HOWARD SHORE
questions his own eXistenZ
Interview by Jonathan Broxton
Howard Shore and David Cronenberg have, over the years, developed one of the most fruitful and long-standing composer/director partnerships of recent times. Ever since The Brood back in 1979, Shore has brought his unique, experimental musical sensibilities to bear on the majority of Cronenberg's work, culminating in such excellent and diverse scores as Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly and Crash.
Now comes eXistenZ, a darkly comic techno-thriller which bears all the usual Cronenbergian hallmarks of gross-out gore, deadpan acting and the familiar recurring theme of humanity being diminished by the onset of new technological advances. eXistenZ is set in a not-too-distant future where virtual reality video game designers are regarded as both great artists and international celebrities. The titular game marks a revolutionary breakthrough in virtual reality technology, and allows the player to literally become part of the game by way of a genetically modified organ known as a Game Pod, which inserts one of its umbilical-like appendages into the player's spinal column though a special socket at the base of the back. However, dark forces are at work, and soon the game's designer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her companion (Jude Law) find themselves on the run from unknown enemies in a world where nothing is exactly what it seems.
Howard, in London to record the score for his latest assignment - Kevin Smith's Catholicism comedy Dogma - took time out from his busy schedule to talk about eXistenZ and his other current works.
JB: What can you tell me about eXistenZ? It seems rather unusual...
HS: Maybe I shouldn't tell you too much about it. It might be more fun to not know so much before seeing it. I can tell you that it is an original science fiction film written by David Cronenberg. The last science fiction movie he wrote was Videodrome in 1981, and the early movies that I did with him (The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome) were a trio. They were of a piece. Then we did The Fly a few years after that, and it started a new period of movie making for us. This film harkens back to those three early films, and it's part of that type of movie making. David's pictures are very unique. eXistenZ is very different from, say, Naked Lunch or The Fly or M. Butterfly. I approached eXistenZ uniquely. In working with a group for as long as we have - it's been 20 years now since we did The Brood - there's no sense of going back, you're always going forward.
JB: So what kind of score have you come up with for eXistenZ?
HS: The score is all about perception and perspective of sound. I played with the idea of ones perspective of music, and the reality of how instruments relate to each other. If you listen to a symphony orchestra, there's a context to how the sound reaches you because of the way the orchestra is seated. The brass are in a certain position, so you hear certain things in a certain perspective. You hear the violins in relation to the cellos or to the basses, or to percussion in a very specific way. Through listening to contemporary music, we've developed this perspective of what we accept as being correct for the way music is supposed to sound. The movie explores that idea on another level - not in music, but in reality, what's real and what's virtual - and the attempt was to do something similar to that musically. What I did through the recording was to create certain sounds and certain perspectives that you wouldn't normally hear. Things that play very soft in musical terms might be very close to your ear and might in effect be very loud. Things that are very loud might be placed further back in perspective, and sound very quiet. The perspectives are being constantly altered depending on the scene in the film. The score uses a lot of elements of sound. It's a large orchestra, but it's been recorded in a unique way. It also uses other layers of sound. There are live electronic instruments like the theremin and a sextet of electric guitars. There is also an electronic soundscape that was created in collaboration with Robert Cotnoir that we then combined with the acoustic recordings. It's a very layered, very textured score, and the studio was used as a creative tool to create it.
JB: That's something that you often seem to do with your scores - you never settle for the conventional approach when you're writing music. It always seems as though you're trying to push the boundaries of what film music can be.
HS: I was fortunate in that I have been offered movies that allowed me to do that. The constant searching for new ways of using film music was one of things I was most interested in. I have tried more conventional forms as well, just for the fun of it.
JB: How much music did you write for eXistenZ?
HS: I wrote 55 minutes of music for this film.
JB: And how long did you have to score it?
HS: 8 weeks.
JB: You say that, on eXistenZ, you played around with different sounds and techniques. Does this mean it's going to be a quite atonal score, or have you tried to work in recurring themes and elements?
HS: It's a polytonal score. I have used four themes throughout the film. There are recurring motifs that are manipulated electronically and acoustically. There's a lot of humour in the score, actually - there's a lot of humour in the movie. It's not as dissonant or as disturbing as, say, Seven.
JB: And there's going to be CD release...
HS: Yes, it is released in America on 14 April and in England on 26 April, on the RCA Victor label.
JB: Just going back to David Cronenberg: a lot of people often say that your best work comes when with you work with him. Why do you think that is? Does he inspire you in a particular way?
HS: David just inspires me by his filmmaking. He also gives me a lot of latitude when I'm creating music for his films. He doesn't restrict me in any way, he doesn't box me in and that's probably why the music ends up being so interesting.
JB: In that case, would you say the music you write for Cronenberg's films is the music you personally really want to write - as if you were given completely free reign to come up with an original piece?
HS: I guess some of it is. But, you know, film music is a wide brush. The music that I'm writing for records is probably more sophisticated than the music I'm writing for films. Some people think my film music it already pretty sophisticated and complex, but I don't really feel that way. I feel that it is a pretty broad stroke. You can only do so much in movies. You're always dealing with a certain drama, there's a certain texture to the film already, there's only so far you can really go. You have restrictions in length, and you have tremendous restrictions in form, because form is always being dictated by the scene. You have restrictions in orchestration, because you're dealing with a certain type of approach to the film, so you can't always do everything you might want to do with a certain piece in terms of orchestration. You have restrictions in conducting, because you can't always use the dynamics or phrasing that you might use in a purely musical piece that you would in a film recording. There is considerable dramatic latitude to writing film music but, in terms of pure music, of what you would write for a record or a concert hall, there's a lot more room.
JB: How did you and David Cronenberg actually meet?
HS: We've known each other since we were quite young actually, and we have some mutual friends. I knew about him, because he was already making 8mm and 16mm films when he was a teenager.
JB: You actually started out doing Saturday Night Live...
HS: Well, actually Saturday Night Live was my second musical career. I was on the road for 4 years with a group called Lighthouse, and I recorded 8 albums during that period. Afterwards I started working with a group of writers and actors that evolved into Saturday Night Live.
JB: It's a long way from there to David Cronenberg movies!
HS: (laughs) I suppose. But, if you think about it, it's not really that far off. Yes, one was a live show, but I've always done theatre, and a lot of my film music background is based in theatre. Then I got interested in opera, and opera is a perfect relationship to twentieth century film music. It's what it grew out of. Cinema came from dramatic and comedic operas. The music I did in theatre led to Saturday Night Live, but it also led to documentary shorts and then to features. Really, Saturday Night Live was almost like doing one comedy score. It could have been the music to Big, or Mrs. Doubtfire, or Ed Wood, or any of those comedy scores. It's just that it was a show that was on television, and it lasted quite a long time - it's been on 25 years. So part of my whole background was doing that kind of show. It wasn't that unusual.
JB: Speaking of comedies, the other movie you've got out at the moment is Analyze This. I've heard about the movie, and the fact that there is a Mafia influence to it, so I kind of envisaged the score to be a kind of The Godfather with laughs...
HS: (laughs) Well, not really! Robert De Niro plays a mobster who has psychological problems. He's the head of a crime family, and he goes to see a psychiatrist played by Billy Crystal. The great and funny part of the movie is De Niro, because he has most of the comedy, and Billy Crystal for the most part plays it straight. So to see De Niro play the role he made famous in The Godfather and Goodfellas, but doing it in a comedic sense, is hysterical. It's so rich with humour, and De Niro is such a brilliant comedian, his timing is incredible. That was really the charm of it, for me, having him do that role. So my music is all swing music - very Nino Rota, Henry Mancini, that kind of stuff. It was fun to do that for a while.
JB: Swing music is something that people wouldn't really expect from you. When people think about "Howard Shore Music", they normally think of the really dark scores like Silence of the Lambs and Seven, but yet you've done comedies, you've done Big and Mrs. Doubtfire and so on.
HS: That's true, there's a whole element of comedy that I've done that has been really popular, and people quite often want me to do comedies. They hire me to do comedies because they think of the work I've done in that area. I mean, Harold Ramis on Analyze This probably wasn't thinking "Get Howard Shore because he's gonna write a dark score..." (laughs)
If I have been typecast at all, it's probably been for doing good work. The feeling probably is that "this guy will do something interesting, and something original, and something good for the movie", as opposed to "he only does this kind of thing, or that kind of thing". That's really the essence of film music - being versatile, being able to write a lot of different kinds of pictures. Being able to deal with different kinds of drama, or comedy. That's what it is.
JB: Will there be a CD release of Analyze This?
HS: No, there were some rights issues which could not be resolved, and that stopped the CD from being released.
JB: Did you encounter any problems with songs in that movie? That's something which often happens on comedy movies, with songs being tracked in at the expense of underscore...
HS: This had some songs, but they were all good choices. It has music from the fifties, like Louis Prima, and current recordings of Tony Bennett. They were quite smart choices, actually. What I like to do with this kind of movies is to weave the score in amongst the songs. The music that I wrote fits right in with Tony Bennett's music. It works together. I think that another film I did that had a similar successful use of songs and score is Philadelphia.
JB: I'd like to talk a little about the "afterlife" of your work, if I may. I don't want this to sound in any way derogatory, but I often find that when I listen to some of your scores on CD, I don't particularly "enjoy" listening to them, because of the style of the music. Scores like, for example, Cop Land, and Seven, are quite difficult to listen to away from the cinema setting. Is your music's afterlife on CD ever an issue when you're writing, or does that never enter your mind?
HS: No, because that's not really what I'm doing. I'm not making a CD, I'm creating a score to a film. The only concession I make to the CD is when I'm mixing it, or assembling it, and I'll say "OK, let's do this, and we'll put that on the CD". But the CDs I make are the soundtracks to the movie. They aren't meant to be listened to in the same way that you would listen to a completely conceived album of music. You really have to see the film to enjoy the use of the music in the film. However I think that soundtracks like Nobody's Fool, Philadelphia, M.Butterfly, Naked Lunch, Ed Wood, Crash, Prelude to a Kiss and The Game can be, as you say, "enjoyed" away from the screen.
JB: In situations like that, then, do you feel that sometimes it's better for people not to listen to your scores without having seen the movie? People can often dismiss scores as being simply "noise" without really knowing how they relate to the film and to what's going on on-screen. I know I've been guilty of that in the past...
HS: I don't know, it's a whole different sub-genre, the soundtrack area. How people buy them, and collect them, and listen to them, and what's popular about them, it's a whole different world. I'm involved in making movies, not in making CD soundtracks. However I am interested in making records.
JB: You mean like original classical pieces?
HS: They would be original contemporary compositions, yes.
JB: There aren't many film music composers who actually go out of their way to do that. Would that be instead of films, or as well as?
HS: As well as. I'm interested in movie music, and it's something I feel I'm good at. I never stop learning. It's a good way to be in front of orchestras and to be in production is very interesting to me. I'm never going to stop doing it, but I'd like to produce another series of music other my film music.
JB: Have you ever thought of doing concerts? You know, like "An Evening with Howard Shore", where you would play suites of your film music. I'm sure there would be a lot of interest.
HS: Well, I did do a concert like that in Seville, Spain a couple of years ago. It was an 18 year retrospective of my film music career in a two and a half hour concert, which started with The Brood and ended with Looking For Richard, which was the last movie I had scored at that time. Then last year I did two concerts of my music from Crash, one in Ottawa, Canada, and one in Melbourne, Australia, and that used the fourteen-piece group with the six electric guitars . I've always wanted to do something with Ornette Coleman, and we've always talked about doing Naked Lunch live, but I haven't been successful in getting that produced. It was harder to produce than I originally thought it would be because of the orchestral nature of it. Once you go into the realm of orchestra the options get slightly limited because of the size of it. That's why I was interested in doing concerts in a format like the one for Crash, because it's a way of touring and doing live concerts, in a very non-restrictive way. That's probably why people like Philip Glass and Steve Reich generally use small ensembles to play their music. Once you venture into the orchestral format there's a whole other set of circumstances to deal with. Quite often, film scores use that configuration. Also, when people think of film music in concerts, they think it's going to be Lawrence of Arabia or Star Wars, a more pops-oriented concert, and I wouldn't really be doing that. When I did the Seville concert and I listened to that 18 years of music and I thought "some of this is really good! It's really good concert music", and it inspired me to create other music that was not film music which I would be able to perform as concert pieces, so that's really what I'm interested in doing now in the next few years. I'm sure there will always be opportunities for me to do retrospectives or concert performances of my film music.
JB: Who does influence you, musically?
HS: Toru Takemitsu is a big influence. John Cage. Nino Rota.
JB: What about people working today? Do you ever listen to film music of other composers around at the moment?
HS: Yes, I listen to what people are recording. I see a lot of movies and listen to many new soundtracks each month. I'm always interested to see how people approach different subjects and how they write for them. I'm also interested in the acoustics of certain rooms and the performance of different orchestras. One thing I have noticed, though, is that it seems to be a fairly conservative period in film music.
JB: I agree. It's not like in the sixties, when you had the Jerry Goldsmiths and the John Barrys really coming to the fore. There are very few people who, in the last five or so years, have really stood out as being the next generation of film composer. Maybe people like John Ottman, or Marco Beltrami, or Debbie Wiseman, but other than that...
HS: Yes. It's a very conservative period. There's not a lot of innovation going on.
JB: Just looking to the future - what can you tell me about Dogma?
HS: I just finished recording at Air Studios Lyndhurst Hall last week. It's gone very well.
JB: That's another unusual movie. What kind of score have you done for that?
HS: Again, it's one of those ones I'd like not to label right away. It was recorded live, and it used a very small orchestra, with mixed choir, and a children's choir. The live recordings are fantastic - they have so much energy to them. The film itself is a comment on religion, and it's very unique. It's been described as a love letter to faith.
JB: What is happening with Chinese Coffee?
HS: Al was shooting a couple of films back to back so there was a production hiatus. I had recorded some music in London and we were still discussing ideas. I've done three movies with Pacino now. He is very much about the process, it's always evolving. The first film we did was The Local Stigmatic, which was never released. It's in the Metropolitan Museum's film archive. Then we did Looking For Richard, which was released by Fox Searchlight. Then he asked me to do Chinese Coffee, which I hope he'll release too, but I don't know.
JB: So you did actually write the score?
HS: Yes, I did some sessions at CTS, Wembley. I recorded a score which may have been considered somewhat controversial. It's interesting that in film music it's not good to be too controversial, yet for new music compositions, to have people discuss and debate them is welcomed.
JB: And the other one that's just come out is Gloria.
HS: Yes. I've worked with Sidney Lumet before and he asked me to do this, and I love Sidney and I love his work. The film didn't have a great release in America, so I hope it's received a little better when it opens in the UK.
JB: One final question: what's your favourite score of your own, and why?
HS: [thoughtful pause]. I love Naked Lunch. I love the collaboration with Ornette. I love the combination of Moroccan and bebop music. I love the improvisation of it, and the energy of what we created, because sometimes that happens on movie scores, where the performance can be a fantastic thing. That's what happened on Naked Lunch and, coincidentally, the same thing happened last week in Dogma. The performance transcended the writing and the orchestration, and the performance became the great part of it. There was no improvisation in Dogma, but just the way it was performed was so great. It's so alive, and you capture that in a live recording. This is the first time this music was ever performed, and it may be the only time this music is ever performed. That's the interesting thing about film music - you write it and it's performed and recorded and usually that's it. Dogma's performances are just great, and the Naked Lunch recording was equally fantastic. Just from the energy that happened in that one week. It's something that you constantly hope for.
With thanks to Vance Brawley, Cathy Moore, Jeff Sanderson, and the wonderfully accommodating Howard Shore.
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