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Posted: |
Feb 23, 2018 - 3:19 PM
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By: |
Erik Woods
(Member)
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Excerpt from this interview
http://www.bsospirit.com/entrevistas/joelmcneely_e.php
BS: More or less in between these two major projects you also participated in a number of films which, for many film music enthusiasts, provided you with the opportunity of writing some of your most memorable themes to date. Take, e.g., Iron Will (1994): a rousing orchestral score that turns out to be another major character in the movie. Here your music does cover a wide range of emotions and styles. Is such a heterogeneous score a big challenge for you as a composer?
JM: This was continuing the round that I had done in Young Indy. It wasn't a big budget movie, but it was certainly my first movie that wasn't a low, low budget movie. So they had the money to score adequately with a large orchestra and, I guess, it therefore turned out to be my first real movie, so-to-say.
The director Charles Haid loves music and had all kinds of pre-conceived notions of what he wanted ,and they fortunately matched what I wanted to do: i.e. ,to make music be a large part of telling the story. He gave me a big canvas to work with and it was an enormously fun movie to work on.
BS: One very much discussed issue about Iron Will is the impact that temp tracks might have had in the final result. Was this the case?
JM: Oh yeah. There's one very important scene there which was tracked with the opening or… well, I'm not sure which cue it was but it definitely was from Silverado. I wrote something completely different for it and after they had screened it for the executives of the studio they went: "No, no, no. We want that big thing we had in the temp". So I had to go back and recompose something more like Silverado which is something that I really didn't enjoy doing but had to. And I called Bruce Broughton and told him what was going on and he was very nice and said: "Oh, I had to do that, too. Don't worry about it."
The fact that it went up on the record, that's kind of bothersome because anybody that knows both those pieces may go like: "This guy is just a copycat". But in my defence I have to say that it was either do that or not be the composer on the film.
BS: Does it happen to you frequently?
JM: It doesn't happen to me as much anymore because the older I've gotten the more secure I am as an artist. And I realize you can say no to that sort of thing and, maybe, you should say no. But when you're young and you're just starting a career, you don't want to make anybody angry at you. You just want to give them what they want. So you don't have the courage or the moral conviction to go: "That's not right. I'm not going to do it." All you want to do is get another movie so you can keep going.
As you go down the road you realize: "Oh, maybe the better thing to do is to stay true to your own artistic ideas, and maybe they'll respect you for that." So, I don't do that anymore. I don't play that temp track game. (laughs)
In fact I try not to listen to the temp tracks of the movies I work on now. Indeed, I think if I had to do over these things again, I absolutely would never give into that temptation or direction from filmmakers. I would at least work hard to try to convince them that having something original for your movie is better than having something that imitates something else. And not all filmmakers would be persuaded from the beginning, they'd go: "Yes, but this piece of music works perfectly." Then you should try and write something that works as well. And even so, filmmakers may get stuck on their initial idea. That's fine, I understand that but it's certainly a creative trap for a composer.
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Posted: |
Feb 24, 2018 - 3:13 PM
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By: |
bobbengan
(Member)
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Yea, I'm also a fan of this one - temp lifts and all. McNeely was on fire in the early 90's. This, BEAR MOUNTAIN, TERMINAL VELOCITY, parts of VIRUS (that end title!) and the unreleased melodic stuff from SOLDIER are great, among other efforts. I still need to track down his more recent Disney efforts, which I understand are great.
IRON WILL director Charlie Haid was a teacher of mine in college, and had only good things to say about working with McNeely (and Haid, who I'd known most of my life from his brilliant acting in ALTERED STATES, was *quite* a character and an amazingly bouncy, vital fellow at 70 years old - contrasted with Peter Bogdanovich, near the same age as Charlie, who didn't teach a damn thing of value and just grumbled bitterly about any and everything imaginable - film scores included).
Anyone who hasn't heard it really needs to check out a score McNeely later did for him called SALLY HEMMINGS: AN AMERICAN SCANDAL, which is not only a great and varied score but also, to my ears, one of McNeely's more original - a nod or two to classical gestures (i.e. Marcello's Oboe Concerto in one cue) aside, I didn't detect any explicit temp track issues with that one. It's got a wonderful love theme, too.
And yes, a very good and "frank" interview there that's easy to appreciate.
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I love the score as well, and was never bothered by the temp tracking. The first time I heard it, it nearly blew my socks off, and I have been a McNeely fan ever since.
Wouldn't it be great if an expanded edition could be released with McNeely's rejected cue(s)?
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