Whiplash Composer Justin Hurwitz Settles the Score
Director Damien Chazelle and composer Justin Hurwitz met at Harvard playing in the same band. By sophomore year they were roommates, and soon enough the two were taking time off from school to create what they thought was just a student film, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. “The idea for the film was to do a sixteen millimeter black and white vérité style movie, but juxtaposed with this big,
From Stage to Screen: Adapting Jersey Boys
Jersey Boys is the story of the rise and fall of The Four Seasons, the “clean-cut,” all-American rock band that actually had two ex-cons and enough mob connections to satisfy a Scorsese film. Yet in the early 1960s the band sold themselves as the (Jersey) boys next door, and created some deathless tunes in the process.
Jersey Boys began it’s life, of course, as the Tony Award-winning juggernaut that became the 13th longest-running show in Broadway history when it played its 3,487th performance this past April 9th.
From The Dark Knight Rises to Divergent: Composer Junkie XL
Composer Tom Holkenborg goes by the name Junkie XL. He is a musician, producer, engineer and composer with a tinkerer's compulsion to experiment. His collaboration with the legendary Hans Zimmer on The Dark Knight Rises led Zimmer to recommend him for the recently released blockbuster Divergent. Holkenborg began his music career at the ripe old age of four, when he started playing piano at the behest of his mother,
Missing 87-Year old John Ford Film Upstream Found, Screened With Live Score
This past Monday, composer Michael Mortilla and Nicole Garcia brought a slew of instruments (a piano, violin, kazoo, handbell, even a bag filled with aluminum cans) and performed a live score accompanying a screening of the 1927 John Ford film Upstream. “My basic role is to provide a soundtrack for a film that never had a soundtrack,” Mortilla says. He and Garcia performed their Upstream score in front of a live audience in the screening room at the Motion Picture of Association’s headquarters on Eye Street in Washington D.C.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s Composer Henry Jackman on Scoring a Superhero
The versatile Henry Jackman follows his scores for Seth Rogan's apocalyptic comedy End of the World and the animated NASCAR-racing snail film Turbo with a full-on superhero, Marvel's Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He took time for an interview to talk about the superhero who finds himself something of a Rip Van Winkle, dealing with a world more than 60 years after he was frozen in WWII.
How do you approach a score for a superhero?
SXSW 2014: Home‘s Ronen Landa, the Horror Film Composer Scared of Horror
Composer Ronen Landa first came to SXSW in 2005. He was here with a documentary called The Dreams of Sparrows, a remarkable film shot in Iraq at the outset of the war. First time director Haydar Daffar collaborated with a team of Iraqi directors to capture life in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. Landa had worked with the film’s producer, Aaron Raskin, who brought him in to compose.
Looking Back on Some of our Favorite Stories of 2013
When we launched The Credits a little more than a year ago, we aimed to shed a light on the many talented filmmakers who often don’t get much press for their work. While we’ve occasionally spoken to folks who need no introduction (John Waters, for example), most of the filmmakers we’ve focused on have a little less name recognition but a huge amount of talent. We interviewed a lot of people, so the below roundup is really just a taste—there were far too many people to mention in a single post.
Multi-Instrumentalist Mark Orton on Composing Alexander Payne’s Nebraska
Mark Orton is a man of many talents. He can play on any type of guitar, keyboard and percussion instrument. He’s a trained sound engineer and composer. He’s provided scores for feature films, documentaries, experimental radio, video/art installations, concert halls, modern dance, theater and, wait for it—the circus. He’s a co-founder of Tin Hat, a composer/improviser collective that is internationally renown.
Orton’s path to becoming the composer for Alexander Payne’s critically acclaimed Nebraska is an unusual one,
Walt Disney a Movie Character for 1st Time in Delightful Saving Mr. Banks
In the tradition of the behind-the-scenes Hollywood story comes Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks. The crowd-pleaser, set for a December 20 release, employs the studio’s time-tested, multi-layered storytelling approach to the tale of how Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) managed in 1961 to convince prickly Australian author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) to release the rights to her successful books about a nanny named Mary Poppins.
It’s a departure for the stalwart studio,
Composer Jozef van Wissem’s Bloody Good Score for Only Lovers Left Alive
Jozef van Wissem’s score for Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is one of the reasons you walk out of that film in a kind of satiated trance. From the very beginning of the film to the last scene, music is a huge component of the story, and Wissem’s a huge reason it all works so well. Tom Hiddleston’s character, Adam, is a musician as well as a vampire.
Soundtrack Heaven: Inside Llewyn Davis, Her & More
Part of what we try to do on this site is introduce you to all the people who make movies. By that we mean all the people, as each film you see is a final product that was assembled by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of talented people.
Looked at a certain way, there's a Russian nesting doll quality to the medium—the director and the stars are the largest doll in the set,
Breaking Down Rom-Com Master Richard Curtis’s About Time
Richard Curtis wrote three of the most beloved romantic comedies of the mid 90s and early 2000s—in a remarkable string, he penned Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones Diary (which he co-wrote with Helen Fielding and Andrew Davies). His directorial debut in 2003, Love Actually, which he also wrote, was an international success and helped create cross-pond love for fantastic actors like Bill Nighy, Chiwetel Ejiofor (now poised for an Oscar nomination for his starring role in 12 Years a Slave),
Comic-Con 2013: A Superhero’s Secret Weapon? Music
Iron Man’s got the Mark 42 armored suit and Wolverine has the claws, but both of these bad boys have something else to help them wow fans time and time again—great music.
Comic-Con started off, if not with a bang, with something better — a grand, sweeping, orchestral superhero movie score. The men who put music behind Marvel characters like Iron Man, Kick-Ass, Wolverine, and The Avengers spoke to the fans about the challenges of finding a musical equivalent to the grand sweep of characters and stunts that are themselves bigger than life.
An Insider Discussion on Film Scoring
Remembering the director is boss is key to working in the movie industry, according to music professionals.
“You have to yield to the director. You can only have one vision,” long-time movie music editor Dan Carlin told The Credits after a panel discussion on film scoring hosted by the MPAA in Washington, D.C. “That’s what unites a crew that’s putting together a movie.”
Carlin, whose four decades of movie credits as a music editor include The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Bruce Almighty (2003),
Chatting with Super Composer Hans Zimmer About Man of Steel
According to a 2007 British survey Hans Zimmer is considered “one of the world’s 100 living geniuses.” He shares space on the list with the likes of Stephen Hawking, Prince and Philip Glass. Zimmer’s own list of achievements includes an Academy Award, several Golden Globes, Grammys, Lifetime Achievement Awards, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and dozens of film credits that attest to his significant contribution to many of the industry’s finest films.
Breaking Open the Piano: Making Weird Music With Atli Örvarsson
Atli Örvarsson grew up in the town of Akureyri, with a population of a little less than 18,000 people. Although a small town, Akureyri boasts a vibrant musical culture. It was the perfect incubator for young talent like Örvarsson, who was exposed to classical music, jazz, and rock and roll from a young age.
Örvarsson’s credits include The Pirates of the Caribbean series, the recent Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,
Scoring Giants: Mark Isham on Composing the Jackie Robinson Biopic 42
Let’s take a quick glance at some of the giants composer Mark Isham has worked with; Robert Redford, Brian De Palma, Jodi Foster, Robert Altman, and Sydney Lumet. In the music realm, his list includes; Bruce Springsteen, Willie Neslon, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, and Van Morrison. Yet there is one legend Isham has worked for (in a very different sense) that loomed even larger when he joined director Brian Helgeland’s team to take on Warner Bros.’
House of Sound: Composer Jeff Beal Talks David Fincher, Scoring Netflix’s Breakout Hit, and Jazz
When composer Jeff Beal heard that director David Fincher was involved in an intriguing television project with Netflix, he wanted in. That project was House of Cards, an original series starring Kevin Spacey as House Majority Whip Frank Underwood, a vengeful political animal with scores to settle. Fincher asked Beal to submit some musical sketches, and what Beal created ended up becoming the basis for the show’s theme,
Triple Threat: Chatting With Film/TV/Video Game Composer Christopher Lennertz of NBC’s Revolution
Christopher Lennertz’s composing career has settled nicely across three mediums, making him one of the busiest musicians in Hollywood. His most recent film successes includes scoring a string star-studded comedies like Identity Thief, Think Like a Man and Horrible Bosses. For scoring TV, his credits include NBC’s new series Revolution, about a family struggling to reunite in a totally powerless American landscape–and we mean that literally,
Composer John Debney Answers The Call, and Goes Really Dark
Incorporating ‘found sound’ into his score for director Brad Anderson’s The Call, Oscar nominated composer John Debney wasn’t afraid to get weird. From slapping the tops of pianos to creating a bizarre engine revving sound for the film’s deranged lunatic, he took risks. The result is a truly unsettling soundscape–from the same man who wrote the score for Elf, no less.
The Call,
