Saturday Night at the Movies

by Jenny Nelson

  In a way, it’s not surprising that there was no musical ‘eureka’ moment with the Avatar score, as Cameron described with Titanic. Creating music for a planet set in the future involved a fair amount of back and forth: the composer would share extracts with the director, ‘and he would reject some of them because he thought he had heard them before, he’d reject some of them for being too dissonant, he’d reject some of them for various other reasons, and then he would accept, and accept, and accept, reject, accept, accept, accept – and slowly we wove our way through putting the score together. In addition to which, the film was constantly changing, until release practically.’

  So, elements of the making of Aliens, then, but this time countered with over two decades of experience in the film industry and more of a shared understanding between the composer and director. Areas of potential conflict still cropped up, and Horner felt the need to confront Cameron on occasion, to ensure the heart of the movie could shine through: ‘I thought it was too effects-driven and I was worried he had nudged it slightly in favour of being a fan-boy movie. I thought he should just edge back a tiny bit. It was just us . . . at a watch-through screening, doing the dubbing, and he agreed. And we . . . took out the music he had earlier rejected and put it back – and it just was enough to warm it slightly and not make it quite as sterile.’

  Horner was modest about this input – ‘I don’t know if it would have made any difference, any more emotional than that or less emotional’ – but by offering his perspective, he served as a reminder to Cameron to focus on the heart of the story. The composer was well aware of how far the two had come in order to have such an open discussion: ‘He thinks very intensely about everything he does and that’s the level we exchange at. He trusts my instincts – and the fact that I would say that meant a lot.’

  The Avatar score has Horner’s trademark sweeping motifs and use of native instruments, and there are occasional nods to Ennio Morricone’s music for The Mission. A stand-out cue, ‘The Bioluminescence of the Night’, features pipes and chimes to enchanting effect, and it seems to light up the world around you when you listen to it. Elsewhere, the choir and dogged brass fanfares build the scale of threat and danger during ‘War’, for the clash between the Na’vi and humans on Pandora. When asked if Horner was happy with the final score, Sara said she felt both men were, describing them as ‘the kind of people that are willing to die for their art! Honestly, they’ll drive themselves, and the people around them, as hard and as far as they can.’

  Nominated for nine Academy Awards in 2010, including Best Picture and Best Director – both losing to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker – Avatar won three Oscars for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects. Horner was in the running for Best Original Score, his tenth and final nomination, and it is somehow fitting that at this ceremony the Academy gave an honorary award to Roger Corman ‘for his rich engendering of films and film-makers’.

  A director with near-limitless ambition, James Cameron plans to release four Avatar sequels: the first is due for release in December 2020. Horner had been about to start work on the follow-up at the end of 2015, and while we’ll never know how he would have extended this musical universe, there is some solace in the director and composer being able to reach a creative understanding. As Cameron acknowledges, ‘I will miss the collaboration, I will miss the fun, I will miss the creation. You know, certainly miss him as a person. He only lived just over the hill from me, a couple miles away, and he’d pop back and forth to my place and me to his when we were working together. I’m not saying we hung out and played video games the whole time in between movies – it wasn’t like that. But, I’m going to miss him as a human being first, I’m going to miss him as a collaborator, just because it was good, and we knew what to do, and we knew how to talk to each other.’

  Speaking about the role of the composer within the film-making process, Horner shared a typically instinctive perspective about the importance of communication: ‘It’s always been important to me how I get along with people, but now it’s even more important that they know who I am and that we really click . . . before I agree to do a film. I’ve seen a lot of films where I’ve been asked to do them, and I just know I’ll never get along with the director, I just know he’s not into the same aesthetic I am.’

  Having decades of experience with so many other directors no doubt allowed Horner to value certain individuals’ personalities and working methods but also to recognise his own worth. As he explained, ‘The composer is part of the nuclear family. There’s the producer, the director, the writer perhaps, the studio, of course, but they’re kept away until the film’s ready to be seen – and there’s the composer. So you’re part of a very intimate relationship, and my responsibility is to just make it perfect.’

  Perfection – striving to create the best story and tell it in the best way possible – lay at the core of the Horner–Cameron collaboration. Despite conflict, they helped to push each other further, and grew to recognise their individual strengths and flaws. They might not have compromised, but they adapted. As Horner observed, ‘Jim’s wired like me, he’s a perfectionist. I do get along very well with him despite the difficulty of working with him. He has different people skills than I do! But he puts 1,000 per cent of himself into something, while a lot of other people bail out somewhere in that process, and that’s part of Jim’s mystique.’

  Collaboration History

  Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), production design and special effects by Cameron

  Aliens (1986), written and directed by Cameron

  Titanic (1997), written, directed, co-produced and co-edited by Cameron

  Avatar (2009), written, directed, co-produced and co-edited by Cameron

  Suggested Playlist

  Battle Beyond the Stars, Main Title

  Aliens, Ripley’s Rescue

  Aliens, Bishop’s Countdown

  Aliens, Resolution and Hyperspace

  Titanic, Rose

  Titanic, Southampton

  Titanic, An Ocean of Memories

  Avatar, The Bioluminescence of the Night

  Avatar, Jake’s First Flight

  Avatar, War

  Collaborating on just four films over three decades, Sir David Lean and Maurice Jarre nonetheless made cinematic history. From the staggering success of Lawrence of Arabia to Lean’s final film, A Passage to India, Jarre provided the epic, sweeping music to match Lean’s landscapes on-screen, from the eastern deserts and snowy Russian forests to the stormy Irish coastline and sweltering Indian cities. Between them they created some of the most popular and enduring works for cinema.

  David Lean remains one of the UK’s most respected directors, with a reputation for his dedicated and exacting approach to film-making. He directed sixteen feature films in a career spanning forty years, and remains the only Brit to win the Academy Award for Best Director on more than one occasion. In 1999, the British Film Institute compiled a list of the top 100 British films, and Lean had an impressive three in the top 10 alone: Brief Encounter at 2, Lawrence of Arabia at 3, and Great Expectations at 5. With a background as a successful film editor, Lean had a fine eye and ear for the pacing of storytelling, and in 1962 when he first met the young French composer nearly two decades his junior, he quickly understood that this inventive musician could capture the emotion at the heart of the story. Jarre created memorable scores, inseparable from Lean’s films, and won the Oscar for Best Original Score for three of them. Put simply, the director knew what he wanted from the music, and the composer delivered the perfect atmospheric and dramatic sounds for his vision.

  Born in 1924 in Lyon, Maurice Jarre quit his college studies in engineering to enrol at the prestigious Paris Conservatoire. He studied percussion and worked as a timpanist, and later credited this role with providing an informative musical education, giving him the perfect perspective from which to observe the makings and machinations of the orchestra. As part of his course, he had to
study the music of five different cultures and he chose Russian, Indian, Japanese, South American and Arabic styles, which would come in very useful later when composing film scores for exotic locations. After graduating, he played in the orchestra of a theatre company in Paris, where he was also the arranger and conductor, and in 1951 he became the composer for the Théâtre National Populaire in Lyon, writing original scores for a variety of plays including Richard II and Macbeth. He would spend twelve years as music director there, but started composing for film the following year, with a score for an anti-war documentary short directed by the French film-maker Georges Franju. This was the start of a partnership between Jarre and Franju that would include two more short films and five feature films.

  His early working relationship with Franju gave Jarre an understanding of the skills required for a successful collaboration, as well as allowing him to develop what was already a unique and recognisable style as a film composer. Throughout his career, he pulled off the tricky task of composing music that was recognisably his, yet he was never pigeonholed by it. In the early 1960s, however, while his career was on the up in France, he needed to work on a British or American movie if he wanted to step into the international arena.

  From Paris and Lyon we turn to Croydon, where David Lean was born in 1908. A fairly unremarkable pupil – his school reports offer little suggestion of future job prospects – a gift from his uncle set him on his career path. When he was ten, he received a Brownie box camera, and in a 1985 television documentary, David Lean: A Life in Film, he told Melvyn Bragg that this present was ‘the biggest compliment I’d ever been paid’.

  When he was allowed to go to the cinema as a teenager, he fell in love with film. On leaving school, he managed a year as a clerk at his father’s firm before announcing he wanted to work in cinema, so his dad arranged a meeting with a fellow accountant at the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. The young Lean was paid £1 a week to do all sorts of jobs at the Lime Grove Studios, from lugging cameras around and making the tea to a short stint as wardrobe mistress, before entering the cutting room. Developing editing skills when working on newsreels, he learned about the practicalities of film-making, such as working to tight deadlines and applying imaginative techniques within creative constraints, and he rose up the ranks. By 1941, when he edited Powell and Pressburger’s 49th Parallel, he was a highly respected film editor.

  Lean had Noël Coward to thank for his entry into the world of directing. Coward was looking for a good technician to co-direct with him on In Which We Serve (1942) and several people recommended Lean. The original plan was for him to focus on the technical aspects while Coward concentrated on his fellow actors, but as Lean gratefully reflected, ‘Noël got bored very quickly’, so he took over all of the directorial responsibilities. He went on to adapt several of Coward’s plays into films including Brief Encounter (1945), for which he earned the first of seven Academy Award nominations for Best Director.

  Even at this stage, Lean’s meticulous approach to film-making was well known. The director Ronald Neame, who worked as his producer, described how he would obsess over every word in the script. They worked together on the Charles Dickens adaptations Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, and Lean became heavily involved with the screenplay, editing and cinematography as well as directing. He gained a reputation for creating memorable scenes with little or no dialogue, suggesting a real grasp of the power of sound within a film, be that speech or music. During the 1940s and 1950s he worked with some of Britain’s finest composers, such as Richard Addinsell on Blithe Spirit (1945) and The Passionate Friends (1949), and Malcolm Arnold on The Sound Barrier (1952), Hobson’s Choice (1954), and his biggest hit before Lawrence of Arabia, the British-American co-production The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  Lean’s genius at creating visual masterpieces was given a new lease of life in 1955 when he started working in Venice on Summertime, released in the UK as Summer Madness. From then on, all of his films were set and shot abroad. His projects became larger in scale as the 1950s progressed, and The Bridge on the River Kwai displayed his breadth of vision. The highest-grossing movie of 1957, this epic war film about British soldiers in a Japanese prison camp in Burma was garlanded with seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.

  After the success of The Bridge on the River Kwai, David Lean and producer Sam Spiegel were keen to work together again. They initially planned to make a film about Mahatma Gandhi, but the project was abandoned. Then, the film rights to T. E. Lawrence’s book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom became available and Spiegel snapped them up. Lawrence was the illegitimate son of an Irish baronet, and was considered a rather romantic figure, depicted in the film as uniting Bedouin peoples of the Arab peninsula to fight in the First World War and then to push for independence. Various biopics had been in the pipeline but they hadn’t come to fruition and this was a story Lean wanted to tell, exploring wider themes of identity and divided allegiance.

  All in all, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) took nearly three years to make: after extensive preparation and location work by Lean, filming began in May 1961 in the Jordan desert known as Jebel Tubeiq, near the Saudi Arabian border. Film shoots in Spain, Morocco and England followed, and a royal premiere was set for 9 December 1962. As the project entered its post-production phase, David Lean and Sam Spiegel turned to the matter of the composer.

  Here’s how Maurice Jarre got his big career break. At first, the director had assumed that Malcolm Arnold would score it, following on from their earlier collaborations and the composer’s Oscar win for The Bridge on the River Kwai. The producer, ever mindful of appealing to as broad an audience as possible, wanted to commission both Arnold and William Walton, so the prestigious list of associates could feature two leading British composers. He asked the editor Anne V. Coates to provide a two-hour rough cut for them to watch, and they are said to have arrived at the screening room after a long liquid lunch. After giggling – and snoozing – throughout, the two composers didn’t hold back in their criticism, with Arnold describing it as ‘terrible’. Once Lean and Spiegel heard the feedback, that was the end of that.

  Another early plan was for the score to be in two parts, to demonstrate the British forces and the eastern setting, so Benjamin Britten was brought on board to write the former and Aram Khachaturian the latter. Jarre, whose recent work on the French film Sundays and Cybele, a project Spiegel had been involved in financially, had impressed the producer and director, was invited to fill in the gaps. Jarre was delighted to be part of this trio and in July 1962 he spent time in London researching T. E. Lawrence. The following month he discovered the collaboration had been cancelled: Khachaturian couldn’t leave Russia and Britten had requested a year and a half to compose his part of the score due to other work commitments. With four months to go before the premiere, that wasn’t an option.

  Sam Spiegel’s next plan was for Richard Rodgers to step into the frame. Hard to believe now that the man behind The Sound of Music might have scored Lawrence of Arabia, but the producer thought the Broadway composer would be a good fit, having penned the ‘oriental’ musical The King and I and a Second World War television documentary Victory at Sea. In September, Spiegel returned from the States to inform Jarre that Rodgers would write 90 per cent of the score, and he would orchestrate it and provide the remaining 10 per cent. Jarre wasn’t best pleased, as he had already turned down film-scoring work back in France, but accepted the new arrangement and asked whether the new composer would come to London, or whether he should go to America to meet him. Spiegel didn’t think that would be necessary, stating that Rodgers would stay in New York and send over his themes in a few weeks. During September, while Rodgers used Robert Bolt’s screenplay as his primary inspiration, Jarre watched as much film footage as he could – over forty hours’ worth, all told. Initially he didn’t watch scenes with the main actors, Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif, but rather visuals of the desert, and musical ideas began to take shape in his mind. />
  Later that month, Spiegel received Rodgers’ themes by mail and arranged for a pianist to play them to him, Lean and Jarre. The ‘Oriental Theme’ was not particularly impressive – Jarre later said it sounded like ‘something left over from The King and I’ – and the ‘Love Theme’ wasn’t much better. The third theme was a British military number, and the pianist is said to have commented that it was an old march, not an original, by which time Lean’s patience had been well and truly tested. After a frustrated outburst at his producer – ‘Sam, what is all this rubbish? I am supposed to be editing the film, and you take up my time with the nonsense!’ – he then asked Jarre if he had composed anything. Jarre played a piece simply called ‘The Theme from Lawrence of Arabia’, and he recalled that Lean put his hand on his shoulder and announced, ‘Sam, this chap has got the theme. Maurice, you are going to do it!’

  And so began six weeks of writing and recording two hours of music, scored for a hundred instruments. A daunting challenge, and one that Jarre apparently completed by dramatically limiting his sleep – one story claims he got through it by working for four hours at a time followed by a ten-minute nap on his office couch – but he was prepared, having immersed himself in the footage and the story. He was already transfixed by the images of the desert so the themes came naturally to him.