#25
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autor: Adam » sob sty 12, 2019 13:19 pm
Randall D. Larson: You’ve returned to the horror/thriller genre with ESCAPE ROOM. What can you tell me about the film and its musical needs?
Brian Tyler: The thing about ESCAPE ROOM is that it had a unique kind of thriller aspect, but at the same time there’s an element of a classic paranoia film. When you’re sitting down to start writing a score, there’s so many directions you can go. The palette is unlimited in terms of what you can use. There’s all this emotion and intensity and suspense going on, but the idea for me was to limit the instrumentation. I wanted to use analog synthesizers from the early ‘80s, and I wanted to use environmental sounds. There was an element of time running out, so I used a lot of ticking clocks and alarms within the music, and then there was this idea of “the other” that’s kind of soulless, as well. For that I used industrial pistons and gears and power tools and things like that for percussion, and I blended that with live grand piano which reflected the humanity of the characters and worked against those pistons and mechanical sounds. That was really the idea behind the score going into it, before even writing a melody. It was setting it up in a way that can be conceptual and mirror the story.
Randall D. Larson: You worked with one of your assistants, John Carey, bringing him in for the first time as a co-composer. How did the two of you collaborate to develop this score?
Brian Tyler: I’ve known John for a long time. He has a great knack for feeling the way a scene should work. We’re both very interested in the way that harmonies work, how chords are voiced, and what type of inversion chords we’ll get if we do this or that. We get very geeky about the compositional aspect of it. Even when we’re talking about pianos we began thinking of using environmental and industrial sounds; gears and machines and things, it was very much like orchestrating. John’s got a great orchestrational mind. He’s really actually mostly a traditional orchestrational composer and that’s really why I chose to work with him on this. I thought it would be interesting – he’s mostly interested in the John Williams and Bernard Herrmann styles, as I am, but I really thought it would be fun for us to team up and apply those same orchestral techniques to things that weren’t traditional orchestra.
Randall D. Larson: How did you use that sonic structure to develop the suspense, horror, and shock moments in the score?
Brian Tyler: There are these moments of suspense and revelation in the movie, and the thing that I really wanted to work with was the idea of time and tempo and pitch. The tempos in this score accelerate and decelerate a lot. The ticking clock is not steady – it often speeds up and so the tempo and chord changes in the music speed up as well. I felt that there would be an unbalance to the score if I could manipulate the pitch, even within a single cue. All of a sudden the pitch starts falling, and the whole cue starts de-tuning. That does a very weird thing to your brain because if you‘re bending between the notes on a piano, in between quarter notes or even bending the whole cue in between keys, up and down, it gives you a sense of unbalance. It was a way to create a sense of disarray and panic. And then when our characters would strike back and begin winning, then it would actually be quite triumphant. So really all these elements – melody, tempo, pitch – are constantly moving. I felt since the movie is really about solving a puzzle, it’s like these three different things are part of this complex three-dimensional sonic Rubik’s Cube, and the score is always moving and you’re always trying to follow it but it keeps on slipping away from you…
Randall D. Larson: Those bending notes you referred to, is that in effect something like a Shepard Tone or is that something else?
Brian Tyler: Yes, in fact I used Shepard Tones in the score quite a lot. The main theme has them throughout the piece. And then, also, I would subtly detune maybe one of the pitches in a chord progression and it would start drifting downward and then it wouldn’t match the rest of the ensemble. It was all a way to keep the audience off balance and maintain quite an unsettling atmosphere.
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