We would like to know more about your work on United 93 it was a very emotional movie and you choose to do a more subtle score. We would like to know more about it.

John Powell : It took a while to understand that the movie didn’t need any music at all. I was introduced to the work of Paul Greengrass when I heard he was coming to direct Bourne Supremacy. I watched Bloody Sunday a movie about the 1984 riots in Ireland and it doesn’t really have any music at all, it was rare but yet very powerful, he created an extraordinary movie. So we talked right from the beginning of the process of United 93, he was on Watchmen for a while and developed the comic for Paramount and this was the next project he jumped on really quickly. We talked many times about what possible role music would have in a film like united, especially in the style he would be working in. When the movie was shot and I started watching it. He took a while but he felt that we could ease some of the pain… actually the film itself by adding music. Like in Hitchcock’s lifeboat, you know a bunch of guys in a lifeboat, the score was included, Hitchcock was there, the movie was quite large and emotional, the strings were going at it and Hitchcock said : “hang on, hang on, I don’t understand, the guys are on a lifeboat, where exactly is the orchestra?” And someone said : “They are on a third boat next to the one with the camera”
The whole thing was the third wall. Music pulls you out. The main argument right now in Hollywood and in all filmmaking is how much manipulative the music can be. Because it can be incredibly manipulative. So the trick is to do it in such ways that people don’t notice it, or be irritated by it or even enjoy it. So in a film like united I would be very wrong to manipulate people in a way that they didn’t notice. And more than that there was nothing to manipulate since the emotions were already there, what tension was I going to add? So ironically I think we wrote the music to try to bring down some of the tension and separate things out, say to the audience: “this is a movie that’s why there is some music”. To separate things from reality. Paul told me : “just take people’s hand to keep them from being too involved”.

Let’s talk about Mr and Ms Smith, a lot of guns, action and the battle of sex… tell us about your approach…

Doug Liman has one thing in mind when he started making the film. He was trying to show his parents relationship, he will tell you that if you ask him. I think his parents were married a long time and he says that is how it’s like in my house. So I asked do they really have Uzis ? It really was a metaphor for him, he believes that he watched his parents trying to hold a relationship together through a lot of inconstancies. He just made it a little bit grossier and bigger suitable for keeping interest of a 40-year old poised. It started domestic with a domestic love affair movie but he had to hardware it to make them happy. He was not so sure about the tone, how people would take it . One day he called me and said “I’m editing Mr and Ms Smith and there is this extraordinary piece of domestic violence in it, his wife his kicking his wonkas”… If you take treat it with the wrong music running he doesn’t feel very comfortable so we had to let them know that it was at a comic level and more than that at a cartoon level, that’s the best way to describe it. Cartoon was a big influence in this movie. So you have walk on very fine line with a very extensive work to get that tone. Especially, for example, when the two of them are having dinner and he is not sure about eating because he doesn’t know if she is trying to poison him, so I had to tone that making sure that everything was correct. For the love affair I used a lot of latino and flamenco very cliché if you like, little pieces of it, I used that as a very much sure hand to try new passion, as people were going to take that as chemistry between two actors who were in a very public lovin’ affair. So the producers wanted to make sure that the chemistry was there and I had to make it more passionate more hot. I found a flamenco player in L.A. and we played around the idea, that the right inspiration for the movie.



Do you think that a composer gives everything he’s got for a first movie because it could be his chance?

I remember killing myself on Face Off because of that very reason, thinking it’s just too good to be true. I went till the end of it without going to any of the scoring sessions at all except for the very last one I think it was the last cue it was about 6 in the morning and we recorded it at 10 o’clock four hours later. Hollywood must be the only place in the world where you finish a cue at 6 and record it 4 hours later; they have a cue team who stays up every night and all… The first sessions I went in was strings and it was great after that we went to the premier at the Chinese Mann theatre, I haven’t been in Hollywood long and they sent the limo and when we arrived the crowd was on the other side of the road getting’ all excited and not so much anymore once they realised they didn’t know who I was. Nicolas Cage was there, and John Travolta… What you have to know is that the Chinese theatre has the worst sound system in the world, it sound like a bag of nails. I sat there and as the movie goes I slipped under my seat thinking that I would never work again because the sound was like a big mash. I totally miscalculated that. Thank God the next weekend it did well and everyone was happy. I really think that it depends on inconstancies, sometimes it’s about how you feel about what you do, where you are, what you listen too… To really think you’re going to get in.

Do you sometimes go back to your previous work on DVD, like "Tonight I’m going to watch chicken run" ?

No, I can’t. Well sometimes 5 or 6 years later you tune in your TV and see something, you stay on it for a few minutes listening saying mmmh. But then I can’t for long and let it go.

Your son’s here?

Yes he is.

And he is at an age where he could watch Chicken Run, do you encourage him to do so ?

Oh well of course it is nice for him to know what his father does. And especially if it can help him to go to bed when it’s time. He sings United 93 even if he can’t watch it of course. But the tough part is that if he watches them I have to watch them too…

Do you prefer to start early composing for a movie or do you need the finish picture to help you compose ?

There is a lot of reasons to start early and one of the main reason is that people come with a lot of giblish and it’s difficult because we don’t want the temp, we don’t want to use other people music to temp with the one you’ve created when going at home but you risk that you’re going to work 3 or 4 times more than you would have otherwise. The real factor is that any scene that starts at ten minutes long will end up at three so you’re composing music which is going to be ditched. It’s great if you can use your own sound but it’s a long waste sometimes a waste of energy that could have been dealt with by putting temp music. It’s the question to know if people wanted to get involved with temp music and fell in love with it which makes the process of writing anything that could be much more suitable with the movie but now people are really hooked with the temp music… So there is a lot of reasons to and not to, it really depends on the director. If he is directing and writing the music it’s a great idea, John Ottman for example composing and editing or Mike Figgis. I’m sure that there is directors who would love to have a mind melt with composer when they can’t write the music themselves, so they can express their ideas as they go…