The score

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...

13:19 · jump to transcript →

They brought out all of this color and detail. It's so gorgeous, too. And one of the things, as Lorne Balfe, 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 Lorne'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...

52:52 · jump to transcript →

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 Kraemer 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...

1:06:28 · jump to transcript →

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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Tom Hooper

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 Schönberg, who wrote this extraordinary score.

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Tom Hooper

is Valjean rescuing Fantine. 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 recitative. Bertie Carvel, who plays Bamatabois, actually is an Olivier Award winner for the musical Matilda. He's a wonderful actor.

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Tom Hooper

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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Matthew Vaughn

Marius de Vries, 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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Matthew Vaughn

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 de Vries rescued us and wrote a new piece of music. Well done, Marius de Vries, again.

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Matthew Vaughn

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.

11:28 · 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...

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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, Lang.

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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

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And then this whole shot, you really get to enjoy that soundtrack. And like Roque 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.

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much more physical way than I think you expected. Man, I can write so much VHS fan fiction now from this commentary. By the way, that was not the clearest explanation of this, but maybe we'll get into it more, and no, we probably won't. You know what's funny is I helped them score that desk a little bit. We took a bunch of knives and stuff and were rubbing it, and like...

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The guy who does that band, it's a side project of his. His name's Steve Moore, and he's a great composer. He's actually going to be doing our next film we're doing. Yeah, The Guest, which we start shooting in a month. Yeah, I don't know if people pick up on it, but she is supposed to have recently tried to kill herself, which is what's going on with that bandage and the blood on there. You can't really see it that well. I keep going past it really fast, but Tom, the production designer, is really proud of the photograph to the left.

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And then James Gammon, who's a composer that we know, a very talented composer, did this little thing for us very quickly. And then, yeah, and we've got no comments on it. It was like all this debate as to whether or not we did it or not. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in these movies, I think it's just kind of like, you know, it's entertainment, the entertainment value. I don't know if Trump's anything. So I hope you enjoyed it. Yep, it was a lot of fun to make. See you later.

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Jason Schwartzman

No, I'm actually at my friend's house. This guy named Julian Wass, who's a composer, and he did the music for this movie The Overnight.

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Wes Anderson

Oh, yes. - And I'm-- We're gonna put the movie out on a soundtrack, and I'm over here, just gonna do a song with him for the soundtrack.

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Peter Becker

So where I was going with the music set of questions had to do with Randy Poster, Alexandre Desplat. And, presumably in this case, Britten is almost like your third composer. He came with the package. - [Anderson] Yeah. We sort of started with Britten. And there are some Britten pieces that I just started listening to anything I could get a hold of because I didn't know the whole body of work. And many of these pieces, some of my favorite ones are ones I just found trying to say, "Well, how could this fit into the thing," during the script-writing phase.

1:20:20 · jump to transcript →

And Antonio Pinto's score, which was absolutely crucial to the scene as well, as were all his cues throughout the film. Amy's writing comes in here as well, her notebooks, her diaries, which I think are really amazing. I find it so powerful just looking at her handwriting and seeing how she came up with the process of creating these songs and crossing out things. And also when she sings it, she sings it differently. It's an ongoing process of the songs developing.

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That's Amy's humour again. It's still there. It makes everyone laugh. But we very consciously were evoking, taking the audience back to that jazz. We used jazz score here as well to put you back in to that moment where she had kind of felt like she perhaps got to the limits of the kind of pop

1:46:08 · jump to transcript →

as it plays out now, but those piano notes are the first sound in the film, and now it comes back in again and develops and evolves into a very huge and beautiful piece of lamentful music. It's difficult, difficult to come up with, you know, do you have a composer when you're making a film about a musician like Amy? Her music is so iconic, do you just make it with Amy's music? But I always felt we needed something else to kind of move away from her music and to keep that special and to underscore key elements, and so...

1:57:37 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

Got a medic down in here. I haven't talked much about music. I've been focused on the director's cut side of it, but Harry Gregson-William had done the score for this, and I really love the combination of the technical side.

1:48:42 · jump to transcript →

Len Wiseman

That right there, just to go back, I don't know how many people catch that. He checks her hand again. He just checked. It was just a detail. Actually, that was Colin's idea that I thought was genius. You know, when he finally meets up with Melina, he's just like, just let me check the hand just to see that this is really the person. There's just too many twists and turns going on that he just wants to make sure. And some people catch it, some people don't. But Harry Gregson Williams did the score that the combination of having this, you know, kind of very

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Francis Lawrence

These kind of moments are always sort of fun to me, too, with playing around with editing. When you can sort of play with time a little bit, and make it feel like she might still be in the room as Marta's coming upstairs. But really she's been long gone and quite safe. That was him at the Embassy. It was. Playing hard to get, are you? No substitute for a good old-fashioned blow job in my experience. He's not like that. One of the things I often thought about with this movie, and I think I talked about it a little bit in the beginning, in terms of the screen direction thing, was Hitchcock, right? That this was not an action film. It's a mystery and suspense thriller. So to sort of play around with tension was really fun. You can even hear the Hitchcock reference a little bit in some of the music that James Newton Howard composed for the film. And not particularly in the beginning and the very end, in terms of the big, operatic ballet pieces, but in the more thematic material that's in the body of the movie, you can hear that influence, the Bernard Herrmann influence to the music. This is, I would say, I think it's my sixth movie with James. He started working with me on I Am Legend, and we haven't stopped since, in terms of movies. So he did all the Hunger Games movies with me, and Water for Elephants. And I wanted to bring him on here. He had quite a job. I mean, there's a fair amount of music to it, but it was also just really a unique opportunity for music. If you just look at the opening and the end sequences, the music there is really tricky. We had basically choreographed those ballet pieces, to pieces of The Firebird. But we knew we were never gonna do The Firebird. We were not specifically doing The Firebird. It was just inspired by The Firebird. So we maintained a very specific beats per minute, but the idea was for him to create a solid piece of music for those first I don't know, 10 minutes of the movie, that were gonna carry us through, that were gonna work for the Dominika sections, that were gonna work for the Joel sections, that were gonna have some sort of tension. It's also gonna feel like a ballet, because I wanted it to feel like a dance, and then it was then gonna lead into a ballet that was gonna truly work for both, the dance and also for the pieces of Joel running. And then we sort of do something at the end, and I'll get into that at the end. But the idea that there's almost a mirrored, book-ended dance sequence when she sets her plan into motion at the end, a new kind of ballet score comes up and plays to the end of the movie.

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Francis Lawrence

I love this idea too with music. That you hear this music that's this kind of dance that is playing into the dance that she's doing, and her plan. But it also kind of works almost as source and not just a score. So when you see the record playing it's like as if he's also listening to the music as well. And I just love that moment of him leaving his door open expecting to be arrested at any moment. And, you know, us getting to play with the expectations of the audience there.

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By the way, there's my daughter, I should say. In the car. Ashley McQuaide, her big cameo. She's great. She's gonna go do good. She's very sought after in Hollywood. The one thing I can say is this. This crash coming up was a bit of a fuckup. The taxi was supposed to fly over the other car. SO we were disappointed... ...but I think that the shot still looks pretty bitchen. It looks fantastic. Your eye is drawn to the Lycan. Which is what it should.... - Could have been better. And here-- You know, Paul Haslinger did the music here. I love this, you know, how we changed into this new... ...Style in the music exactly when we get into close combat here. Paul, being an old hand... ...having done the score for Underworlds 7 and 3. He did an amazing job. - Amazing job. Yeah. - Yeah. Every-- All these Lycans are CG Lycans... ...but they mostly are.... There were guys dressed in blue with funny heads. So they look like really big... - Suits kind of looking like... This was a big moment. - Looks great. And India's face.... We really didn't do anything to it. She was able to scrinch up her face. - Yeah, she's a badass. Well, there's a bit of CG going on. We changed her eye shape and the color of her skin, obviously. But she was good. - This is an old trick, you know. The guy dry his fist across his mouth. I told Theo to do that. But it really always looks good, I think. It's the moment too, where Selene realizes... ...that this creature back there has... ls connected to her. - ls connected to her. She saw a level of power in there she hadn't imagined. Here's the Kris Holden-Ried introduction. Yeah. Here's where he comes in. Might have... And it's not even the last new character. In the script, this is the third time we see Kris... ...or Quint. - Quint. And here, we talked about that scene... In the apartment when she throws the guy out of the window. If you look at the monitor, there's actually a shot from... ...coming out of the club... ...which was Prey. So we used footage for that as well. lt was not a waste of time shooting there. Very expensive stills. - Those two days... ...that we spent shooting there. - That town is all CG, and then we.... Somebody gave us that in the last... There were so many people working so hard... ...for no money for this one. I love it. - Yep. How did you find me? Now we have an actual conversation. An actual dramatic scene. Yeah. - The first of the entire film. There's not a lot of talking. - Yeah. I think Michael Babcock, who did the sound design... Which is so beautiful, I almost cry when I think about it. When we heard about... "What did you do, Michael?" "I did Inception and Dark Knight." We're like, "Okay, good." And I think when he showed us the first reel... ...we had, like, no notes. lt was perfect. Anyway, he said... ... after we'd done this, "I really enjoyed working with this. ll even do a talkie with you guys." That's nice. - Yeah. I remember at the end of this scene, when we did India's side... ... that Kate went up to her and complimented her and said: "You did a really great job." - Yeah. And it was a.... It shows Kate's consideration... ...for other actors, and really the.... The person that Kate is. You know, because here's this young girl... ...who was clearly a little bit nervous acting... ... against a movie star, and an actress of Kate Beckinsale's quality. Yet Kate was very generous with her. The funniest thing-- Not funny, but extraordinary thing about India... .IS that she is like a very old soul in a young body. Oh, my God, yeah. She's 17 when we shot this movie. But she's incredibly mature. - Yeah. Incredibly. And sometimes when I talk to her, I feel very like a kid... ...and she's the old-- Yeah. Yeah. - She's the grownup. But she knew this character. And so many times, "No, let's do it like this." And she always stood her ground, saying, "No, she wouldn't do that." And I love being told that... ...because that means the actor knows. Are your fingers crossed? - No. No. No. Okay. All right. Okay. No, I like it when the actors know their characters, so they... Yeah. This is also our first day shooting. I loved shooting this scene. Oh, God. This scene. "Blight of nature." That's, you know, epic Underworld dialogue. It's one of those scenes that in 2D doesn't look great. In 3D, it looks spectacular. - Yeah. Why is it raining? Because it looks nice. Why is it thunderstorms? - Because it sounds nice. Theo James, stunt driver. - Yes. You can actually see that a bit. Yeah, and if you look at the van, I mean.... All the.... We wanted everything to be low-tech... ...as all the other movies. The low-tech is very important. That combined with the Vampire aesthetics that you see. The Celtic signs of Kate's corset... ... the weaponry and stuff like that. This area here is actually shot in that dam. In the actual hydroelectric dam. What's the name of that dam, Richard? I can't remember. Spencer Dam or something? - I don't know. It's outside... Up above Vancouver. - Up above Vancouver. Nobody shot there. Like, 20 years ago... ...someone shot there. I can't remember what film. It's been closed down, so.... We were the first to... - Part of the water supply. Amazing location. - Yeah. Absolutely beautiful. And brutal. - And remember how it--? Brutal as well? - Brutalism. But it also rained... ...torrentially before we shot. We thought we'd get two streams of water... ...and we got the whole megillah. lt was fantastic. This is one of the things I love about Underworld. These, you know.... The looks. And it feels... It makes me believe that this world exists. Now we're also back in... This is Underworld. We've been in brutalism. - Yeah. Now we're back in-- Oh, yeah. This is a wonderful set that Claude Pare designed. Our production designer. Wonderful production designer. Award-winning production designer, might I point out. And this, actually, was fun... ...ecause I was walking the streets and suddenly: Here in L.A. before we started shooting. I started talking to Kate and Len, and Len... And Kate says-- I don't know how she came up with it... ...but she says, "I know Russian." So I said, "We must get some Russian in, then." So.... Because I think it's so sexy. - Yeah. Of course that means Charles Dance... ...as to Know Russian too. Yes, and Theo James. That's Kate's mother, by the way. The Sony people, when they heard that, were excited. Because internationally, Russia is now a big territory. So.... At a certain point, they said, "Can you have more Russian in the movie?" This, again, being Charles Dance... ...a well-known British actor. Charles Dance is one of those fantastic old-school actors who... ...when you give him direction, he looks at you and he says: "Thank you, sir." Then he does exactly what you asked him to. He does exactly what you ask for... ...and It's such a pleasure to work with him. Listen to me. I start speaking British. And the actress here playing the doctor is... Her character's name is Olivia. Is Catlin Adams... ...who is Kate's.... Acting coach? - Occasionally. Kate recommended her. - Happy family. That's how Underworld is. - Yeah. Or SCars. I've never seen a child... We should have had more Swedish in the film. We have a little. Underworld 5, actually, I've heard that there's a big Swedish subplot. I had Kate say: Which all Swedes will understand, but she said it. It's very cute and.... So she, you know.... Because she's.... The musicality of it here. Her Russian is perfect and it... She speaks, I don't know, how many languages? Five languages. - A lot. Yeah. And she could just start speaking Swedish. That was insanely fun. I love this sequence... ...because it's so many things at the same time. I think it's terrifying, but I also think... ... It's, you know, touching, but also sexy. I think it's one of the most disturbing scenes in the movie though. Where you realize that this girl... ...who you thought was this innocent child... ...now has this voracious taste for blood... ...and has now gone to a different place. She is a creature of the night. - Yep. The blood on her face was great. You added that afterwards, James? - It was all CG, yeah. Good.

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Joss Whedon

We did this in re-shoots, and I had said we really need somebody that expresses the gravitas of what they've been through, and Kevin said, "Or they could make that joke about the hammer that you almost put in." I'm like, "Okay, yeah, let's do that instead." And I think, ultimately, my desire for people to internalise what's happened and pay for it is sometimes not the best instinct for these summer movies. I'm at war with my own intentions when I make these things because I want to make a fantasy, but I'm offended by the irresponsibility of the fantastic. And, uh, so the tone of the thing is something I have to play with very specifically. And there is a moment where I feel that I got it wrong. And putting the score together came late in the process, later than it should've, and there was one cue that we had two versions of, and it's Cap's revelation that he... Or his telling Tony that he's at home here in this place. We had a cue that expressed the kind of doubt and poignancy in that. And I suggested, "Well, what if we tried putting in "a version of the Captain America theme there?" And everyone liked that better. And, I mean, absolutely everyone. But every time I watch it now, I go, "No. Should've had the doubt," because I don't want him to be saying, "Oh, no, it's great. I found my home." I want him to be saying, "I'm a guy who never will." And, "I'm not satisfied. "I'm not proud of this, that this is what I am. "It's just something I've come to accept," so that music cue will drive me crazy, like many things, until the end of time, possibly because I'm already crazy.

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