Jerry Goldsmith Panel Discussion Part Three - Conclusion

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

Written and transcribed by the cellist and reviewer Richard Harwood
 

Following the panel discussion, a Q & A session was to end this rare and amazing event. These were some of the questions asked:

Neil Brand (regular musician at the NFT): I would like to kick off with one of my own because, having seen the film, one of those wonderful things about the score is how it tells you what's out there that you can't see. I'm thinking in particular, there's one sequence in which we see Anthony Hopkins fishing, and you wrote a lovely piece which is almost down in that watery environment -- we're with that fish, that little gold thing trying to attract the fish -- and then the camera is away from the river, and suddenly we get this sense of suspense and danger, and then I think I'm right in saying there's a focus pull and there's the moment. Now, that must have been a decision you had to take -- whether to have the music tell you the bear was going to be there, or whether to have the music not do that. Now, was that something that came up as early as 'spotting' the film?

Lee Tamahori (director of The Edge): It's self-evident. The imagery is, actually, telling you anyway. So, what Jerry was doing at that point is, actually, just helping the imagery out. There was no way that the imagery wasn't telling you that something was going to happen anyway, so it would have been foolish for us not to actually amplify that with the music. It's a fine line between telling 'Look out, something's going to happen...' If I could be a little clearer about that, had I not had these two particular shots -- which are somebody's point of view that's kind of drifting around -- had I not had those shots, and Jerry had done something kind of sinister with the music, it may have actually tipped its hand more. But as I was doing it visually anyway, Jerry was just following along with these visual clues.

Jerry Goldsmith: What happened is...before you went to those point of view shots [the music] was very placid, sort of serene, and on the point of view shots I made the transition there -- but not that heavy. I mean, it was like something was a little bit amiss. That was something that I don't think we discussed. I think Lee figured I was smart enough to figure that one out for myself [laughing].

NB: I was also interested with the plane crash that you didn't...I mean there's a lot going on there obviously, but you didn't actually score the plane crash, hitting the mountains going into the lake.

LT: Ah, but we did. Now here's an interesting thing. This is what happens later on. These are very trick decisions. Jerry has a music editor, and he has worked with Kenny Hall for decades I believe, but these are very close relationships as well. After [having written the score], Jerry's off doing his next job, or whatever, on holiday, and I'm sitting mixing this picture and Jerry's long gone. Now, his key link to the whole mixing process is actually his music editor, so Kenny was with us when we were mixing dialogue and effects and music together. When it came to the plane crash...now Jerry had actually scored...this plane flies in to a flock of birds and all hell breaks loose. It just goes roaring down amongst the mountains and eventually hits...it's kind of a three stage crash -- you know, hits birds, comes down, breaks off a piece on a mountain rocky ledge, and then it keeps on going down and bits fall off, and eventually it hits the water. They go under water and guys swim out of this plane, get to the top, save their lives and drag themselves onto shore.

Jerry scored the whole thing all the way through. As we came to mix this thing, I suddenly...and I hadn't seen this before. Had I known so, I would have stopped [Jerry] at the scoring stage. But I couldn't see it until we had all these elements. The mixing of, especially the effects...once you heard that, I suddenly had this idea -- it might be more terrifying to actually have the impact with just purely effects and no music at all because there seemed to be enough visual information and audio information of wreckage and breaking glass and stuff to just be jarring enough. But having done that, I was now ahead of Jerry's track and I had to almost literally cut it in half.

Things like this send Ken Hall into apoplexy because you don't want to be just starting on some random beat. So we went through it carefully and I said, 'Look, why don't we do this -- take out the whole impact where they hit the birds, take out everything where the plane hits rock faces, and start the score where Jerry's got it once the plane hits the water.' Because the impact on the water was so huge in terms of effects, it managed to disguise the introduction of the track at that point. So once we go under water, it seemed like a good editing point, if you will, to reintroduce the track. Now it seamlessly plays as if the track started there but only Jerry and I, and Kenny, will know how awful that is a decision as it comes. Now I look at it, I'm glad I made that decision. It's horrifying to do it like that but now what you have are these moments of terror...the terror is amplified. If the music was still in there, it was actually detracting from the scene. We were going from screaming panic inside a small aircraft to big exteriors where we were just hearing tiny sound effects and a motor that was running down and so it seemed to me that this jumping from big sounds to small sounds, without music, actually helped the scene out. It is one of those moments...Kenny's ringing up Jerry, wherever he is, and saying 'Do you know what these guys are doing?' [audience laughing] But I'm sure it happens and only Jerry could tell you this...I'm sure it has happened on every movie and in some way or another, those things do happen. You chop, change, you have to slice pieces out. Kenny did some extraordinary things in here -- I swapped a couple of little pieces around. Blasphemous though it seems, I felt that, suddenly once I heard it when we were mixing it, god, I wished I had changed [that around. But Kenny] found a way of cutting that and making it work brilliantly so...

JG: Rarely does 100 percent of your score end up in the movie. It's a fact of life. For some of these decisions are made...you know, I say 'I really don't think music should be there.' He says 'Well, do it and if it doesn't work we won't use it.' Which is really wonderful. I say 'Well wait a minute, do you know how much work that is?' [audience laughing] 'If you're not going to use it then why am I wasting my time on something that's questionable when I can spend more time to work on something that we know is important.' That wasn't the case here, although I did feel, I must say, when we 'spotted' the picture -- Ýand I think I even expressed it -- do we really need music on this crash. I'm not going to give up here, see, I knew it all along! [laughing all around] So when Kenny told me...he made his inevitable phone call to me, 'Do you know what they're doing?' And I said 'Yes,' and I said 'Well, it sounds OK to me.' You get used to this. You do something for long enough, you know all the tricks...there are few surprises left. The composer has to develop the attitude, what is best for the film. That's the toughest thing, I think, for a director, is all these egos he's gotta work with, forgetting his own ego, he's got all the other people. Everybody that's contributing to this film has got their own ego and they think that their contribution is the most important in the film, probably from the honey wagon driver up to the lead actor. And everybody's contribution is terribly important but they are all parts of the sum total. So I think the greatest task the director has is to sort this all out and somehow keep all these egos in line. And that's something I've learned. Yes, my contribution is terribly important to the film but is not the ultimate. Whatever works to make a film better for all of us.

How often do you use twentieth century compositional technique?

JG: A lot more in the '60s and '70s. I think that Freud, Planet of the Apes, The Mephisto Waltz, some other films, employed some of the avant garde techniques. I think that film making was different then. I think they are making a more conservative kind of film today and the music goes more in that more traditional, harmonic and compositional structure. The key thing about composing for films is the versatility and one must be able to adapt to the various dramatic modes of the film and the demands of them. But Planet of the Apes certainly gave the composer the freedom to be as abstract with the music as he wanted to be. It was necessary for a film like that. And so I could write almost a dodecaphonic score for that. There was a very romantic nature to The Edge, plus there was the viciousness of the bear which gave me a chance to be a little more, say, forward-thinking with the music. What one has to do is to be able to balance these elements. The trick is to be able to, within the confines of one score, stylistically be as conservative harmonically, and yet, in other occasions be as abstract as you want it to be -- yet make it all sound as one.

What film have you most enjoyed doing the score for and which have you found the most challenging?

JG: I think the most challenging picture, up until now, has been Basic Instinct. I don't know, the enjoyable films are the little films like Rudy, which nobody even saw over here. They're fun because you just write a pretty melody. You don't have to get violent, or anything. You don't have bears to deal with.

Many thanks to Simon Ward, events officer at the National Film Theater.

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