The score

Hi, I'm Adam Egoyen. I'm sitting here with Michael Dana, and we're doing commentary for Exotica. I'm very excited. It's the first time I've done one of these with Michael. We were originally supposed to do this just over a month ago, but Michael was just coming back, interestingly enough, from India, where he was starting work on the score for Life of Pi, and it is fantastic.

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music in this film which is immediately so exciting and so accessible and then there's music which kind of lurks and kind of has a develops in a much more gradual way through the course of the film and I think that's what's so interesting about this score like here we're about to go into this club and there's a lot of music like this which is just really exciting and which you puts you into a world and you want to be in that world and it's almost like a drug it's sort of

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visual motifs, but we needed an amazing score. And what was so beautiful about this is that Michael and I had been working already together for 10 years, really, since Family Viewing. And from that very first film, we developed this language, this ability for me to write a certain type of script, knowing that Michael's collaboration and artistic understanding

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which Ennio Morricone will incorporate into his score, replicated by human voices, this being the story of human jackals. Mulock's face looks dead, merciless, as he stares us down. For dramatic purposes, this location is supposedly a Texas-Mexico border town called Paso Negro. In fact, it was a small village called La Sartanilla in the municipality of Tabernas in Almería, Spain.

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And here's the great Eli Wallach as Tuco, the first, but in some ways third, of the film's trinity of heroes, classified as the ugly. He was apparently surprised while biting into a turkey leg, still clutched in one hand with a bottle of wine and a six-shooter in the other. Only five shots were fired before he crashed through the window to his freedom, so those bounty hunters couldn't have been able to fire more than a couple of shots before he put them down. The arrival of Tuco spurs the arrival of the music score, because Tuco is our story.

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I would say contrary to his nickname that he has the devil's good looks. Lee Van Cleef has the face of a satyr. There's a force of frankness in his eyes, a perfection about his hawk-like features that makes him almost uncomfortable to look at, and it's a quality that Leone milks to the breaking point in this sequence. This scene supposedly takes place at sundown, but just before Angel Eyes helps himself to his first spoonful of food, a rooster's crowing is heard on the soundtrack.

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Lots of camera movement, lots of cranes and fast dollies and whip pans and filters and people dressed in black leather and a lot of... Yes, exactly. All soundtrack-y. 65 songs in three minutes and, you know, whatever was dangerous last year and has now been completely homogenized because it's been used in a Kentucky Fried Chicken ad. Right. And in that three minutes, Parker and Longbow were going to violate every single...

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that he's being a lech and you realize you've misunderstood him and the intention of that was to introduce a character to make you immediately dislike him and then realize you've misjudged him right and that's that's kind of a trick to help you sympathize with a character that's traditionally unsympathetic right working on the movie with you i mean we kept going back and forth about that about you know how to as a composer i had to like figure out how to treat the characters musically

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And remember, it was at night, so the power went out, so she's holding a flashlight, pointing a gun at the doctor, while he's cutting her open to take out their child. And he's telling Jeffress not to let her look at her own open stomach, or she'll convulse. Exactly, and that's filmmaking. That, to me, is the distributor saying, don't look at the way we're advertising this film, you'll vomit. Score, what score? Do you mean music or test? Well, I meant music, but test, too. Yeah, Joe.

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Tim Lucas

If you've seen this film before, and obviously we have, there is a clue to the mystery of these proceedings in Ennio Morricone's score, which is serving us a dolorous suspense cue that actually lays out the bare bones of El Indio's pocket watch melody. We see sentry guards stabbed to death.

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Tim Lucas

This is a remarkable, half-lurching, half-meowing crime cue by Morricone. I imagine that it had some influence on Quincy Jones' later score for In Cold Blood. Speaking of In Cold Blood, Indio has a parting comment for the warden of this jailhouse.

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Tim Lucas

The cut is Hitchcockian in the sense that he would increase the suspense around a bomb by showing it hidden and suitably disguised, yet in plain view of the unsuspecting people around it. Nothing is going to explode here, at least not yet. Leone is giving us a dose of irony, especially when we recognize Lee Van Cleef's voice on the soundtrack, which means that Colonel Mortimer was being served from the liquor cabinet of the very safe he is seeking to identify as Indio's next target.

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You always have that story in mind, but you're looking at this actor and you're going, what's going to really serve that actor? So I love that because you and I share that same love of a movie where you want all of these actors to score, but also for the audience to have these characters that are...

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They brought out all of this color and detail. It's so gorgeous, too. And one of the things, as Lorne Balfour, brilliant composer, one of the things that they were trying to do was bring out more detail in everybody's face. But in doing it, faces started to look muddy. And I said, no, let it be a darker scene. The light is going to come. And so I love the scene. It's got this very unusual...

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I never tire of looking at these shots. And look at this, the design. You come over, here she is. You're just wondering, who is that? You have so much going on. And you know who it is, but you don't. But you don't. And it's taking your time, allowing the audience to absorb that. Now it's a perfect shot to have that here. And a shift in Lauren's score. When the truck tips over, it stops being the mission theme and it tells you, now it's on. And that you discovered...

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To begin, composer Monty Norman recalls seeing Maurice Bender's titles for the first time. At the time, I wasn't too happy with what Maurice was doing to my James Bond theme because he was pulling it around. He was starting in the middle and putting another bit here. And I thought at the time, he's going to ruin this number and it's never going to be heard of. It's never going to be a hit, this number.

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the sides so that we could put a sheet of glass or perspex over Sean's shoulder and have the tarantula go over the glass. We did that and then Terence wasn't satisfied with that and then we had Bob Simmons do it again with the tarantula actually climbing over his body. Composer Monty Norman's music adds to the mood of the scene.

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way I thought somebody who's Chinese would live on the island. While James Bond waits for Professor Dent to arrive, he puts on a record with an instrumental version of Underneath the Mango Tree, a tune which will be used later to introduce Honey Rider. Monty Norman remembers composing the score on location in Jamaica. I met Chris Blackwell

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These are all shot in London, not Austria. We just needed these little pieces. Remember, we ran out of time. Yep, that rope, we shot it. That was in Austria. And then Joe, again, I drove Joe crazy with the music. On this cue, yep. The cue, getting off the opera and keeping the pace going, and then he brings in the theme like this, and it was really beautiful. And this was, again, just the things that sort of, the moments of humor like this that...

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And all of these little intercutty bits that we did. We actually shot a lot more of that, of those guys in the control room. We thought we needed more of that. And we actually ended up needing very little. And the other big piece of this was score. Were we going to have music on this sequence or not? And Joe Kramer actually wrote a fabulous piece of music for this sequence. And we debated it right up until the end. And what it ultimately came down to was that I noticed the effect of music...

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It actually didn't look like... So we could capture the image. Yeah, and it had to create... All of those bubbles are to create the sense of movement that you wouldn't otherwise feel. You needed to constantly feel this sense of current. This is me just being pulled along. Yeah. And then here is where the score begins again. I like what you did here with that also, bringing her character in. Very heroic. Yes. Well, you remember, we debated that. There was a whole thing about whether or not to see Ilsa jump in.

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And we changed it to, I've saved your soul for God, because to me, buying someone's soul had a kind of connotation that made me think of the Faust myth and lacked that kind of warmth and beauty. But that's a personal choice. I should say here that the extraordinary thing about making this film is that I was reunited with the original creators of the musical, Claude-Michel Schoenberg, who wrote this extraordinary score.

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is Valjean rescuing Fontaine. But it was also an interesting example of how, you know, I originally felt that we probably couldn't cut the music down, that we'd have to take it, you know, as it came. But it was interesting that the more I got to know the score, the more Claude Michel could show me how there were ways of, you know, making cuts in the score, particularly in the rest of Teeth. Bertie Carville, who plays Bamataba, actually is an Olivier Award winner for the musical Matilda. He's a wonderful actor.

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It was more interesting if the soldier really thinks there's a special intimacy going on between them, but it's all really in the surface of stealing from him. I love the music in this. We had this great band of seven or eight players who did a huge amount of improvisation based around the score. And we'd kind of watch the scene together at Abbey Road and mark up certain beats I'd want to hit with the gypsy violin or with the accordion.

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David Kalat

It's the calm before the storm, a moment of preternatural quiet in which for a full 90 seconds the soundtrack goes dead. There's a lot weighing on these people's minds, too much really to say. Emiko has failed to tell her fiance that she loves someone else because he distracted her with a demonstration of a doomsday device. Ogata is fretting from the sidelines about their illicit love affair. Shinkichi is an orphaned survivor of Godzilla who knows he hasn't escaped the monster at all.

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David Kalat

Do you hear that low rumble in the background? That ominous bass line? Wow. Somehow I've managed to drone on this long without yet telling you anything about composer Akira Ufukabe.

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David Kalat

The Ainu had no written language, and so it was a very musically-oriented culture with a rich oral tradition. And young Ifukube soaked all these cultural influences up like a sponge. As a professional musician and composer, his music would be identified by short, repeating motifs, ostinatos, just like the Ainu folk music he grew up with.

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Universal's interested, they're not interested. They're interested again. What is their problem? You know what the funny thing, speaking about the music of Repo Man, was that it seems like that was one of the first compilation of soundtracks of bands, actual bands, instead of just a composer. You know, the only other thing I can think of that's analogous to that would be Easy Rider. Because remember the Easy Rider album was a great compilation album, and very of that time.

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It's amazing. Sometimes you just call them up. People are afraid to call. They just call you up and just say, will you come do this? That's the way I did a thing for a guy that called me up to score a movie. I said, sure.

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He fainted. That was before he heard the score or after? No, after he heard the score. Alex, how long did it take you to write this, or what were the circumstances writing this? It was what you said. I wrote the speech for Cy and the speech for Tracy as audition speeches. Right. And we included part of Cy's speech in the film and part of it on the song, and most of Tracy's in this scene. And you just...

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by proximity to the score. They dump their clothes when they come out because it could be metal filings and that saves them better themselves in the clothes. And they're distancing themselves from any forensics investigation that would link them to the score. That's why they drop their clothes in the alley. That's why they have separate cars. So by the time these guys get out of their work car, the blue car on the right, and jump into the private cars and take off, they could be stopped for popping a red light and there's nothing on them that could tie them to the robbery that they've just done.

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One thief's cousin had married this detective's wife. Well, it's just like in my neighborhood, people don't realize, or don't come from, Michael does come from the neighborhood, and I come from the neighborhood in, you know, Brooklyn and Queens, where it was not uncommon for one brother to be a thief and another brother to be a policeman. And what you were saying, everybody was sitting around. We were sitting around, and they started talking about these old scores, a score being a robbery.

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Some of my other work that I really appreciate right here. This is a local character, a guy dancing to polka. We found him in a bar. Again, authentic. This bar as well. Hey, Jose Greco, sit down. Jose Greco was a flamenco dancer who was big in the 50s. I got this business deal from your end of the L.A. score.

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When I asked them to write the score for the film, I said, one thing I don't want you to do is write a theme song. Don't write a song that has any lyrics, let alone the lyric to Live and Die in L.A. To my amazement, they, one day in the editing room, handed me a song that they had written and recorded with that title, and it was meant to be the signature song of the picture.

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but the beat and the melody were insinuating and sinuous and very sensual and evocative, I thought. And so I met with the two fellows, Jack Hughes and Nick Feldman, who comprised this group, and I told them I would be interested in having them write a score for To Live and Die in L.A., but I hadn't made the movie yet, and I didn't even finish the script at that time.

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I had done this once before with the group Tangerine Dream for a film I had made called Sorcerer. I heard that group playing in an abandoned church out in the Black Forest in Germany at 3 o'clock one morning, and it struck me as being the perfect soundtrack for the film that I hadn't made yet. And so I approached them to do the same thing that Wang Chung did. I think in both cases the scores turned out to be very good, although

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Darren Aronofsky

He knows it's going to come. It hasn't hit him yet, and his nausea is growing in the back of his throat, and it doesn't kick in until there. We call that the vibrator cam, which was just basically shooting with a long lens and shaking the camera viciously. And now the paint is here, and we sort of accompanied it with not only the sound design, but the score as well. All the different elements working together, all the different departments.

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Darren Aronofsky

hallucination part of the sequence. The whole score changes, as well as the sound design, as well as the camera work. This was all shot MOS. We couldn't afford to bring a sound rig down into the depths of New York City, and so we shot a lot of this with a Bolex, which is a very, very simple 16mm camera.

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Darren Aronofsky

with that, with the noise, with the score. And this headache sequence was perhaps one of the hardest days to shoot, I think. It was really, really hard, because there was a lot of sort of special effects involved. There was blood, and there was scissors, and there was loss of hair, and there was the smashing mirror. And then there was Sean's performance, which for me is like being really tight and close friends with Sean for years. We were best friends in college.

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Which is too bad, but again, it's quite a legacy that he left us here. But yeah, just thought of going to see this in a theater, a movie like Cheeky. It's sort of mind-boggling today, but you know, that's what it is. I should also mention, since we've been hearing a bit of it here, this was actually the third and final score that was done for Tender Brass by Pino Di Nagio. Obviously he had done All Ladies Do It before this, as well as Manila from Las Lola. And I think this is the most traditional of the three scores. It still has a bit of a pop sensibility, but it sounds very...

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which got a very wide soundtrack release. Strangely enough, this film has never had a soundtrack release of any kind, except there was one track, the main title, there was one track that was released on a very, very rare CAM compilation CD. It's called Da Film di Roteci, La Musica del Pecceri, Volume 2. It's a two-volume set that they did of sexy scores.

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But apart from that, I don't know why there was never an album released. I mean, there isn't a ton of score in this. I mean, there's also a lot of songs, but there's still about maybe 25 minutes of score. So my hope is someday we'll get a CD release of this or something, because otherwise it's been sitting in a vault. But Pino Di Nagio, of course, was no stranger to doing sexy films before he met Tinto Brass. It goes all the way back. I think the earliest one was in 1979. He did kind of a really fun sort of nudist sex comedy. It's called Skin Deep or Senza Bucha.

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Barry Sonnenfeld

Obviously, this is all computer graphics element... ...done by Industrial Light & Magic. Mary Vogt is a wonderful, sweet costume designer... ...who worked with me on Big Trouble and Men in Black I. Elfman did a fantastic score for this movie. VICTORIA'S SECRET This is probably the longest shot in production. This took over eight months of work in the computer. We kept trying to make the heads better and the eels wetter... ...and figuring out the speed that both the foreground guys should move... ...and how quickly the deep background stuff... ... should look like flesh and underwear... ...as this creature is creating... ...What will become Lara Flynn Boyle. Graham Place, the co-producer, has done about 20 things with me. He's my best friend. Just last night, I bought him dinner at Chinois on Main... ...With his wife and daughters. Hey, pretty lady. We're back in Pasadena. This was done with a series of shots which were seamlessly connected. For instance, that thing where his legs went up. Now, this is a separate shot. We've made a perfect dissolve. Rick Baker designed Lara's stomach here. She realises there's a problem between the picture she wants to look like... ...and what she turned herself into. It's all about Lara's stomach. I love the way Lara walks across there, just kind of trampy. Again, this was another dissolve. She walked across... And this is about an hour later... ...because we had to take her stomach off and add makeup to her. Robert Gordon was the first writer hired. Then Robert and Barry Fanaro, who worked on several movies with me... ...and went to film school with me... ...did a lot of work on the movie as we progressed. Now we're at New York City... ...on Sixth Avenue in the upper 40s, lower 50s. Patrick Warburton, who is Agent Tee, was also The Tick... ... which I directed the pilot for and produced... ...and also had a role in Big Trouble, a movie I really am quite proud of.

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Barry Sonnenfeld

What time? - Lunch. That section was ad-libbed at the last minute. I wanted a comedic rapid-fire discussion... ...between them to really help us understand... ... there was an immediate connection between them. I love Danny Elfman's score on this part of the movie. He's starting the romance in a lovely way. Elfman did an amazing job on this movie... in terms of comedy, action, romance. Before we're taught how to think... ...

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Barry Sonnenfeld

He calls it a human beatbox. And his buddy Biz Markie is one of the best at it. We did not treat his voice... ...nor did we change the sync of Biz Markie's sound. I love the push-in off of Will onto Tommy's reaction. Watch his mouth and listen to the sound. That's totally done by Biz Markie. Danny's score here is just beautiful. That guy looks like Howard Stern or Joey Ramone. I don't know which.

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Marius, one of the composers, came up with the idea of the radio sort of from the 50s, 60s, everything that was what we thought was the beginning of the superhero culture. And the music here is, I'm very proud of the music. It took us about eight months to get it right and four composers. And we wanted to do what we call a sort of a John Williams-style score, which then morphs into a modern kick-ass identity, shall we say.

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Unlike these two, wouldn't swear for troopers. Dave should go. Why? Dave, you should totally go. Go. You're a dick. Don't be afraid, Dave. You're a pussy. This is a piece of score we wrote, literally. I mean, a lot of this music we did in the last week. We had a source track here, and then I turned on TV, and it had become, I think, a Renault adverts music. So I thought, forget that. So Marius rescued us and wrote a new piece of music. Well done, Marius, again.

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And here, this is our love letter to a John Williams-style score. Obviously heavily influenced by Superman. And I think this scene illustrates how difficult to get this movie right, because if we pitched it one degree left or right, this would really be an embarrassing piece of crap to watch.

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Macaulay Culkin

This is a good place to bring up the score. John Williams was not the original composer. If you have one of the early posters of Home Alone in your attic somewhere... ...It says "Composer Bruce Broughton." And Bruce Broughton was the original composer... ...on a film that I wrote called Young Sherlock Holmes. And I loved his score for that film, so I met with him and hired him for this. He was not available to do this... ...and he essentially was doing The Rescuers Down Under. I think that's what it was. So we lost him. So we had no composer while we were shooting... ...the second half of this film. And we went to John Williams thinking, "He'll never do a film like this." But he saw the film, loved it and decided... Amazing what he did. - His score is unbelievable. The score is beautiful. No. - He doesn't miss. Well, the thing is, comedy's very difficult to score... ...because it can always sound stupid or goofy. And John never really let that happen. I think one of the great things about John Hughes' screenplay here... .IS that John really filled in every possible... ...logic hole here. - Yeah. Little loophole. Any-- You know, in other words, by putting this kid into the back of the van... ...he took care of the fact that you would be counted... The head count worked. Also adding Buzz here, confusing her... ... Just added to the... I don't wanna say the reality... ...because the film has a heightened reality, but the reality of what's going on. Yeah, and how it all happened. - And the audience always bought it. They bought the fact-- Particularly, we were concerned about mothers... ...because mothers would say, "How can you leave your kid alone?"

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Macaulay Culkin

Look, honey, the kids are.... You had Ally Sheedy in the sequel. Ally Sheedy was in the sequel. Yeah. - Yeah. But we-- I think we were piggybacking movies at that point. We were just finishing Only the Lonely, and Ally decided to do it as a favor. We were mixing and matching cast. - That's true. Ha, ha. I did a little stint in that one, Ally did a little in that. Is that okay? - Yes. I'll wait. A bit of the New Jersey influence here. We had one of my favorite bands at the time... Still pretty big in England and places like that. Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes... ...recorded a version of "Please Come Home for Christmas." It was my opportunity to get to work with some great soul singers... ...and some people I'd always wanted to work with for the soundtrack as well.

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Macaulay Culkin

Again, when I first heard the John Williams score with this film... ...it just brought it to life in a way that I had never imagined. It is what he does for a living. It is. Yeah. But he does it so much better than anyone else. That is true. - I have to say, he is.... He's truly a master. He never, ever misses.

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There should be. Why isn't there? It's not the actors. It's, like you say, the editor. I think the score, by the way, which we haven't mentioned yet. I don't know what you make of it, but I freaking love the atmospheric side of it. I don't know about the themes. I didn't really notice them too much, to be honest. But the general sort of ambience is brilliant. Yeah, I love... Yeah, I mean, Eric Goldenthal combines electronic with, like, orchestral stuff, but also...

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uses a lot of weird sort of percussive instruments to create sound effects, and that's where they had a major sort of argument about the sound levels of the sound effects of the music, because the music's also creating sound effects, and what would you then level out and balance with the sound effects? But yeah, I think this is probably the most lush score out of the three, because even at the end when she...

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dies or sacrifices herself. It's a really emotional piece of music. I think it's a wonderful score. I've flip-flopped a lot on the scores. I mean, I still love Alien because that theme. But this one, that intro music, the title theme, that sort of synth, I love that stuff. Really good. I think it's probably, yeah, I think the score's doing a lot to save the...

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Jonathan Lynn

is totally in character for a dentist. This is not Matthew Perry's tongue. He didn't fancy standing there all afternoon while we shot shots of teeth and tongues and things. And the first shot of Matthew is the one when we pull out and see him. This music, which, as you can hear, has suddenly taken a kind of French turn with that accordion, is part of Randy Edelman's wonderful score.

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Jonathan Lynn

And I also had talked to Randy Edelman a lot about Charlie Mingus's band Blues and Roots. We use a bit of their music later. Mitchell Capner, the writer, had suggested this in an early draft of the script. And we talked a lot about Gerry Mulligan and the baritone saxophone and all of those things come up in the score later. Thousand? For what? You know what your father would be proud?

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Jonathan Lynn

Who's that? I don't know. You smell great. So we decided to have an old film running on the TV. It's Key Lager with Humphrey Bogart and Oren Bacall. And when Randy's score comes in, is adjusted then,

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Ted Tally

I went to New York with Dino, and I was very nervous. This was Tony, Anthony Hopkins. The thing I did know and what I was confident about was the type of movie I wanted to make. Like I said, I went in there knowing the tone of the movie, my approach to the movie, how I wanted to not show any of the gore. I didn't want to make a horror film. I wanted to make a film that was psychological, emotional, and smart. That was what was on the page. And the only scene that Tony had a concern with when I sat with him was this scene right here. Tony was concerned that as originally written, his attack on Graham here was too graphic. By the way, it's an interpretation because 10 directors would direct a scene in 10 different ways and show various degrees of violence. It's about showing the details of the guts falling out of his stomach, or the blood, how much blood to show. And I chose to play it mostly on their faces. Once the attack happens... Here's my little homage to Silence. You see the... - I see the bug. You like that. So I chose to play the violence part of this scene on their faces. I love this book. This is an original. My prop guy, Brad, found this original book from France, Larousse... When I read it, I had no idea what the hell it was. It's the bible of cookbooks. - Yes, I learned that quickly. He found this real old French cookbook. There was a lot of dialogue about how do we sell his moment? It's really just a subliminal thing. It wasn't really supposed to be so pointed where it was like, "Oh, sweetbreads." I thought sweetbreads was brains but it's not. It's actually... Thyroid. -... thymus. I learned so much about anatomy on this film. If you work on a Lecter movie, you learn a lot about cooking. I thought Edward was fantastic. There is a tremendous intensity of performances in this movie. And really a dream cast as Brett already said. If you could have anybody in the world for these parts and be lucky enough to get them. It's pretty much what happened to us. Great actors want to play good characters. They want to play great characters and all of these characters, down to Freddy Lounds, and other smaller roles, were just written so well. They were interesting and dynamic. And these actors were interested in playing this. To convince these actors to do a third in the series, all that went out the window when they read the script. Certainly once they started working. There's our cold opening. I'm very proud of this title sequence because it was actually done two days before we had to lock picture. My editor, Mark Helfrich actually was the brainchild behind this because... You re-shot the journal here in a very interesting way. Initially, this was done in a much more straightforward way with the images very flat against the screen. Yes, a lot of times. Mark is kind of... Everybody on my team, from my AD to my production designer, are filmmakers. Mark is a filmmaker in his own right and he just understands the visuals and storytelling. I love how, you know... But this was written. - Yes, it was. But the way that the camera roams over these pages and when we go in very close and it gets grainy, the camera movement left to right, up and down, is all not scripted, of course. This is something I don't really have the patience for. Mark kind of took this book that he was fascinated by. I think he has a copy of it in his closet at home. He just knew every page, every frame and went with Dante and literally just shot. This is a wonderful opportunity. This kind of title sequence is sort of old-fashioned in a way. But it's a wonderful opportunity for a screenwriter to get information in quickly to cover a lot of ground between the arrest of Lecter and where we are when the movie is going to start. Covering a period of several years, you are doing that without any dialogue just by these images. It's a very useful shorthand. Danny did the same thing that Ted did with the script in this sequence that Mark did with the visuals in this sequence. Danny did the same thing with the music. I think the music here is so fantastic. It's very much like a Bernard Hermann score, which I knew was a big inspiration for Danny. Danny is a big fan of Bernard, and this was his chance. He's done darker scores, but they've had a kind of lightness, or comedic darkness to it. Danny did something here that kind of made people's skin crawl in the theater, like, "You're in for it. "If you're gonna sit through this movie, you'll experience some stuff. "Shit's gonna go down."

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Ted Tally

He's breathing heavy. It's probably the first time he's ever kissed a woman, or a living woman. Now, would you show me where the bathroom is? Then we went back and re-shot this. Why? For this insert. And that's digital blood in the water, believe it or not. It's done by the computer. It's just a wonderful little moment, because she can't see the teeth in the jar, or the shattered mirror. She doesn't realize the increasing danger she is in. Again, you're telling a story with visuals and not with dialogue, that really means very much. I have to do a little work. If I'm keeping you from work... - No. ...I'll go. - I want you to be here. I do. It's just a tape I need to watch. It won't take long. This is similar to my scene in Family Man, where he's watching the videotape. Another family movie, right! - Another family movie. I did the same thing with Danny, where he transitioned the recorded music on the tape into score. So now, this music in the background... - Right. Which is Duke Ellington. - Duke Ellington transitioning into the score. Right. No, it's great.

1:29:23 · jump to transcript →

Ted Tally

I love this. Breast shots in movies are just... This is just the most bizarre seduction scene. That's what we liked about it. - This is the editor's daughter, by the way. Really? That's Mark's daughter? - She's so cute. Here we are with another family movie. You shot hundreds of feet of family videos. And this is the girl from Family Man, who played the neighbor. Oh, I didn't remember. - Yeah. Very talented and sexy woman, who I knew would help in arousing Ralph Fiennes. Lisa Thornhill. She's a great actress. I just love how many different things are going on here. He's aroused by seeing his next set of victims, as well as by the proximity of Reba. What's it about? She assumes he's watching some kind of business promotional video or something. She has no idea what he's watching. She's excited because she's rarely dated in recent years. And they're both so unsure of themselves. Emily is really a sexy woman. - Yeah, she is. Tremendous amount of sex appeal. It's homework. Yeah. There's nothing like this in any of Thomas Harris' other books. There's nothing quite so strange and wonderful as this kind of scene. It's so bold. - Yes, it's very bold. It was always one of the most powerful scenes in the book, to me. Francis Dolarhyde is so scared that he will hurt this woman, that he is falling in love with. And she is still unaware of how dangerous he is. See how the music transitions with the score. I'm good at shooting monitors, TV sets. Yes, I think you should only shoot TV sets and family videos. Will there be family videos in your next film? Absolutely. I love this shot. I like a lot of my shots, huh? This is... - A lot of great camera work. It lasts for about one second. It's already over. That's Francis Dolarhyde"s happiest moment of his life. Then immediately... - Paranoia sets in. Paranoia sets in, the fear, the anger... But notice the camera hasn't cut and it's going to go with him. This is Jimmy Muro, our Steadicam operator. He's unbelievably talented. It's very hard to operate because of the sheer weight and bulkiness of it, right? Also the distance showing, and then going in... The camera movement is also to hide his private parts. Well, of course. But it's very hard to hold this huge camera and move behind the actor. I love this with the blown-out windows.

1:30:49 · jump to transcript →

the parts that somehow we orchestrated to get the actors to be able to create a feeling and do a thing and emote in a particular way and the photography and I just, you know, like this moment here between, you know, Dakota and just, you know, Carrie's performance here. It's one of the only times in here where we talk about Joe Bechara's music, which is this great score. And this is really one of the only places in the movie where we have

1:20:52 · jump to transcript →

pretty music, like dramatic music in the score. And it's because it's the only place, you know, we really didn't want to have drama music anywhere in the movie. Right. And because we didn't want any of the moments to sort of shift into kind of a saccharine place. But here it's kind of earned because it's so grim what's happening to them and Carrie's sadness about what their children are going through is such a nice counterpoint. And what Josh

1:21:22 · jump to transcript →

ending on mom's face like that. And that's it. And that's it. And then you get, you know, we should spend a moment here talking about Joe Bishara's score, which there's so much to talk about. You can't talk about all of the great work that everybody's done on the movie. But Joe came in. I had heard his work on Insidious, and I was so impressed by it. He really managed to eschew cliché, you know, horror movie clichés, and come up with some really creative stuff. And...

1:33:00 · jump to transcript →

The only interesting part, I guess, about the logos is the movie starts right away. The soundtrack, that eerie soundtrack, starts in the first image of the movie. That's hopefully when the audience gets hooked, and we never really let them go until the end. Detroit. And there you are, slang.

0:44 · jump to transcript →

I think also the first time that you start feeling Roque Baños, a magnificent soundtrack, which is, like he said, it was, you know, the whole music was actually done through not classical instruments, but mostly pipes and weird instruments that he found made by a guy in Tucson that created his own instruments in his backyard called Anorchestra. And

22:09 · jump to transcript →

And then this whole shot, you really get to enjoy that soundtrack. And like Broca said, it's like if the house was singing this unsettling song. Right. Here we get a glimpse of the daughter. She's curious. Of course, the TV is there, but he doesn't watch the TV. So I thought it was interesting to have it pointed in a strange way, not towards the house, not towards the bed.

22:40 · jump to transcript →

You know, making sure that the rhythms of the sequence are getting kind of faster and faster. And the camera moving, and having to be aware of where everything was in the order in which it was happening, so you're feeling a visual progression. And the music is building, it's building. And then right here, the cue just takes a moment to breathe coming up. I love this. Speaking of music and speaking of war. 45 seconds. Yeah. Yeah, these are... Here we go, music stops now. Yeah, I love it. This is a sequence that really didn't come together

44:05 · jump to transcript →

it was decided very early on to put Gabriel at the center of the scene. Now, this is where we leaned into the sound design and the score, but you really hear James Mather's malfunctioning Sonos soundbar here. And he had recorded it on his phone and he played it to us and he just said, how about this? And we leaned into it. He recorded about five minutes of it. And there was a point where he was playing bits of fallout through his soundbar and recording it, but it's so distorted you can't tell. With...

1:24:34 · jump to transcript →

This was... Listen, you just have to imagine me listening to this stuff when I was 12 years old. I know. Listening to my DVD commentaries, and this is where I have my film skills. So honestly, dive in and be... All the dorky stuff is what people want to hear. I love it. That's why we're... Okay, so I can do some dorky editorial stuff real quick. So if you want... So the Sony Venice camera shoots at 6K, and in the Avid Media Composer timeline, we're actually using ultra-high-definition...

1:49:34 · jump to transcript →

Bob Gitt. And Preston Jones. This film is all about good and evil, light and shadow, love and hate, and that duality is heard in Walter Schumann's score right at the beginning of the credits. We started with the demonic theme for Preacher, and now you hear the angelic theme, which is the lullaby for the children.

0:39 · jump to transcript →

Robert Golden, the editor, felt that Walter Schumann was next to Lawton, the most important person on the film. And I'll try to say some more things about the score later. Lawton perhaps felt that the most important person was Lillian Gish, who's the first person we'll see after the credits. Lawton was trying to recreate the power of the silent era, especially D.W. Griffith, and he loved Lillian Gish. Now, Terry, the

1:02 · jump to transcript →

Now, unusual for the time, and really for any time, Lawton had his art director, his editor, and his composer on the set with him, working as part of the creative unit all the time. Lawton didn't want Bob Golden to do any editing until all of the film was shot. This is the one scene in the picture that Bob Golden did start editing ahead of time because they wanted to be sure to clear it with the Breen office. It's a dicey, very dramatic scene.

29:22 · jump to transcript →