18 MusicWeek 20.09.13 INTERVIEW DAVID ARNOLD
late Sixties I went to see films at the cinema with my mum and dad and then a lot of times by myself on a Saturday morning in the cinema club. The first three that I saw were Jungle Book, Oliver and You Only Live Twice.
Those three were a pretty good starting point. If you think about it they’re all amazing scores and amazing songs and amazing voices cast as well. One was a musical, one was a cartoon film with lots of songs in it and one was an action adventure fantasy film with John Barry’s score and the amazing songs in it. I was being incredibly moved in lots of different ways and thinking at the time I wanted to be either a musician or an actor because that’s where I felt the most exciting things happened. Living in Luton in the late Sixties with a black and white tele and no telephone you’d play in your garden, you’d go to the swimming pool. There was not much else going on so to find yourself in the cinema and watching all these incredible things happening in exciting locations no wonder it was enticing and felt aspirational so I definitely wanted to be a part of that for a long time.
Did you end up buying soundtrack albums or did your parents have them in their record collection? They had soundtracks of musicals largely, like Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals like South Pacific and Carousel. My dad had a lot of classical music and my mum had Beatles and then crooner singers like Tom Jones and Vince Hill and Perry Como and Jack Jones.
Your move into doing film music was very organic, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was. It felt like it was what I was always going to do, but I never really expected or thought I might get paid for doing it. I did it for 10 years before anyone paid me a penny and I would continue to do it if people stopped paying me because I do love doing it. I started off with the usual thing getting involved in school plays and performances at colleges and things like that. There’s an old arts centre at Luton where I met [film writer and director] Danny Cannon. He was 16 and I was 19 and he was making little films on a Betamax recorder that his dad had lent him and I used to be practising in one of the rehearsal rooms in this place so I was there for three or four years doing the music for little films with Danny. We had little screenings at this arts centre of films we had made and we entered one of them into the BBC Young Film Maker of the Year competition and it won and Alan Parker was one of the judges. He suggested Danny apply for the National Film and Television School as a directing student and he did and he got in and I applied as a composing student but didn’t get in, but I carried on doing Danny’s films while he was there and I started doing films with other film students. It wasn’t until Danny graduated a year after that he got the financing together for the Young Americans film and made that and got me involved and that’s where it all started really. The point from where we started to the first film was 12 or 13 years. If you don’t get paid for anything until you’re 31, 32 it makes you appreciate it a little bit more. It was a practical apprenticeship and I know there are a load of amazing courses for people, but in Luton at the
ABOVE
Hello Stratford: The Who
concluded the Olympic closing ceremony where David Arnold was musical director
“I [composed] for 10 years before anyone paid me a penny and I would continue to do it if people stopped paying me because I love it” DAVID ARNOLD
time nobody knew any of that stuff and I don’t even though if they existed then. It did make me realise ultimately the only way you can really get on in this is to create your own chances by really meeting as many people as you can and getting in with other filmmakers who are at the same point in their career as you are.
That gave you such a long time to learn about what works in terms of synchronisation of moving image and music. What are the key things you picked up? There really aren’t any rules. It’s like saying because you’ve painted one house red every house should be painted red. Every single film has a set of problems and I found that the greatest thing I learnt was understanding story, understanding motivation and understanding logic and sense in a film because there are millions of people who can write music brilliantly, much better than I can, but it’s not just about writing music. The one thing that is difficult, nigh on impossible to teach film music students, is to understand story and I found the thing that probably informed me the most when I was doing all those student films at film school was I snuck into a couple of debriefs they had where a visiting director or producer would go through people’s work one by one and sort of tear it apart so you really have to understand the reasons why you are doing something and the impact it has.
Someone like John Barry was obviously a brilliant composer, but what made him so special in terms of how he used music with film? He had many great qualities, but his gift with melody was extraordinary and his ability to establish something tonally in character in a very, very short amount of time is almost unsurpassed. Perhaps only Ennio Morricone did it brilliantly as well. You hear
something for five seconds and you’re in no doubt as to what is happening and what this film is about and what is about to happen. He was a very elegant composer and while it sounded quite simple it was quite complex harmonically the way he wrote. He had a great jazz influence. He could move from one chord to another and just make you feel unsettled or elated and then he could write amazing melodies at the same time.
Quite often directors will keep going back to the same composer like Steven Spielberg with John Williams and Tim Burton with Danny Elfman. What do you see as the key ingredients of a successful relationship between a film director and composer? I’m pretty sure if Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton weren’t getting what they wanted out of John Williams and Danny Elfman they wouldn’t be asking them. There’s a great deal of security. When you are directing a movie there are so many things stacked against you. There’s the budgetary issues, the schedule, the studio, the producers. Everyone’s going to have something to say about what you are doing and part of the way of you delivering your vision is to have people around you who can help you do it and understand what it is you are doing and there is a great amount of security in a director having his crew who knows how he works, understands what he does.
What do you make of the approach of someone like Quentin Tarantino where he uses existing recordings rather than go to someone and say, “Write me a soundtrack for this film”? You can’t argue with anyone’s working methods. The only thing that I think is a bit sad is no one is going to be temping their film or be influenced by the score of a Quentin Tarantino movie and if you think of the films he has made and perhaps potentially what may have been written for those films it could have been extraordinary. He creates the music for his film by using scores from other films that other directors have taken the chance that he won’t take and would employ a composer to handle an emotional part of
www.musicweek.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72
