James Horner's TED Talk on composing film scores

in my line of work it's a sort of curious backwater scouring for films because I just want to give you a sort of a tiny bit of a background unlike other disciplines in the arts my field is one where you know you say right you're going to write music for a film but it's a medium that is so proprietary it's Omo it almost works against the creative process unlike painting for instance or even writing music where you're not writing for film you're writing songs but almost any other art form you create or can create a whole series of paintings using that analogy for a moment where it is each painting might be a small progression but it's all part of your consciousness it's part of how you look at the world and it is a there's no feeling of proprietary when you for instance gets a commission to make a painting painter painting for for somebody a Monet for instance you look at you go to an art gallery and there are many Monet's on on display some of them have been commissioned some of them are from private collections unlike that world the film world is very proprietary when I do a film score I am basically nothing more than a fancy pencil for hire I don't own any of the music when I'm done it belongs to the film company and likewise when I'm done even if I come up with something astounding that I may want to revisit as though I was a painter and I said god I'm going to do another one right away in the world of film composition you can't do that because you don't own the creation and therefore each timeout has to be completely clean canvas as it were and if I come up with an interesting idea on film a and want to explore that it's very hard to do that and bring it into film B without somebody saying hey that belongs to us you can't do that so my world is very very closed down creatively compared to other disciplines dance painting almost anything else I can think of writing it's it's just amazing and with music at least from my perspective everybody feels that they recognize music recognize themes so everybody feels they always recognize somebody style or doesn't that thing sound like something else and that's always part of the film world and also in my writing for film you work for clients because after all I'm writing something it may be stunning to me and it may be an absolutely wonderful reaction to the film I'm watching but you're working for somebody and you're hired by somebody who may or may not share the same tastes and frequently doesn't and sometimes you get into situations where you think you've created as I said something lovely and the person you're working for says yeah but can you make it a little cuter or can you make it a little happier or can you make it a little and you always have to sort of keep in mind that no matter what you do you really are working for somebody else and somebody else tastes and the whole art of film composition for me has become one of gentle manipulation not only of an audience but that because that's my job but also gentle gentle manipulation of the employer the director in my case to accept ideas that he's never heard before and accept them as his own against an image that he's lived with for quite a long time and if he's a writer as well as a director it's something that he's dreamed up from day one he's written a script he's gone out and shot the film and he puts the whole film together and then he looks at me and he hires me theoretically and I look at the film and he's trusting me to give a reaction as a bystander as it were as somebody who has never been involved in the process to look at the film and give my version of what I see and very often directors will say well that's not what I had in mind at all I shot it with this in mind and I shot at this and I shot at that and I wanted this to happen but when a bystander who's not been involved in the creation of making the movie looks at it they have a whole different perspective and it is not as a film composer you can't look at a film from the directors point of view you have to look at it completely objectively as though because that's my that's the only way I can react so I give you that only is a brief very brief run out to what it's like in the film world trying to compose for people who may or may not understand what music does what film music does and trying to make the whole thing work together it's a very complicated process and there's a lot of massaging that takes that's involved as you can imagine and nowadays with expenses being much higher films being much much more expensive than they used to be the stakes are that much higher and the nerve nervousness factor on the part of employees is that much higher will it be right will it affect an audience a certain way all of that it's a very interesting sort of way to be creative against a medium that really doesn't belong to you at all and you're just reactive to it

Channel: TED Blog Video

Views: 165,628

Keywords: James Horner, TED, film

Id: xIcwsQgQrEg

Length: 7min 1sec (421 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2015