And that’s disappointing, but it’s also what the job is. Jordan has more than once said to me, after he listens to a cue, “You know, there’s a world in which we don’t go with any music here.” And that’s not meant as a way to disregard the music or discount it, but he wants to let me know as an artist that this is a place where he’s considering no music. So, I say all that because there are a couple of cues on the album of which very little is in the film. It’s because the album is its own thing, it’s an extension of the film, and people who buy albums are interested in the music as an art. And so, I put more music on the album than might have occurred in the film, or different versions of the music than is in the film. There might be the same amount of music but the version I have on the album is maybe more listenable on its own right than the version that occurs in the film.
SC: Along those lines, was there anything that took an especially long time to write or to get absolutely correct?
MA: Let’s see. There’s a cue called “Man Down,” which is pretty long. It’s more than six minutes long, and it’s most of the seventh reel of the film. And it’s a really important cue—that whole section is like one consecutive thought. The music is there because we’re waiting for something to happen. A lot doesn’t happen, and we’re waiting. We know something bad is going to happen, we just don’t know what, or what the result of it is going to be. And it’s a really important tension moment that kicks off the whole action-adventure section of the film.
That cue went through many, many revisions. They weren’t complete revisions, but there were revisions where the different emotional temperatures of the different sections of it were all under review. For example, “Where do we feel like OJ’s being a hero? And where do we feel like OJ needs to run for his life? How much foreshadowing do we give the audience about what that choice is going to be?” That cue was under revision for more than a month, maybe two, while we constantly were going back and forth. It’s an important part of the last act of the film, but it did take a long time to get there.
SC: On the other hand, was there any cue that you sent in that was immediately well received and accepted as is?
MA: One where we went, “That’s it”? I don’t think there was anything that was just, “That’s it.” Not because there’s not that spirit, but because part of it is—when you have so many creative people offering ideas—even though something’s working and it’s good, it’s like, “Well, we haven’t tried everything. What if we tried something else?” In Jordan’s creative world, there’s a belief that any idea that’s good is probably going to stand a challenge from other good ideas. Or it’s going to benefit from a little bit of tweaking.
Most things involved that, but there were a lot of cues that always had the same DNA. For example, the cue called “A Hero Falls” had many revisions, but always kept the exact same DNA. Its DNA also ended up influencing a cue at the beginning of the film, because it was working so well—it was still changing, but it was working—so the pieces that were working were put earlier where things weren’t working. Another cue called “Pursuit,” where Em is on the motorcycle, also kept its same DNA throughout, but there were lots of different changes about how to ramp that up and make it as exciting as it needs to be.
The Other Collaborator: Director Cory Finley.
SC: Do you have anything that you’re currently working on that you would like to tell us about?
MA: I’ve co-written an opera with Rhiannon Giddens. She’s an amazing Grammy-winning Americana singer-songwriter, who is also a trained opera singer, which most people don’t know. We’ve co-written an opera called Omar. It’s about the life of Omar ibn Said, who was a Senegalese Muslim who was enslaved in the Middle Passage and brought over to the Carolinas in 1807. He could read and write Arabic, so he wrote his autobiography, which is in the Library of Congress at this point. It’s the stuff of opera—this idea of faith helping us transcend even the most difficult physical circumstances. It’s going to be at the Los Angeles Opera in October and November, as well as other opera companies over the next couple of years.
I’m also currently working on a film called Landscape With Invisible Hand, which is based on a short story. It’s directed by Cory Finley, who did Bad Education, which I did a few years ago.
—FSMO |