"Two New from Mychael Danna" Article by Doug Adams for Film Score Monthly October, 2001

"It's a bit of a blur." That's Mychael Danna's succinct summation of 2001. The comment is made with equal amounts of weariness and enthusiasm - and well it should be. The Toronto-based composer has been involved in no less than six major projects this year, racking up over seventy-thousand kilometers of travel history in the process. February and March were spent in Mumbai assembling the score for Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, a cross-cultural blend of classical Indian music, Western orchestral scoring, and electronic elements. The film won the Golden Lion award at this year's Venice Film Festival and will be released in the U.S. around February 2002. Gita Govinda, an original ballet score based on the thousand-year-old Indian erotic poem, was performed by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and choreographer Nina Menon. Danna has already begun discussing musical ideas with director Atom Egoyan for Ararat, a tale examining the Armenian genocide in the early Twentieth Century. He's also currently in talks to score Ang Lee's The Incredible Hulk.

Doug Adams: I loved the way that you handled the ensemble in Hearts in Atlantis. Could you give us a little shopping list of what you had in the orchestra?

Mychael Danna: It was a pretty small group of instruments, although some of the families were rather large within the group. It was written for single woodwinds, strings and harp. The string section was pretty big, but we kept them muzzled, or muted much of the time. Scott [Hicks] wanted to have that wide spread presence across the stereo field, and there is something you can really feel when there are fifty or sixty string players sitting in front of you. Even if they're playing one note very softly there's just a feeling of harnessed and subdued power. That's something that is a theme of the film, so it was a sound that seemed to work very well. We unleashed it in a couple of small instances, but generally it was just a feeling of wide power and that well that you could draw from at any point.

Then there were other instruments: There was some glass harmonica. I used to pronounce it "harmonica," but I've learned now that it's actually "armonica."

DA: I've heard both ways too, I never knew which one was correct. It was originally made by Ben Franklin, wasn't it?

MD: That's right. Yeah, he called it the "armonica."

DA: He must have had lofty aspirations that day.

MD: Or maybe he had a Cockney accent!

DA: [Laughs] Maybe that's possible.

MD: Anyway, there's a small, small amount of that. And then there's piano, which has a pretty important role. But the overall style is very subtle and restrained. I would define it as American transcendental.

DA: I noticed that you treated the orchestral colors very carefully. They shift and fade into one another rather than abruptly changing. It seemed like you broke down traditional divisions of melody, counter-melody and some kind of harmonic support. Weights were constantly shifting between parts.

MD: That's absolutely right. That was consciously done. I used solo woodwinds, for that reason. There are the individual colors, but you can blur them into each other. You get a distinct color change, but one that can be done as a cross-fade, as it were, so you end up with a gradual shift into another color. If you have doubled mass woodwinds, those colors are already less distinct so you're less conscious of those kinds of shifts. We wanted it to be very smooth and subtle, but to play the colors almost in a thematic way.

DA: Now you've also got some electric guitar effects in there, correct?

MD: That's right. That's the last element.

DA: Was that treated similarly where it was less a featured part than just another color the score could move towards?

MD: Exactly. I'd be surprised if anyone would be able to say that's a guitar [just from listening]. It's very, very manipulated and fed back into itself. It's basically unrecognizable as anything. It's just supposed to be a morphing kind of sound. One of the images that Scott used in the film is glass - light refracting and reflecting through glass, and shifting and morphing. That's something that I tried to do in the audio field as well. The glass harmonica itself is directly derivative of that. The guitar effects are also an audio equivalent of light shifting and being split up and refracted and bent and all that.

DA: That brings me to my next question, which regards your "in" to the film. I loved the fact that your score didn't go directly towards any supernatural elements, and it didn't go directly towards any nostalgia type of elements. It hit upon all of them in a glancing way, but it was more about larger issues and ideas. In a way, it seemed like a lot of the music emanated from Anthony Hopkins' character and used him as a point of reference or point of entrance into the world of the film. The music has this affable melancholy feel to it, which is very much in line with his portrayal. Were you thinking somewhat along these lines?

MD: Absolutely. Although in a lot of ways Bobby is the central character of film, the central character for the scoring process was definitely Hopkins' character, Ted. I did this for all the reasons you mentioned, and because his character has all these elements, but is very ambiguous. There's something that's left uncertain. He's really just a collection of impressions and unarticulated ambiences. That was the world I wanted the music to inhabit. We do touch on small town nostalgia, and we touch on a deeper more mystical side to his character, and also a sense of his power, but in a very simple, subtle and often ambiguous way.

DA: I thought this worked for the film because, really, the story is about people having their lives changed after coming into contact with this man. It was nice to have this as the predominant musical voice because everything is coming back to the relationships or the interactions with this character.

MD: Absolutely. You've hit right on it. He does color these people's lives from that point on. His presence really affects the coloring of the ambience of a scene, of the music, or of the film. So that's exactly right.

DA: How difficult is that? Is it more difficult to score a character than something more plot-based?

MD: You know, I think it's different every time. It's not very often that I would score a character. I'm more used to scoring narratives, or at least narratives of my or the music's making. The idea of scoring a character's ambience and his internal world is a little different. Yeah, it was actually kind of difficult. Scott and I spent a lot of time fine-tuning how far we were going to go with all these ideas. We started out very, very subtle and then we tried a version where things were much more articulated. And finally we ended up with what I feel is a pretty good balance between those things. There are moments where the ideas blossom forth and are really clear, but generally it's just a waft in the air - the presence of Ted.

DA: Where on earth do you start with something like that? Where do you sit down and say, "This musical device will have a connection to his portrayal of this character,"?

MD: That's the hardest thing to talk about. In all films, that's a very important characteristic of music: that sonic, ambient world that you go to. Music has that ability to tickle those parts of the memory that we all seem to carry around with us in our emotions - and in such an often indefinable way, in the same way that it's impossible to describe a scent.

In this film that was really the challenge - to find that tone and do it in a simple, simple, simple way. Scott called himself the Note Miser. He wanted the music to say what we needed it to say with the fewest possible notes. That was the goal that he had in mind right from the beginning.

DA: A lot of it seemed to be dealing in degrees of subtlety. At its edges, the music is constantly threatening to head off into a more extroverted direction, only to be drawn back to its simpler roots. You'll introduce a little bit of chromatic writing here, but quickly pull back to something that's more diatonic. Or you'll introduce the glass harmonica in what appears to be a modern color effect, but we realize that it's really being treated as an extension of the violin section, and we're back to string scoring. I loved the fact that it would hint at these further developments but always dissolve back to home base.

MD: Yeah, again that comes back to our process. In some cases, it did originally go further, and then we felt that that wasn't the right thing to do. In fact there were some changes to the picture after the first recording, so we ended up going back to London and recording some further material. Interestingly, we recorded some pieces that were more blossomed fruitions of these ideas that were touched on. There was a theme, the nostalgic theme, and I did versions where it's much more developed in a standard melodic way. We ended up not using them, because they were just saying too much. It seemed that, in this film, just hinting at things was the right approach.

After applying musical touches to the timeless themes of Hearts in Atlantis, Danna turned his attention to a considerably more modern incarnation of filmic entertainment: a six-minute car chase internet film. But while this may at first seem several rungs down the creative ladder from the existential musings of Hearts, Danna's work actually graces one of a series of clever films executive produced for bmwfilms.com by David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club). Each film features BMW cars, actor Clive Owens, and a brand name director such as John Frankenheimer, Guy Ritchie, or, in the case of Chosen, Ang Lee. Chosen re-teams Danna and Lee (the two previously collaborated on The Ice Storm and Ride With the Devil) for a thrilling ballet mÈcanique in which a mystical Tibetan boy is relentlessly pursued. Danna's score plays up the elegance of motion in a hybrid Baroque / minimalist score gilded with a few pseudo-Tibetan touches. If the above sounds like an odd combination of elements, it is. It's also one of the most unique and fresh pieces of action scoring to come out this year. Chosen is still available at bmwfilms.com, and a DVD collection of all of the films is due in the near future.

Mychael Danna: I did Ang Lee's BMW film, Chosen, which seemed like it would be just a short film, but was actually a major amount of work. I was trying to replace Bach in the temp score. It was rather cruel.

Doug Adams: That's a tough act to follow.

MD: Basically he's the closest thing to God, so, yeah, it's a very humbling experience. I felt pretty humbled by the end of it.

DA: Years ago, when you and I talked about The Ice Storm, you said you very rarely see the types of films that you end up scoring, that often you'll end up attending action films, and that you would someday like to approach an action score. So is this finally the Mychael Danna version of the action score?

MD: [Laughs] Well, it's probably what someone would imagine a Mychael Danna-type of action score to be. I've become a parody of myself in this case! This concept was Ang's - the idea of Baroque music, the idea of the control and the fleetness of foot. Baroque music is just effortlessly emotional and it's got all kind of layers and levels but everything works together beautifully. It's an obvious metaphor for the lovely BMW product. Ang also wanted a Far Eastern character brought out for the young boy, so he wanted Tibetan music there. But, in fact, we ended up using the Baroque orchestra to generate those sounds in a very interesting way with the French Horns - which are, of course, valve-less, natural horns. The whole experience was extremely difficult and extremely humbling, for the reasons I mentioned to you before.

DA: For the Bach comparisons?

MD: Yeah. The film had been temped with Bach Double Violin Concerto. And if there's anything that makes a composer feel inadequate it's trying, in ten days, to write like Bach, who is, of all composers of all times, just unmatchable and in his own very perfect universe. So, that was a rather daunting task. Plus, I decided I wanted to use a Baroque orchestra. I contacted this local [group], the Tafelmusik Orchestra here in Toronto, which is an orchestra I've been watching for the last twenty years. I just love their playing. They're a fantastic orchestra. But I had a few days to learn to write for their instruments. [The Tafelmusik orchestra uses period Baroque instruments. - DA] I didn't realize how different these instruments were from the modern-day Nineteenth Century / Twentieth Century orchestral great grandchildren. The difference between a natural horn and a valve horn... they're two different instruments. That's easy to say, but they really are. They're utterly different in every way. It's best to not even think of them as horns. I actually got together with one of the horn players. It's a fantastic instrument, it's so beautiful and so interesting. And the oboes sound completely different.

Of course they're all much, much more limited in every way. But, if you write for those instruments, they're incredibly wonderful instruments. With the pitch difference and everything else, it was incredibly difficult to wrap my head around that in a few short days and pull off Eighteenth Century counterpoint meeting minimalism. Those Baroque instruments can pull every emotion out of me so easily, effortlessly, in a way that the modern instruments don't do. I don't really know why.

DA: It's a bizarre analogy, but it reminds me of listening to a bunch of stereo recordings then going so something that's mono. It doesn't quite have that resonance to it, but there's a punch that speaks to you in such a simple and direct way. It can really have quite an impact. I feel that way about some of the older instruments. They may not have some of that refinement, but they can really connect with you so directly.

MD: Yeah, you're right. Or black and white movies, or something like that. They are less refined and less civilized, but in some ways they, because of that, are just more human. They've got a more direct line to your heart somehow. I remember this Baroque violinist showing me the way that you're supposed to bow longer phrases on a Baroque violin. It was described in some Eighteenth Century textbook that you should imagine the strings attached directly to the heart, you're elastically pulling it and letting it go.

DA: You mentioned that in Chosen you used some of the Baroque instruments to imitate the Tibetan sounds. I didn't realize this.

MD: Yes, in the very beginning, those were the natural horns and recorder. The idea was that it was to touch on that world a little bit.

DA: That score really connected with me the first time I heard it. I thought it was a wonderful use of this style of music.

MD: Well, thanks. To be honest, if someone asked me what do I listen to when I go home, the answer is Baroque music. It's very, very close to my heart. It's the "musak" I play in my house. They've got this station that comes from my cable that only plays Baroque music and that's what I have on all the time. I guess it's deep inside me, definitely, that kind of music. It was a real labor of love. But I have to say, like all Ang projects, it was brutal. Absolutely brutal.

DA: You said you had, what, ten days to do it?

MD: Yeah, it was pretty quick. I don't know exactly how many days, but it was pretty quick. By the time I got the final cut there were just a few days until Ang was up here. We recorded at CBC, and that session, of course, went all night. Literally. Ang had a nine a.m. flight and we worked right up until he got in the cab. Typical Lee schedule! [Laughs]

DA: Did you have the concept in place when he arrived in town, or was it just completely started from scratch when he got there?

MD: No, he had temped the score and we talked about what I would be doing. Then I think he came up about three days before. I'd written it and, in a mock up state, had played it for him. There were a few changes here and there - tweaks and so on. In fact, there's a long and a short version. I'm not sure if you're aware of that.

DA: No, I'm not.

MD: The one on the internet is the edited version. It's at least two minutes shorter. They couldn't fit the whole thing, time-wise. I believe the long one is nine minutes long. I definitely hope you can hear that. I believe there's a DVD coming out.

DA: That's what I heard, that it would be coming out at some point.

MD: Well, that's the thing to try and get. I haven't got one myself, so I guess they're not out yet, but that will have the long version on it.

I would love to write for that orchestra again someday. This was a really wonderful experience, but I feel like this was my little exercise, now I'm actually ready to do it.

DA: For Chosen 2.

MD: Yeah, if there's ever an action film where they're looking for Tibetan / Baroque music I'm definitely the guy for that project. Because there's not very many other people who've got that experience under their belt!

I am very happy with how it turned out, but I feel like the door of potential is just open a crack. While I was working with them I had all these other ideas that I would love to have done. If this were a feature, it would really be fun. But, I'm just going to store that it the back of my mind and someday I will definitely use that orchestra again and go even further with it. They are really an incredible group of musicians.

DA: You have to convince Ang to let you work on the next Crouching Tiger movie.

MD: Well, I got a call from him a few days ago about his next film which is The Hulk. 2003 is the release date. But, I doubt we'll be using a Baroque orchestra!

DA: [Laughs] I don't know, that'd be kind of cool, wouldn't it?

MD: Well, I would think so, but...

Doug Adams and Mychael Danna previously spoke about the scores to The Ice Storm, The Sweet Hereafter, and 8mm. Doug Adams can be reached at DAdams1127@aol.com