Siren Song
Harry Gregson-Williams hits some rough water in Sinbad and the Seven Seas.
By Jeff Bond
Excerpted from FSM Vol. 8, No. 6, on
sale now.
What if they made a Sinbad movie and nobody came? That's the question
Dreamworks may have been asking itself this July as Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas became
the latest high-profile, traditionally animated adventure film to crash
on the rocks of the high-pressure summer movie season. "There might
have been a time when certain four-year-old boys might have been able
to picture themselves as Sinbad," composer Harry Gregson-Williams says.
"I don't think they appreciate the aesthetic of someone of my
generation where one was brought up with cartoons -- now they're
bombarded by it on TV for free in all manner of different styles, and
something has to poke out like a Shrek
or a Finding Nemo."
Sinbad hit about $10 million
in box-office receipts on its opening weekend, following disappointing
debuts for Fox's Titan A.E.
and Disney's Atlantis: The Lost
Empire and Treasure Planet,
all of which indicate that the market for serious animated fantasy
films that has long existed in Japan has yet to migrate to the U.S.
"During the course of making Sinbad
I was aware that this was by no means a dead cert," Gregson-Williams
says. "But I must say 10 million dollars doesn't sound too good. I'm
sure it'll do all right on DVD but it's a shame." The composer doesn't
have his own theory about why the movie has had hard luck finding an
audience, but he has been approached with some. "Someone said to me,
where's the cuddly funny animal? I asked what he meant, but certainly
there's a question of why do you do a film like this animated? Wouldn't
it be more fun to see Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones slogging it
out on the high seas for real rather than a cartoon. Usually there's
that kind of reason; in Shrek
you have a green ogre and a talking donkey, and how do you do that in
live action? But the more I thought about that comment the more I
thought it hearkens back to sort of Errol Flynn really. It's
particularly disappointing to me because it feels like a waste of seven
or eight months of my life."
Gregson-Williams wrote a full-bore orchestral score for Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,
coordinating with the animation team over the course of development of
the film. "There's 80 minutes of symphonic music on Sinbad so this was a new kettle of
fish for me," he points out. "If people are into film scores than I
suppose I can take consolation in that. We did some nice stuff in Shrek but it was more of a pastiche
of a fairy tale. There's not a lot of pastiche on Sinbad but there were obviously
boundaries one didn't want to cross because it was supposed to be a
swashbuckling Sinbad
adventure. So one didn't want to hear a synthesizer or anything like
that going on."
Playing It Straight
While both Atlantis: The Lost Empire
and Treasure Planet boasted
comic sidekick characters in the Disney tradition, Sinbad strove to play it straight,
and the result was an unusually strong dramatic score. "The thing one
could try and do for a movie like this is try and forget that these are
cartoon characters and try to place the viewer in peril if that's what
the characters are in," Gregson-Williams says. "When we started out on Antz Jeffrey [Katzenberg] said
look, think of this more as Romancing
the Stone -- we've got to forget we're looking at ants within 10
minutes of the movie opening. And although we weren't looking at
animals in this one, we're looking at Sinbad and Marina, but they are
cardboard cutouts so musically one's got to take the serious line and
say this is Sinbad, he's a hero and try to portray that musically."
Gregson-Williams wrote a bustling theme for the Sinbad character
(voiced by Brad Pitt in the film), but after its initial high-energy
statements the theme is played out in a richer, more supportive guise
as the film progresses. "When we first meet him he's a bit of a loser,
really;" the composer says of the Sinbad character. "He can't really
get a girlfriend, he's a thief and he's not got much integrity. The arc
of the film takes us to a place where he does get a girlfriend and more
importantly does do an honorable thing and puts his neck on the line
literally for his childhood friend, and he wouldn't have thought of
doing that at the beginning of the movie. Within his theme I wanted to
get this kind of blackheart character who would bounce around doing
anything he liked, but toward the end of the score and the movie I
think what I tried to aim at was that it would transform itself into
something much more honorable and noble."
One of the score's central challenges was to tackle the mythical
characters of the Sirens, female apparitions who lure sailors to their
deaths with their voices. Gregson-Williams had to create a musical
effect for these characters that would both underscore and inspire the
onscreen action. "I wrote that about 18 months ago; it's one of those
cues where supposedly the animators were going to animate to the
music," he says. "Their idea was that these sirens would come out of
the water and when a siren was onscreen you'd hear a voice and you'd
understand that the sirens were trying to entice Sinbad and his crew
who were entirely male except for Marina [Sinbad's love interest,
voiced by Catherine Zeta-Jones], off the boat and to their deaths.
Consequently the only person who can take control of the situation is
Marina and she shows some heroic tendencies and saves Sinbad and his
crew from certain death. But I wrote the cue and was playing catch-up
the whole time -- I had hoped I would write the sequence and that would
be it. They loved the music and it was just storyboards; I couldn't see
where a siren jumped out of the water and where one didn't, but I kind
of sprinkled the piece with these vocals, but what actually happened is
they'd animate a little bit and then toss it back to me and of course
they'd moved where I thought a siren was going to jump out of the water
and where my vocal was and it would have to be changed, and that went
on until the bitter end. It's brilliantly animated and it's probably my
favorite scene in the movie but it's also the one that gave me the
biggest headache. That's the challenge with animation; it's such an
ongoing process.
For the full story check out FSM Vol.
8, No. 6, on sale now...
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
|
