:Speaking of Truth, it isn’t quite like Furious 7 or Avengers: Age of Ultron, so is your approach to each film generally the same or do you change it to suit your expectations of what that film will be like?
I didn’t really have an idea of what the music should sound like for Truth when I started discussing the film with James Vanderbilt, the director. I had a general sense that it was going to be a tighter, more intimate sound, but knowing that there’s a thriller aspect to it, being that it’s a true story where things kind of go haywire. I was thinking about the investigative aspect to the story when I read Mary Mape’s book and then James’ screenplay. I got into that mode where I was very interested in some of the movies that I really enjoyed that had conspiratorial flavors to the scores, like JFK, John Williams’ score to that, for instance. The story read very much like a page-turner, like All the President’s Men and stories like that. The thing that was unexpected was when I watched the film. James and his editor showed me the film — actually, played the film and left the room. They wanted me to see it on my own, so I was in a room by myself screening the film. They put zero temp music in it.
Oh wow.
Yes, It was completely dry in terms of the music and just the performances of the actors. This was really interesting to me, because the thing that I noticed was that the way he directed the film and Cate Blanchett’s performance, Redford’s performance, Topher’s, and Elizabeth Moss’, and all of them, there’s this really emotional side to the story that I, for some reason, didn’t see when I was reading it. And so I knew that the music really needed to reflect this. It needed to have a strong emotional component to it. I found that the music ended up having three different goals, really, when I was starting. Three different musical responsibilities. One being the investigative, journalistic, news-like music, and then there was the political/militaristic vibe that represented the branches of government that they were investigating. Then there’s this father/daughter kind of family, not literal father and daughter, but the relationship between Mary Mapes and Dan Rather and this team, and how their lives start getting ripped apart, it becomes very much along the lines of needing some very poignant music. So it was a bit of a surprise. The movie took me to a different place than I thought I would go for sure.
Truth is truly a fantastic score, it really is. One of the things that I loved was how parts of it really sounded like, well, the news.
Right.
How did you go about capturing that feel?
You’re right, you’re hitting upon what I was referring to just now, which was the three categories, or goals, or styles in the movie, being the journalistic side of things. There’s probably about, maybe a third of the music, maybe a little less in the movie, that has that tone. It’s often when they’re investigating things, when they’re trying to track things down, information. You’ll notice there’s these ostinatos in the harp and the piano — consciously, or maybe subconsciously, I’m not sure which came first, it’s a bit of a chicken egg, but basically the idea behind that being journalistic was a literal one. There’s something to that “dun din din din” sound that sounds very metric, like typing. The thing I noticed is what seemed to work the best at representing the journalistic trade of typing when you don’t literally see them doing it is doing things that simulate typing, like piano, pressing of the keys and fingers in a rapid motion, doing piano ostinatos seemed to fit the bill. Not just in an intellectual way, but somehow evoke something to that effect. I think that’s why it sounds kind of “newsy,” when you have the harp — and then, I had the strings support the ostinatos and the piano, and it became the orchestra simulating a typewriter typing. I think that goes a long way to sound like the news. And then, certainly, the one piece at the end, which is the main title, was all the other themes — actually the theme of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes and all these other themes that were actually not in that style in the movie. I did a rendition of those themes, which were very different, in the news style that almost sounded like a news theme to go along with Truth, if it were a news program. The other two-thirds of the score being the emotional component and the political component, those got enveloped into the news style of music. But yeah, I’m glad you noticed!
What was your experience working with James Vanderbilt like?
James is an old compadre of mine. We know each other well within film and outside film, which is great. I’ve been working with him for twelve years, on and off, on movies where he was writing the film and I was composing the score. We had not worked in this capacity before as director and composer because he hasn’t directed a film until now. The thing that I found interesting was that there was a common language there more than I would’ve guessed. I think, basically, because the screenwriter and the composer are connected as bookends in a movie. One writes the first word before anything’s filmed, and the other writes the last note. It’s kind of the last thing that’s put into the movie. We have a connection of opposites, or a balancing of the pendulum on two sides of the swing. James is such a cool guy, just a good guy to hang out with. And, he’s really brilliant. His knowledge of things is just amazing, and he’s a fellow film and film music nerd. We often just go on tangents. It’s funny, we’ve worked together for a long, long time, and it was great to do it in a different capacity with someone who really knows his stuff. He’s a great collaborator.
What was your favorite achievement in the Truth score?
Oh, you know, that’s a good question. I think the music tells the story and in two ways. That was the goal, at least. I guess the greatest achievement of it was, two things need to be done with the music that James left room for me to do. This was not a matter of fixing the movie, this was a matter of design. James left the responsibility in my hands, which was kind of scary (laughs). He had a lot of confidence, which was great. More confidence than I did in me. He laid it out so you needed to have a great deal of clarification, subconsciously, with the music and the storylines, being that there are a lot of names and a lot of characters because this is a true story. You had to be able to tell the difference between what General, and what Commander, what Lieutenant, and this and that. A lot of clarity needed to be given. The music had to do this. Now, it’s a subconscious thing that happens, but it certainly is effective with thematic scoring and having certain sounds used with certain characters and what not, in the same way, through repetition of things, our brains associate, which lots of studies have shown, with visuals. Like, where you would play a sound and you would see a color, they’d flash a color in front of the eyes of a child and you would do it many, many, many times. Over time, they would naturally associate, not even realizing it. You’d play the tone notes and they would say green or blue or what not. Like an idiomatic response that you see when you don’t even realize that you have memory that you don’t know you have. A good example would be typing, ironically, with the journalistic thing. Your fingers just rip away with finding the letters on a keyboard when typing something out. If you then were asked to just write the broad grid of where all the letters are on a keyboard, pretty sure 99% of the people would not be able to do it. Yet, your fingers know where they all are! So, I think what happens with a score like Truth, where you have that much information, I was trying very hard to clarify things (laughs) so the viewer uses a little less effort to glide through the story, which made it more emotionally impactful later when you really feel like you’ve gone through this journey. One of the things that this does, thematic writing, it instills a sense of history that you don’t get when you’re in the theater, unlike a TV series where you might have twenty episodes to get to know the characters. You’re watching something and you really get into it, you become, in a way, friendly with the characters on the screen and you feel like you really know them. A movie like this, which was about two hours, is an incredibly short amount of time to get emotionally attached to someone. Very rarely in real life would this happen. If you’re lucky, you may have two or three times in your life where you sit down at a dinner and afterwards you think, “Wow, I feel like I’ve known them all my life.” But most of the time, it’s not that way. It takes time. Music is this steroidal accelerant that you inject (laughs) into a movie with themes that make you really feel like you know these characters longer than you actually have in terms of you sitting in the theater for only a few hours. So that was a big goal, hopefully we achieved that because by the end of the movie, if you count the credits, I think the last twelve minutes, or so, of the movie, there’s no dialogue, no sound effects. It’s just music. The whole coda of the film is done with visuals and music, then it goes into the end credits. But there’s quite a lot told with just visuals and music. James, by design, had left room for me to do this, he left room for the score to do this, and at the end of the day, I needed to pull that off. Otherwise, the movie wouldn’t really make any sense, in terms of that, by design. Or, it might not have an emotionally satisfying ending. Hopefully it did, and if people watch it and feel that way, then great. That would make me really happy (laughs).