www.JohnBraheny.com - Writing for Film and TV

HOME - JOHN BRAHENY - JOHN'S BOOK - SONGWRITING CRAFT - SONGWRITING BUSINESS - MARKETING YOUR SONGS
WRITING FOR FILM & TV - SONGWRITER RESOURCES - INTERVIEWS WITH SUCCESSFUL SONGWRITERS
THE LOS ANGELES SONGWRITERS SHOWCASE - SITE MAP

	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: The dub track is interesting because I know a couple of writers who got into the film because the song was on the temp track. AS: All kinds of things like that happen. Certainly for anyone who's beginning, the more they can be around and exposed, the better. You're not going to get a chance scoring a film if you never leave your room. It doesn't matter how much you write in there. The Sundance workshop, the BMI workshop, songwriter's things where they can hear material and see what's out there, what working and what's not working. All exposure is worth something because people move through industries together. JB: You score a college film for a young director who later turns out to be... AS: Basil Poledouris and John Milius were in school together and that's a relationship where a collaborative effort began and it goes on. Bob Zemeckis and I met at a turning point for both of us in our careers on Romancing the Stone and something was forged in that time for the both of us that has endured. Those kinds of relationships happen all around you. When you're 20 years old and you do a student film and there's some folks there working on this film...one's a producer and one's a writer, etc. And 10 or 15 years later, that one's the president of Fox and this one here's the head of one of the top agencies. That's how it happens. All of those relationships that continue, you move as generations through the industry. That's very important too. JB: Did you do any kind of apprenticeship program with anybody? AS: I've never orchestrated for anyone. I never wrote a note for a piece of film until a man handed me 12 cans and I had 9 days to write sixty minutes of music. I didn't even know what a click track was the day I was handed the cans. I did not know what any of it was. It just turned through this flukey course of events that I was given a film to score, never having done it or even thought about doing it. JB: Had they heard something you did? AS: It's one of the blessings and curses of the film industry, where an opening can be created. You can hear the argument that I'm so good and no one will listen to my music. That's one of the curses because maybe you feel that level of intelligence en masse out there is not what you hope it would be to understand the contribution you have to make. However, there is an upside to what's perceived to be a less than ideal level of intelligence which means that things will be allowed to happen that should not be allowed to happen like having a 20 year old guy who's never written a note of music for a film be handing 12 cans and be asked to show in 9 days with a score. So that's the upside of this thing. JB: Like chaos theory. AS: Exactly. The door is being shut because of this level of ignorance and on the other hand, I negate the fact that that may be the same force that will open the door. So there I was with this job and I remember I drove out to Simi Valley to buy the Knudsen book because I heard I needed that. I went down to Pickwick Books in Hollywood and I bought Earl Hagen's book called Scoring For Films and I read the book in one night and listened to the records and listened to the examples as to how he put these techniques together. And the next day, literally, I was writing music for this film. So there it was. The technique is pretty doable in terms of the mechanics. Not musical techniques, but the mechanics of film are things that you can learn. You can learn what click tracks are, what time code is. The contribution the Grant Brothers have made with the oracle is beyond anything I can think of...what that has allowed in terms of facilitating the organization of music as it applies to music and the obligations of time. JB: Is that the time code machine? AS: No it doesn't actually code it. What it does is allow you to take a piece of film and organize the music so that things will be where you want them to be when you want them to be there. So everything from generating click tracks which can be used as guide tracks to play to, to generating streamers which provide picture cues so that you can hook up to those. But it's incredible the way they put it together and facilitated that whole nightmarish aspect. That is pure mechanics and it allows one to spend all one's time on the writing of the music compared to how it used to be. There was a lot of fear for the music editor and composer. These guys have really made a great contribution. If you're a painter and you make a choice as to the medium you're going to work in, after you've decided the subject, that wipes out tremendous numbers of possibilities. Same thing in music. The moment you begin, every time you make a choice, you cancel a tremendous number of other possibilities. So then, the creative process as I experience it becomes this kind of following along and I think when people get bogged down in trying to do too much too quickly and I've actually tried to short-circuit my process, what's come to be my process. When I see a scene and I'm actually going to begin to write, I work on incredibly sketchy pass. The mission, the goal, the aim of that particular stage of the process is to get a very, very overall view of the music. I find that if I try intentionally to be more specific than this threshold that I've come to discover for myself, it cuts the energy off and I'm stopped and then I have nothing, because then I'm not doing the task at hand. The task at hand is to develop the overall view. Once that's there, then a tremendous number of possibilities have just been removed, a tremendous number of sandtraps have just been removed from the course. They're not there anymore, I don't have to worry about that anymore. Now I have this here and now within that what I've experienced is that it's almost as thought a different part of my brain is called upon to do these different aspects of this. It's more difficult for me, always, to derive that first very vague version of the music. The first thing I work on is a four-line sketch. Sometimes I may only write one line, it's just very vague. But that's always the most taxing. That's what I feel is the essential creative part of my job. Once that's done, I feel that I can unplug that part of my brain and then I plug in another part that starts to elaborate and chisel and highlight and bring this into some kind of relief and make it happen. It is far less painful, for lack of a better word, than this original. And it stands to reason, in a sense that, the first process is something coming from nothing. There's blank paper -- there's nothing there. I have to come forth. Once you come forth with something, it is no longer something from nothing. There is something there. The very fact that it's there now has all of its own life. It's got things that it can do, it has things it can't do. I mean if I've established key relationships, those are there, they will be adhered to. I don't have to worry about all the other keys now -- they're gone. It's just from here to here to here -- whatever it is, harmonies, a melody -- that becomes the law and it's not every other melody that could be written I have to be taxing my brain with. That choice has been made. It's done. Not that you won't refine it and do things, but something exists now, so it's a whole different energy to work on something that exists, I guess is what I'm saying, as it is to work on something that doesn't exist. < last page \| 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 \| next page >