by Jenny Nelson
Faced with this catch-22, Horner had no choice but to wait and adapt: ‘It was a textural film, it was less about themes, so I had to work with footage that wasn’t really finished yet. In terms of copying, I had a budget, but I couldn’t copy things and send things to the copiers for the orchestra because if the film changed, I’d have to change the music and then we’d have to recopy the parts. What ended up happening was I had to write the whole score in a very few amount of days, which is the sort of famous story about Aliens. And it was very intense and very compressed.’ Less of a collaboration then, more of a ‘just get on with it’. In an interview with America’s National Public Radio in 2016, Cameron is aware that he and Horner did not communicate about the music as effectively as they could have: ‘There was never really any creative tension, because we never really worked creatively together. That was the problem. Aliens was the mistake that we needed to make to know what to do on Titanic is really the way I look at it now. It was my first orchestral score. I didn’t really know what to expect . . . I didn’t know what his process was. He didn’t know what my process was – I didn’t have a process.’
The music for the fight scene between Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, and the alien queen was written overnight because Cameron reworked the scene and Horner had to adapt the music to fit. The film itself wasn’t completed until the week of release, and Cameron and his editors ended up cutting and splicing sections of Horner’s material to fit the finished article. According to Cameron, the composer hadn’t given them much choice: ‘He did his one-and-a-half day’s scoring session at Abbey Road, said, “Here’s your music”, and then went on to do, I think, The Name of the Rose.’
Despite the pressures and frustrations – or possibly in part due to them – Horner delivered an energetic score that’s teeming with uncertainty. One highlight is ‘Ripley’s Rescue’, a musical juggernaut with militaristic drums that will grab you, drag you along, make you jump and leave you breathless – all in around three minutes. An additional pressure for the composer was creating a worthy successor to the Alien score by Jerry Goldsmith, but the director kept things succinct, nodding to the famous description of the original: ‘As Jim said, “It’s grunts in space”; grunts are marines and he has this thing for the marines. And that was the brief! Don’t think about the artsy stuff, just nail this . . . It was an action film and that was the whole approach from the get-go.’
Horner’s nuanced and rich score earned him his first Academy Award nomination. The film received seven Oscar nods in total, winning two, and it was a box-office success with a worldwide gross of around $180 million – nowhere in the league of Cameron’s and Horner’s next two collaborations but still impressive, especially for an R-rated movie. Despite the accolades, it had been an exhausting and tense project, and it would be safe to assume neither composer nor director was particularly keen to work together again.
Until Titanic.
As Cameron recalled, they had both been unhappy with the experience of Aliens, ‘So when we got back together on Titanic, we both bent over so far backwards you could hear vertebrae snapping from a mile away to try to accommodate each other with a process that was going to work creatively as a true collaboration.’
After Aliens, Cameron directed The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), another successful sequel that demonstrated his ability to create box-office gold, becoming the highest-grossing film of the year. He followed this up with True Lies (1994), his third and final collaboration with composer Brad Fiedel. Then came his biggest project to date, allowing him to explore his fascination for shipwrecks and to make the film pitched as ‘Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic’. As director, writer and co-producer, Cameron was meticulous in his historical research and it was the most expensive film ever made at the time, with an estimated budget of $200 million to reconstruct the RMS Titanic and recreate the sinking of the ship.
James Horner and James Cameron at the Golden Globe Awards in 2010, where Cameron won Best Director for Avatar.
In the meantime, Horner had kept up his impressive work rate, at times scoring in the region of ten films a year, including Field of Dreams (1989), Patriot Games (1992) and Legends of the Fall (1994). He had collaborated with Ron Howard again on Willow (1988), Apollo 13 (1995) and Ransom (1996), and had begun working with Mel Gibson on The Man Without a Face (1993) and Braveheart (1995). Cameron had been a fan of the evocative score for Braveheart, still one of Horner’s most popular and influential works, and listened to that and the score for Apollo 13 while writing Titanic: ‘And I thought, “Who am I kidding? It’s got to be James. You know, I just gotta figure out how to work with this guy.” And so we got together, and it was the most polite meeting you can imagine. But out of it came this sense that: OK, we kind of screwed up. We got off on the wrong foot. Let’s figure out how to fix it. So we rolled up our sleeves, we figured out how to fix it, and we never looked back.’
The composer describes it as a ‘happy coincidence’: ‘I asked Jim for an interview, and it ends up that I was also on his mind for doing it. He had a couple of people who had approached him and he thought, “That would be a nifty idea but they can’t score a movie, they can’t do this, they can’t do that – what about James?”’ They shared a clear vision – at least of what the film should not be like – up to a point: ‘We didn’t want it to be this big Hollywood melodrama,’ Horner explained, and Cameron ‘told me not to use violins, he told me it’s got to be as emotional as it can be, not schmaltzy – he always associates violins with being schmaltzy, although I did use violins’.
After this initial conversation, Horner began to work on the score, faced with the particular challenge of composing for a story based on actual events: ‘The key to the emotions going through an audience, structurally, as a puzzle for a composer, is suspending or using the knowledge of how the evening ends, how the ship ended, that despite yourself knowing it’s not going to end well, you fall in love with the characters . . . Whether you like the film or not, it’s brilliant film-making on Jim’s part to weave a story like that, and the music just marries that, amplifies that, in a way that nothing else can. Despite yourself knowing it’s not going to end well, you get sucked in, and then when it doesn’t go well, you’re completely shattered.’
Horner immersed himself in the film, watching thirty-five hours of raw ‘dailies’ footage, and according to the director, he created three themes very early on, ‘before there was even a cut of the film. He played them for me on piano and they were so emotional, they were so heartbreaking – just in a simple solo piano form – that I knew we had a great score, from that moment on . . . And that was just right off the bat, with zero input from me, other than James reacting to the footage that I had shot.’ Some of Horner’s early piano sketches featured in the final score, such as the scene in which Jack draws a picture of Rose. Apparently the composer offered to orchestrate it or get a more skilled pianist to record it, but the director convinced him he’d captured the essence of the scene.
While the composing process was far more harmonious than their earlier collaboration, the production for Titanic was, as with Aliens, beset with crises, mostly related to time and budgetary restraints. Their comparative closeness is evident in how they communicated with each other during the making of Titanic, however, and the composer seems to have become an ally for the director: ‘We got to a point where he had delayed the release of the film several times, he had just given up his salary – he’s very honourable that way – he felt he had completely screwed up the studio and he just wanted to make the best film possible. The effects were dribbling in, he was doing the editing – he had four editors but he would edit at night himself because “Nobody else got it” . . . We had this discussion about the success of the movie and I told him, “You’re in the best possible position because the world thinks it’s going to be a complete screw-up and disaster, and we know how stunning it is. It’s the best! It’ll be such a shock to an audience to finally see i
t and have them so moved.”’
Cameron has said he got to know Horner – as a person and as a talent – when working on Titanic, as he told National Public Radio (NPR): ‘I think the depth of his emotion and his sensitivity is what gave him a lot of his musical talent. I mean, sure, he was classically trained and he was a pianist and he knew what he was doing technically, but I think it was that he, himself, was a very emotional person. And I think that was a big part of what he brought to the table as a composer.’
A solid example of a film score created from a communicated and shared vision between composer and director, Titanic is not only the highest-selling primarily orchestral soundtrack ever, but it’s one of the best-selling albums of all time, remaining at the top of the Billboard chart for a record-breaking sixteen weeks. In retrospect, did the composer anticipate its incredible success? ‘I had no idea it would do anything like what it did. I just knew that there were no worries that this wasn’t going to play. I said it’s too good a movie, and if it works on me, I know it’ll work on an audience. We discussed it a few times, and history proved that right.’
The popularity of Horner’s score is evident to this day, and in August 2017 it was revealed as number 1 in the Ultimate Classic FM Chart, making it the best-selling classical and orchestral album of the past quarter-century. His widow, Sara, was asked what she thought his response to this accolade would be: ‘He was a very individualistic thinker so I don’t know if he would feel like that was his best work, but certainly the public love it. What I would say is – and I think this is true for all the composers I know – is that their relationship with the audience was where they felt most emotionally connected in the world. I think touching the inner feeling world of the audience was what composers most wish to do, and when he was successful at doing that, I think James felt like he had fulfilled his destiny. Really reaching out to people because he was socially really shy, a lot of composers are, and the deep, intimate contact they have with people is through their work.’
Titanic broke box-office records and picked up fourteen Academy Award nominations, winning eleven, a feat matched by Ben-Hur and, later, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. James Horner collected two of them, for Best Original Score and, along with lyricist Will Jennings, Best Original Song. He alluded to the story behind ‘My Heart Will Go On’ in his acceptance speech: after thanking singer Céline Dion and her husband and manager René Angélil, James credited ‘Jim Cameron, for being in a good mood that day when I brought you the song’. A brief but fascinating glimpse into their partnership. The director had not wanted a song over the closing credits, but Horner believed otherwise, so composed a song, recorded a demo with Dion, and presented it to Cameron who, as it would seem, was not averse to negotiation that day. The rest is chart history, and yet another reason to secure Titanic’s place in popular culture.
Before turning to Horner’s and Cameron’s third and final collaboration, Avatar, it is worth finding out more about the composer’s approach to film scoring by exploring his work with Ron Howard. The former actor, better known to many as Richie Cunningham from Happy Days, has a reputation for being one of the nicest guys in Hollywood. Horner scored seven films for him in total, starting with Cocoon in 1985 and most recently The Missing in 2003, and the director shared his experiences of working with the composer, and of hearing the news about his death, in 2016: ‘It had been some years since we’d worked together. I always feel that, movie by movie, it’s important to cast the composer the way you would your lead actor, and so just as I’ve worked with Tom Hanks five times, there are certain people that I enjoy collaborating with. James was one of those.’
The collaboration could have actually begun earlier, because Horner was asked to score the 1984 mermaid romcom Splash. Displaying an integrity that not many would have shown at the start of their careers, when presumably the temptation is just to take a job, any job, for the money and experience, he admitted, ‘I didn’t think I was the right guy. I thought I was miscast, and I didn’t want to screw up my first job with them. And I told them. I was hoping that they wouldn’t fall in love with whoever did that score, that they would then bond with that person, so I was risking that.’ It paid off, because the eventual composer, Lee Holdridge, didn’t deliver the goods to a sufficient extent to erode Howard’s esteem for Horner, and the composer signed up for Cocoon the following year.
There seems to have been a real sense of truth and integrity to all of Horner’s decisions as a film composer. A notable cinematic ‘what might have been’ is when he declined the offer of scoring the Lord of the Rings films because he couldn’t spend the required time in New Zealand due to family commitments. Later in his career, he offered to score 2015 boxing drama Southpaw for free because he loved the father–daughter relationship at the centre of the film.
The search for the truth – the core – of the story was a binding force for Howard and Horner, and the composer observed their shared motivations in that Ron ‘has this heart which comes through on a lot of his films, and that’s what I go for, that’s what I aim for on every project. I never aim for the surface elements. In all the films I work on, there’s always that “What is the heart of the film?” – and I try and nail that. And Ron is so warm-hearted, it just happened, we just clicked like that.’
Howard has described Horner as ‘a great artist and a wonderful storyteller’ who also taught him, directly or indirectly, about the impact of music on a movie: ‘We were exactly the same age, so we kind of grew up together, advancing our careers at a similar pace, and James was really the composer who helped me to understand how the performances and the camera decisions, the camera movements, could influence a composer and what a great storyteller a movie composer can be. It’s about reinforcing nuances, ideas that literal language can’t quite convey. The camerawork almost gets it there but the music completes the telling of that story, of that moment.’ And there are so many examples of this from their collaborations: ‘The Launch’ from Apollo 13 and ‘A Kaleidoscope of Mathematics’ from A Beautiful Mind are great places to start.
Despite collaborating more frequently with Hans Zimmer in the decade leading up to Horner’s death, Howard admits, ‘I really miss James, and I was always, always, in the back of my mind assuming we’d work together again. In fact, I had a great lunch with him a couple of months before he died, and it was terrific to reconnect with him. It wasn’t about a particular project . . . he was very busy, working on a lot of different movies, but he had really fallen in love with flying. People don’t realise what an avid hobbyist James was. He could make radio-controlled helicopters from scratch and fly them! He had really fallen in love with flying, and that crash was devastating for me but I knew from our last conversation that he was doing something that he truly loved.’
Back to Cameron and Horner for their third and final collaboration. If anyone thought they might sit back and rest on their laurels after Titanic, or go for something on a smaller scale, they were much mistaken. Cameron had actually written a treatment for Avatar in 1994, with plans to start making it after Titanic, but the intended 1999 release came and went because, according to the director, the technology wasn’t developed enough. He was willing to wait another decade to ensure his vision of the planet Pandora and its blue natives, the Na’vi, was realised to its fullest potential – and, yet again, the risk paid off. Not only was the film praised for its groundbreaking visual effects, but from an estimated budget of over $300 million, it went on to earn more than $2 billion worldwide.
The composer spent over two years scoring Avatar and, unusually for him, considering his work rate in the 1980s and 1990s, he didn’t take on any other projects during this time. When asked about the long gestation period for both film and score, the composer said that Cameron ‘wanted a big commitment. He ended up not dealing with music for quite a while, but the whole brief for me was that it had to be emotional but the music had to be of a sound world that transcended stuff I’d done before [and] had
to match the brilliance of his visuals.’
For the director, it was a no-brainer to recruit Horner for the project because ‘we had established a good working rapport, and I think that’s really the most important thing. It’s like having a tango partner – you’ve got to have absolute trust.’ The composer completely understood, and could cope with, the pressures facing him: ‘I couldn’t be even a millimetre less. I had to be right where his visuals were, if not better.’ Horner might have even enjoyed being pushed to his creative limits, knowing by this time that that’s what the director would expect from him. He worked with an ethnomusologist and recorded sections with a chorus singing the constructed Na’vi language. In fact, he described the music as two scores merged into one, as the Na’vi music combines with a more human, or traditional, sound world – and that took a lot of preparation: ‘I wanted the music to be as stunning sonically as the visuals were, and I couldn’t get away with just playing it on the piano, I had to mock it all up and that takes time.’ Sara Horner remembers that, during this process, her husband ‘would record and then they would make something else, and there were constant changes because at that point it’s much more process-oriented. There were mock-ups being made every day, and then Jim listens to them and comments on them so he could participate much more in the process, and they were both perfectionists, so James was just exhausted!’
