Minions & Monsters: The Hollywood Dream Turns Dark | Collider BTS

[00:00:00]You make very precise decisions based on my very first time seeing the film. No one else gets to do this, but I get to watch the film with their music.

[00:00:10]I'm a rather thematic composer. Every piece of music in the film has a thematic connection [music] for the Minions, and there's lots of different ways to do that. And then there's a theme for James and Henry. [music] It's kind of like a love thing. It's a friendship thing. Family, you know, you can sort of say that. It's like finding somebody that that appreciates you being different. And then there's a theme for the Minions when they create chaos. And from that theme I also derived a theme for Irene. And then there's a theme for James' dream, which [music] became the Hollywood theme, which also became the Monsters theme as well. So, there was a very deliberate attempt to [music] say that your dream can become an obsession, which could come back and hurt you and maybe destroy the galaxy if you're not careful. So, even though it was a very deliberately optimistic theme, it was a theme that I could twist into a darkness that can happen with big ideas.

[00:01:02]The one that was really tricky was the opening titles because [music] it kind of had to be this proto score that was the score we were about to have, but because it was proto cinema, all of those images with the Minions inserted in them are really from the 19th century. They're not from the 20th century at all. So, all of those very, very early shots, the question is we couldn't have a big orchestra playing.

[00:01:24]What did we [music] have? And could we use the tunes? So, yes, I'm kind of previewing all the tunes there. They're kind of all in there in some way or versions of them, but I just kind of said to myself, "Okay, well, I'm allowed 120 musicians for the score. For this bit, because it's before cinema, maybe only have six." So, it's just a very few players, which is always harder. It's much easier to hide behind big orchestras and large choirs and batteries of percussion. But, when you kind of come down to it you have to make things work with just a few players, it's you have to concentrate harder, I think.

[00:01:56]There was a one scene you know, all of that was very, very complete. It It really was not touched from when I saw it with no music. But what happens is that you're the composer, you come along and you see the film and you know, oh, I know music is definitely going to be starting here. And it almost tried not to have a panic attack at how many times and how many things I knew I had to do and shift before we finally arrived meeting Max, the director, when we discovered it was a film shoot. That's a hell of a sequence and I've come across sequences like that before, but early on often you see them and you know that they're going to get cut down. This one wasn't going to get cut down. It was exactly as it was. I watched [music] that with that feeling of oh, this is going to be tough. But it was constructed in a way that visually, storytelling-wise, you know, there were clear changes and it just had to keep changing. So you had to keep it interesting. And I kind of backed [music] into that one by doing the bit in the town first with the train. So once the train hits the Hollywood Boulevard or wherever it's at, >> [music] >> and once it starts going along there, I did that piece first when I was in Paris because I wanted to try that out. I thought that could be funny. So once I had that, then I went backwards and started again. [music] And then how do you do Keystone Cops? How do you then do the plane after that? How do you do the bad guy? How do you make the sound of a Western, but not just be completely sort of cliche? So I kind of took two cliches and slammed them together. So you have Aaron Copland, Elmer Bernstein going at [music] it, but you also have Morricone trumpet and Italian sort of slammed into it as well.

[00:03:25]Everything's in this score that I've ever heard. I've been listening to music for 60 years now. You hear all this music, it goes in. The question is, how does it come out again? And you want it to come out and be mixed and make a gumbo of something else. When people say I have a style, that's all it is. It's just my style is everything I've ever heard, but mixed accidentally or deliberately in certain ratios.

[00:03:48]There was nothing modern at all in it.

[00:03:50]The only thing that could be described as modern is a theremin, which is kind of I think it was invented in the '20s anyway, but became famous in the '50s for kind of sci-fi films. So, when we had a sci-fi character thought, and there's a lot of references to The Day the Earth Stood Still, and that's a character that has that kind of electronic vibe around it. But, no, there's nothing original other than the sheer willfulness of hitting stuff loudly and proudly in a way that just is not done anymore. And using oversized orchestra, although it was funny, some of the bits we had a very large orchestra. We had six trombones and sort of nine horns, five trumpets, lots of percussion. But, all is not uncommon to that type of orchestration. However, we had a large string section because often you need a big string section to do some of these huge things for monsters, etc. But, there were a few cues where we were definitely doing impressions of black and white stuff from the '20s, '30s, '40s, where one of the things that made it sound wrong, we discovered, was having a large string section. So, even though the brass was big, the percussion was big, we found that if we reduced the sound of the string section by at least half, suddenly it sounded more authentic to that era, simply because in those days those orchestras were studio orchestras, so they did 9:00 to 5:03.

[00:05:04]They weren't session musicians as we think of them now. They basically had a job where they played every day, Monday to Friday, maybe even Monday to Saturday, from 10:00 to 1:00, 2:00 to 5:00, and that was the gig. So, to keep an orchestra on staff like that, you're not going to have 60 strings to begin with. You're only going to have 30 strings.

[00:05:21]I had no idea about the film, knew nothing about the film kind of till the last minute. I got the film pretty much finished, which is also great, cuz often when you're working on films and they keep shifting on you, it's kind of difficult. But, this one very hardly moved at all, really, by the time I was on. So, I got the film, watched it once with no music, and then I went to Paris and spent some time [music] with Pierre and Greg, the editor. They took my studio with me, and then I could try ideas on Pierre and write >> [music] >> and see what came after our discussions rather than coming back immediately to LA and then having to do it over Zoom, which we did as well, but that first initial blush of I really wanted to check that he really meant what he was saying because people can say things with music. They can say, "Yes, I want it really aggressively old-fashioned and >> [music] >> and I want, you know, full level of stupid and heavy pathos and and overrought [clears throat] and over the top." You know, they could say that, but when they really hear it, uh they don't really mean it. So, I needed to check that. So, I got to sort of stay in Paris for just a little bit, try a few of those things out. And that first time I pressed play on the sequencer, which is we do everything on the sequencer at this [music] point when I'm writing, you press play and they have a pretty good idea of what you're going to do with the orchestra.

[00:06:36]It was either, "Oh, I've made a terrible mistake." or, "Yes, this is good." And [music] um I was prepared for both.

[00:06:43]That's why I went cuz you really want to see people in real life when they get very uncomfortable. You can learn a lot from that. It's very hard to do just over a few screens. Sometimes it's it's difficult to judge whether people are being polite or or whether they're uh exactly what is worrying them. And and if you have your director there in the room and you're pressing different buttons and you're turning things off and turning things on, it's like you can tell if there's a problem by how they're sitting, not just what they're saying. And you can maybe find the solutions, which is I [music] turn the brass down or I turn the winds down or something. I change something about it. And then you learn an awful lot. So, it's an instant within [music] 10 minutes I can tell if I'm going in the right direction. And I was there and I pressed play and Pierre just seemed to like it all. And so, I assumed that he really meant it. And so, [music] I went for it. And then subsequent meetings, which were over Zoom like this, when I got back to LA for the rest of it, he was sitting in a little theater in Paris, just watching whatever I was sending. Um and we have a camera on him as well whole time. So, I would but there's a 4-second delay, 3-second delay. So, I would I'd be very watch I'd be watching for the things that I was hoping going to make him laugh and see if they made him laugh and that kind of stuff.

[00:08:01]>> Whatever he did, he made everything funnier, full of stakes, and more emotional.

[00:08:09]>> That kind of switch and energy is difficult. And if [music] you look back at the history of this early period of Hollywood, the composers who were scoring [music] that stuff were very adept and fluid in the way they shifted.

[00:08:21]And that was part of writing as they did in those days for operas and there a lot of music written for plays and ballets as well. It was storytelling music. It [music] was much more literal storytelling than normal symphonic writing. So, I think there was a kind of a language that had been developed in Hollywood that I was definitely referencing and and that fluidity from one thing to the other. But you had to make sure that the material could feel heartfelt when it shifted that [music] way. And then it's all about making sure you're harmonically in the right places and shifting orchestrations elegantly. I learned to do it years ago doing song arrangements [music] for animated films where you have to flow in and out of songs and that came in extremely useful in Wicked and doing that. So, I kind of just use that same technique [music] but just quicker.

[00:09:05]And just looking very carefully at whose perspective a scene is with which minion. Is it with James or is it with Gumi? Is Gumi lying to us? Do we want to underpin that with the music or can we just stay still [music] with James and Henry this idea that the ultimate movies is exciting, wonderful, creative thing.

[00:09:22]So, you make very precise decisions [music] based on obviously conversations with the director but also based on my very first time seeing the film. No one else gets to do this but I get to watch the film without music. And my impression of the film is also it's all I have no music. I do kind of have music. It's just running in my head and I'm not quite sure what it is yet, but I definitely get stuff appearing as I watch the film with with nothing other than my own kind of imagination.

[00:09:47]Sometimes obviously nothing comes, but I get to follow the story as the audience did without any influence and the influence of the music I can then more carefully judge that as to what [music] we need or don't need.

[00:10:01]It was me having a bath in all the stuff I'd always heard earlier in my life and some I'd absorbed without knowing and some I had great fondness for. So, I knew everything kind of between about 1910 and 1955 [music] was open to me. So, I just kind of played in there. That seemed to fit the style of the film and certainly seemed to fit what Pierre was asking for, but every time I went either for just things that made me laugh or things that were just fun or things that were so over dramatic they made me laugh as well. So, it's a little bit of a circle of stuff where the only stuff that wouldn't work was things that were in the middle didn't seem to work with this film.