Saturday Night at the Movies

by Jenny Nelson

  One of the earliest partnerships in this book, the rapport between David Lean and Maurice Jarre may feel more formal in comparison to others here. The two weren’t ‘buddies’ in the sense of popping round on a Sunday night to listen to tunes in the composer’s garage, and Jarre was not involved as a sounding board for the early development of the films. There were no on-set visits, no on-screen cameos for the composer, no interviews describing each other as a brother: this was a relationship based on a clear respect for the scale of the other’s talents, though that is not to say that they did not have a bond beyond the purely professional. Described by Jarre as ‘a master of cinema, a model of rigour and professionalism in the service of cinema’, Lean had a reputation for demanding the best, and woe betide you if you were a crew or cast member who could not deliver. The fact he kept returning to Jarre says it all. Their success suggests that perhaps a close personal chemistry between composer and director isn’t essential; what might be more important is to have clear, shared goals for the task at hand and for both parties to work hard to achieve them. Nevertheless, there was a fondness there, and the composer was on course to score Lean’s next project, an adaptation of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, before the director’s death from pneumonia in 1991 ended the superb collaboration.

  Although Jarre also worked with other legendary directors such as Alfred Hitchcock (Topaz) and collaborated on three films with John Huston and five with Peter Weir, including the acclaimed scores for Witness and Dead Poets Society, he often cited Lean as one of the directors he admired the most.

  After Lean’s death, Jarre said, ‘I owe him everything . . . He gave me the best pictures, the opportunity to receive three Oscars for four films – not so bad! – and he gave me his friendship. He was a gentleman. When I lost him, I lost not only a great director, but a great friend.’ In 1992, the composer conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a special tribute concert at the Barbican in London, featuring his scores for the four films. He was visibly moved at the end, addressing the audience, ‘Thank you. I think David would be happy.’

  Collaboration History

  Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

  Doctor Zhivago (1965)

  Ryan’s Daughter (1970)

  A Passage to India (1984)

  Suggested Playlist

  Lawrence of Arabia, Overture

  Lawrence of Arabia, Main Theme

  Lawrence of Arabia, That is the Desert

  Lawrence of Arabia, First Entrance to the Desert – Night and Star – Lawrence and Tafas

  Doctor Zhivago, Overture

  Doctor Zhivago, Main Title

  Doctor Zhivago, Kontakion – Funeral Song

  Doctor Zhivago, Lara’s Theme

  Doctor Zhivago, Then It’s A Gift (End Title)

  Ryan’s Daughter, Rosy’s Theme

  A Passage to India, A Passage to India

  A Passage to India, Adela’s Theme

  A Passage to India, Bicycle Ride

  A young British theatre director making his debut feature-length film and an established composer from a Hollywood musical dynasty: the writing was not necessarily on the wall for Sam Mendes and Thomas Newman to forge a long-lasting partnership, but after the runaway success of their first collaboration, American Beauty (1999), Newman has provided the music for all of Mendes’ films that have required a score – that’s six out of the seven: the Depression-era crime tale Road to Perdition (2002), biographical war drama Jarhead (2005), a tale of the suburban American Dream gone wrong, Revolutionary Road (2008), and two James Bond blockbusters Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015). As Mendes has described their collaboration, ‘It has ended up being, not through any design, just accidentally and totally for the right reasons, one of the longest and most rewarding artistic relationships of my life. Every movie has been a journey, and every movie we’ve found new things, and the day that I would want to stop working with Tom is the day that we both look at each other and say, “Well, there’s nothing in here that we haven’t done before.”’ So what’s their secret?

  With different backgrounds and a decade between them, the root of the Newman–Mendes partnership appears to lie in a mutual appreciation rather than similar upbringing or implicit shared experiences. They are two thoroughly charming gents, both genuinely generous in their praise of the other, and their collaboration is undoubtedly strengthened by the fact they have not fallen into a symbiotic working relationship but have plenty of their own projects on the go. Sam’s stage work spans William Shakespeare to Roald Dahl, with successful productions of Richard III, King Lear and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in recent years, and in 2017 he directed the Royal Court Theatre’s fastest-selling play to date, The Ferryman by Jez Butterworth. Thomas has an impressively varied CV that features animation (Wall-E, Finding Nemo), drama (The Help, Erin Brockovich), comedy (the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel series), biopics (The Iron Lady), and documentaries (He Named Me Malala). There is clearly no shortage of composing work for him and he’s earned enough Academy Award nominations to no doubt feel intense pressure to win one: his most recent Best Original Score nod, for Passengers in 2017, was his thirteenth in the category.

  Before turning to the first collaboration, let’s get up to speed with the Newman family to understand why the surname holds such clout in Hollywood. Alfred Newman, Thomas’s father, was Head of Music at 20th Century Fox from 1940 to 1960 and the recipient of nine Academy Awards – more than any other music director or composer. His brothers Lionel and Emil, Thomas’s uncles, were also composers and conductors, and Lionel was nominated for eleven Oscars, winning for Hello Dolly! with Lennie Hayton in 1969. Thomas’s cousin, the singer-songwriter Randy Newman, has picked up two Oscars from an impressive twenty nominations, and has added his musical touch to seven Disney Pixar films including the Toy Story trilogy. Joey Newman, first cousin once removed, is also a composer, as is Thomas’s brother David, who has scored around a hundred films, and Thomas’s sister Maria is a critically acclaimed violinist, violist and pianist.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that Newman would become a film composer, but what a weight of expectation! Speaking in 2014, he acknowledged the pressure: ‘It was a career I never thought I wanted to go into for probably just that reason. It was a long-cast shadow, but somehow I ended up in it!’ He was fourteen when Alfred died and although he’d seen some of his father’s films, it was only in his mid-teens that he ‘started to drift into a sense of what it meant to be a creative person, which had never occurred to me growing up. What is it to be creative, what is it to have an idea, no one had ever really talked about that.’

  Despite the pressures of living up to the family name, Newman had the freedom to develop his own style, one that is now instantly discernible and often imitated: ‘I always had a voice, but I don’t think I really knew it, and as a student I was quite shy and probably felt at the bottom of the class, and maybe that turned me into a good listener. I think I started to develop a sense of aesthetics and I started to learn what I liked, and I just went for it.’ The skill of listening is significant because a typical Thomas Newman score is atmospheric rather than bombastic, with a subtle and an often modern-sounding approach that doesn’t veer into nostalgia or familiar ‘retro’ territory, even if he’s scoring a period piece. His preference for percussion and experimenting with eclectic instruments allows for a deftness of touch that never stifles.

  Newman has described the spareness of his approach: ‘Any time I write, you see an image and you have an idea. Maybe you work on a marimba idea or a piano idea and you put it up against an image and the image tells you something. Maybe it tells you the writing is too dense or too thick and you thin it out or you subtract. So typically I try to have ideas, put them in front of an image, then ask myself why they work or why they don’t work. It’s less about who I am as a writer, and more who I’m accepting in, what my ears are buying. Early on, I thought no one’s listening anyway so why go out of my way to try to impress people, so I tried to subtract, and I
guess my sense of harmony became very spare as a result.’

  It goes without saying that he had an easier entry into the film industry than most. One of his first jobs was a cue on Return of the Jedi, thanks to Uncle Lionel who was musical supervisor on the first three Star Wars films and a close friend of John Williams. Not many aspiring composers get their work experience by orchestrating the death of Lord Vader, but Newman went on to build his own reputation and by the time he met Sam Mendes, he’d been composing for film for well over a decade, with The Player (1992), The Horse Whisperer (1998) and Meet Joe Black (1998) under his belt, along with Oscar nominations for The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Little Women (1994) and Unstrung Heroes (1995).

  Thomas Newman’s and Sam Mendes’ first collaboration was one of the defining films of the 1990s, with music to match. Picking up five Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, American Beauty (1999) was a landmark moment in the careers of both composer and director. Speaking to Andrew Collins before the release of Spectre, Mendes said, ‘You’ve got to remember, I was a first-time film-maker and was asking somebody who’d just composed music for The Shawshank Redemption and all these wonderful scores to do my small movie, so he gave me my break in a way!’

  Thomas Newman and Sam Mendes at the premiere afterparty of Revolutionary Road, 2008.

  Newman shared his memories of meeting Mendes: ‘I was in the middle of The Green Mile and there was a bit of a hiatus when they decided if they wanted Tom Hanks to dress up as an old person to play himself, or if they were going to cast another part, so there was a seven- or eight-week break and I wanted to do something quick and different. My agent suggested American Beauty, which was just beginning to happen, and I went and met with Sam in an office building in Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, and we hit it off.’ The original brief was for Newman to provide music to fill in the gaps between country-and-western songs that were due to feature because lead character Lester Burnham was described in the script as a fan of the genre. However, as the composer recalls, the musical direction changed after Mendes returned to England: ‘It was him, I think, who wanted to have the things percuss and bang and bonk and move forward with a kind of pace.’

  While Mendes had attracted admirers for his successful stage productions of the musicals Oliver! and Cabaret, the film studio had offered the role to about twenty other directors including Mike Nichols and Robert Zemeckis. Mendes’ agent, Beth Swofford, was arranging meetings with studio figures to discuss potential directorial roles for him, and the story goes that he picked out American Beauty from a pile of scripts and knew that this was the one for him. DreamWorks Pictures had bought the story by Alan Ball, so Mendes met up with DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg and, after receiving his encouragement, successfully pitched for the role of director.

  Some might have wondered whether an Englishman was the right person for the job of bringing the story of a midlife crisis in the American suburbs to life, but the distance perhaps played to Mendes’ strengths. As Newman notes, ‘Sam’s very observant, I think, culturally and emotionally – that’s one of his talents.’ These powers of observation, combined with the composer’s awareness of the importance of listening, made for a fertile collaborative environment. The composer was impressed from the start by the director’s intuitive approach to the scoring process: ‘He was a very quick learner in terms of knowing how malleable music could be and how malleable post-production could be; how you could make something slightly different than the intention . . . He has an amazing work ethic, an amazing way of knowing how to bring good things out of people.’

  In Mendes’ words, ‘You really are in the hands of another creative force when you’re working with a composer . . . I think when you get that feeling that the music has a life of its own when added to the visuals, that’s the work of someone with a real gift. It isn’t always the work of someone who’s shadowing the movie with music all the time . . . So it was a process of discovery for me, to try and work out where and how I felt I wanted music to be used.’

  The American Beauty score contains some of the most recognised – and imitated – film cues around today, seeping into popular culture and even spawning a dance song, ‘American Dream’ by Jakatta. Initially Newman’s music gives the impression of a light veneer, but the use and layering of unusual instruments provide a resonance and texture that pulse throughout the film. It is never overpowering, yet asserts prominence within key scenes. ‘American Beauty’ is often referred to as ‘the plastic bag theme’ because we hear it when teenagers Ricky and Jane are watching a video made by Ricky of a plastic bag seemingly dancing in the wind. The composer is modest when asked about what is now considered to be a quintessentially Newman cue: ‘It’s not like you ever look at these things and say, “Aha! Here’s my moment!”’ According to Mendes, ‘I remember the piece that accompanies Lester’s fantasy of Angela on the ceiling in the rose petals being an absolutely perfect piece of music. It’s probably only forty-five seconds long but it’s just exquisite . . . That’s what you hope for, and a lot of the time with Tom, that’s what you get.’

  Newman struggled, however, with the film’s opening cue ‘Dead Already’. After fifteen or sixteen attempts that all received a lukewarm response from the director, he knew he was running out of time, and luckily the percussionist Michael Fisher stepped in: ‘He was the one who said, “Let’s play with tablas”, and that’s very much the case with my players. I really try to invite ideas from them, and it just kind of came together. I finally had the guts to play it to Sam and he liked it!’ Mendes recalls, ‘I put in all the other pieces of music and mixed the whole movie while he was still trying to write that piece. In fact, the last piece of music that went onto the picture at the very end of the mix was that opening piece. He nailed it right at the end, and when he finally wrote it he said something like “This is it. If you don’t like it, I give up” – and luckily I liked it!’

  The duo’s next collaboration was the Depression-era gangster film Road to Perdition (2002), starring Tom Hanks, Jude Law and future James Bond Daniel Craig. Newman returned to the more orchestral style of The Shawshank Redemption for this story set in the organised crime world of 1930s Chicago. It’s an assured score, with the composer’s stylistic mannerisms well placed within the broader orchestral realm. Dark and gloomy elements suit the revenge theme of the film, yet it’s not without moments of humour and surprise. The Irishness of the Chicago setting is hinted at with the appearance of pennywhistle and pipe in ‘Rock Island, 1931’, but these are carefully placed rather than overbearing. Another highlight, ‘Road to Chicago’, begins with a piano before introducing multi-layered strings and the title cue, which provides hope tinged with melancholy.

  Mendes explained that he doesn’t follow a set pattern in his films, and doesn’t expect the composer to either: ‘I don’t use what I would consider the same box of tricks for each movie. For example, American Beauty was very still, very composed; Road to Perdition had a much broader scope, much bigger landscapes, much fuller, much more symphonic. Jarhead was all hand-held cameras, there are no right-angles in the movie anywhere, so there’s something a bit more rough and improvised, whereas there was nothing improvised about Road to Perdition at all. You could use those analogies exactly the same way with music: you’re using chamber music for American Beauty, there’s glassy strings, things that hover and shiver but nothing overtly emotional, and very few big statements. There’s mischief in the music, there’s quirkiness, there’s oddness and I think originality, whereas with Road to Perdition it’s much grander. Often Tom’s trademark bowed and strummed instruments, but always sitting within a broader, more sweeping gesture. And then with Jarhead, you’ve got something much more eclectic: you’ve got guitars and odd use of Middle Eastern instruments, and strange bowed, strangely surreal sounds. A fragmented score for a fragmented movie and a fragmented narrative.’

  Based on the best-selling 2003 memoir by Anthony Swofford,
who served in the first Gulf War, Jarhead (2005) is a study of the psychological effects of warfare. Focusing on the personal experience of one soldier, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, it captures the heat, boredom, loneliness and exhaustion experienced by the soldiers, and the music serves to mirror these frustrations. Working with his regular musicians, Newman created a multicultural soundboard, merging boundaries to reflect the soldiers’ backgrounds and current location. The director is full of praise for Newman’s skilled multi-instrumentalists and describes sitting in on some of the recording sessions as ‘a real thrill’: ‘If you say something like “It needs to feel a little bit more mischievous there, when that happens”, then someone will have an idea and the piece will be adapted and suddenly it will come to life or it will catch the light in a different way.’ A quick scan of the Jarhead credits reveals a number of unusual instruments and effects, with George Doering playing the esraj, reverse hammer dulcimer and bowed cumbus, among others; Rick Cox tackling the processed xaphoons and ambient elements, and the aforementioned Michael Fisher looking after daf, riq, wave drum and crotales. Not your typical film score. It’s a curious listen and by no means an easy one, with electronic cues like ‘Full Chemical Gear’ providing a more masculine sound, ‘Listen Up’ nodding to Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself ’ with its swagger, and pieces like ‘Dead Anyway’ offering eerie soundscapes.

  By his own admission, the composer enjoys the challenge of exploring and creating different sound worlds through experimental scores such as Jarhead: ‘The idea of colour excites me, the idea of seeing where I end up as opposed to assuming where I’ll go. This idea of un-intention, of being unintended in my approach and then listening to something that I write and putting it against an image and asking myself if it works and why. Instead of saying, “OK, I’m going to sit down with manuscript in hand and I’m going to write my piece”, which is typically what we think of as a composer’s role . . . for me, it’s always finding an idea and grabbing it and stuffing it in my ears.’