There's nothing like desperation to sharpen your sense of focus.
Thomas Newman
With film music, endings are often more difficult than beginnings, because a beginning is an underline, a way of exciting a moment, and then you have to find a way to dissipate that.
My uncle Lionel ended up being a bug guy at 20th Century Fox, which my father had been - and, of course, my cousin Randy - you know, one of the great American songwriters. It was a storied family and, in many ways, very tough to emerge from.
Robert Altman was a very jovial guy and obviously a famed improviser and perhaps less effective in post-production, which is like the crystallising process. So I found myself at sea often with him because we'd have conversations about what music is, and in the end, I don't know how interested he was?
I first came to Abbey Road Studios in 1994. I scored 'Little Women' there. What I remember most about it was how hard it was to come to London from Los Angeles and conduct when you're jetlagged.
If you fail, fail fast enough so you can regroup and do it better.
The experience of a film is immersive, and music is supposed to underline and help that experience.
I know what my taste is, and I do like my touch on the piano.
The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.
The idea of creating film scores was terrifying for many years, into my 30s. It struck me as a career of doing 30-page term papers the night before they're due.
I had ideas. A lot were good, but in many ways, I had no idea or experience about how to carry them out.
I didn't listen to any of my dad's scores.
The golden age of Hollywood was the conceit of the movie and the style of the movie.
'Sugarcoat the Galaxy' is inspired by color-inflected photographs of galaxies. It likens sounds to spun sugar and confection, wrapping static harmonies inside energy and pace.
The rare opportunity of writing music for a movie about the making of 'Mary Poppins' was impossible to ignore. The fact that it could provide emotional content in relief of the struggles that the Sherman brothers and Walt Disney endured was reason enough to take on the challenge.
In 'Saving Mr. Banks,' the challenge was just transitions. Time transitions from 1961 to 1906; how do you follow a character in one environment to another? And sometimes these transitions were quick, so how do you do that?
It's a practical matter. If you're useful to others, you'll be hired.
I flew to England to see the rough cut of 'Revolutionary Road.' I was quite moved. As a married man, it's kind of disturbing to see a couple try so hard to work things out and fail so miserably.
What satisfies me most are those nonverbal moments with players, when I sense them thinking and responding. And I think, 'Wow, this is amazing.' Hollywood gives us the money to do this. I want to be grateful for that, and I also don't want to waste it.
There are moments when I invoke my dad and think about him on the podium, but in a very positive way. I don't feel at all intimidated by him. I feel like I've found my own voice.
In animation, action is changing so quickly that there's really not a lot of suspended moments.
Whatever you say to yourself about it being just another movie, and you're going to do the job you always do, it ends up being a 'Bond' movie and a sense of what it is to put music to James Bond and to honor the music that exists.
'The Starship Avalon' is perpetually mobile. The music is designed to give the impression of endless sleep and endless journey with a significant interruption that guides the story that follows. It's color and pulse followed by great size.
When you see an early edited version, you're not sure what it is. The movie is getting on its wobbly legs.
I realized so much of my life hasn't been in a well-lit room, and I realized the importance of documenting my experiences as a way to memorialize them.
There were certain things in 'Nemo' - just this low hum of ocean and watery sound - that was enough to imply water, as opposed to restating it over and over again.
In live action, sometimes a mood or a feeling can go on for quite a while. Animation is a lot more effort. There are a lot more notes.
After the music that had been created by my family, I thought there was no way I could stack up.
You want to say as little as you can and get the most punch out of it, always with the knowledge that people are not in the theater to listen to your music so much as to respond to the movie. You're a part of that experience.
I just want my music to involve an audience in what's taking place onscreen.
For me, like anyone, you want to go into a movie and have an enjoyable time where you're just involved.
Music is such an odd thing when you think about it - behind an image until you take it away, and then you realize a movie sounds blank without it.
There was no saying I could ever step in and do what John does, because it'd be really hard to be John Williams.
Losing makes you strong.
I like being the underdog.
In general, I probably have a shy nature. So the idea of poking out with my music is probably not something I want to do.
Part of me wants to stay hidden; it's no coincidence that I write movie music. It lets me stay in the shadows, in a way, but still lets me be expressive.
The thing I don't want to do as a film composer is reiterate. I prefer to subtextualize or to underline rather than to say, 'This is what you should be feeling.'
I think I compose as a listener: improvising and listening back excites me because I get to ideas that never would have occurred. Then I bring in the computers and samplers... and I begin to loop and process and change them.
Movie music allows me to work with players as creatively as I can.
There was no way I could not do 'Finding Dory.'
When you go into something like a space movie, you think there's going to be no music or little music.
It's always easy, I think, to raise the importance of a scene through the addition of music. But it's very awkward to end it unless there's a door slam or a gunshot or something that just takes you right out of it.
The thing about the creative process is it's so chaotic.
We're all shocked by new ideas, and we're less shocked when we hear them again. And less shocked when we hear them a third time.
My father used to say it was just there, the opportunity. It was all teed up for him. The talkies were starting, and here was Hollywood waiting for people to come from New York who had the training, who could do music with a sense of dramatic context.
Music is one of the last elements in the creative process. It can and hopefully should tie a bow around an artistic concept, how a story moves forward, the pace of that storytelling.
Post-production is kind of the death of hope. The money has been spent. The grand ideas are either there or they're not there. So music oftentimes has to compensate if there are issues, or it has to stay out of the way if the movie is working really well.
In the end, you don't want music to be noticed as much as digested and integrated into the storytelling. And make audiences sit forward in their seats and enjoy the movie.
There were moments in 'Malala,' I felt very moved by the storytelling, and 'pleased' would be the wrong word, but the music could be part of what moved me: that I was trying to contribute to something that was meaningful outside the realm of creative work but just more in terms of the world.
