10:17):
He got his family out of Austria just in time
after the Nazi annexation. And, you know, because he had
taken this job, brought them along and had a glorious career.
And in my view, just you can call it snark
or just, you know, preference or whatever. I think he's
like a higher, higher, higher grade Max Steiner. You know,
so I'm glad he's got his name on as many
(10:38):
films as he does. But all that makes me think
of exactly what Williams was doing with Star Wars. it's
a very similar assignment. And it's not a film that
recalls for moody, introspective film scoring. It's not, you know,
I mean, Williams could do with just about anything at
that point. But that's where I sort of see it, though.
(10:58):
The key linchpins in that style of film scoring, Tim,
would be like, you know, King Kong, Steiner, Korngold, Adventures
of Robin Hood, and then, you know, many other major, major,
major composers in between. But then somehow when Star Wars
came along, And John Williams made it what it was
(11:19):
in many ways. That was a kind of reclaiming of
a tradition. That's my view. What's your view of it?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Very much so. It was an anomaly in the 1970s
to score a film that way. It was very much
a throwback to an old way of scoring. Lucas very
explicitly referenced Korngold, as well as like the old Buck
Rogers serials and things like that. But his whole conception
was this is basically a silent film and the music
(11:46):
has to do the same kind of heavy lifting and
also kind of narrating, very explicit narrating of the action
and who is this character and what's the relationship to
that character that you got in opera and you got
in those early Hollywood films. And people are inclined to
impose that choice on John Williams. And Williams met the
(12:10):
assignment pretty well, I think, but It wasn't his idea
per se. It was him responding to Lucas saying, I
want classical sounding music and I want it scored like
an old Errol Flynn swashbuckling adventure movie. And so Williams
gave him that, I think did better than Korngold, but
it was very much reviving this classical Hollywood classical approach
(12:34):
that then sort of kicked off this wave of similar
style and similar approach to scores throughout the 70s and
80s and beyond. But it was a total kind of
going back in time to something that had been kind
of outdated by that point.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah. You know what I wrestle with a little bit?
Was it really best for his artistic career to have
done every one of the Star Wars pictures, scores?
Speaker 2 (13:01):
I've asked myself that question as well. I mean, I
think he clearly cares about it. He could have walked
away at any time. And so it means something to him.
He wasn't locked into a contract and did these additional
seven feature films under duress or something. He wanted to
do it. And I think for him, it was this
opportunity that's pretty rare in any capacity, Hollywood or otherwise,
(13:25):
to have this gigantic canvas for big, operatic, extroverted music
where you can write all these different character themes and
develop things like a symphony, like an opera. And it's
something he built over the course of almost 50 years.
So I can see the appeal from a composer's standpoint
of what this gave him that other things wouldn't. And
(13:47):
Disney and everyone else who's taken over Star Wars sort
of bending over backwards to accommodate John Williams and the
way he writes and the way he, kind of the
old-fashioned way he does his craft. So it was a
unique opportunity that I certainly appreciate. However, would his gifts
have been better served doing something completely different after a
(14:08):
certain point. I would have loved to have seen him
go elsewhere outside of Star Wars at least after the prequels,
maybe before.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, and around that time of the prequels, I think
around the time of The Phantom Menace, he gave an
interview and he straightforwardly said, it is remarkable to me
that George Lucas' films have required almost constant music. Williams
did so much before Star Wars that is so various
and a composer who could meet almost any genre and
(14:40):
find something in it. But it is not music. We
don't really sit around and listen to Earthquake or The
Towering Inferno the same way, or The Poseidon Adventure, which
is probably maybe the best of those three scores that
he did. That was my adolescence, the disaster movie cycle, right?
But at the same time, Williams was doing Westerns and
(15:02):
two films for Robert Altman. He was a busy, busy man.
There's something about that moment when he met up with
Spielberg and Jaws came about particularly. That marked the arrival
of somebody who just knew exactly how to meet the
(15:22):
challenges of that film, I think. Also, I love that film.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Jaws is a masterpiece. ¶ ¶ Yeah, and I refer
to Jaws as the Big Bang of his career. Like,
he was 43. He'd done all these other things. He'd
had all these other director relationships before that. And there's
some great stuff before 1975. And you can hear him
(15:51):
developing his voice and building his muscles and trying all
kinds of different things. He does avant-garde. He does westerns,
like you say. He does kind of light 60s jazz
romantic comedies and big movie musicals like Fiddler on the Roof.
So he's doing all this different stuff before Spielberg finds him.
(16:12):
But I think Jaws is the culmination of everything he'd
been sort of working towards. I mean, it's the first
perfect canvas he'd been given, in my opinion, up to
that point. And not just a canvas of a great
movie and a great thriller and a great director, but
a movie that was begging for music to just go
(16:32):
hog wild and music to take the wheel so much
of the time, which a lot of movies up to
that point didn't ask for that. Music was much more
in the background or just kind of nestled in here
and there. And Jaws was this just, I have this
Spielberg quote that he gave me for the book about
John Williams was this thoroughbred just waiting for someone to
(16:52):
open the gate and let him loose. And I got
to be the guy that let him loose with my movies.
And I love that analogy. I think that's exactly right.
Which is not to discount the stuff that he did
before Spielberg. But I think Spielberg was the first person
to unleash him in that way. Ah!
Speaker 1 (17:27):
If you go back to this Max Steiner, you know,
the question, the question of the hardest thing being in scoring,
you know, when to start and when to stop. Do you,
as just a movie-going temperament, like a whole hell of
a lot of music on your movies? Or is the
answer more complex for you?
Speaker 2 (17:45):
It's certainly complex. And there's plenty of exceptions to the rule.
But I do have Spielberg's aesthetic taste for my movies
to be slathered in score.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Assuming it's good and assuming it's well slathered, I love
the alchemy of music and celluloid. I love the magic
that happens when you apply music to images and story
and acting and drama and all this stuff. So I
love a lot of it. And a lot of my
taste has been shaped by the Spielberg Williams project over
(18:19):
the last 50 plus years. But there are plenty of exceptions.
And there's these eras of film, like in the 60s
and 70s in particular, where there was a lot less score.
And it was a lot more powerful in a way because,
you know, there's all this white space. And when the
music comes in, it makes a real difference as opposed
(18:39):
to just as it can be pejoratively described as wallpaper,
where you just have music just smothering the film. Right.
It has to be done tastefully. I would argue John
Williams does it as tastefully as anybody, but I do
like a lot of music in my movie.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, yeah. But I'm glad you brought up that era
because that's, again, partly it's just kind of when you
come into the world and come into your own sort
of movie going, you know, sort of early peak, right?
And here's two quotes to kind of illustrate this maybe
oppositional viewpoint, right? Jerry Goldsmith, who you mentioned earlier, Planet
of the Apes, and then to our purposes here, Patton
(19:21):
and Chinatown. Okay. These are films. Patton is a nearly
three hour film with less than 37 minutes of music
in it. And Chinatown is like, it's a tick over
(19:44):
two hours and it's like a little less than 30.
And those are... themes and scores you remember, in my view.
And maybe we just don't make the movies often enough
to actually invite that sort of moody, introspective thing.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
¶ ¶.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Here's what Jerry Goldsmith has said. Sparing judicious music is
really what makes an effective score. Speaking for his own
personal taste there, of course. And that would sort of
contrast what we found this the other day on a
video on Classic FM, interview with Christopher Nolan regarding the Odyssey.
And this is Ludwig Gorenson's latest score. And Nolan just
(20:38):
sort of straight up acknowledged, he says, pounding music layered
over most of the film. That's what I do. Yes,
he does. And I agree. He does that. And you
have to look at Nolan and composers like Hans Zimmer
and Ludwig Gorenson working with Nolan as kind of, I guess,
(20:58):
the extension, the logical contemporary edition of Max Steiner on
King Kong, Korngold on Robin Hood. Okay, I will meet
the challenge of just a lot of music. Certainly Williams
with Star Wars and other franchises he's worked on, but
especially that. And I think there's something I'm not buying with,
(21:22):
particularly in the score like Oppenheimer, which, you know, won
the Oscar. Goranson's already won three Oscars, but that's a
film that is, the whole point is to kind of
just kinesthetically keep this thing twirling forward, moving forward. And
the score is there for two and a half hours
(21:44):
of that three-hour film. Oppenheimer wanted to own the atomic bomb.
He wanted to be the man who moved the Earth.
He talks about putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle. Well,
I'm here to tell you that I know. Gee, Robert Oppenheimer,
if he could do it all over, he'd do it
all the same.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
You know he's never once said that he regrets Hiroshima?
He'd do it all over. Why?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Because it made him the most important man who ever lived.
Is that really the only way you can score a
film like that?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Oh, of course not. I mean, to point to something
like Chinatown, I mean, I'll actually tell you, since you
mentioned King Kong, the first, I think, 20 minutes of
King Kong has no music.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Right, right. Takes its time.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
There are plenty of examples of even scores we think
of as being wall-to-wall or all over the place, that
there's lots of empty space on those films. There's lots
of moments in the first Star Wars that aren't scored
as well, actually, strangely enough.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
I have something here for you. Your father wanted you
to have this when you were old enough.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi knight.
Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant
weapon for a more civilized age.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
So there's not one right way to do it. I
think people like Nolan... and his composers like to overwhelm
the audience in every way, overwhelm them visually, overwhelm them musically.
And that's something a lot of audiences sign up for
and want to have that experience. That's not the intention
of Patton or Chinatown. That's a much more austere, realistic
(23:27):
kind of social drama approach. And so many of those
directors from that era came out of either television or
or the stage. A lot of early television really was
just an extension of plays. And you don't have music
just pounding away all the time. You use it very
judiciously and sparsely. So I think some of my favorite
(23:49):
movies from that era, like The Conversation, the Coppola movie.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
David Shire, beautiful score, my guy.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Solo piano. I mean, it's, It's not just small in
terms of how much music there is, but it's only
one instrument. I love the scores by Michael Small for Pecula,
like Clute and the Parallax View. And you mentioned Goldsmith.
(24:15):
And during that year, he was doing a lot of
the same thing. It wasn't just that there was less music.
It was like really quirky, small ensembles performing the music.
It wasn't a big 90-piece symphony orchestra. So you weren't
overwhelming the audience in either way, either with the amount
of music, the volume of music, and the tonnage of
(24:37):
instruments performing the music. And you could point to John
Williams as sort of the reason that went away with
Jaws and Star Wars, and you could blame him for
ending that era. Because at that point, a lot of
directors just thought, I need music all throughout my movie,
otherwise it feels naked, it feels awkward.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Music's going to help kind of keep the thing moving along.
And it does. I mean, music, it performs all these functions.
Part of it is just kind of guiding the watcher,
giving this sort of current underneath the images to just
make it move. A lot of times movies or scenes
without music will feel 10 times slower than if you
put music in there. So there's all these reasons for
(25:19):
putting a lot of music on your movie. And some
of them I think are not healthy or are based
out of fear or based out of like an inability
to trust your audience to hang with you and hang
with this scene without being kind of goosed along by score. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
And frankly, I think to half the time to just
energize a scene that lacks energy and you just have
to kind of establish. And I think what I found
reading up on this a little bit for this talk
is it's a pretty interesting debate about, as a composer,
am I dramatizing what is happening and what that person's
(25:57):
primary emotion at the moment is, or just kind of
finding a corollary to the actual action we're seeing? Or,
maybe and, but or, are we talking about something that
is underneath all this? And, you know, the subject these
(26:17):
two people are avoiding or the thoughts they cannot express.
And a lot of the best film composers seem to
be drawn to that more elusive task of like, how
do I deepen this a little bit? It's not really
like just covering up what might not be there in
terms of filmmaking. It's really more about like, let's take
this seriously enough to kind of get in there. And
(26:38):
I think William's And many others knew that, knew that
and took that challenge on.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Agreed. And I, you know, it's not a binary thing
where it has to be one or the other. The
music is sort of commenting on the action or it's
telling us something that we're not seeing. And the best
scores are probably a mixture of both elements happening together. Right.
You mentioned Bernard Herrmann, who I think was really the
first composer to explore subtext and psychology properly. and neurosis
(27:05):
and all the things that the people are not saying
in Hitchcock films and things like that and making an
art out of subtext. And Williams, I think, struck a
really brilliant balance between the kind of Steiner-Korngold operatic style
(27:31):
here's what's happening in this scene, here's a kind of
musical definition of who this character is, but giving us
a depth as well, and what he calls under-dialogue, these
kind of unspoken things that maybe only music can touch on. ¶ ¶.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
I like to go through a couple of categories, if
you don't mind.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
I'd love to kind of just hear like a favorite
or two of your picks for kind of those big
and tall music foreground scores that you may have heard
more recent or way back.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
So, I mean, I think the masterpiece in maybe the
magnum opus of the Spielberg-Williams collaboration is E.T. It's not
my personal favorite, but it is, I think, their masterpiece.
And that is just a essential example of what we're
talking about. Big, operatic, music forward, music leading the emotions,
telling you what to feel and when to feel it
(28:35):
and all that. And I think it's a perfect example
of that. We talk about Goldsmith, who talked about Spare
and Judicious, and yet, and partly because of Williams, he
also went the full opera route himself. starting on things
like Star Trek The Motion Picture.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Which I think is an absolutely gorgeous, masterful score, and
it's him sort of responding to the Star Wars phenomenon,
but in his own unique Jerry Goldsmith way. He's using
this thing called the blaster beam. It doesn't sound like
a Star Wars knockoff, but it's this big, grand, romantic,
(29:21):
operatic score that.
That he then did a bunch more in that vein
in the 80s. And I think he did them as
well as anybody. So those are some examples of that
approach that I love.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
How about a couple of scores that are very different,
work more in the goldsmith dictum of spare and judicious
and just, you know, whoever they're from, but just so
you know, like maybe less, but also just a very
different kind of like maybe intention.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Well, I brought up the conversation earlier, the David Shire score,
and I would nominate that because I just think what
you can do with a solo piano and judiciously spotting
where to put the music And it conveys the loneliness
of the main character, Gene Hackman's character in that, and
the melancholy without it being really on the nose. And
(30:09):
I just think that's such a perfect example of that
kind of scoring. One more recent one I thought of
is the movie Jackie. with a score by Mika Levy.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Fantastic, yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I love that movie, and I love that score, and
it comes in funny ways, and I think a lot
of that was actually the director's choice of where to
put music, as a lot of these things can be.
It's not always the composer's choice, but it comes in
and out the way I perceived it as these kind
of unpredictable waves of grief. So sometimes there's just this
heavy surge of music, and then it just goes away.
(30:52):
So it's not scored to wall-to-wall, and it's a quirky
kind of ensemble playing the music, but it's a great,
more contemporary example for me.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah, yeah, I want to revisit that. And also, the
score for Under the Skin, which is just as sort
of out there and, I don't want to call it non-linear,
because it's not trying to be linear or non, but
it's a very challenging score for a very narratively challenging picture.
Jonathan Glazer's film. Have some face.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Thanks a lot, Jessica.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
I've never heard sounds like that. And really, just to
say that, I think is, you don't get to say
that too often at the movies. I've literally never quite
heard that sort of, in her case, that sort of
manipulation of sound before. And it's perfect for what's going
on in that science fiction film. But yeah, love it.
(31:53):
I would mention, I think, for the big, I can
never find anything to equal or crowd out my affections
for Alex North's Spartacus. When you listen to the overture,
(32:18):
The whole opening credit sequence, all of it. And then
the main love theme, which is, God, the most devastating
love theme, I think. I don't know. That's my feeling
(32:41):
about Spartan. I can't talk about it rationally.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
It's a great nominee.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
I love that. And for small, yeah. I also think
Goldsmith's work on Chinatown is fascinating in that he was
brought in late because they threw out the Philip Lambrose
score to Chinatown, which if you ever hear any of that,
have you heard that, that original score? I have, yeah. Yeah, different,
you know, kind of a cheesy, melodramatic. And Goldsmith had
(33:06):
10 days and resisted the producer Robert Evans' one suggestion
to like, well, make sure it's period, 1937. And Goldsmith
just sort of said, why? Why do I have to
stress the time it's set in when we can see
it in every frame of this film? So it's not
like he scored it with an aggressively contemporary sound, i.e.
(33:27):
early 70s, but it's timeless. And boy, that stuck. I mean,
that to me feels maybe like Williams' achievement with Star Wars.
Maybe Goldsmith made Chinatown better than it is.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Absolutely. And Chinatown is such a perfect example for less
is more. And also that maybe overthinking a score can
hurt it. And if you only have 10 or 11
days to write it, you might actually come up with
something brilliant. But it's a great film and a great score.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
John Williams, as your most recent sort of and sort
of most conspicuous project in this realm of film scoring,
this biography that you wrote, it was based on many
hours with Williams that you did not even know you
were going to get originally, right?
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah. I mean, the short version of the long saga
is that I worked on it for about two years
before he even agreed to speak to me, so... It
started out with no access, and then I ended up
getting kind of unprecedented access to him, which transformed the book, obviously.
But it's kind of interesting doing it as a purely
archival research project to start with and sort of building
(34:57):
an oral history around him and going back to quotes
and interviews he'd given over the years and then sort
of turning at 180 and inviting him into the story
and getting all this Rich insight and amazing stories and
quotes and personality that came right from the source.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
So why did it take that long to get his approval?
I mean, I can imagine he's a private man, right,
in many ways.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
He's very private, and he'd always resisted any attempts by
anyone who wanted to write any kind of personal life. story, biography, documentary,
anything of the sort. So, I mean, I think there's
different reasons for that, but basically he's a very private
person is the answer. And I think the timing of it,
(35:45):
he started talking to me the year he turned 90,
which was a year that a lot of people were
sort of making him look at his legacy. And he
was sort of accepting that that was the natural course
of things by that time of your life. And his
talking to me also coincided with Steven Spielberg producing a
documentary about him. And Spielberg's the only person he would
have said yes to for that. So it was a
(36:07):
real luck of timing and confluence of events, I think,
that led him to acquiesce.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
So what exactly got Williams to say yes to your request?
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Well, I initially approached his management that kind of went
through the proper channels and was given a very pretty immediate, no, thanks,
but no thanks. He doesn't want to do that. And
my other strategy, though, was I just kept working on
the book. I had a contract from the publisher, Oxford
University Press. I was interviewing people around him. So colleagues, musicians, directors.
(36:41):
And I think he was hearing back from those people
to some extent and not, I guess, not anything too worrying.
And I also wrote, because I never actually asked him
directly about this, I had his home address, and I
wrote him not one, but two actual letters a year
apart from each other while in the midst of working
(37:02):
on the book. And I think it was just, like
I say, him turning 90, Spielberg doing this documentary, other
things sort of... The thing he said to me the
first time we met was, I realized you were going
to write this book regardless, so I figured we should
get to know each other a little bit.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Was it a Williams score that got you interested in
this whole idea of film music being a component of
the movie going experience that like was, you know, maybe
a gateway drug or something for you?
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yes, it was. So this will age me young wise,
but I heard the score for Jurassic Park before I
saw the movie as a child. And it was the
music that really like turned me on. And then it
was my cousin who explained to me who John Williams was.
And I realized I had sort of been unconsciously aware
of him via Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jaws, all this
(37:53):
other stuff. I just wasn't cognizant of the fact that
there was some person out there writing this music. And
so I started collecting his scores and started paying attention,
you know, developing this awareness of what film music was
doing in every film I watched and slowly sort of
grew in my appreciation of other composers and just have
(38:13):
been kind of monomaniacally obsessed with film music. most of
my life, but it's all because of John Williams.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Tell me where you think you'd like to see film
scoring as a key component to why we go to
the movies, whether we know it or not. Where would
you like to see it go in the next 10,
20 years?
Speaker 2 (38:33):
It's interesting. You talked about this coming in cycles, and
I think there was a reaction to the kind of Steiner,
big orchestral operatic approach in the 60s and 70s. And
then there was a revival of something akin to that
with Williams and others. And then there was a reaction
against that. And Hans Zimmer sort of represented a reaction
(38:54):
against that in terms of moving towards a more synthetic
kind of pop sensibility. And then we've had this other
kind of reaction to that. And people like Johnny Greenwood,
Trent Reznor, Mika Levy, kind of people outside of the
box in terms of traditional film scoring. And they don't
come out of film scoring programs in school. There are
(39:17):
rock musicians or recording musicians who are bringing a different
kind of offbeat approach, which I like. I mean, of late,
I've just enjoyed being surprised by a score and not
feeling like it's on autopilot or it's something that's, you know,
I've heard a million times before. I don't know where
we're going. I mean, Ludwig Gorenson is sort of, I
(39:38):
don't know if he's the bellwether, but he is sort
of at the top of the heap right now in
terms of the demand, the Oscars, the attention. however you
feel about his score for The Odyssey or Oppenheimer or
Tenet or any other films he's done, people really respond
to his scores and they talk about them and they
(40:00):
listen to them on their own. So he's definitely touching
a nerve. And I really like him a lot, but
he's an interesting heir to the Williams philosophy, the Williams
sort of tradition. And yet he comes out of hip
hop and he has all these other influences. And there's
so much kind of sound design as part of the
(40:20):
Odyssey score that you would never hear in a Williams score.
So it's this interesting mix of old and new. As
far as where we're going, the trend that I really
like is directors like Nolan or Damien Chazelle or Ryan
Coogler with Goranson who want music to be part of
the movie from the ground up. And the music starts
(40:41):
getting written before the film's even shot and they're playing
it on the set. and the music's informing how certain
scenes are constructed. We've sort of been moving in that
direction with certain directors and composers, and I love that.
I think that is the evolution of film scoring, where
you're not just bringing someone in at the last minute
and they're sort of painting on a layer of music
(41:02):
to this thing that already lives and exists and might
even have kind of a reference soundtrack that you're sort
of having to work around or imitate or something. but
rather music is sort of being written as the film's
being written, essentially.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Right, right.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Which I think leads to more idiosyncratic scoring approach. If
the music's not just coming in late and having to
deal with other reference points, it gets to just evolve
with the creation of the film. I think that's a
great way forward for the art of film scoring.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
I also think this is an unusually good time for
film scoring when you look at everybody you've mentioned so far.
Johnny Greenwood, I don't think There's a more beautiful score
in the last 20 years than Phantom Thread. And there
will be blood before that for Paul Thomas Anderson as well.
I think Michael Ables is a stunning new, not new anymore,
(41:55):
but a rival. He couldn't get arrested, you know, for years.
And then Jordan Peele found a little YouTube clip of
his music and hired him for Get Out. And then
at the Oscars that year, Spielberg, came over or shook
Jordan Peele's hand and said, that composer, that's your John Williams.
You know, you stick with that guy.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Yeah, and they are in some ways the modern version,
some of these different, like Paul Thomas Anderson and Johnny Greenwood,
Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Warrenson, Peele and Ables, they are
sort of the heirs to the Spielberg-Williams or the Herman
Hitchcock kind of duo. where you associate one's aesthetic and
(42:42):
style with the other. They're kind of inseparable and they
work in tandem so well together. And the composer is
invited to be part of the creative process in an
outsized way. That's an old tradition, but I just want
to see more of that where music is not an
afterthought and music is not you kind of bringing in
a gun for hire to try to do something your
(43:06):
best imitation of what's on the temp track. That's where
film music has gotten really dull and boring. But you
have these two really creative people coming together to make
this third thing in a way that it's not going
to sound like John Williams or Max Steiner or anybody else.
It's going to be its own animal, but it's the
result of these two powerful artists working together. So that's
(43:30):
the way forward. But it's always been the best way
that films have been scored, I think.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Oh, it's such a fun thing to talk about this
with you.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
The Movie Racket is produced by Joe DeSoto and Michael Phillips,
Adam Kempinar and Sam VanHalgren, executive suite producers. Thanks to
Tim Grieving for his time and insights. His book, John Williams,
A Composer's Life, is available everywhere. And you can find
out what else Tim is up to on his website, timgrieving.com.
That's T-I-M-G-R-E-I-V-I-N-G dot com. I'd love to get your thoughts
(44:18):
on your favorite film scores. Write me at movieracket at filmspotting.net.
I'm waiting.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
Do it!
Speaker 1 (44:26):
We're going out today with the last few bars of
The Bad and the Beautiful theme by David Raxson. I'm
Michael Phillips, and this is a FilmSpotting production.
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