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	Interview: Alan Silvestri
	Writing for Film and TV SONGS FOR FILM & TV MUSIC SUPERVISION 101 PRODUCTION MUSIC LIBRARIES SONGWRITING DEALS FOR FILMS RESOURCES INTERVIEW: DANNY ELFMAN INTERVIEW: ALAN SILVESTRI			< last page \| 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 \| next page > JB: That is certainly true with you all the time with songs and songwriters. There are people who have a great command of the craft and you admire that without it's speaking to you. And sometimes you don't see the craft. You're more responding to the emotion and the heart. AS: When they come together, you have a Mozart and a Shakespeare in literature. JB: And you had great technicians at the time that we don't know about. AS: They didn't capture the power of the thought. So on every level, that applies to every aspect of film. It applies to the music, its applies to the filmmaker. There are filmmakers who are wonderful technicians, but they don't somehow capture a certain depth. Then you'll see a filmmaker with less technique maybe, who, with very simple means, can make a tremendously strong impression. So I think we're always searching for the finest thought we can bring forth from ourselves as eloquently said as we are able. That's really what we're ideally doing every time out of the box. JB: Do you think it's possible for the technology to get in the way? AS: I think anyone who blames the tool for bad work is looking in the wrong direction. Ultimately the only thing one can say is that the tool was so seductive that it sent this artist down the road to ruin. I don't buy it, because the tool is the tool is the tool. And what could someone be saying that would be so weak as to allow the tool to become the master of the process. JB: I've heard a couple of writer/producers say that they had to get past the place that they were so seduced by the technology that they would spend all their time getting a drum sound. They said that they forgot they were writing a song and it really should have been the other way around. AS: The whole computer consciousness, as I experience it, is really one that's very playful. And I think that's great. I think you need to play with the technology just for the sake of playing with it. You need to bang the hammer this way and that way. That's all preparation for using this tool to its maximum. It can't be centered around the tool. It's not good enough to negate the tool as a means of focusing on what it is I'm trying to say. That's excluding and non-creative. It has to do with starting at the beginning. "What am I doing?" That's the question that has to be asked. Then the process will have an order to it. And you won't go and be side-tracked. But then, there are times where you should just shurly be playing with the technology, if that's where your interest is. You should spend some time getting a great drum sound. Maybe not while you're telling yourself that you're writing a song. Do that as another activity rather than trying to confuse the issue. And it's confused when we've lost what we're trying to do here. JB: Have you found that there is any or less use of live orchestras? AS: That's a complicated question. I think there are relatively more ideal and less ideal conditions in film scoring. The more ideal has to do with having the financial means in the project to do what you feel is best for the film. It doesn't necessarily mean that you do something on a grand scale, but it does mean that if that was what was best for the film, you would be able to. There are situations where the financial picture is very restricted and that becomes a less ideal condition to work in. However, at that point, the mission is still to achieve the maximum amount of effectiveness within the constraint. At that point often the electronic, synthesized devices can help deliver more bang for the buck. And at that point it becomes a consideration on a financial basis. So I think it's always complicated. I do not see electronic devices as having replaced an orchestra. I don't experience that, I don't see that and I don't think it exists. I also don't think that in any way it is devaluing the whole electronic, synthesized world. I think it's unfair to equate the two and it's wrong thinking to try to place synthesizers and live musicians at opposite ends of a stick. It's two sticks and the electronic world has developed incredibly wonderful possibilities. One thing that it has done which is really amazing and wonderful is that it is giving people who are starting out a tremendous possibility to hear their music played and put together, and that's something that I would have wished had been around when I was younger. For a relatively small investment, a songwriter and film composer can really write and hear his material in a way that's never before been possible. Experience is ultimately what all of this is about. JB: You don't have to get together a big orchestra to hear whether it really work or not. AS: You can certainly simulate almost any kind of orchestral music enough to derive some perspective and some real input as to what it is you're doing. And I think that's spectacular as a tool for the craft of writing. JB: It's certainly been a great training ground for writer/producers to start by doing their own demos and have all the time they need to do it. AS: Without having a clock ticking over their head. So aside from all the wonderful coloristic contributions that it's made to working in the field, what it's done for the educational aspects of writing music is spectacular. JB: Let's talk about dealing with directors and that communication process. Have you ever found it difficult to translate what someone's saying they want into understanding what they want as opposed to their limited ability to convey that? AS: You have to always jump off the cliff at some point. That is never very easy. You may, over time, develop a tremendous level of confidence where you know that when you do jump off the cliff, you'd made a good jump. You may not have jumped into the same spot that was hoped for, but no one can say it was not a good jump. And that's about as good as it gets. On the down side, no matter how specifically and accurately you talk about music, there always arrives the moment of truth and I think you have to really trust yourself as far as feeling you have gathered as much input as you possibly could. And then it has to be yours. If you chase someone's concept without having made your own peace with it and found your own way into it, you're making a horrible mistake for a lot of reasons. One is you will not be able to converse from some other point of view that is not your own. And the aftermath of that is that you cannot morally justify having done that and by being in a position where you cannot morally justify what you've written, what happens is that you lose all the power of the statement because it won't inherently carry anything. So you need to hear as much, you need to be as open as possible to understand the movie, you need to understand the scene as best you can. You need to be free to talk about it and ask questions. You need to be free to be confused and find out. Very often what you'll find when you become a little more confident is that when you're confused, most often it's beaches it is confusing. And you don't save yourself anything by walking out of the room being confused and thinking, oh well, I'll this then in this scene and we'll see. Because if you're confused, you're going to bring in something confused to something that's confused already. Very often, a director is asking you to shed some light on a problem. I find that over and over again when I'm sitting in a spotting session or assembly with a good director, who's interested in his film, I find that very often they are looking for the music person's impression of things because things will be a red flag for the composer that might not be to other people. An example is you're in the middle of this very active chase scene. Instinctively things will come into your mind as you're watching it. And all of a sudden for two seconds there's a cutaway to a room somewhere. Now I'm not talking about an instance where stylistically you have something very active and then we cut to stillness. This is just this thing out of nowhere. And then you're right back into this other material that you had just come from. Sometimes, even though this is a very course description, you'll think, "what in the hell would I do there?" What would I do? This thing is going to need a lot of pastes. It's going to have to be back in full force. I don't get that. On many occasions that kind of thing has arisen. And I've said something about it and the next time I see the film, the cut is gone. So that's the greatest part of the collaborative side of the film. And that's something that is developing. It's taking time for filmmakers to realize that they do not have to be musicians, they do not have to be composers. They don't have to have a musical vocabulary to be effective. What they need to do, as the composer needs to do, is to know what they're doing in the room. They need to understand that first of all, the film needs to be expressing 98% of what it's about to the composer. And if it's not, there's a problem. The other 2% is things where the director wants to weigh a scene a certain way because he or she has an image of the overall film that the composer won't or shouldn't have in excess of the director at least. Then there's a real finesse possible to weigh scenes, to weigh moods to be creative with the composer. And the composer needs to hear about those intentions even though he's seeing the image on the screen because, like the script is the blueprint for the film, the rough cut or the film with no sound and no loops and no music is an unfinished stage of what will ultimately be the final film. There's still a lot of room for things to be shaded. More people are starting to be comfortable with that. Film music is, by many people, known for the power that it can contribute. The film director wants and needs that. < last page \| 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 \| next page >