 |
|
| View Mode |
| Regular | Headlines |
|
| All times are
PT (Pacific Time), U.S.A.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Crash Course |
| Posted By: Jeff Bond on July 26, 2005 - 10:00 PM |
Crash Course
Mark Isham scores the summer's quietest blockbuster.
By Jeff Bond
Excerpted from Vol. 10, No. 4, on
sale now...
Box-office analysts bemoaning the current state of the film industry's
coffers might do well to take a look back at early May's release of
Paul Haggis' Crash. The $6.5
million indie has grossed $48 million since it opened on a
comparatively paltry 1,900 screens, with no marketing budget to speak
of. Savaged by some movie critics but celebrated by others, the Magnolia-like examination of race
relations in Los Angeles built its audience through word-of-mouth and
proved that a water-cooler movie experience could still draw in
audiences. Composer Mark Isham has made a practice of moving between
big-budget efforts and independent fare like Crash.
"I find that you're allowed to do much more interesting things," Isham
says of the independent genre. "People on the larger budget movies,
there's a lot at stake and I perfectly understand this. The temp score
is appeasing people's fears about what they're getting for their money
and it tends to be something tried and true that has worked in the
past, and people are responding well to that. So you're asked to
deliver that product, whereas [with] a script like Crash, people wouldn't be making
these movies unless they were willing to make something a little
different."
Isham had known writer/director Haggis (screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby) for 15 years
and had worked with him in television projects like Easy Street. In watching a rough
assembly of the film Isham discovered Haggis' temp music created a
challenge that was not only aesthetic but budgetary. The temp score
went from the barest, most minimalist piece to Jonathan Elias' Prayer Cycle with Alanis Morrisette
that was a big, ambitious piece of music with soloists and choir in
there," Isham says. "My first questions to him were about why these
choices and what attracted him to those choices and what his take was;
obviously some of these pieces were hitting various emotional or
momentum issues. It came out that he loved the fact that there were
ethnic voices but they weren't on the nose: it embraced the
multicultural aspects of the story but there certainly wasn't a Persian
woman on the Persian scenes and so on. I made him aware of the fact
that with the budget he had we couldn't hire a choir or an orchestra
and that I wasn't a fan of fake orchestras, so I needed a bright idea
to give him emotionally what he wanted but that would fit in with the
budgetary restraints."
The challenge of tackling a low-budget film that the filmmakers have
tracked with a high-budget score is one Isham has faced before. "You
have to think differently on films where you can't hire what you need.
I remember a film called Romeo Is
Bleeding, which was temped with Jerry Goldsmith's grand score to
Basic Instinct, and this was a
$4 million film. I said, 'That's fantastic and I love that score as
much as the next guy and it brings this film up 200 percent, but you
realize it's a practical impossibility.' No producer or director wants
to hear that but they don't want to write the check. So I went home and
came up with this five-piece band and a couple of different ways of
sampling a few things and presented it to them and it actually turned
out to be a better score for that movie because it was edgier and it
taught me the lesson that no matter what the temp is, there are better
solutions that can fit within practical boundaries."
Tending the Flock
Isham's solution for Crash
was a score built around electronics as well as a haunting female vocal
that somehow avoids the current "wailing woman" cliché of ethnic
world music scoring. "What I came away with from his temp was that
there were minimalistic pieces that worked really well and that we
didn't need the traditional largeness of the orchestra and choir, and
that this movie was pretty deep and an emotional roller coaster, and
certain scenes can come off as truly horrendous, and I felt like the
music had to help you through the movie and be like a shepherding hand.
The reason the temp was so attractive was that it was like a friendly
voice for lack of a better description. A friend of mine described the
score as being like a guardian angel and there was a sense we had that
that was what the score needed to do."
The film's structure relies to a great degree on coincidences as a core
group of characters, including a racist white cop, a black film
director and his wife, a white politician, a Hispanic locksmith, a
Persian family, two black carjackers and others encounter one another
in recurring and unexpected combinations. The emotionally charged
episodes that follow allowed Isham to lay back with some of his
electronic music without overpowering the scenes with music, while
building more thematic, emotional material into other scenes and
linking everything with some ethereal, haunting vocals. "There
definitely are themes that go through the film," Isham says of his
score. "The little girl, the daughter of the locksmith has her music,
but I think that's the only character who has their own music.
Otherwise the themes are connected very much to emotions the characters
are sharing. The piece that is sung in Latin that comes from the Von
Bingham sort of tradition comes from a point where life seems to be at
its lowest and the most hopeless -- that theme is shared by almost
everyone in the movie when they hit rock bottom. The one that is sung
in Welsh is more of a theme of redemption, when someone is offered the
opportunity to come back and do the right thing and rise above that
point they had experienced, and again that theme is shared by many of
the characters."
For the full story, see FSM Vol. 10,
No. 4, on sale now!
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Today in Film Score History:
April 19 |
|
| Alan Price born (1942) |
|
| Alfred Newman begins recording his score for David and Bathsheba (1951) |
|
| Dag Wiren died (1986) |
|
| David Fanshawe born (1942) |
|
| Dudley Moore born (1935) |
|
| Harry Sukman begins recording his score for A Thunder of Drums (1961) |
|
| Henry Mancini begins recording his score for The Great Race (1965) |
|
| Joe Greene born (1915) |
|
| John Addison begins recording his score for Swashbuckler (1976) |
|
| John Williams begins recording his score for Fitzwilly (1967) |
|
| Jonathan Tunick born (1938) |
|
| Lord Berners died (1950) |
|
| Michael Small begins recording his score to Klute (1971) |
|
| Paul Baillargeon records his score for the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “When It Rains…” (1999) |
|
| Ragnar Bjerkreim born (1958) |
|
| Ron Jones records his score for the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "We'll Always Have Paris" (1988) |
|
| Sol Kaplan born (1919) |
|
| Thomas Wander born (1973) |
|
| William Axt born (1888) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
