Lost Issue Wednesday: The "Composer Guy"

Part 1 of 4

by Mike Shapiro

Hereís the first installment of a huge John Ottman interview that never made it into the print magazine for...well...space issues. Sorry itís so lateóEnjoy!

John Ottman's life has undergone some fairly dramatic changes since his promising debut on the film music scene (see FSM #62). His dark, imaginative music for The Usual Suspects earned him considerable notice in the industry, and the result has been an onslaught of more work than the former film editor could have possibly anticipated. His recent works include the Jim Carrey vehicle The Cable Guy, and a live-action remake of the Snow White legend. At the present, he's gearing up for Suspects director Bryan Singer's next work, Apt Pupil.

Concurrent with his rather sudden launch into the "big time" of film music have come trials that are unique to the frenetic pace of Hollywood production. John took some time to talk about his recent scoring experiences -- and the almost comical working conditions that a modern film composer must endure in order to practice his craft.

Mike Shapiro: As we last left you, you'd just scored this very promising independent feature. Now all of a sudden you're scoring this huge, highly-promoted film for a big studio. How did you make that transition?

John Ottman: It was actually Ben [Stiller] just seeing The Usual Suspects. Basically he saw the movie and really liked the film, and set up a meeting with me. Frankly I didn't know who Ben Stiller was, which was probably a good thing, so as not to intimidate me. So, I gave my pitch on how I work things, and he basically said he wanted a big Hitchcockian score. They hired me because they heard Suspects, and also I guess because I was half the price of everyone else they could get! [Jim Carrey was taking half of the film's budget.] I was kind of like the Suave of film composers: "I could do what the they [the big guys] do, for less!"

MS: What were your thoughts on a proper approach, orchestrally, to the film score?

JO: Like Suspects, it was something that had to ride a fine line. Cable Guy was kind of a bold film in the sense that they were taking this actor who plays wacky characters and putting him in a darker film. The music had to go with that dark storyline, while at the same time reminding the audience not to take this too seriously.

My philosophical approach to the movie was basically trying to -- as I do with anything I score -- pull out from the character anything I can to humanize him. And because his character's problems were completely rooted in his childhood, I tried to bring that out with a sort of strange nursery rhyme theme subtly sung by children. The hope was to bring an ironic feel, because the film's subtext is basically about society being raised by television.

MS: So you're referring here to your use of the choir.

JO: Right. If you can hear it.

MS: Is that actually audible at any point?

JO: Barely! If you watch the film on video and have it blasting and there's no one in the room making a peep, you just might hear it.

MS: So how much time did you have to write the score, and how much music was there?

JO: Well, that brings up why this film has to take the cake as one of the most unique scoring experiences a composer could have. It was a long story, but I sort of became committed to the movie for the entire duration of the shoot -- which is why you haven't seen my name on too many other films recently! I'd been locked on this one for about five months. From day one of shooting they wanted me to score while they were shooting the film, and so I was providing synthesized renderings of scenes as they constructed things. When they would change, I would change. So it was this constant process for months of altering cue timings. The irony is that the first cut of the film was over three hours, and I had composed and rendered over two hours of music. And there's about 24 minutes of that left in the final film, in between all the rock songs.

MS: Was this process something you suggested?

JO: [laughs] I didn't suggest this at all. Sure I wanted to temp-score this with my renderings when they were pretty much finishing the editing, but I didn't know that from day-one I'd be scoring and providing music for them to temp the cuts with.

MS: Do you think there's a positive effect of following the film that way?

JO: Well, it stopped anyone else from creating a temp-score they would have fallen in love with... it was always my music. At the very beginning I was really playing music editor and creating a temp-score (of other film music) and Ben sort of went along with it, but I sensed he really wanted me to do my own music. I was sort of afraid to, because my mock-ups would obviously be synthesized. I mean although I do pretty detailed renderings, I can't make it sound like a polished live score, so my own paranoia kept me from doing it. But then I took a chance and started sneaking in my music, sort of weaning them on my thematic ideas within the temp-score I was editing, and he liked it. So I sort of got the confidence to sort of throw away the other soundtrack music I had temped in and replaced it with my score. From that point on it was temped entirely with my renderings.

MS: Did you start by coming up with a main title?

JO: Before the film was shot I had read the script a couple of times, and I wrote a main title for it, just knowing that it may not have jived once the film was shot. But, to my elation, it worked, so I pretty much drew all the thematic material from this main title which was about five minutes long. I had different motifs that I had created, and it took me about two weeks to sort of get it all laid and thought out. But what's great about spending all the time up-front: You don't have to spend so much time later, because you've created all your motifs to draw from.

The model of the theme was actually never used verbatim in the film; it's what's on the rock "soundtrack" to the film. They actually mastered the CD weeks before I ever recorded the actual score -- yet I wanted to get at least something on the CD. So, I got a bunch of young musicians together -- mostly from the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra -- and recorded this piece in a small studio in Burbank.

MS: So is this the first feature you scored that you hadn't edited?

JO: First "real" feature, yes. I had scored a couple feature-length things when I was first getting into composing. But as for a big film, yes; and it was a little strange: I remember the first day I attended dailies I walked into the screening room and people looked at me like some plumber had just walked in. I'm used to sitting right there in control with the director, so it felt kind of weird. I had to bite my tongue a lot, because as an editor I was watching dailies and editing them in my mind's eye, yet I was the composer, and it wasn't my place to invade the editor's territory!

MS: That issue aside, do you find it easier (or more difficult) to compose given that you've worked as the editor?

JO: Well, I was on Cable Guy for so long I might as well have edited it! But, having edited films helped me pretty much predict what was ultimately going to end up on the floor, and so I could more easily pace the score as I wrote it, kind of predicting these things.

MS: Has your actual methodology of writing cues, starting from the electronic realization to the final product, change in any way for this film from what you did on Suspects?

JO: On Suspects I did very few synth renderings up front because the director likes to hear beautifully recorded finished temp music, even though he knows when I do the score I will change it. And Cable Guy was the first time I temped the score with my renderings. I really liked doing it that way, actually. No, I guess no real difference, since whether temping the film or not with my renderings, I always do renderings prior to recording with the orchestra. I used pretty much the same equipment as with Suspects, but this time I had a little more... I used a sampler, my new toy, which helped provide some more convincing brass sounds and such. I also got a DA-88 multi-track deck which enabled me to sing along with my sequences to give them an idea of what the children would sound like. I just recorded myself in a high child's voice eight times, sounding like eight kids, well, eight kids straining. It was kind of funny. I think I sounded even more creepy than the kids did.

MS: You mentioned you had to do a lot of revisions to your music during the editing of the film. How far into the process did this carry over?

JO: All the way to the last day of scoring. The unfortunate thing about the whole process was when I saw a scene for the first time, usually in a longer state, I'd score it and felt musically it had a beginning middle and end with each cue. It had some musical integrity, an idea that was flowing through it. And as they started hacking away basically I didn't have the time to re-score a scene, so I felt like I was being a music editor editing the music...my cues kept getting shorter and shorter, and then something would move, and pretty soon it was a very mechanical process, moving measures here, snipping others out there, so that my cues really didn't resemble what my ideas were from the very beginning. So that was disappointing. You yourself were there at the scoring stage, and witnessed the amazing situations, where inevitably we'd be on a cue, and things would be going really well for about 20 minutes, and then the editor's assistant would walk in and tell me that they've changed the scene again, even though this was the "locked" picture.

It's amazing, I remember I kept getting video tapes to my studio, and one said "locked," and I said "Thank god! They've locked the picture." And a couple of days later I'd get one that would say "Locked -- B." [laughs] So, it was never really locked. I would have to re-score the music on the spot, with 90 musicians sitting out there. Or, on a couple of occasions, I took the music home, feverishly rewrote it to a new video, and had it ready on stage by the next morning.

MS: Your copyists really earned their money.

JO: The copyists, Janice Hayen's group, were amazing. It eventually got to such a condition that we had to have re-scoring dates a week later, and we were recording the final score while they were doing the final dub. They were dubbing reels one through six while I was scoring seven through eleven.

MS: What was the reason for booking the additional dates?

JO: Because at the last moment they wanted to totally re-edit the scenes, and there was a last moment conceptual change in the film... I think legs were beginning to shake about how dark the film was, and so they wanted to sort of lighten things up a bit. And so pushed it as far as I felt I could without detracting from the integrity of the music.

MS: So they had test screenings...

JO: They had test screenings that went relatively well, but then they had a couple where people reacted negatively to the end of the movie, because Carrey's character is practically in tears, talking to a helicopter who he thinks is his mother, and basically addressing the abuse he's had by being raised by television. And yet they wanted that to be funny! I had scored it in a sympathetic way with a children's choir, which I felt made a lot of sense -- it was a beautiful scene. But that struck the fear of God into someone, and immediately there was a change to make it lighter. But you can't make that a funny scene, so I made it quirky. It still works now, but...

MS: Were the changes you had to make on the stage just the result of editing changes, or did the powers that be not like the music on hearing it on some occasions?

JO: It was mostly the result of picture changes, but there were a few instances -- which is always my worst nightmare but it happened -- where the director suddenly has a new idea. So I smiled and said, "Yes...?" and I huddled with my team and we just altered the cue, and thank god we were successful. I guess my every worst nightmare happened on Cable Guy, so at least I've gotten them out of the way! It's funny, the reason I had never subscribed to Film Score Monthly was because every time I'd read it there'd be some horror story by a composer, and frankly it scared the hell out of me so much that I knew that if I read much more of it I wouldn't want to be a film composer anymore. Ignorance is bliss. However, every one of those situations I had read about have happened now -- director asking for changes on stage, last-minute picture alterations, dubbing while you're scoring, etc. So now I can talk about it and scare the hell out of someone else! (And now I can subscribe!)

MS: How would you characterize your creative relationship with the director on that project?

JO: Ben is in many ways a clone of Bryan Singer, so I had him pretty figured out by day one, and we got along well. But additionally we clicked because he grew up revering the same shows I did and knew them well. Bryan never watched TV like Ben and I did. And like me, Ben could whistle the incidental music to many of those shows. We bonded when I sung a bar from the Star Trek series and he continued it, and I think he thought, "Okay this is going to work." And I think he got a kick out of the fact that I would score something hinting at a television show, and we'd start talking about that show. So we tried to as much as we could allude to as much TV and as many movies as possible, because the character was obsessed with film and television. We even went so far as to very subtly suggest to the total film-nut that in the helicopter sequence we allude to Capricorn One. No one really noticed; I guess I was the only one paranoid enough to think that my subtle homage to Capricorn One would be perceived as a rip-off. But when I pointed out what I had done to Ben, he turned to me and smiled and said, "Yes! Capricorn One!"

But when all was said and done, there were just a couple times TV and movie themes integrated into the score... it's very subtle. I used the Bewitched theme for a very brief moment in one part. You really have to listen, except the obvious North by Northwest reference... Matthew Broderick is running up a tower in the end of the film, and Ben went, "I want Hitchcock, I want Hitchcock..." and I'd say like [hums a few bars from N by NW], and he said, "Exactly!"

MS: Is it a literal quote of North by Northwest?

JO: It's in the spirit of North by Northwest. I used tambourines to offset the melody line, which is one of that score's signatures. So you get that feel, but I'd like to think it was pretty original.

MS: So unfortunately you didn't get a soundtrack deal...

JO: [sighs] No, because the film didn't make as much as they'd hoped. If the film had gone through the ceiling, there would have been. It's really upsetting. The reason I really want soundtrack albums is so I can have them on my shelf to look at. Especially when you go through all that work, create some fun stuff, and have it so buried in the mix. Because it's a union recording the re-use fees make it prohibitively expensive to release a CD. However I'm going to do it on my own as a promotional CD for myself, spend a couple thousand bucks. [laughs] And I'll do a mailing to music supervisors, friends and family...

MS: If you'd like a copy of the original score to Cable Guy , write to...

JO: [chuckles]

MS: So what was your final opinion of the film as a final product, and the role of your score within?

JO: If nobody had known who Jim Carrey was, and if it had come out of the blue as some little film in some off-season, I think it would have been embraced better. It just had everything going against it. There was a $20 million price tag on Jim Carrey, so all the industry people wanted to hate this film no matter what. It was a film that sort of disillusioned Jim Carrey fans, yet they were the same people who were saying they wanted Jim Carrey to do something different. I remember when we just started doing Cable Guy, I talked to all these people who loved Jim Carrey, and they would say, "You know, I'm really getting burned out on his schtick." And I said, "Oh, but this is something totally different." Yet these same people saw the film and were shocked by his darkness. It was really a film that couldn't win. However I think that in a retrospective of his work, 50 years from now we'll look back at Cable Guy and discover it was probably one of his better movies, because in this film he's actually more real of a character; and it's a more believable story than his others. It's not Gone with the Wind, but I think if you go to the film just wanting to see an interesting story with a comic/dark edge to it, then it was satisfactory.

MS: Now you're responding here to the actual cut that made it to the theaters....

JO: Yes. There were some scenes that were unfortunately cut out in the interest of time. And I'll say that I was extremely disappointed with the final [sound] mix in some, okay, most areas. The music had an intention of weaving things together, especially because I had to compete with so much source music, that when my music had its moments, it really needed to tie things together with a familiar motif that I feel I made extremely accessible, not only to sympathize with the character, but to really tie the story together for people. And because of the start-and-stop obliteration of the music through the sound effects, the music seemed to feel as if it started and stopped constantly. Its lyricalness was kind of destroyed.

To be Continued in the next Lost Issue...

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