John Q

by Jeff Bond

Excerpted from FSM Vol. 7, No. 2, on sale now...

Any look at current film composer bios would seem to indicate that every rock musician and record industry producer has composing for film as his or her ultimate goal, and for film score enthusiasts these new recruits are often regarded with suspicion as people who don't have the proper classical training to really tackle the job. Aaron Zigman, whose film assignment was Nick Cassavetes' John Q, at least comes by his film composition credits honestly. He was trained as a classical pianist and had teachers in theory and harmony while attending college in Los Angeles. But he took a profitable detour into the record industry when he was hired as a songwriter in the early '80s, writing songs for The Jets, Carly Simon and Natalie Cole, as well as arranging and orchestrating string dates on records by Seal and Tina Turner. His arranging skills led to film work on The Birdcage and License to Kill, but he didn't win the job on John Q off of those accomplishments. Instead, he befriended director Cassavetes after a concert performance of one of Zigman's original compositions. "He had actually come to a concert of mine, a 35-minute tone poem for when Itzaak Rabin was killed with a 75-piece orchestra that took me about 5 months to write," Zigman explains. "Nick came to that event and was impressed and said 'Maybe someday you'll score one of my films.'"

Cassavetes had Zigman audition for the composing post on John Q early in filming of the drama. "He sent me the opening montage from a daily and said here's the six-minute opening, I'd like to champion you to get the job but I can't guarantee it," Zigman recalls. "I went in with 55 people and wrote a vocalize that's similar to the one that's in the movie, based on the Ave Maria text and they were impressed and had me come onboard." While he had no real training in the timing and synchronization skills necessary for the work, Zigman managed the task easily enough. "I just went by gut instinct and it felt pretty natural to me. It's always a learning experience because you're learning any time you do anything. It was challenging but it wasn't daunting. It turned out to be a really positive experience and I certainly got really good as far as plotting timings and points and understanding the art of hitting things and not hitting things. I learned a lot from Nick in the sense of what not to step on and the art of not telegraphing things."

The subject matter of John Q is highly dramatic, if not downright inflammatory: Denzel Washington plays a man who holds several hospital workers hostage when he discovers that he doesn't have the necessary insurance to get a heart transplant for his young son. With the potential histrionics of that situation, Zigman's challenge was to support the film's emotions without going overboard. "I've been such a fan of movies for so long and listening to different composers, and one of my pet peeves is people who step on emotions and with all that great emotion come in with music and really tell you how to feel," the composer says. "Once in a blue moon the cliché stuff you really need, but on two of the most emotional scenes in the movie we really played it dry because Denzel was so good you really didn't want to step on his performance. Then there were other times when you really want to hit it hard. There was one scene in particular where Mikey falls to the ground and has his heart attack, and Nick really wanted to hit that. The story's very relatable to Nick because his daughter has a heart condition, and he said he really wanted to feel like he felt with his daughter in the hospital, which was an incredible feeling of anxiety. He said this is one moment where he really wanted me to tear it up, and that's one of the big heavy cues in the movie. It's kind of a little wild, kind of 20th-century classical, Flight of the Bumblebee type thing."

Zigman's early involvement with the score meant he was able to develop from his initial audition sketches and even contribute to the film's temporary score, a rarity for a composer these days. "They brought me in early and had me do 30 percent of the temp score," Zigman acknowledges. "That was my graduate class when I was with Nick hip and shoulder for a few months before we got a final cut, and they had me do a lot of music for the preview and they wanted to test the waters further. Even though a lot of that music I had to completely rescore, it made it very comfortable to me by the time I got to the final cut because it gave me a sense of what the colors were going to be and Nick had approved the cues in the sense of their genres before I tore them apart and rewrote them to the final specs. That was challenging in itself to be onboard for the actual preview."

Zigman says he finished the final score in nine or 10 weeks, after spending several months collaborating on the temp score before recording the final version. "We recorded at Todd-AO studios, which is my favorite room in the world. I was really hoping we could do it in Los Angeles because I love the musicians here -- so many of them are my friends and it was one of those magical three-day experiences working here." Using the building blocks from his audition sketch and material from the temp score, Zigman compiled a score that addressed familial, religious and social issues inherent in the film's text. "In the opening there's a four-grouping note quote from the Ave Maria that I wrote, and I took that theme and interwove it through the score in different textures," Zigman says. "I stayed away from some of the more conventional sounds and used different palettes of exotic percussion and imaging of guitars underneath the string writing I was doing to keep it kind of left-of-center since the story had such an Americana flair to it. I didn't want to make it generic, but certainly I gave various people their themes. I gave Duvall his theme and probably the obvious cliché was to hit the sniper and the ugly part of it, but for the most part I used this surreal, late 19th- century classical themes running throughout, using choir to give it almost a religious tone overall."

Check out the full story in FSM Vol. 7, No. 2.

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