A Year of Living Wonderfully: Interview with Alan Silvestri

Alan SilvestriAlan Silvestri talks to Colonne Sonore about his magnificent 2007: the warming celebrations in Castell’Alfero, the success of his premiere concert in Madrid, the challenge of Beowulf.

 

Since our last interview on November 2005, Alan Silvestri scored three movies: The Wild, Night at the Museum and Beowulf, the 12th picture of his lasting collaboration with Robert Zemeckis. But much more happened in the meanwhile. Two unusual commitments had him writing the music for Tokyo Disney Sea Park’s show The Legend of Mythica and penning the hymn for the NCAA. Then, last June the composer landed in Italy to enjoy the sincere celebrations organized for him in Castell’Alfero, Asti, where the artist has his roots. Just a week later he walked with visible emotion the stage of Teatro Monumental in Madrid, to conduct the RTVE Orchestra in what was actually his premiere live concert. The audience’s jubilant ovation sealed some of the most warming pages of the composer’s private and professional life. With these remembrances still fresh, the artist took with us a trip backward through the pages of this amazing year’s diary, reflecting on the complex experience of the Beowulf’s scoring, that again made him confronting with the performance capture’s snares.

 

ColonneSonore: Last time we talked in 2005 about Beowulf’s score, you had only recorded the source music and last June, during your visit in Italy for the Castell’Alfero celebrations, you were still working on the score. Can you please outline the entire scoring process for Beowulf, from conceptualizing to recording session and mixing, and how many time it took?

Alan Silvestri: When I went in Italy last summer I had only done about 20 or 30 minutes of the score and all the rest had to be done. First thing I recorded was the music for the Comic-Con preview, and it had to be done much earlier than the rest of the score had to be finished. So it created a certain kind of difficulty because you wanted it to somehow be thematically connected with the movie and yet you were having to do this piece of material very early on - but it all worked out fine. The way Bob Zemeckis presented it to me was that because it needed to be finished so early, if I wound up changing my mind and didn’t want to use the music in the final film that would be ok, but of course financially they were hoping that, whatever we did, it could be used in the final score, because it would be a much greater expense to redo all of that. I think there were about 20 minutes of film and I think we had about 16 minutes of music in it. 
Then, after my visit in Italy, we started recording again sometime in September. The scoring spread out of a long period of time because of the nature of the project. What I found very interesting was that because so many of the finished shots came at the very last moment, because of the rendering of the film, we had to wait until we had those images to score. We worked very intensely in the last month. For instance the entire dragon sequence, that is at end of the film and is about 20 minutes, I couldn’t’t really do it until the very last days. Anyway I could not wait for all the shots to be completed or I would never have made it. That part was difficult.

CS: So you really had to use your imagination…When did you start to see something finished?

AS: It’s hard to remember any of the sequences that I did when I had all of the shots finished. And there were still things that I never really got to see finished before I had to go to score them…You have something to work with: you have very rough versions of the film to work with but you really - as you perfectly said - have to use your imagination. The director is the guide;  he’s the only one who knows what will really be on frame when it’s finished.

Silvestri during a break at the celebrations in Castell'Alfero (Asti)CS: The film touches several themes and arguments, covering universal human boundaries like the struggle between good and evil, the aspiration for power, the flesh’s temptations. But it also talks about love, friendship, honor and glory, so resulting in a in really varied narrative: you have the protagonist confronting with all his limits, regretting as an old king about his mistakes and just some minutes next slaying a dragon in a roller-coaster sequence. How much a difficult task was to set the proper musical key for each side and level of the movie maintaining a general, distinctive tone in the score?

AS: That really is what the composer’s job is in film scoring: you somehow need to find thematic material that will address all this areas that you speak of. Then of course, if you have a clearly defined theme, you have the opportunity to show it in many different musical settings, as you go through the narrative. So I think you can say it’s difficult but it these tasks are really at the heart of what it means to be a film composer.

CS: Was there a particular side of the movie that ended up to be particularly hard to score or to approach?

AS: I think one the most difficult sequence in the film was the seduction scene. You always have to walk the line between how specific you become and how general you become. You have to find a point of view: sometimes you have to play the perfume in the air,  the scent of what’s going on in the room, rather than specifically the action. We needed something that could be sensual and something that was also seductive and dangerous, because Bob very much wanted us to feel the idea of the spider and the fly, of someone lured into someone’s web, that by the time he finds out he’s in trouble he’s also stuck in a way he can’t get out. That was the sense Bob was looking for.

CS: Can you talk about the pulsating Grendel’s mother’s motif? It has some distinctive resemblance with Jerry Goldsmith’s Basic Instinct score, as in a certain way had the What Lies Beneath score, maybe because also Goldsmith’s score was a post-modernistic approach to the Herrmann language…

AS: That was a combination of real harp, electronic instruments and repeat effects. These musical "associations" began way before film, I would say. Certainly in opera, but also with the classical composers, certain kinds of musical styles have over time been  associated with certain kinds of events. Scary music for instance. There’s certain kinds of approaches that have been associated with something scary, like low tremolo strings, and others, for instance, with playfulness, as when we hear pizzicato strings played in a certain way. Then the genre of 'westerns' developed a style of music; it wasn’t necessarily in the tunes but it was certainly a style. For instance when I did something like the western music for Back to the Future: if you hear that music away from the movie you know it’s a western because it is in that style of music that is associated with western. Jerry Goldsmith has been very instrumental in promoting certain kind of styles for certain kinds of cinema. Look at his contribution to the vocabulary of mystery music, or the vocabulary of high-adventure. I’ve grown up with these masters’ continuation of the vocabulary so I think that’s where those kinds of sensibilities come from. Jerry has been an icon in the way that he has captured and advanced a wide range of musical genres. And John Williams as well: he didn’t invent adventure music but look how far he’s gone to create those associations in the audience. I think that’s probably what you’re sensing there…

CS: This can be referred to what you called “associate aspect to film” in our previous interview…

AS: Yes I think it’s very much like that. We also have this association, for instance, with the angle of the camera, when we see something happening in a film and it looks like it may be a mysterious plot-point, and then there’s a cut to a close-up of somebody for a reaction. There are all this kinds of devices in forms that have been part of the cinematic vocabulary. Part of the fun filmmakers can have is that they know this vocabulary,  they can create these kinds of impressions and associations just because people have seen so many films. Certainly like in a movie like What Lies Beneath the great influence was of course Alfred Hitchcock, and you can see Bob, as a director, enjoying the vocabulary that Hitchcock has so beautifully created - once again not in a vacuum, because there were those who came before Hitchcock. You can see Bob having fun with the genre in terms of angles that he would shoot the scene. I remember in particular that scene with Harrison Ford lying, seemingly dead, in the hallway on the phone and Bob keeps cutting back to the phone: you’re waiting for that hand to go and you know that - you’ve seen that scene so many times you already now what’s gonna happen, because you feel that kind of cutting. And then you can see Bob just makes you wait and wait and wait, until you can’t believe you’re cut back to it again and then finally you get the big shocking moment, where his hand moves and everybody screams in the theatre. So that’s the vocabulary for that kind of movie and as filmmakers we can have fun with it.

CS: About resemblances, there’s a vivid Morricone hint in Beowulf’s main theme, the heroic one: the use of masculine, staccato male choir, the marcato writings - something that was recognizable also in certain writings of Van Helsing. Was that an unconscious inspiration or a direct homage?

AS: I wouldn’t’t say it was that at all, not direct at all. As a matter of fact I was really looking for something very simple and I knew  that this was going to be a kind of "manly" film [laughs]. I was really just looking for this kind of very masculine, strong kind of music; not really a fanfare but something related to gladiators, warriors… So no, there was no direct homage in that case. It could be as closely related to Darth Vader as anything else, not in notes but in terms of predominantly brass, somewhat ominous masculine kind of treatment. I think that’s really all I was looking for, not directing it toward anyone else in particular.

CS: Anyway the score is "pure Silvestri” sound and maybe the most powerful resemblance in the main theme is the one from Van Helsing. Did you and Zemeckis referred directly to it during the score conceptualization?

AS: Absolutely. Bob very much liked that driving relentless rhythm, having all of the low strings basically being used as percussion instruments almost.

CS: The orchestration is interesting. The overall sound of the score is very massive, in a sort of metallic, very sharp and masculine way: rich use of brass, chorus and percussions, harsh string writings and very little woodwinds showcase - probably one the most restricted use of woodwinds you have ever done, despite the more intimate and dramatic moments. Can you explain about this?

AS: It’s just the way things worked out in this. Having worked with Bob so much in the past, now I know what his sensibility would be like when he dubs the film - when he put together all of the sound effects, dialog and music. And so I know from the past with Bob that when I see a sequence like the ship , for example, I know what’s going to be the sonic state. It’s gonna be very difficult to find room for music and so you have to go with the essential, just the most essential components, because I know it’s gonna play this way strong and he’s gonna want to hear the dialog way up front, all the creeking and great sound on the ship, the rain…everything. In a sense it was a very simple approach to a lot of the orchestration: it had to be powerful and be something that could come through or survive all of these very strong sound effects. The story is bigger than life and is what we’re really hoping to communicate, in the music all through the score. All is bigger than life, the love story - it is almost Shakespearian - the sense of honor, the battle, so musically we were trying to be extreme.

Silvestri during the celebrations in Castell'AlferoCS: Was “Beowulf Slays the Beast”, probably the climax of the score’s action-material, particularly complex to write considering the amount of sonic texture coming from the sound effects track?

AS: That was a very challenging part of the film, because I believe what you have in “Beowulf Slays the Beast” was the last part of the very long dragon sequence, and even though it was divided into a number of pieces, in the film there’s no break between any other: the music is pretty much playing continuously from when the dragon breaks out of the cave all the way into Beowulf is buried. But the action part of it, until the dragon dies and crashes into the water, that was about a ten minute non-stop action sequence. There were all kinds of decisions that Bob was considering, for instance: now that we have gone underwater, do we want to address that in the music? Do we want to maybe take a lot of the sound away and treat it differently and then again differently when they come back out of the water? What he decided in the end was that he just wanted to have this relentless rhythm through the all sequence. The challenge in a sequence like that is: how do you even try to built it? Because if you have to play what in effect is a ten minutes battle it’s really difficult to have a feel like it goes anywhere. I mean at some point you just don’t’ want to feel like you are stalled out. That was difficult because he really did not want to stop this constant pressure and drive. So I did the best I could.

CS: Can you define the role of electronics in the score? Initially, also because it grandly opens the movie, its coexistence with the orchestral element could be read like a musical reflection of the movie‘s task, that is to represent the oldest English poem with the state-of-the-art digital technology in moviemaking. But then the synth writings seems to slow down progressively, apart for the Grendel’s mother materials. Is this connected with the progressive development of the character and with his ultimately coming to terms with vainglory and heroism?

AS: Actually, when I was conceptualizing the score from the beginning, I thought that throughout the body of the score it might be more of the influence that we hear in the very opening of the film. As we started to work through the score it just turned out to be so important to have the orchestration be able to compete with this high level of sound effects. In the main title there’s no competition: you have the opportunity to know that whatever you did musically it would be heard. But once I started to work through the body of the film, especially in the action sequences, a lot of that kind of electronic influence really had difficulty cutting through the sound track of the film. So it turned out as an ongoing consideration about how to set this thematic material so that we really would be able to hear it, although even in most of these cue there are a lot of electronic instruments that are playing with the orchestra: a lot of percussion instruments, a lot of big drums. I would think in some of those places there could be as many as 40 tracks of electronics that are playing with the orchestra and that you might not really pick out even. For instance in the scene of the ship, you wouldn’t listen to this and say it had a heavy electronic influence; it really sounds like a massive orchestra. Pretty much every cue in the film had lots of electronic elements, but they were not designed to stick out as electronic elements but rather create other layers along with the orchestra. Anyway, nobody is inventing "new emotions" in a film, whether it’s a film about knights in armor, the knights in Beowulf’s time or a very modern film that has to do with struggle and conflict. Love is love, hate is hate and those things haven’t changed since the beginning of time, so I think the choice to set music differently has more to do with the overall look and style of the film and once again it take us back to what we were talking about earlier, the vocabulary and associations of film. When we see knights and armor, very old settings, we have associations about music that would be appropriate for that kind of image and we have traditionally heard these big, brassy powerful orchestras. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with that kind of association doing a rock’n’roll score for a movie about knights and armor - and it could be very effective, playing completely against the association, but it could be very risky too. Because now the music is not just supporting the action, it’s making a very broad statement and calling attention to itself.

CS: Considering how difficult was to work on Beowulf, with a so complex production and unusual way of approaching the images, do you have any regrets now that the movie has been released? Anything that you think you could have done better in different working conditions?

AS: No, there’s nothing I would change. One of the things that happened was that Steve Starkey, the producer, really wanted to have the score finished for the first week in August. Then I was working on the dragon sequence, with pretty rough images on the film, and I sent mock-ups of all of these sequences to Bob. He called me after hearing the music and said: “I really love the thematic material, and I love the drive, and I love this and this and this but I realize hearing it with picture that you’re not seeing enough of what's going to be there. We can’t even do this yet, we have to wait and we have to get you more refined images”. What we realized was that it was going to be a problem. I couldn’t score these sequences before I had a certain amount of the images to work to. So we extended the scoring schedule right up until the very end of the dub of the film, well into September. What happened was I had to go back into a lot of these sequences as the finished material came in, doing revisions and changing things. It made some things more difficult for the filmmakers but I got to do all of that, it was the only way to really do it. I don’t have any regrets because in the end I was given all of the time I needed to go back in.

Alan Silvestri on the podium of Teatro Monumental in Madrid (Photo by Pietro Rustichelli)CS: Before the release of Beowulf, you confronted with another, unique experience: your premiere live concert in Madrid. Was something you was looking at? It was also something educational for you?

AS: It was completely educational for me. I had only gone out into the concert world, with anything I had written, maybe two or three times before. Two times was for the Sundance Film Festival: they did a concert for benefit in Lincoln Center, but I only did one piece of music, something from Back to the Future. Henry Mancini did some music that night, Georges Delerue also did some music - which was unbelievable - and Maurice Jarre as well, all put together by David Newman who is a good friend of mine. I got to be a part of this amazing evening, with these amazing composers. Then I did another concert like that, pretty much with same people at the Hollywood Bowl, once again just one piece of music. And then I did an evening for the Henry Mancini Foundation a couple of years ago, again with one piece of music, the suite from Forrest Gump. So I’ve never really thought about walking out on the stage and doing a two hour concert of music that I’ve written. I’ve never had any experience in doing that, never… It was very educational for me, compounded by the fact that it was in another country where I didn’t know any of the musicians. I didn’t know about the concert hall, I didn’t know about the orchestra, I didn’t know the copyist… many unknowns! I didn’t know what the audience would be…who would go to that concert? You can imagine how shocking it was to see how much the audience enjoyed the music. And I actually also did a lot of work to modify the music for that particular orchestra. Some of those things we did that night didn’t really exists in a form that you can even begin to bring to the concert stage, there was nothing for Judge Dredd for instance, or for the Father of the Bride material, that I put together from part one and two. It was a lot of work for me to do in order to have two hours of material but it was all very educational.

CS: What was your feelings returning over the oldest material, especially Back to the Future and Father of the Bride? When John Williams was rehearsing his ‘live-scoring’ for the 20th anniversary screening of E.T. he said that going back over that score was like coming back to an old friend…

AS: It was very much like that. It was a lot of fun to go back through those scores and see what I did back then. It was very much like going back to see an old friend because I could see that I think in certain ways, I have a certain way of saying things. Maybe in the end that’s what everyone would call a style. It was fun to go back and see how I have spoken with music over such a long period of time; to see that my voice maybe sounded a little younger  25 years ago but it was still my voice. I think I understand what John Williams is saying by that.

Silvestri at Castell'Alfero (Asti)CS: And before Madrid there was the great celebration in your honor at Castell’Alfero. Did you enjoyed it?

AS: It was actually overwhelming. It was first of all overwhelming to be there where my great grandparents had come from; it was overwhelming to see the response of all those fantastic people; it was overwhelming to have my children with me and for them to see all of this. They haven’t been around the movie business and they haven’t been around that part of my life and I think it was a little shocking for them to all of a sudden come face to face with their dad's career.

CS: The film festival dedicated to you that the Comune of Castell’Alfero programmed before your arrival culminated with Night at the Museum, your last film at the time. A great score written in not much time, considering that John Ottman was first in charge. It looks like working under pressure really inspires you…

AS: There are some great advantages to that kind of pressure. I had a situation like that on The Bodyguard, I had a situation like that on Practical Magic, I had the same situation on Father of the Bride. One of the great advantages for me with that kind of pressure is that you don’t have any chance to over-think what you do. You have to get an enormous amount of work done very quickly and so you have to take things that are coming to your mind without sitting and thinking: “this is good, this would be better…” - you don’t have time for any of that. You have to think of something to do and you have to write it down. It’s a very different exercise from when you have a lot time to sit, try things, that’s also an interesting process, but this high pressure - no time to second-guess - a different kind of result can come from that.

CS: The last jump in the past is actually a double back. It’s about the recent Film Score Monthly's release of your scores for the CHiPs show: in fact the disc was published one year ago but it really takes back to your beginnings, some thirty years ago. What were your feelings and considerations listening again to your work for the show now?

AS: That was really going a long way back and I’d like to think that I’ve learned few things since then [laughs]. There were very limited means for production, doing a show like that: I could only have a total of ten or twelve musicians. This was when disco was very popular and that was really what they wanted for that show. As long as you kept that driving disco rhythm they really didn’t care what you did on top of it. Anytime I would try to stray away from that I would get a call from the producers and have to change it back. It was a great learning experience for me, anytime anybody gets the chance to write music for film there’s an opportunity to learn about music for film. And it also allowed me to begin a career in music for film and make my living with music.

CS: In recent years you have tried new media with fine results, as the Tokyo Disney Sea Park’s Legend of Mythica and the NCAA’s tune demonstrate. Does this also match with a lack of stimulating demand from contemporary Hollywood?

AS: It doesn’t really have anything to do with the film side of things. Those were two completely different kind of event. Mythica was presented to me by Chris Montan, who is the head of music for Disney Animation. Chris is a long time friend and we’ve done a lot of work together. They were planning on a very kind of unique, new show for the Disney’s park in Japan and he thought that this might be something that would be fun and interesting for me. I met with the director and he turned out to be this amazingly creative guy. It was fun with a very different way to work. The NCAA was brought to me by Mike Gorfaine and Sam Schwartz as something that had come to them. I’ve done movies that have addressed that kind of material, one in particular was American Anthem, which was all about kids trying to find their way into the Olympic finalist team. It was a chance to do something outside of film but the process is still very similar. What I did actually with the NCAA project is that I took a number of dvds of the young athletes and I actually cut something together, then I could use it as I was writing; something where the kids could inspire me as I went through that process. So that was fun as well. It wasn’t any kind of reaction to anything happening in the film world at all.

CS: About contemporary Hollywood: can you name the score you most liked in 2007?

AS: I haven’t heard enough things to really make a good comment about that. The world in film music has really expanded greatly, as you know. There’s just so many new interesting people and new interesting ways to doing things. I did go to see 300 with my son, he really loved it. That music was fantastic, the composer did a fantastic job in that film.

Silvestri and wife Sandra at Castell'AlferoCS: Did you read about Warner Bros’ apologizing for the direct quotation from Elliot Goldenthal‘s Titus score in Tyler Bates’ one for 300?

AS: Yes, I read about that but I don’t know the details. You bring out an interesting argument about temp-tracking. That’s something I think you have to really look at on a case by case bases. If you are doing a movie and they temp-track it with a piece of music by John Williams, let’s say they temp-track it with something from E.T., and they say: “We want you to do something like that”, that means one thing. But then if you go write ‘da da--da-da-da-da--da-- da--’ [sings a hint from E.T. main theme] that’s different. You can’t blame that on the temp-track, because that’s the exact tune and that would be a problem. Not knowing the details about what happened in the score of 300 I can’t comment about how close the material was.

CS: In your agenda there’s Zemeckis’ next performance-capture movie: A Christmas Carol. It will be the same scoring process as Beowulf?

AS: Exactly, it will be a very a similar process. However now we are aware of the difficulties of that medium as it relates to film composing. We’ve already talked about how we would have to build this score’s schedule very late in the process, so we’re sure that I have as much of the final imaging of the film as possible.

Very special thanks to Alan and Sandra Silvestri for their fundamental collaboration and kind support. 
Thanks also to Silvia Burla for the substantial help and Tiziano Toniolo for contributing with the photographic material.

For further information about Silvestri’s celebrations in Castell’Alfero visit: www.castellalfero.net

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