Saturday Night at the Movies

by Jenny Nelson

  Mendes and Newman returned to themes of suburban dissatisfaction with Revolutionary Road (2008), considered by many as a companion piece to American Beauty. Adapted from the acclaimed debut novel by Richard Yates, this is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who live in Connecticut in the 1950s and plan to move to Paris to escape, as Frank puts it, ‘the hopeless emptiness’ of their life – and the composer provided a suitably unsettling and claustrophobic score, steeped in sadness. The haunting ‘Revolutionary Road (End Title)’ ranks among his finest; ‘The Bright Young Man’ offers brightness in the piano tune but seems purposefully lacking in warmth, with the percussion keeping the audience at arm’s length, and another stand-out cue, ‘Golden People’, captures the feeling of being an observer of this apparently perfect marriage, somehow conjuring elements of envy between the pauses.

  Mendes had a particular idea in mind for the music: ‘I was very conscious when we did Revolutionary Road that we work off a single theme, primarily, in a way that was quite old-fashioned. You have your tune for the movie, you develop that tune, you repeat it, sometimes you play it on a single piano, sometimes with a full orchestra, and all the ranges in between. And you hope that that tune expresses both the beauty and the sadness of the story, and both the love affair and the tragedy simultaneously, depending on how it’s delivered and orchestrated. So we took that one theme and we manipulated it and changed it and Tom varied it with great skill throughout the movie so it had a kind of changing aspect along with the changing fortunes of Frank and April.’

  By this stage, with four collaborations between them, Newman could have felt relatively confident in his role as Mendes’ go-to composer, but he has never allowed himself to get too comfortable or to assume that the relationship will continue from strength to strength: ‘You still have to perform. There’s going to be a moment when you’re in a room with him and he’s not going to like something you’re doing. You presume nothing about that relationship other than that you’re grateful for it, but I still have to honour the composer–director relationship and try as hard as I can, and guide him if I feel he needs guidance but also bow to his visions if that’s the thing to do.’

  Arguably their two most recent films, involving British super spy and cultural institution James Bond, were steeped in more pressure than the others put together. As soon as Sam Mendes was announced as the director of the twenty-third official Bond film, Skyfall (2012), fans wondered if his usual musical collaborator would join him. Could a composer who was so well known for his minimal, atmospheric style take on 007 and all the stylistic expectations that go with the franchise? ‘The big question for me was, was he going to be able to carry over into the Bond world?’ admitted the director. ‘Because it’s a big ask. He had to adapt and use the great John Barry stuff and the Monty Norman theme, and that’s a tricky balance for a composer. One of the great thrills for me, because I stood by him and insisted that we used him, is how amazingly he pulled it off.’

  Mendes continues, ‘There’s a certain amount about his work that is consistent across all the films but then there’s a certain amount that doesn’t sound like Tom Newman at all. Maybe retrospectively you hear the score for American Beauty and go, “That’s Tom Newman”, but at the time it was quite original. But I’ve always loved pushing Tom in new directions in the way that I was pushing myself. The most recent example of that is working with him on Bond. He’d never done a big action adventure movie before, and neither had I!’

  Newman recalls his initial conversation with Mendes about Bond: ‘I called him up and said, “Listen, I don’t know if you would ever consider me for this but I would love to be a part of it if you would have me”, and he had had it in his mind that he wanted to work with me and Roger Deakins [the cinematographer who had worked on Jarhead and Revolutionary Road], and bring us along. Which was flattering on the one hand, but on the other, did I understand the Englishness enough of the Bond experience, and could I do it? . . . I knew I was going to live or die in the arena of “Does it work or does it not?”’

  By focusing on the task at hand, the composer was able to approach the scoring for Skyfall as he would for any other movie: ‘You get signed to do the film, you read the script, maybe you start seeing little bits of picture. It wasn’t long after they wrapped that I came to London where I was for two or three weeks before Sam had an opportunity to even see me because he was so busy editing. And then you just go to work. Sam’s so specific, he’s so meticulous with his sense of music and how it aligns with action, that he’s just looking and listening every step of the way. As the cut refines, so does the music, and then you’re into a period of time where he’s really weighing in, in terms of what you’re doing.’

  As Mendes recalls, ‘Tom, who’s supremely gifted, sometimes needed to be convinced, cajoled, into using bigger guns, bigger artillery in terms of the sheer muscle required to rise above the sound landscape of an action movie. You needed big traceable percussion beats that run under things, that bind sequences together, you need to not be afraid of using horns and some of the more muscular sounds that are available to you in a big orchestra. But then there’s delicacy too and still the confidence – I mean, one of the pieces I love most in Skyfall is the confidence to empty out and go to a single tone, something that really is haunting and strange: when Bond goes to Skyfall, to Scotland, for the first time, the score there is mesmerisingly simple and hypnotic. It’s a sort of counter-intuitive choice you get from somebody with Tom’s taste and keen eye for the unexpected. You don’t get, “Oh great, it’s a big shot of a car driving across a landscape, let’s hammer in with eighty strings”; instead you get this shivering, strange tone that makes it feel that he’s going back in time. It did everything that a bigger piece would do, but more, and it was not a cliché. That’s the other thing: he has a remarkably keen eye for moving away from the clichéd and the obvious, in terms of musical language.’

  As Mendes points out, the composer successfully created a Bond score and a Thomas Newman score, with the occasional nod to his predecessors David Arnold and John Barry, as well as the required incorporation of Monty Norman’s original Bond theme, while cues such as ‘She’s Mine’ shine with brassy flourishes. Newman was careful in his preparation, admitting, ‘Immersion scares me because then you start to really feel the weight of what’s gone before. I did a lot of listening, but I didn’t do such serious listening that I felt burdened by it.’ Just before the film’s release, he said that the whole experience had been ‘amazing’ but tough: ‘It’s a lot of work that comes down the pipe very late, so you’re really up against a huge mountain of work over a small period of time, and that’s daunting.’ The Skyfall title tune is put to superb use in ‘Komodo Dragon’; ‘Quartermaster’ goes at a real pace with layered, jangly sounds; and another highlight, ‘Tennyson’, feels like a trademark Bond action cue, appearing in a key scene in which Judi Dench’s character M defends the role of the secret service as Javier Bardem’s villain gets ever closer. While other composers might have thrown down the gauntlet and brought in bombastic crescendos, Newman never overdoes it, allowing the on-screen action to speak for itself.

  Skyfall was the first James Bond film to take over $1 billion worldwide and was the highest-grossing film in the UK until Star Wars: The Force Awakens knocked it into second place three years later. It also won critical acclaim and picked up two Academy Awards and two BAFTAs, including Best Original Score for Thomas Newman. When it was announced that Mendes would return to the franchise to direct the follow-up, it was taken as given that the composer would join him.

  The director is particularly proud of the score for Spectre (2015), describing it as ‘much more effortlessly muscular and wide-screen and cool’ than some of Skyfall. He points to the balance Newman achieves between different instruments and themes, particularly in the opening ten minutes where he weaves the Bond theme in and out of drum music on the streets in Mexico. ‘If you study it as a so
undscape – holding off the music during the foot chase through the streets and the beginning of the fight in the helicopter, then when it comes back in with this immense force during the second half of the helicopter fight – the courage to drop music out during action and then bring it back in again, that came with both of us in the second movie. The danger with action music is you’re trying to pump false energy into stuff that feels like it hasn’t quite earned it, and so you’re having to push the music to fill in the gaps that the physical action is not succeeding on illustrating, whereas in Spectre . . . I felt like it was there at the right time.’

  Other highlights include ‘The Pale King’, which makes a bold entrance before ultimately tiptoeing into the musical shadows, the gentle ‘Madeleine’ and more experimentation with signature brass elements and the Monty Norman theme in ‘Westminster Bridge’. Perhaps second time around, Newman was more used to blending in that music into his own score: ‘The idea of Bond is so much bigger than I am that you kind of have to allow it at all times and swallow it up and enjoy it.’

  When asked what directors should look for in a composer to achieve a fruitful working partnership, Mendes offers this advice: ‘Ultimately, it’s an entirely personal thing. One person’s Mozart is another person’s Salieri! Some people hear truth; some people hear fakery. Don’t look at their list of credits, don’t look at what they’ve done in the past, just close your eyes and listen. Do you like it? Does it speak to you? Does it feel like your movie? Then, meet them. Do you talk the same language? If you don’t, don’t be ashamed to say, “Thanks very much, but I don’t talk Newman, and you don’t talk Mendes”, but if you feel you have a shared way of communicating about music, and you get on – because you spend a lot of time biffing things back and forth in a room – that’s a good sign.’ He also rates honesty in both directions, describing the ideal composer as ‘not someone you can push around, not somebody who is scared of telling you that they want you to give this piece of music another shot’.

  Mendes continues: ‘But the most important of all is you’ve got to have a sense of humour! You’ve got to be able to laugh because making a movie is not easy. You have to be able to get perspective on it at some point because otherwise you can all get things out of proportion. Tom is extremely funny and witty, in an extremely dry and self-deprecating way, but he does make me laugh a lot and I hope I [make him laugh a lot] too, although possibly less than [he does me]!’

  It’s evident that both director and composer get stuck in, never simply going through the motions. Newman reckons their collaboration works so well because ‘we have a sense of style, I can put feeling into his images’ but it’s significant that he acknowledges the role of a composer within the bigger picture: ‘It’s not about you, it’s about the film or the image and how much can you adapt to it.’ Their other projects, from Mendes’ stage productions to Newman’s regular scoring work for directors like Steven Soderbergh and John Madden, have allowed for some space over the decades, which may have helped keep things harmonious. According to the director, ‘We’ve had some adventures together, and we know each other now very well. It’s quite eccentric now, our working relationship, and it would be quite unlike anyone else’s. If I worked with another composer, I’m sure it would be very different, and when he works with other directors, I’m sure that relationship is very different. But we get a kick out of working with each other. We’re yet to get bored of each other, so I hope that continues!’

  Collaboration History

  American Beauty (1999)

  Road to Perdition (2002)

  Jarhead (2005)

  Revolutionary Road (2008)

  Skyfall (2012)

  Spectre (2015)

  Suggested Playlist

  American Beauty, Dead Already

  American Beauty, Any Other Name

  American Beauty, American Beauty

  Road to Perdition, Rock Island, 1931

  Road to Perdition, Road to Perdition

  Jarhead, Unsick Most Ricky-Tick

  Jarhead, Dead Anyway

  Revolutionary Road, The Bright Young Man

  Revolutionary Road, Golden People

  Revolutionary Road, Revolutionary Road (End Title)

  Skyfall, Komodo Dragon

  Skyfall, Quartermaster

  Skyfall, Tennyson

  Skyfall, She’s Mine

  Spectre, Westminster Bridge

  Spectre, The Pale King

  Spectre, Madeleine

  If you ever need convincing of the power of film music, listen to the opening bars of ‘The Breaking of the Fellowship’ from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), the first in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and you’ll be transported to Middle-earth faster than you can say J. R. R. Tolkien. The music and films brought that fantasy world to life so perfectly that composer Howard Shore and director Peter Jackson cemented their place in cinematic history with their combined eye and ear for detail, and they returned to the Shire the following decade with The Hobbit trilogy. Previously both had achieved some success with individual projects, such as Jackson’s horror-comedy Braindead and psychological drama Heavenly Creatures, and Shore’s extensive work with fellow Canadian director David Cronenberg on unsettling films including The Fly and Crash, but together they proved themselves masters of Tolkien’s realm.

  The composer’s and director’s greatest joint achievement lies in the very scale of the project. The original book, The Fellowship of the Ring, which introduced the world to this classic tale of good and evil, loyalty and friendship, and survival and courage, was published in 1954 and took Tolkien fourteen years to write. Peter Jackson and his co-writers and producers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens spent three years working on the screenplays for the trilogy, and the filming in Jackson’s native New Zealand was a hugely ambitious project, building a fantasy landscape. They filmed the three movies back to back and, at around fourteen months, it is the longest shoot in history. Jackson described it as a major endeavour during the post-production of The Fellowship of the Ring, ‘just in terms of the physical endurance, mental endurance, the stress and sheer size and scope of it. From that point of view it has been like a siege, a marathon – it has been gruelling.’

  And then there’s the score, which comes to an immense ten hours for the complete box sets. Add in Shore’s work for The Hobbit trilogy and we’re in the region of twenty-one hours of music, with well over a hundred leitmotifs for characters, cultures, objects and events. Considering the large scale required for every aspect of the production (costumes and prop-wise, we’re talking 48,000 pieces of armour, around 19,000 costumes and 1,800 pairs of hobbit feet for the lead actors, and that’s just for starters), it is hardly surprising that this was not simply a collaboration between director and composer, but rather an involved group dynamic with, according to Jackson, ‘a wonderful family-like feeling’: ‘There was no room for anyone to be a prima donna or to be difficult, because we were all together for so long.’

  The Lord of the Rings series, aided by the Harry Potter films, reignited a love for the fantasy genre and brought about a renewed interest in Tolkien’s books. Unadjusted for inflation, it is the highest-grossing film trilogy worldwide of all time, ahead of the original Star Wars and The Godfather trilogies. It is the fifth-highest-grossing film franchise of all time – a feat that’s all the more impressive considering that the James Bond series, which is in fourth place, encompasses twenty-six movies but this covers only seven (Jackson’s six films are grouped together with the 1978 animation). As well as striking box-office gold, the critical praise and awards rolled in and The Lord of the Rings won seventeen out of thirty Academy Award nominations – a record for any trilogy – with The Hobbit films later bringing the total number of nominations to thirty-seven. The third and final Lord of the Rings film, The Return of the King, won an unprecedented eleven Oscars from eleven nominations, including Best Original Score for Howard Shore, who had received the same award for The Fellowship of the Ring. All three fi
lms won the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album, and Shore’s music for the trilogy has been the highest-placed film score in the Classic FM Hall of Fame, the annual poll to discover listeners’ musical tastes, every year since 2003. The music is ageless, somehow inseparable from the films yet resoundingly powerful in its own right.

  The young Peter Jackson was fascinated with Ray Harryhausen films and comedies such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus but it was the original King Kong that inspired him to pursue a career as a movie director. He loved photography, and when he was eight, a family friend gave him a Super 8 camera. A fan of ‘Hammer Horrors’, one of Jackson’s first homemade films, Curse of the Gravewalker, was about vampires, though he never completed it. (Decades later, when he cast Christopher Lee in The Lord of the Rings, he was tempted to see if the actor could provide a cameo as Dracula so that he could finally finish the job.)

  When Jackson left school and was working at the local Wellington newspaper, he saved up to buy filming equipment and was particularly interested in special-effects processes and techniques. His first film, ‘splatstick’ horror-comedy Bad Taste (1987), might not seem an obvious debut for one of the most bankable directors in the world, but Jackson’s career continued with projects that mixed comedy and horror to differing degrees, such as the aforementioned Braindead, known as Dead Alive in North America, and Meet the Feebles (1989). The director built a reputation for himself with Heavenly Creatures (1994), for which he and his partner Fran Walsh received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, and after that success he was able to make his first big-budget Hollywood film, The Frighteners (1996), on which Robert Zemeckis served as executive producer. He collaborated with New Zealand-born composer Peter Dasent on three of his early films, but after acquiring the film rights to Tolkien’s book and embarking on a project far greater than anything he’d worked on before, he was looking for an experienced composer.