Scoring Your Film


Last week I walked out of the theater having just watched Chris Nolan’s latest flick, “Inception”, which was an entertaining movie to be sure; a visual buffet, a thinking man’s blockbuster, and the most entertaining thing I’ve seen all summer...  But the thing that struck me most, which added that extra layer of boner-inducing awesomeness that kept my mind on the film days after i watched it, was the bombastic score.  I just couldn’t get enough of those loud brass aural assaults! 




For someone so ingrained in cinematography and the visual side of film, it’s odd to think that, more often than not, what I find most affects my perception of the events on the screen is the music.




If I’ve always stated that the script is for the actors, and subtext for the camera, then it must be the emotional core that’s left for the composer.  So my question is, with such a meaty chunk of the film experience balanced on score, why do so many aspiring directors overlook this irrefutably integral piece of the pie?
 


I’m talking about you, Joe Filmdude.  Most of you get excited about telling a story, you go all out to track down the newest hot shit camera and a DP that will make you look like you know what you’re doing, and it just about ends there.  Some of you will go the extra mile and have a little money for post effects, but most shorts out there are either illegally co-opting copy written material, or using a synth score that your brother in-law cooked up in his basement. 




How can you expect to have someone dump a boatload of money in your lap for that first feature film if you haven’t tested your mettle in every aspect of the job?  Oh, you think when you have the budget you’ll just hire a composer and wipe your hands of the thing? 




Score can be so many things, heroic, subtle, transformative... For his entire career Sergio Leone actually wanted to bring score into pre-production, a feat he was never able to accomplish until he did "Once Upon a Time in the West".  His concept was to have Ennio Morricone record all the major themes before filming began, and then play the music for the actors during the takes since they were going to be dubbing the audio in a studio later anyway.   This allowed for precisely timed line delivery and blocking, camera moves that sweep up just as the song crescendos... it was experimental and resulted in a very unique feeling film that is now considered the greatest western epic ever made. 




(for those of you who have never seen it and one day plan to, spoilers contained in the clip below)





In this particular clip, the final duel from Once Upon a Time in the West, you realize that this harmonica score that's been so cool the whole time, that's made Charles Bronson such a badass, it's got an origin that ties the whole thing together and you finally understand his motivation.  Score can be so much more than just music behind the story, it can be the story itself.  



Now this is something that I don’t have a ton of experience with, however what little experience I DO have was with high caliber engineers and composers, which changed the way I think about and prepare this side of my films.




Before you mentally cut me off and tell yourself you just don’t have the budget to do a score, I’d tell you the same thing I tell producers who try to sleight the crew, don’t pay respectable rates, and don’t feel they need to have craft services on set… if you can’t afford the essentials, you can’t afford to make your movie.  Clearly I’m only talking about people who are trying to put a serious foot forward and making an already sizeable investment in production, not those of you who are dabbling in shoestring seat of your pants sort of deals (which are of course a necessary step for all of us).  But many of you out there have managed to cobble together several thousand dollars for your short, maybe to the tune of $8,000.  I suggest, why not hold off a little longer and make it $10-11,000?  Why short change yourself the experience of directing an entire production?  How can you develop a style which will set you apart from everyone else, when you’ve only worked with half the tools in the box?  I assure you working with a proper score composer who knows what he’s doing can be more affordable than you'd think and is truly worth it.




Before co-directing Donut Shop Hero, I thought I knew what it meant to score a film.  I thought we could explain the cues we wanted to our composer and the rest would take care of itself.  Well fancy that, when you’ve never been involved with scoring a movie before, it doesn’t exactly come out like you think it will. 




Scoring our film involved creating ‘themes’ for our central character, the villains, dramatic moments and comedic beats…  How do you know when you need a full on song, and when you just need a drum hit?  How do you know when to lean back and not use a score?  I definitely didn’t want to be one of those guys who just lay down a blanket wall-to-wall score to cover poorly paced writing, acting, and editing.




We knew we wanted dirty 70’s funk, something reminiscent of Lalo Schifrin’s score in Dirty Harry or Curtis Mayfield’s work in Superfly.  Here it wasn’t just style over substance, we wanted the audience to feel at any moment our unlikely security guard hero might stand up and go all Dirty Harry on these cats holding up the donut shop. 




After going back to the drawing board several times, the composer finally brought us a theme for our central character that felt like it had always been there -- written, somehow buried in the script when it was conceived and just now unearthed.  With much excitement, Charles and I then went through and laid out our thoughts on where score was needed based on all the different points mentioned above.  “We should be scared here”, “this moment needs a sharp accent”, or “we need Pete’s theme to come in here, but it should sound ‘off’ because he’s unsure of whether he’s going to stand up to fight”, we even gave timecode points where cues should begin and end.  We thought we knew what we were doing.




What we were brought was a movie score laid out to the exact specifications we’d noted, and boy did it make absolutely no sense.  While some of it worked, several moments now fell flat, some of it just felt unfocused.  What followed was a month of intense tweaking, micro managing, and long, very late nights.  I loved every second of it.







What it boils down to is, like in every other aspect of directing, you must get the practice in if you’re ever to walk into a production office and confidently say you know what you’re doing.  So if you’re already out there putting in the work behind a camera, maybe it’s time you thought about extending that investment into post!


-Nick Harris