Saturday Night at the Movies

by Jenny Nelson

The idea for Back to the Future came about when Gale was looking through his father’s high-school yearbook and wondered whether he would have been friends with his teenage dad. In the original film, Marty McFly travels back to 1955 to ensure his parents fall in love – fending off his mother’s romantic advances in the process – and in Back to the Future Part II he and Doc head to a futuristic 2015 to save his children from going to prison. Picking up where the first film left off, it builds on intertwining timelines that the third film (shot at the same time as Part II and released the year after it, in 1990) expands on, bringing the action to 1885 before returning to 1985. By weaving the timelines together, the trilogy becomes a cohesive whole, unlike many sequels that can feel tacked on to the original.

  Silvestri’s main theme for Back to the Future is everything you’d expect and hope for: big, dramatic and exciting, it stands squarely in the hit movie-music canon alongside John Williams hits such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman. In 2016, Silvestri explained how it evolved out of a visit he made to the set when they were filming the ‘Enchantment Under the Sea’ high-school dance, a key scene from the 1955 part of the movie in which George and Lorraine, later to be Marty’s parents, share their first kiss: ‘They were shooting it in a church in Los Angeles, and it was probably the busiest day of the entire shoot because of the sheer number of extras and people involved . . . We didn’t have much time to talk about the film but [Zemeckis] turned to me at one point and he raised his hands over his head, and he said, “Al, it’s gotta be big!”’

  Silvestri continued, ‘As I started to work through the film, I [began] to understand what he was communicating. I think a large part of that was, he really didn’t have any big shots in the film, he didn’t have big vistas, shots of the desert and mountain ranges that went for miles and miles. Everything was small, image-wise, in the film: it was the town square, it was the McFly house, and yet the story was a story of heroism and great friendship and great love.’

  Silvestri set to work on a theme that would embody such grand ideals. Perhaps surprisingly, as he explains, what he came up with could also be described as ‘just as a tune. It literally is as you would write a song – it’s got a verse, it’s got a release and kind of a pay-off-type chorus.’ In all its glory, played by over a hundred musicians, it went down wonderfully well with Zemeckis. Audiences similarly took the main theme to their hearts and elements were subsequently incorporated into the sequels, such as the Back to the Future III end titles. Silvestri went into composing the scores for the two follow-up films knowing he had received the seal of approval with his music for the original film but also aware of the weight of audience expectation when it came to reusing and reworking now-familiar motifs.

  He equates the concept of a sequel to having old friends – as well as enemies, which as he points out are an equally important asset in a sequel to a successful film. Along with those existing characters, in which we are already invested, there are other aspects of the film that feel familiar to us, such as the way it is shot or, of course, the music; these became part of the ‘paint box’, as he put it, that he and Zemeckis and other members of the crew worked with to create the next film.

  ‘Because the sequels will move into new narrative areas, new relationships and all kinds of things, you’re going to need some more paints than just the ones that were developed in the original film, but you keep all of the ones that were in the original there alongside them, to be used whenever it’s appropriate . . . We knew that this Back to the Future theme resonated with our audience, and that was an amazing thing to have going into Back to the Future Part II and Part III . . . It equates to a kind of freedom because you already have things there that you know will work and will pay off, which you didn’t know when you began the first film.’

  Between the release of the original Back to the Future film and its sequels, Zemeckis embarked on another adventurous project, this time merging animation with live action in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Released in 1988, at the time it was the most expensive animated film ever to be green-lit, and as with so many movies, the end result could have been very different if the studio’s first choices had accepted the offer. Apparently Disney asked Monty Python star Terry Gilliam to direct but he declined, while Harrison Ford, Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy had all been considered for the role of Eddie Valiant, which eventually went to Bob Hoskins.

  It’s hard now to think of anyone else fulfilling the part of the jaded private detective as well as Hoskins, and it’s equally tough to imagine any director other than Robert Zemeckis at the helm of this technically challenging project. He created a visual treat that is, in itself, a celebration of film-making, with knowing nods to and heartfelt nostalgia about Hollywood’s Golden Age. Silvestri composed an evocative score to fit the 1940s setting, with the piano swirls of ‘Eddie’s Theme’ instantly conjuring up images of smoky jazz clubs. He clearly relished the task of creating a musical homage to the era: ‘Valiant & Valiant’ opens with a slower, melancholic version of the refrain from ‘Eddie’s Theme’ before perking up halfway through with the help of a double bass.

  The versatile composer sounds as if he’s having just as much fun in Death Becomes Her (1992), from the knowing strings at the start of the ‘Main Title’ that entice the audience with horror tropes before welcoming in light orchestral tones, setting the scene for the black comedy ahead. The end credits offer an extended version of this theme, reminiscent both of the suspense of Bernard Herrmann and the playfulness of Danny Elfman, with an atmosphere that is gleeful, tense and magical.

  The story of two feuding women who drink a potion for eternal youth was another opportunity for Zemeckis to experiment with his passion for visual trickery, and it’s hard to forget the image of Meryl Streep with her head twisted all the way around, embracing Bruce Willis who’s holding a candlestick with a hand that just so happens to go through a hole in Goldie Hawn’s stomach. Death Becomes Her was Zemeckis’ first leap into the world of computer imagery and he sees it as the next step in a career that has embraced complexity: ‘Every movie I’ve done so far is more complicated than the one previous. I don’t know if that’s a good trend or not.’ The film was another commercial success and it won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, but it was his next directorial project that would cement his reputation as a world-class storyteller.

  The tale of a slow but warm-hearted man who indirectly or unintentionally affects various historical events, and his enduring love for his childhood friend Jenny, Forrest Gump (1994) picked up six Oscars in total, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Tom Hanks, and Best Director. Zemeckis puts the achievement down to teamwork and a shared goal, stating, ‘I was able to do good things in Forrest Gump because everybody was always ready and prepared and willing to work.’ The film earned Silvestri his first nomination for Best Original Score – his only nod in that category to date – though his music is far less overt than in Zemeckis’ earlier films. Pop and rock hits from the era by the likes of Elvis Presley, the Doors and Lynyrd Skynyrd soundtrack many key moments within the film, but it is Silvestri’s music that underpins the more emotional elements in the story. Crucially for him it was a lesson in restraint, and a significant example of an occasion when he disagreed with a director.

  Robert Zemeckis and Alan Silvestri during a scoring session for A Christmas Carol, 2009.

  ‘There was a moment in Forrest Gump where Jenny leaves the house early in the morning and doesn’t say goodbye to Forrest. She just leaves him there. Bob shows this cut of Forrest looking into her bedroom from the door with this look on this face as though he knows something has happened here, and then there’s this shot of Forrest sitting in the window seat . . . [with a] long camera move. And when we sat and spotted the film, discussed the film, I didn’t want to play any music for this. I remember Bob turned to me and said, “Really? You’re not hearing anything here, Al?” – which is the way he always refers to it . . . This is the kind of sequence that I would say could make a
director very nervous about being this exposed, with no music, and there couldn’t be any effects, so it was basically a silent camera move. I said, “Bob, if you want me to play something, of course, I will always do that, but if you’re asking me, then no, I think it shouldn’t have music.”’

  For Zemeckis, it was an example of how well their relationship worked that Silvestri could say that to him: ‘That is like gold – because you don’t have any objectivity any more.’ Zemeckis acknowledges what must be a common experience: becoming too close to the material you’re working on and consequently feeling unable to tell for sure whether a particular scene is working – at which point it is tempting to want to ‘shore it up with music’. But sometimes the composer’s job is to advocate no music as the better option, as it ultimately proved in this case.

  They came to a compromise by allowing the audience to decide at an early test screening of a ‘work-in-progress’ version of the film. According to Silvestri, Zemeckis reserved the right to come back to him to ask for music if the audience didn’t respond favourably to the scene. At the end of a rapt viewing, he turned to Silvestri and said, ‘OK, no music’, and that was that.

  Weighing up both sides of the creative argument is important for Silvestri. Ultimately he sees his responsibility as speaking up if he feels strongly about something but accepting that a final decision is the director’s prerogative. ‘I don’t always fall on my sword, I feel I owe it to him to bring my sensibility and my impressions and all the rest of it, and if for whatever reason he feels there’s a different approach, then I will always do what he asks because he is the captain, and he does have a perspective on this film that truly no one else in the entire creative process has, and that has to be respected.’

  From the mid 1990s and into the next decade, both composer and director enjoyed playing with different genres, such as Silvestri’s Herrmannesque score for Zemeckis’ unashamedly Hitchcockian thriller What Lies Beneath (2000). This was shot back-to-back with Cast Away (2001), or to be precise, it was made in between: the crew shot the first part of Cast Away, made What Lies Beneath to give Tom Hanks time to lose weight and grow a beard, then returned to the tale of the man stranded on an island. Apparently Zemeckis had flagged up this interesting dual production process to Silvestri in 1998, asking him to set aside the year 2000 to score both films, to build suspense with one project and create emotional isolation with the other. Previously, Silvestri had made a worthy contribution to the sci-fi movie-music canon with Contact (1997), Zemeckis’ project directly after Forrest Gump, in which he soundtracked the story of scientists trying to communicate with extraterrestrial life with real delicacy. The gentle ‘I Believe Her’ is a great example of his versatility and the score is one of his finest, subtle and nuanced, and the perfect accompaniment to the film’s wider themes of humanity and discovery.

  Unsurprisingly for a director who has said, ‘I just hope my body of work is always one of stretching. I don’t ever want to go back over any familiar territory’, Zemeckis has continued to experiment with new visual effects and technologies, in particular performance-capture techniques, a type of animation created from the recorded motions of the actors, as used in Beowulf (2007), A Christmas Carol (2009) and, most significantly, The Polar Express (2004), which was listed in the Guinness World Book of Records as the first all-digital capture film. It also earned Silvestri his second Oscar nomination for ‘Believe’, co-written with Glen Ballard and in the running for Best Original Song, although a more memorable musical moment for many is the energetic ‘Hot Chocolate’ sung by regular Zemeckis collaborator Tom Hanks as the conductor of the magical train.

  Considering the variety of films the director and composer had worked on by the mid 2000s, it’s worth taking a moment to explore how they approach each project, and whether they have found a set pattern that they adhere to in order to achieve the most effective results.

  Silvestri describes their creative process as follows: ‘If there is something to read, he’ll send it to me, and we’ll have an initial phone chat, maybe a dinner, talking about the movie . . . I pretty much never see anything while they’re shooting, I don’t look at dailies, I don’t see a scene here or there. And then when he first sees the assembly of the film, I sit with him and watch the film as a film, even though he for the most part hasn’t started to work on it, editorial-wise, himself. And that’s an amazing event because I get to see the raw material of the film.

  ‘And then he goes off and does his director’s cut, and when he’s got through that process for the first time, we go through the traditional spotting session where we start with the first frame of the film, and we stop and go all the way through . . . We discuss every scene in detail, where music will begin, where it will end, where there should be music, where there shouldn’t be, what we think the tone should be . . . And then I go off and I start to write, and then, as things appear, I send them to him and he gives me his notes, and we start to creatively work, piece of music by piece of music, all the way through the film.’

  Over the decades, the two have developed an intuitive way of working, as Zemeckis explained in 2000: ‘You develop a shorthand. You know how the person is thinking or feeling. I’m sure Al can sense how I feel about a cue when I say the first word or by the look on my face.’

  These early discussions provide an invaluable steer to the composer, but not necessarily because they offer clarity. Silvestri has previously described Zemeckis as not specific in his musical directions and explains that he, the composer, finds such an open approach powerful: ‘He’s very interested in having someone bring their perspective to him, and so he’s very open about my impressions of his film. He invites all of us who work with him to bring something to him. That being said, he very clearly understands his film and knows, certainly as you go through the process, what it needs . . . So when I say he’s not specific it’s only in the most initial phase where he lets the film speak for itself to see what his creative team will find and what they will bring in response to that.’

  In the 2010s, Zemeckis–Silvestri films have inclined towards more character-driven stories with Flight (2012), the story of a pilot who crashlands a plane and is hailed a hero until it is revealed he was intoxicated during the flight; The Walk (2015), a warm-hearted biographical drama about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974; and Allied (2016). The Second World War romantic thriller received mixed reviews, overshadowed in the press by news of star Brad Pitt’s divorce and the surrounding rumours, but the music shows yet another dimension to the composer. The soundtrack features eight Silvestri cues along with a selection of existing swing and jazz numbers and he manages to create an atmosphere of portent in the muted ‘Main Title’, alongside tender moments such as ‘It’s a Girl’.

  Their sixteenth collaboration serves as a reminder that despite decades of working together, it’s not all plain sailing. Creative differences do, and did, arise. On this occasion, Silvestri watched raw film footage with Zemeckis before the director had started cutting, and the composer decided to get started on a piece of music to fit a long sequence at the end that he felt was the heart of the film. After working on it for a few weeks, he sent a presentation over to Zemeckis. It was a difficult time for Silvestri, whose father died while he was working on this composition, and Zemeckis was aware of his creative partner’s loss, as Silvestri explained: ‘The phone rang on a Saturday morning, and Bob started to talk about my dad. We probably talked for forty-five minutes about our fathers – he had lost his father years ago – and at the end he said, “Look, I got this material you sent me, we don’t have to talk about the movie now.” And I said, “It’s OK, this is what I’ve been doing, we should talk about it.” He said, “OK, but I just want to let you know, it isn’t going to be pretty. I think you’re 180 degrees off on this.” And then he proceeded to tell me why.’

  Zemeckis values being able to speak frankly to the composer, and credits Silvestri for being receptive to feedback and
not being too precious about his craft: ‘What he taught me is that there’s no mystery in it, it’s definitely workable, and I should speak my mind. Most composers put up this wall of mystery around what it is they do. I wouldn’t ever suggest anything musical to Al, but if I don’t think something’s working for the scene the way I had envisioned it, I will express that and he’ll either listen, disagree, talk me out of it or go ahead and change it.’

  In turn, Silvestri is receptive to feedback because he knows the director is being honest and constructive: ‘The thing that’s fantastic about Bob is that this is done with the utmost respect and love, but it is very clear. More than anything, he wants to give me what I need in terms of direction to do my work . . . Now this was a case where we hadn’t spotted the movie, we hadn’t sat and had discussions about it, I just went off on my own, but clearly he thought that the direction I had taken was 180 degrees off. And then he was eloquent in how he described why he felt that – and he was right!’

  Over the decades, Silvestri and Zemeckis have collaborated on a vast array of projects and worked through any creative differences they encountered on the way, but more crucially they have become good friends. The director has referred to the composer as his ‘creative soulmate’ and Silvestri compares their partnership to a marriage, noting that just as he and his wife don’t always see eye to eye, in both relationships ‘there is this underlying sense of a common goal and a common way of seeing that goal’. He notes the importance of compatibility but is generous about the director’s role ultimately being paramount: ‘Bob does not write music but needs music as part of his art, and we have somehow found our way to together accomplish his needs in his films and it’s kind of a miracle!’

  Zemeckis clearly recognises the value in having a strong team surrounding him, and has forged other long-term collaborations in his crew, such as editor Arthur Schmidt who worked on every film from Back to the Future to Cast Away, winning Oscars for Best Film Editing for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump, or cinematographer Dean Cundey who was involved in six movies from Romancing the Stone to Death Becomes Her, a key player in paving the director’s early success in the 1980s and early 1990s. All members of the crew need to understand how their contributions fit into the film, which then becomes more than the sum of its parts. Zemeckis values Silvestri for his ability to compose within that conception: ‘He doesn’t just write songs that call attention to themselves. His music always supports the images and the performances, it’s that extra layer, and his approach to the music is always that we’re making a movie here.’