(Published here with permission from Lukas Kendall, since Kremer seems to be missing in action. This appears to be more than a Two-Parter, but I can only find two...)
There are only a handful of Hollywood composers who have written as many creative and entertaining scores in the last 10 years as David Newman. His fresh and inventive style has produced the clever combination of waltz and tango for Danny DeVito's War of the Roses; the Rota-esque, Italian-flavored music of The Freshman; the wild, percussion-oriented sounds in Meet the Applegates; the elegant, ironic score for Norman Jewison's Other People's Money; the moody rock music for Boys on the Side; the beautiful Americana in Paradise; the ice-cold horror of The Runestone; the heroic fanfares of The Mighty Ducks; the jazzy big-band music of The Marrying Man; the Herrmanesque touch in Throw Momma from the Train; and the wicked electronic score to Heathers.
The son of the late Alfred Newman belongs to the legendary Newman film music dynasty, along with brother Thomas, cousin Randy, sister Maria (a violinist) and uncles Lionel, Emil (composer/conductors both) and Mark (an agent). David started as a violinist, and performed on such early '80s scores as E.T.; he also conducted James Homer's first score, Battle Beyond the Stars. Today Newman is one of the busiest composers in Hollywood, scoring big-budget blockbusters by big-name directors. The friendly composer lives with his wife, musician Krystyna and their 7-year-old daughter, Diana, and his 18-year old stepdaughter, Brianne, in sunny Malibu, California.
Jorg Kremer: First of all I would like to ask you about your compositional style, which is very unique. Was there a time when you developed it?
David Newman: Well, I feel that I'm in a constant struggle to develop a style that's expressive of my sensibility. I've always had a certain sound and a feeling of content that I enjoyed hearing. I played the violin from a very early age, and I was brought up playing in orchestras. I went to public school and at that time, there used to be an orchestra in every school in which all grades could participate. Orchestra was actually a class at school so every day for a certain amount of time, you struggled through ensemble music. By the time I was 12, my brother and I [Thomas Newman] were playing Haydn, Mahler, Tchaikovsky & Beethoven symphonies at school and at many community orchestras in town. My Mom made sure that we played three to four times a week in an orchestra. In the meantime I started studying theory, counterpoint and a little bit of orchestration privately when I was about 12 or 13. I also started studying the piano when I was 10 years old, so I was studying piano and violin simultaneously which is the traditional Germanic tradition of learning classical music. I was very interested in performing, and as I got older, in conducting.
I wouldn't know how to describe my musical sensibility except that I feel I learned a lot of it from my father. I have a bit of his perfectionism, impatience, love for the community that an orchestra brings to the table, and a desire to make a strong, beautiful, cogent statement with music. I also think that string playing is very important to me. I grew up with a certain sound in my ear as to how the violin should be played and that has stayed with me. When I hear the way the 20th Century Fox Orchestra used to play in the '40s- '50s (Captain From Castille, the Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, etc.) that is where I think I get my sensibility.
However, I still feel I am discovering what and who I am as a musician, much less a composer and a film composer, because I didn't start writing for films until I was in my late 20s. Actually I didn't start writing music seriously until that time.
JK: You were talking about the influence of German romantic music of the 19th century on your musical style. But I actually hear much more of the modern 20th century composers, like Stravinsky and Bartok, in your scores.
DN: Yes, you're right. The dark comedies I've done have that sensibility. They move really quickly and they have quirky, off-center characters, and there is a certain sarcasm to those films. Some of that 20th Century music seems to fit those characters and moods. One must always make the music sound right for the movie. Very often you can't write exactly what you would like. It's very much dictated by what you're looking at. There are so many extra-musical factors that play an important role.
JK: But in your scores there are still a lot of musical colors that are very David Newman, no matter if it's a comedy or a science-fiction film.
DN:I'm glad to hear that, but when you are imagining yourself, what you do and what you compose, it's sometimes very hard to see and hear how your music affects others. It's much easier to look at somebody from the outside. I'm not sure where all of my trademarks come from. A lot of it has to do with the movies that one does. Maybe some of the movies that you do early on in your career have an effect on where you end up, because you tend to get asked to do similar films, later on. But there are also a lot of examples of people's careers taking a completely different turn. Like Jerry Goldsmith, or Elmer Bernstein for example. They have been able, in the large picture, to reinvent themselves. I really admire that in a film composer. I think that my father had that ability.
JK: You've been associated with a lot of pop-oriented comedies for which you've composed some interesting music, but unfortunately those scores are often not properly appreciated. Would you like to score more dramatic or serious pictures?
DN: Yeah, definitely. What I love the most in music is the dramatic, sweeping and epic type of tapestry. That's much more my nature than doing pop comedies. But to tell you the truth, the thing I like to do most is to work on movies that I think are good. I really think there are not many good movies. I would say about 70% of all Hollywood movies are in some form or another, pop-oriented comedies. So very often you don't have the choice, but yeah, I'd much rather do drama. But it also depends on what kind of comedy it is. For example I really enjoyed working on Matilda last year. I had a great time; even though it was time-consuming and difficult, I loved working on that. I loved looking at that movie over and over again which is really the litmus test. I also loved working on The Nutty Professor last year, which was a big pop comedy. It was a struggle but I still had a nice time on that. Then I got to do an action adventure last year called The Phantom, which I really enjoyed because it was a change of pace. The director is a very good friend of mine. We [Newman and Simon Wincer] have now done 2 movies together and I think I have done good work on both of those films.
JK: Talking about your comedies: Your sometimes wild and inventive compositional style fits those perfectly, like Madhouse, Meet the Applegates or Throw Momma from the Train. Do you like those kinds of comedies, and does a composer have to be a funny person to create such funny music?
DN: I don't know if the composer has to be a funny person. Again it's hard to tell. I really like Meet the Applegates. Michael Lehman directed that movie right after Heathers. I thought it was really a good film. Or just look at the DeVito movies. They are always very interesting with great kind of twists. Generally when a movie is good, your music ends up being better.
JK: I absolutely agree. But in my opinion there is one exception: David Newman. You've scored some marvelous music for less than great pictures. I can't watch Firebirds or Little Monsters, but I just love the scores.
DN: That's very kind of you to say. Coming back to your original question, I don't think you necessarily have to be a funny person, as in a stand up comedian, to write music for comedies. I mean everybody must have some sense of humor somewhere in them somewhere. But I'm also very serious about music. The older I get, the more I find there is to learn about music. I adore studying, and listening to good music and good performances. We go to the opera as often as possible, as much as there is here in Los Angeles. But I would have to say that I also have a pretty good sense of humor. I'm not always a serious person.
PART 2:
Jorg Kremer: A movie I really enjoyed was Coneheads, where you incorporated Herrmann's The Day the Earth Stood Still. Was that your idea?
David Newman: No, actually they were going to put several cues from TDTEST in Coneheads but we decided to go in the direction of a sort of homage. I really liked that score and the movie as well. The only problem was that the movie got all cut up. That was kind of a troubled movie. Unfortunately, sometimes a movie you start is pretty good at the beginning, it's very singular and has a certain point of view. Then by the time it's done, it's all changed and cut. People are scared that something isn't going to work, so they cut this out and do this and that and by the time you're done, it's a completely different movie.
JK: When I hear that music with all the references to The Day the Earth Stood Still, I think to myself: 99% of the people don't get it.
DN: Actually in Coneheads it's really just that motive. There is one original Herrmann cue tracked in the movie in one scene. It's a slow brass piece in one of the scenes where the mother is speaking to the daughter. Otherwise all I used was the motive with the tritone [hums the theme].
JK: A lot of directors turn to you over and over again, like Danny DeVito, Steve Miner, Simon Wincer, Herbert Ross and Brian Levant. In the CD booklet to the album of The Phantom they call you a director's composer. Is there a secret behind the relationship between directors and you?
DN: I don't know. I'm suppose I am not a very prima donna-ish person. I'm fairly flexible. I accept suggestions if I think they're good suggestions. I might even accept suggestions if I think they're bad suggestions depending on the point of view and how insistent the director is about it. Sometimes you get so immersed in things, that it is hard to see the forest for the trees. Film really is a collaborative experience and it can be really great in the best sense of the word. If somebody suggests something to you, your first reaction might be, that it's completely idiotic. But if you respect the other person, you try to sit down and think about what they're saying and why, and a lot of times they're good suggestions. Sometimes it's hard to know. I have quite a few directors who come back to me but I've also had several that have not. It depends on whom you click with. I don't think there is anything you can do about it. I used to think that it was a big deal and that you ought to make sure you end up with a nice relationship with the director. But honestly, you really can only try to do a good job for the movie. I'm absolutely oriented towards the movie. Maybe some people realize that and appreciate it.
JK: Talking about directors who didn't come back, Michael Lehman and Steven Herek. They turned to another composer when they got big-budgets projects: Hudson Hawk and Three Musketeers. Both actually hired Michael Kamen.
DN: That was just a coincidence. I think Michael Lehman would have preferred to hire me on Hudson Hawk. But the studio thought that Michael Kamen had more experience on that kind of action-adventure picture. Also it was Joel Silver's company; he did all the Lethal Weapon movies that have Kamen's music. So that was really a studio/producer decision. I think Michael would like to have hired me on that one. Steven Herek, well I don't know. He once asked me to do Three Musketeers but I think the studio pushed him to use Michael Kamen. Steve obviously liked Michael and has hired him ever since.
JK: One of your most varied scores is the music to the baseball picture, The Sandlot. It features a lot of different musical styles. Somewhere I read that you're a big baseball fan. Did the subject of the movie inspire you?
DN: You're right, I am a big baseball fan. Actually that was my second baseball film. The first one was Talent for the Game. The director had a heart attack during post-production. There was nobody around and I had to record the whole score in one-and-a-half days. That movie was an awful experience. On The Sandlot I had a great time. I had to do a lot of the music at home. There is a lot of blues guitar music in it but also a lot of big band stuff, and regular orchestral material. It's a playful amalgamation of different styles. I think the whole movie was a nice idea. There was a movie I did called Mr. Destiny, which had a big baseball scene, which I really loved too. There is a very nice cue in that movie, where one of the characters goes back in time and is actually able to hit a home run, when before he could not and it changes his whole life.
JK: You've mentioned the time pressure on Talent for the Game. Which movie was the your worst experience timewise?
DN: Definitely I Love Trouble, where I had to replace Elmer Bernstein's score, though I did think that the score ended up being very good. There were quite a lot of people involved in it. I actually wrote about 40 of the 55 minutes of music, but I only had 10 days to do that. I was actually rewriting and reorchestrating while the orchestra was there. I'd just sit down at the piano and dictate 10 to 12 bars of music. The whole experience was the worst in terms of time and intensity.
JK:Honeymoon in Vegas was heavily temp-tracked with The Grifters. Is it difficult to develop your own ideas when you have those musical guidelines?
DN: Well, sometimes it is. The temp-track stuff is endemic to the whole experience of film scoring. I am sure your readers have heard tons about temp tracks so I won't go too much into that. But there is a lot of music in it that is a lot different than what it was temp-tracked with. There is a big cue, as Nicholas Cage jumps out of a plane at the end of the movie, that they were having a big problem with. In the end I was able to solve it in a way that nobody had thought of. The track in the end was an Elvis kind of rocking orchestra cue. It took a few attempts to get it but it finally worked.
JK: A lot of your scores are monothematic but on The Flintstones you used several different themes. Why was that?
DN: A very simple answer: That's what they wanted me to do. The Flintstones was unique because there was all this existing music in it. It's such a popular show in America so it comes with a lot of baggage. I had this theme for the Halle Berry character, then the "motoring around" theme, then there was a theme for Barney and Fred and a couple of other motives. We discussed a couple of themes before we started and I actually wrote and recorded some cues six months before I finished the score. The movie had, I think a one-year post-production. They ended up waiting for computer-animated opticals and it took quite a while. A lot of those themes we decided way up front.
I don't like lots of themes in a movie. I prefer the more constructionist view, that you have motives or a theme and you then develop it as the characters develop or change. To me, the metamorphosis in characters or situations is the essence of narrative fiction, which is the basis of most movies. You can't have too much material because it gets in the way. However, in The Flintstones, the director [Brian Levant] wanted lots of themes. We sorted of treated a good portion of the score like a TV show. He wanted a theme for everything. So we settled on actually using some of the original Flintstones TV music, which we re-recorded, and incorporating the style of the original scores, the whole mickey mousing thing. There ended up being a lot of different types of music in it. It really is a fun score. I think at the end Brian thought there was too much of the "Flinstone's music" (original TV music) in the score. We were always talking about that.
JK: What happened with John Williams? Wasn't he originally to score the movie?
DN: I don't know what happened. He actually recorded a temp version of the main title while he was doing Jurassic Park. I don't think he was ever going to do the movie. That probably only was a rumor.
JK: I once did an interview with the late Miles Goodman, who was one of my favorite composers...
DN: Yeah, he was really great.
JK: We talked about his work with director Herbert Ross. He did Footloose with him. He said that Herbert Ross really didn't care about music at all and wasn't interested in the score. What was your experience with him?
DN: I had a nice time with him. I did two movies with him: Undercover Blues and Boys on the Side. I do not agree that he does not like music. He loves music. I don't know that he particularly dubs or mixes music very well, or at least to my taste but I know that he is a music person from way back. I don't know what it would be like to do a musical with him and be involved from the beginning. My two experiences with him were perfectly nice. I enjoyed working with him and I loved Boys on the Side.
JK: I especially enjoyed Undercover Blues. What impressed me was the large number of cues that you wrote, and most of them were very short, like 20-30 seconds. I would love to have heard some of that great music a little longer. That's why I think Miles Goodman was so unsatisfied, because it must be frustrating when the director says: "The music is okay but only for 15 seconds."
DN: Well, Undercover Blues was a very troubled movie.
JK: Although it was very funny. I really enjoyed it.
DN: Yeah, it's just that this movie had a script where everybody thought that it's such a great story. When they read the script, it seemed like such a good idea. You know, these two people floating through these dangerous situations nonchalantly with their baby. But the reality was that everybody was fighting with each other: the director, the producers, everyone. So they couldn't really finish the movie correctly and it got to be one of those situations where everything went wrong. I think all of that affected the product. But Boys on the Side I think was very good. You know, Herbert Ross can be difficult, but I don't mind. I really like him. He also loves opera, so we have something that is important to me in common.
JK: You know what I like about Boys on the Side? First of all, it's one of the very rare movies where I also like the songs. They were very well selected and they fit the spirit of the movie. And what I really enjoyed was when you segued from a song into the score. You took over the harmony of the song and also the mood and created a perfect harmony of songs and score.
DN: If you're doing a film that has a lot of songs in it and they can actually pick them, it's great. And they had already done that when I started on the movie. I could go in and out of the songs, because I knew what the key, the feel, etc. If you don't know which songs they will use, there is nothing you can do to ease the transitions. The only think I regret about that movie is that there wasn't more music for me to write. Some of the best scenes were scored with songs.
JK: But the music that there is is great and is really important. There is this one country rock theme for the childhood memories and then there is this dramatic theme for their friendship. It really works great.
DN: Well, thank you.
JK: I really love the Undercover Blues score with the whistling, the Mexican stuff and the Pink Panther-like cue. Who came up with the whistler idea?
DN: That was my idea. I thought it would be appropriate to have a whistler throughout the score, because the two characters were kind of dancing through the whole movie with their baby and nothing seemed to faze them. It was as if they were walking down the street whistling despite all the danger around them. That was the conception of the score. It also had the New Orleans kind of elements, Latin based music (I use a sort of Flamenco guitar motive) even some Russian elements. That was an interesting experience. You know, it was very hard to whistle that music. There are not too many people who are good at that.
JK: There is one track in Undercover Blues where you used a typewriter sound effect in addition to the orchestra. Why did you do that?
DN: Just because I thought it was fun. There is really no intellectual reason why I used it. A lot of the stuff you play around with, when it sounds good, when you put it against the picture, it just makes sense to use it in the finale score. I thought of the typewriter sound effect more as percussion instrument, it really can create a nice additional sound.
CONCLUSION:
Jorg Kremer: Almost all of your scores have been recorded in Hollywood. But there are some exceptions like Brave Little Toaster (Japan), The Flower Planet (Germany) and Operation Dumbo Drop and The Phantom (England)...What was your experience with the foreign orchestras compared to those in Hollywood ?
David Newman: They are all a little different. I love recording in London. They have great halls and great musicians. My experience in Munich, well, it was okay. It wasn't tremendous. But that was a long time ago. My experience in Japan with Brave Little Toaster was fantastic. That was right at the beginning of my career. We went there because it was cheap but the hall was gorgeous and I had a great engineer and the orchestra was terrific. I still think that recording sounds beautiful. I had a great time doing it. Of course I also love scoring here in Hollywood. There are certain things that you get here that are hard to transport elsewhere. But it's getting more and more international. I know that composers are scoring in all kinds of places.
JK: For Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure you composed two very distinctive themes, but they didn't reappear in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. Why was that?
DN: They wanted to make Bogus Journey darker. It was a different director. He wanted to make the movie all his own and be totally different. They didn't want anything from the first movie except for the air guitar. And I agreed. I don't think it would have been appropriate to use the themes from the old movie.
JK: That's too bad, because I really enjoyed the love theme from Excellent Adventure.
DN: You mean the one that's sounds a little medieval? I guess I could have used that in Bogus Journey. It just seemed out of context for the new movie.
JK: Another movie I would like to talk to you about is Frankenweenie. You co-composed the score with Michael Convertino. Why was that and how did it work?
DN:Frankenweenie was the first score I ever did. We started out writing together; we split up cues. We were really good friends at that time. We just thought it would be fun. Before Frankenweenie we only did a couple of industrial films. Unfortunately then we had a big fight and that was the end of that. We co-composed some cues, but most of them we split up. I actually don't remember who did what cues.
JK:Frankenweenie was a Tim Burton movie. Would you like to have continued working with Burton? Personally I think your style would have been perfect for some of his films...
DN: I had a nice time with him. It's hard to know or to think about "what if," what would have been or could have been. I don't know what would have happened. As far as I remember, Michael Convertino and I were at least talking about doing Pee Wee's Big Adventure, which Burton did right after Frankenweenie, but for one reason or another we decided not to do it. But I think Warner Bros. would have axed us doing it anyway.
JK: One of my favorite scores of yours is My Father the Hero with this beautiful theme sung by the female solo voice.
DN: They had a song temped in that they were going to purchase for the main title. But then Touchstone said: "No you can't buy it, it's too expensive." I had a good theme already, which was a vocal theme anyway and I suggested that we try to use that them as a main title with a young girl humming. We did a temp and I sang it myself and played it for them. Steve [Miner, the director] liked it. We started putting it together and it sounded really good. Then we had a bunch of vocalists come in and try to do it. For some reason it was really hard for people to sing. We had an older studio singer come in and do it, then we had a younger studio singer. It didn't work. Disney was really great about it. They found an 18 year-old girl that had been in Sister Act [Ashley Thompson]. One of the music executives at Disney, Andy Hill, found her. It took about five hours for her to do eight phrases, but it turned out really well. It was really fun to do, because it was like doing a song, which I had absolutely no experience in doing. Actually I did a lot of theater when I was growing up, but I had never recorded a pop song. This song was hardly a pop song but it had a nice feel and it was good for the movie. For the rest of the film Mervyn Warren sang through all the cues that had vocals on them. He is an absolutely incredible musician. It was like working with an orchestral instrument. He could do anything. I liked that movie a lot. It had a lot more depth than most people gave it credit for. But to each his own. I think the idea of that movie really offended the American sensibility. You know, the idea of the young girl pretending her father was her lover. That's a little too weird for Americans. I also liked the girl [Katherine Heigl]. She was really excellent in the movie.
JK: In The Runestone you even had a little acting part. How did that happen?
DN: I'm very good friends with the director, Willard Carroll. He and his partner, Tom Wilhite, produced Brave Little Toaster. Tom [Wilhite] was the head of the studio at Disney in the era when they made Something Wicked This Way Comes, Never Cry Wolf and Tron. Those were his movies. I've been friends with them for 12 years. They have been my best supporters. Tom was actually the director of the Sundance Institue and allowed me to do an original score for the silent film, Sunrise. It was performed for the opening of the US Film Festival in 1989. But coming back to your question. I couldn't stand it, it was horrible. They even looped my voice. I can't imagine how people can be film actors.
JK: Yeah, I thought the voice used in the film was horrible.
DN: [laughs] you should have heard my voice.
JK: What film would you consider to be your big breakthrough?
DN: For me artistically, definitely Brave Little Toaster. That was a big step. I just love that music. Another step for me were the DeVito films, particularly War of the Roses.
JK: You're credited as co-composer on Dragnet.
DN: I just wrote a few cues. Ira Newborn was very nice to me. I also wrote some cues in Wise Guys, a film with Danny DeVito.
JK: I also like your very distinctive synthesizer arrangements.
DN: I do all of that stuff at home. The whole score of Heathers actually was done at my house. On the films I am doing now, I try to incorporate the synthesizer into the orchestra. I almost always have electronics in my scores. Most of it I design myself. I have a large studio at home. Martin Frasu, my assistant, does a lot of the sound programming but I actually do all the electronics at home. I bring a hard disc systems to the scoring stage just for playback, but I mix all my movies at home and refire all the electronics. That way, it is very easy for me to incorporate the changes that I will inevitably make on the scoring stage. I've used computer-generated music printing since That Night (1993). The system that I use is like a music word processor. Instead of writing it by hand, I just type it in. It really helps because I have horrible handwriting. I have gotten really good at inputting music into my computer system. It's a much better way to notate because immediately after you are done, it is very close to being in a publishable form. It is also incredibly easy to make changes, edit things, all the situations that you would think of that are analogous to a word processor. I also have a large midi system, because one has to do mock-ups nowadays. I also have a quite a few samplers.
JK: Some of the films you've scored weren't that good, though the music was great. Is it more difficult to write music for films that aren't that brilliant?
DN: When the movie is good, you tend to write better music. When the movies are better thought out, when they are more intelligent, it's easier to write good music. Obviously you want to work on movies that are good because you have to look at them all day.
JK: Are there movies you wouldn't do because of their message or political point of view?
DN: Probably, but they haven't come up. Hollywood is pretty conservative. They're not going to do anything that risky.
JK: In my opinion you've composed some of the best film scores of the last 10 years, yet you've never been nominated for an Oscar. Does that bother you, and what is your opinion on the music Oscars?
DN: The music Oscars have lost their luster for me. The choices of the last 10 to 15 years for the most part have been dubious. Music is a very esoteric art form. It's hard to explain. Sometimes you play music for people and they don't like it and after you'll play it over and over again they suddenly are really enjoying the music. When you don't have a lot of music in your ears and you haven't listened to a lot, it's very hard to know what is good and what's not. It is hard to know what you like and don't like. I know that's not a very democratic view but music is a very undemocratic art. It's a very difficult thing to judge what is good music and what's not. Most people that are voting on this, they don't care about music. It's not even an issue for them. They wouldn't know what a movie would be like without music. They have probably never seen a movie without music. In the era of my father the music Oscar had a totally different meaning. It was a real honor. Certainly today a comedy isn't going to get nominated. They have this comedy category now, but they pick dramatic movies that are funny. The kind of comedies that I have done would never be nominated. The Oscars used to be a fun thing for me to think about, but it's not really that interesting anymore.
JK: Isn't an Oscar win financially rewarding?
DN: It really isn't. I don't think it really does that much. I think a lot of people wouldn't even know that you've won. A lot of people don't care. They want you to work on their movie and get the music done.
JK: Is it more difficult for you to write music when you're in a bad mood or when you're depressed?
DN: You have to push through a lot. I don't know how other people deal with it. I only know how I deal with it. You just have to keep going. The great thing about music is that it's incredibly interesting. Actually the music helps me get in a better mood or become less depressed.
JK: Unfortunately a lot of the great score of Operation Dumbo Drop is not on the album.
DN: They didn't want more score on the album. I only had about 25 minutes on the CD, so I picked the cues that I thought were the best. Though I was listening to the score the other day and I agree: there are some good cues in the movie that are not on the CD. There are some nice tracks that would have made a more diverse album. A lot of the music that I put on the album are sort of the same. But I thought they were the most dramatic parts of the score.
JK: You're not very well represented on soundtrack albums.
DN: It's because I do Hollywood comedies. They're expensive to put out. If there are any albums, they're usually song albums.
JK: Your brother has had a little bit more luck with albums.
DN: Yeah, because he's not doing comedies. Also, he's doing little scores. Mostly his scores have been smaller. My scores have generally been pretty big. It usually is a larger orchestra, which means high re-use fees. Some of Tom's scores have been big, but very often he might have a big cue or two and he'll have a lot of real small cues and he'll have a lot of synth stuff. So you can put that on the album. He probably also sells pretty good. There is always the future. Like we talked about Elmer Bernstein earlier on, you'll never know what the hell is gonna happen. Actually I don't mind it. I wouldn't want all that music out. Sometimes you write stuff that you think is not so terrific and then they put out an album and there is nothing you can do about it.
JK: Since pop music is such an important factor in some of your films, do you have a lot of knowledge of pop music and do you like it at all ?
DN: I grew up in a certain era of pop music: the late '60s and early '70s, and I liked a certain type of pop music. I enjoyed the new wave stuff in the early '80s. I'm not a big pop music expert, but of course, it's part of my youth. I grew up with Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and the Stones. It's an important part of our culture.
JK: What are you up to at the moment?
DN: I'm just getting started doing Out to Sea for director Martha Coolidge. It's a Fox film with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. It's a comedy in the Grumpy Old Men style. There is a lot of '40s dance music in it because they're dance instructors on a ship. I'm not quite sure yet what I'm going to do. I'm in the middle of writing some themes.
Then I'm working on a commission for the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a series they are calling "Filmharmonic." I'm really excited about that. The piece will premiere in April of next year. It will be conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. It's a 20-minute computer-animated film based on one of the stories of 1001 Arabian Nights. It's kind of a mythical prince-and-princess love story, but it's a little abstract. It's based on drawings by the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano. He started out in Japan as a game animator. Now he is a very famous artist in Japan. He's also getting well known here in America. It will be a multi-media 20-minute piece. The interesting thing is that I'm going to write the music first and then they're going to animate to the music. The music will be at least 50% of the equation, if not 60 or 70%. They are all music-driven pieces. The other composers who are working on Filmharmonic at the moment will write music for live-action films; my film is the only computer-animated one, but all of them will be silent films. This project is the brainchild of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It's so interesting because I think the Los Angeles Philharmonic has never had anything to do with the Hollywood community. At worst it will be an interesting experience and at best I would hope it could play some part in bringing a brand new collaboration between Hollywood and the classical orchestras around the world.
