Downbeat: Trevor Jones' Dinotopia
Trevor Jones
Dinotopia
by Jeff Bond
Excerpted from FSM Vol. 7, No. 4...
Trevor Jones first burst onto the film-scoring scene in the early '80s
with scores for Excalibur and the spectacular The Dark Crystal,
before eschewing large-scale fantasy epics for more reality-based fare
like Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning and Andrei Konchalovsky's
Runaway Train. By the late '90s, Jones began making a return to
fantasy and science-fiction subjects, primarily by scoring some highly
ambitious Hallmark television miniseries produced by Jim Henson, starting
with Gulliver's Travels in 1996. He scored the striking science
fiction thriller Dark City and returned to territory he had first
explored in Excalibur by scoring Hallmark's Merlin in 1998.
Now Jones tackles Hallmark's sprawling three-part adaptation of Dinotopia,
a project that recalls the scope and imagination of The Dark Crystal.
Jones' Dinotopia music is almost surprisingly bright and optimistic,
"utopian" in the purist sense. "This is a kind of utopian world between
the humans and the saurians, and you really want to suck the audience into
its own reality," Jones insists, pointing out the plausibility of James
Gurney's series of books set on an Earth in which dinosaurs never became
extinct. "This could have happened that this comet didn't wipe out the
dinosaurs at that point in our history and maybe man and the dinosaurs
could have coexisted, and who's to say they wouldn't have evolved some
way of communicating with each other? It's weird because music really helps
to bridge the gap between reality and fantasy; it has that magical ability
to put emotion into images that exist purely in the minds of the computer
graphics guys. That's part of the joy of what I do; from a human point
of view you really want to get the emotion into the picture by having the
music make that transition."
Jones says that his avoidance of the fantasy genre after The Dark
Crystal was quite intentional. "When I do a project I find myself writing
myself out in a genre," the composer says. "If I'm doing my job correctly
I've explored all the ideas and mined that theme, and when people say look,
you've just done a sword and sorcery movie, here's another one -- the last
thing I want to do is another sword and sorcery movie. All my best ideas
have gone. It took 20 years between Excalibur and Merlin,
and I turned down so many sword and sorcery pictures, First Knight and
everything, and I kept saying I wasn't ready to do that. But over the years
you'll be sitting on a train and thinking about the sword and the lady
of the lake and suddenly something occurs to you. Merlin was just
right for me, it came at a time when I had sufficient time between Excalibur
and this was a more mature take on the same subject."
The composer acknowledges that he's taken something of the same track
in the years between The Dark Crystal and Dinotopia. "The
weird thing about The Dark Crystal is that it's a weird period in
my life now that I look back on it, working with Jim Henson," Jones says.
"I had a lot of artistic freedom to work and develop and grow. What people
forget is that Dark Crystal was a two- or two-and-a-half-year project.
I did not only the movie but the making of the movie, we had fashion shows
in London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles, there was an exhibition that
toured the world and went to Moscow and everything, and all of these things
had to have music in them, and we were in the studio month after month
recording music for the Henson organization to use at these things. I've
got hours of the stuff. It's all copyrighted to Jim's company, but it exists."
Jones is currently looking into reissuing the long-out-of-print Dark
Crystal score on his own label. "I'd certainly like to take the album
at least and have a limited edition, because I did it in digital and it's
never been released in digital."
Check out the full story in FSM Vol. 7, No. 4, on sale now...
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
|
