Originally published in Music from the Movies. Article republished with permission from the author.
DEATH TO SMOOCHY and LIFE OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
An interview with David Newman
March 2002
David Newman is probably one of the busiest composers working in Hollywood. After spending many years as a session musician playing the violin, Newman - who is the son of the legendary Alfred Newman, the brother of fellow composer Thomas Newman and cousin of recent Academy Award winner Randy Newman - started writing film music in the mid-80's. Today, with over 70 films in his filmography, he is a very experienced composer who stays very busy looking for new opportunities to explore music and develop his own style. He has worked in virtually every genre, gaining a certain popularity in the comedy genre (The Nutty Professor, The Flintstones, Coneheads) and in action-adventures (Galaxy Quest, Operation Dumbo Drop, The Phantom), but also showing a more serious side in more intimate dramas (Brokedown Palace, Duets, Boys on the Side).
Some of Newman's most interesting and original scores have come out of the extensive collaborations with two Hollywood directors. For Danny DeVito, he has written dark, humourous scores for Throw Momma From the Train, The War of the Roses and Matilda as well as the epic Hoffa, and for Stephen Herek he wrote some of his most powerful works early in his career, Critters and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Recently, David Newman wrote new music for both of them, scoring DeVito's quirky Death to Smoochy, starring Robin Williams and Edward Norton, and Herek's Life or Something Like It, starring Angelina Jolie.
Music from the Movies' Mikael Carlsson talks to David Newman about these two scores, as well as his music for kids aventures Ice Age and Scooby Doo - and his approach to film scoring and his view on film music in Hollywood today.
You have three scores coming out in a very short span of time - the animated Ice Age, Death to Smoochy by Danny DeVito and Life or Something Like It directed by Stephen Herek. I don't know where to start - you are obviously very busy at the moment!
DN: "Well, that doesn't mean I did them at the same time. Hollywood movies are always released in clumps, so I worked all of last year on Death to Smoochy, on and off, and I did Life or Something Like It just recently. Ice Age I've been working on since October-November. They just happen to all be released in the spring break time. You could finish a movie nine months before it's released. This is mainly stuff that I did last year, except for the Stephen Herek movie."
You worked on Death to Smoochy for a whole year?
DN: "Yeah, because I wrote a bunch of songs for it. Certainly not all of them ended up in it, but there are three or four songs that ended up in the movie. It's about a Barney character, so there is a bunch of childrens' songs in it."
What kind of score is Death to Smoochy, if you'd like to describe it?
DN: "Well, a lot of it is based on these songs. They are deconstructed to an extent, they are spead up, they are slowed down, they are inverted. Most of the music is based on the two main characters' songs. They both have a song at the beginning of the movie. The Robin Williams character becomes really twisted and zany throughout the movie, so I did that to an extent with that music. And for the Smoochy character, the Edward Norton character who is a Jimmy Stewart-like character - the only nice person in the whole world of the movie, I took his song and used to make him seem innocent and stronger as the movie goes along. I used that thematically. There is a lot of sounds in the movie. But it's very subtle and to a certain extent organic. It's samples and sounds. I have a sounds that is thematic for the Robin Williams character, it's almost half music, half sound effect. I also used their voices a lot, taking phrases of their songs and things like that."
So how do you work together with Danny DeVito? Most of your previous films together have this dark humour.
DN: "It has kind of evolved. In this film, I wrote most of it while he was cutting the movie. Except for the ending and the beginning, the bulk of the movie was done so I wrote it and mocked it up and he basically put it in the movie."
Do you rely on each other when it comes to the approach of a score?
DN: "We're pretty much in sync. His movies are pretty clear as to what they are, I think. I think it's pretty obvious what to do with them for the most part. Once you go it becomes really clear what to do. I think we've done five movies, so we have a little bit of a short hand. I know what to expect, and I think he does to."
So how about Ice Age?
DN: "That's pretty orchestral, although there is a lot of ethnic elements in it. But it's a big orchestral score. It's more action-adventure than it is comedy. There is a lot of comedy in the movie, but the movie to me is more of an action-adventure."
Is there anything that beats standing in front of an orchestra and hear your music coming alive?
DN: "Well, you know, I've done a lot of conducting in my life. I did a lot of conducting before I started doing film music, and I love conducting - but there is nothing like writing. That part is really the most rewarding for me. Conducting can be very frustrating. I don't know, maybe it's a phase I'm going through. But I enjoy the writing as much as I do the power trip you get with an orchestra. What I love about the orchestra is that obviously it makes everything come alive, but when you need to adjust things on the spot, they can be extremely helpful with helping you navigate through making a rather radical change because the powers that be want you to change something. Sometimes you don't have the time to go back home and fix it, and you need to fix it there. Sometimes I'll just sit down at the piano and just dictate out each line, maybe fifteen to twenty bars, to each section of the orchestra and they'll write it down. That's kind of amazing. I played in orchestras all of my life, I did ten or twelve years of studio work before I started writing film music, I was a professional violinist. So I know what's going on with those guys, I know the dynamic and how it works. I don't want you to get me wrong, it's a great thing bringing it to life. But also the composing is really much more interesting to me than I ever thought it would be."
Is it the musical process or the dramatic process, finding the approach for a film, that you refer to?
DN: "It's the musical process. The dramatic process is really interesting too, but to me the most interesting is the musical process, where the notes lead you, what you are doing with the notes. I like it."
You've done a couple of animated film before, like Anastasia and Duck-Tales. Is Ice Age different from other ones that you've done?
DN: "Yeah, it's a little bit different. It's not a musical, so there are no songs in it to deal with. And it's more action-adventure. Anastasia had a lot of that too, but it had all those songs in it as well."
I thought that Anastasia was scored pretty much in the way that you might score a live action film?
DN: "Yeah, these are big orchestral scores, they look huge in the theatres and they are big movies, you know. You have to make it big, and it's still a movie. If someone made an animated art film you could do something different. The 1001 Nights thing I did with the LA Philharmonic was animated, it was by this Japanese game designer, and that was different."
Do you like to do a big traditional orchestral score like Ice Age, and then try something completely different for the next film, just to find inspiration in your work?
DN: "Well, yes. But each film is pretty different. Death to Smoochy is really different from Ice Age, and Life or Something Like It was really different, and before that I did a film called The Affair of the Necklace and that was really different. That was a period piece. So it always works out. And besides, you can always find something interesting to do - if you love music there's always something interesting to do and learn."
The Stephen Herek movie, Life or Something Like It, is somewhat more serious stuff, isn't it?
DN: "Yeah. It's actually more of an art movie -- it's still a studio movie, but the approach to the score was more of an art film approach, for the most part. It's not really a tremendously thematic score, it's more of a sound mood score. The story is about a young and very ambitious reporter, a woman who just happens to interview a street propheter, a psychic, who tells her that she's gonna die. From that point on the whole movie is about her inner world, her take on everything. A lot of the music was used to get inside her head, so it's not very dense, there's not a lot of melody, not a lot of notes. There is not a tremendous amount of music in the film. It's more used like a character in a way, as a part of her inner world."
Are there any thriller elements in the film and the score?
DN: "The end is more of a thriller. You don't really know if she's crazy or if it really is gonna happen, and there is a moment at the end when it comes to a climax, but actually that moment is treated the most spare way possible."
So there is an unusually small amount of music in the film?
DN: "If you look in terms of minutes of music it's sort of a normal amount, but the music isn't very dense. It's more sound design."
Is it electronic music?
DN: "Well, I think 'electronic' is kind of a weird, anachronistic term now, because everything is samples which is esentially the same as recorded music. It's certainly not an electronic score, it's an orchestra score, but there is a huge amount of sampling and manipulation of the sound that goes in the score, which is kind of the way that I'm doing scores now. It's probably pretty common in Hollywood now. A lot of the music that goes into the film is designed and done before the orchestra is even put on, and then you sort of go in and out of certain types of live density - but the samples should still feel organic. That's the goal."
Have you done this before?
DN: "Yeah, I'm doing this a lot. It's not very noticeable, because I tend to make it really organic. But if you look at what tracks in my scores are made up at home, as opposed to tracks that were played and recorded at Fox or Sony, there would be a lot more than you would imagine."
That's interesting because I believe that most of your fans would regard you as an orchestral composer more than anything else.
DN: "Yeah. But I've done a lot of different things. Early on, I did a movie called Heathers, and I did several movies which had pretty heavy electronic scores. But I was brought up as a classical musician, I was a violinist and went to school as a violinist and conductor. I didn't get into any of this electronic music until I was well into my thirties. My focus was generally, and still is, orchestral music. But I did a piece with the LA Philharmonic a couple years ago, it was based on the 1001 Nights story and had a film portion to it, but this was a live piece and it had a lot of electronics in it. A lot. I've just been doing that the last seven or eight years, more and more designing things myself and then incorporating it. But I don't like it to be ostentatious or histrionic. Of course I have to do certain things, if a movie calls for a certain thing, of course I will do that, but most of the time I like it to organic, I want it to sound orchestral."
How much of it is written down?
DN: "It's all written down. I'm a very traditionally trained musician. I can't imagine not writing it down, I'm absolutely adamant about it. The technologies enabled me to basically orchestrate in the computer. I use Imagic Logic and I work pretty much exclusively in their notation module, which is very well done. I used to orchestrate everything myself - I orchestrated all of my first thirty, forty movies myself. Then I got into computer notation and used to orchestrate in the computer, I used a PC system and then I started using Finale. But then I had to start sketching and had to get somebody to orchestrate because the schedules got so bad. Then I started using Imagic and I started mocking everything up, because it's sort of a requirement now - in order to get a film done you have to mock up everything for the director and play it, and then you talk about it before you get to the scoring stage. It sort of changed the whole dynamic of film scoring. But in my program, Imagic Logic, I can write, design sounds and orchestrate all at the same time."
What was it like to work with Stephen Herek again? You made a couple of movies together about a decade ago.
DN: "It was fantastic. He's always been a good friend. He's a wonderful person and human being, and it was terrific. I had a great time and it was one of the best experiences I've ever had."
What is your approach to music in general? One of the things that concerns me the most these days is that there is an overscoring trend going on.
DN: "Yeah, there is always too much music. But in Life or Something Like It, I don't think there was too much music. I think Stephen made a decision to use the music as a character in the movie, so the music wasn't being used to cover up flaws or to speed up slow parts of the film. That is basically what you are doing on a lot of Hollywood movies now, you'll spot a movie, and they'll and this and add that - and before you know it everything has music. They are frightened of letting anything go without music, they are afraid the movie is gonna be slow or whatever."
How are you able to meet those demands from producers and directors?
DN: "Well, you just do what you have to do. I'm sure you understand that most of these scores that you hear are not what the composer necessarily wants to do. That's hard to imagine unless you see it first hand, and maybe even harder to excuse because what do you care as the consumer? You'd much prefer to hear somebody's original vision than the basically banal, stupid stuff that gets put into music. But in terms of actually making a living doing movies and try to navigate your way through it, you can't always win your battles. In each film you have to sort of pick your battles. Now, you might even do a cue that they'll either take out, or they'll put in a cue of something you wrote for something else. So when you is finally seeing the movie, there might be a lot of more music in the movie than was actually even intended by the composer, or recorded. It happens all the time. It's all moved around."
But how do you feel about that - you're still a highly talented artist, not only a composer for hire?
DN: "Well... I don't like it! But you know, what are you gonna do? You can't go down to the dubbing stage and start screaming! You wouldn't even necessarily even know it before you see the film. There was an interesting article in the LA Times the other day, about the actor Guy Pearce who was in The Time Machine. He was talking about an issue that an actor has in a film - they go and shoot the movie, and then depending on how troubled the movie is, there might be scenes that they had no idea were in the movie. They might change the tenet of the movie completely. That's the way movies are made now, the movies are seen as a commodity. The people that are paying for it, I don't think they think of it as art. It's only the people doing it, because you would never do it if you didn't think it was art - you'd only do it if you love it. You know, no matter how much money you're making, once you get into it and start writing and thinking and doing it, the money just goes out of your mind. You're there like a kid, wanting to put on a good show and make something great, something beautiful. American culture now is sort of celebrating... it's not mediocrity, but there is this very important thing in the decoration of independence, a very important essence of American culture: that everyone is equal. Translated to art, it sort of means that anything you do is just as good as anything else - anything crappy is just as good as any good thing, because after all it's just a value judgement. I think that's really affected where we are right now - is it a business or is it an art. And it really doesn't matter. Even the question doesn't matter, because everything's equal. Commerce is equal to the art, everything is the same. It's got a certain negativity to it to do anything artful, but once in a while, you get a movie like Life or Something Like It which was very good experience. It was very interesting and fun to approach it that way."
Finally, can you tell me something about Scooby Doo? Are you working on that now?
DN: "I am. I'll have until the end of April for that. It will use the theme a lot. It's kind of like an animated movie, but it's a live action cartoon. It's really like a vaudevillian romp. It's going to be really energetic, there's gonna be a lot of beat music in it, a lot of pop oriented stuff I'm gonna do because the characters are very young. That's kind of fun and interesting."
(Special thanks to Mikael from Music From The Movies)
