Could you tell us a little bit about your résumé?
I was born in New York City. I lived in Queens my whole life, went to New York University for graduation studies and classical composition. After that, I moved to California to continue my studies and graduate work, and specifically film scoring working – studying with the likes of Elmer Bernstein, David Raksin and Leonard Rosenman, among others. Soon after that, I got a job working for Hans Zimmer. The movie I started on was GLADIATOR. I worked with him up until RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS, and that would encapsulate movies like HANNIBAL, PEARL HARBOR... After that I stopped working as an assistant, as I kind of started to be a full time composer here in the studios. I started on the TIME MACHINE movie, and after that I worked on BLACK HAWK DOWN. I was doing additional music here and there, at that point forward. And also taking solo credits for myself, things for Jerry Bruckheimer TV shows, such as SKIN, doing documentaries for HBO and National Geographic, and other independent documentaries as well.
And how is the job of assisting Hans Zimmer?
It's a really difficult job. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It's over a hundred hours a week, pretty intense because as we know we have to do more than one thing at the time, and especially these days, there is more demand than ever. It is very difficult to know all the technology because Hans grew up knowing all the synths technology with the notes and processes, things of that nature. So he knows all the stuff. I had to learn a lot about music and a lot about technology at the same time. It's a great challenge of learning.
And how did you get your credit on WHEN A STRANGER CALLS?
It's the best story that a composer could tell. I got a call of my agent saying that Screen Gems was looking for a composer for WHEN A STRANGER CALLS. I submitted a sampling of my work from movies I worked on recently, such as AMITYVILLE HORROR, and THE RING, other kinds of horror and dark music. The director, the producers, all listened to my demo and said "This is the guy, let's bring him in!" So I interviewed for it, and they asked me to do the movie, pretty straight away. The music was the reason I got the job, not because of anyone that I knew. It was a pretty remarkable experience to be able to say that the music was the reason to be a part of that movie.
Now the traditional question is: did you see the original movie and listened to its music?
Yes, I did once watch the original. People were saying that it was a scary movie when I was a kid. It's actually not that scary for me, now. At that point obviously it was! But the music was a very different style of horror movie music for the time. It was a little less subtle than the score that I was asked to provide for WHEN A STRANGER CALLS, the remake.
What was your approach then?
I wanted to come up with the way of how do you do horror movie music and not be generic. Because I think it's very easy to slip into a way where you're like, "OK, just some scary strings here, dark droning things there..." But how do you do that makes it unique? So what I did is that I decided to go to Prague and I recorded two 4 hours sessions with various sized orchestras to do sampling of aleatoric, very Ligeti, Penderecki performances, that I could have before starting to write themes. All this was written out by me and my orchestrator, as a way of having colours to start with and to also work with the client and say that it's not going to sound something like this, but it will sound exactly like this, these horror-labelled orchestral performances. I didn't want to just use any kind of horror movie samples; I wanted them to be very specific for this movie. After watching it, I just saw that there were very disharmonic, glassy textures in the way it was shot and I wanted to incorporate that into the score in a very specific way.
Of course, I couldn't, you know, not doing what the movie required as well. So I think the score is different because of its supernatural nature, meaning that there are at times maybe a dozen or two dozen 50-pieces orchestra drones or ideas going on very subtlety against each other. They were recorded at different tempos and it's kind of an abstract, object-oriented way, instead of writing it a "classical linear, everybody playing at the same tempo." So I wanted to do that. Then we also went to Seattle afterward to record the other bits, all the melodies, all the things in-between. We ended up with an 85-pieces orchestra in Seattle and doing 50-pieces orchestra in Prague. I think that helped giving it a rather unique colour. You couldn't do it with one orchestra. It just wouldn't be possible.
It's true that, when listening to your soundtrack, we instantly feel that there are two orchestral forces, each moving against or upon the other...
I was inspired by the Polish composers, especially Penderecki and Ligeti that were having things with their own tempos and their own colours. But it's very hard to express that to an executive, I think. So I say "Let me just do what I can to make it like that." So they can immediately say if these colours are for their film or not.
The fact is, you can play this kind of music more efficiently in horror movies than in any film genre...
Yes, absolutely. Not all films can hold that kind of music. There are exceptions, things like 2001. But it's hard to do well. I had to kind of assembling building blocks to be able to try to do it with some control.
And what was your relationship with Simon West, the director?
It was really great working with Simon. We had a lot of people in the beginning making musical comments. At the end, it was Simon working with the film editor as well who would assemble the temp score. I worked with both of them very closely about the colours and we worked especially during the scoring days: every day we would come in and listen it, go over again and again to make sure it's exactly what they want. In the end it's a gorgeous movie, it looks really expensive! (laughs) I think it's amazing what they did when they were putting it together, especially when there was that scene that was going to be added... Simon just kind of went out, shot it and just put it together on his fee, right there, at night, when they were cutting it. He's just a really talented director.
You didn't play the cliché of the solo female voice...
No, absolutely no! (laughs) I wanted to use a kind of open piano sound. There are a couple of pianos in there, kind of oddly, which are going against the entire texture. Hopefully this creates a sense of uneasiness and tension that you can't describe.
The great thing about doing movies like this, specifically horror movies, is that they really let you stretch your creative juices. You can really get away with a lot more than you can, as we said, in some other genres films.
What were your past projects up until WHEN A STRANGER CALLS, and what are your next films?
Well, I think I hit every genre last year, and I also worked with every major non-union orchestra in the world. I did SOCOM 3: U.S. Navy SEALs, a video game for Sony, and then I did WALLACE & GROMIT for DreamWorks. I worked on MADAGASCAR... I did a German animation called URMEL AUS DEM EIS. I did a very melodic children score for this one, which couldn't be further away from WHEN A STRANGER CALLS.
Now I'm doing another short film for DreamWorks. I'll be also scoring BONE DRY for Brett Hart. For this I'll be co-writing it my friend Mel Wesson. It's going to be a very dark and hopefully very interesting score to support the plot.