James Horner's TED Talk on composing film scores

In my line of work it's kind of a curious backwater search for

film

s because I just want to give you a kind of context, unlike other disciplines in the arts, my field is one where you know you say, "well you're doing." writing music for a

film

, but it's such a unique medium that it's Omo, it almost goes against the creative process, unlike painting, for example, or even writing music, where you don't write for a film, but songs, but almost any other form of art. you create or can create a whole series of paintings using that analogy for a moment where each painting may be a small progression but it is all part of your consciousness, it is part of how you look at the world and there is no sense of ownership when for example , you receive a commission to make a painting, a painter paints for someone, a Monet, for example, you look, you go to an art gallery and there are many Monets on display, some of them have been commissioned, some of them are private. collections, unlike that world, the film world is very proprietary when I score a film, I'm basically nothing more than a fancy rental pencil.

I don't own the music when I'm done, it belongs to the film company and the same when I'm done even if I come up with something amazing that I might want to revisit like I'm a painter and say God I'm going to do another one right away in the world of film scoring, you can't do that. because you don't own the creation and therefore every timeout has to be a completely clean canvas, so to speak, and if I come up with an interesting idea in movie a and I want to explore it, it's very difficult to do so and take it to the movie B. without someone saying hey, that belongs to us, you can't do that, so my world is very, very closed creatively compared to other disciplines, dance, painting, almost anything else I can think of to write, It's just amazing and with the music, at least from my perspective, everyone. feel like they recognize the music, they recognize themes, so everyone feels like they always recognize someone's style or it doesn't sound like something else and that's always part of the film world and also in my writing for films you work for clients because, after of everything, I'm "Writing something can be surprising to me and can be an absolutely wonderful reaction to the movie I'm watching, but you're working for someone and you're hired by someone who may or may not share the same tastes and often does." .

And sometimes you find yourself in situations where you think you've created, like I said, something lovely and the person you're working for says yes, but can you make it a little cuter or can you make it a little happier or can you make it a little bit happier? ? a little bit and you always have to keep in mind that no matter what you do, you are really working for someone else and someone else's tastes and the whole art of film composition for me has become a gentle manipulation of not just an audience but that because that is my job, but also a gentle manipulation of the employer, the director, in my case, to accept ideas that he had never heard before and accept them as his in the face of an image that he has lived with for quite some time and if it is a writer like Well, as a director, it's something he's dreamed of since day one, he wrote a script, he went out and shot the movie and put the whole movie together and then he looks at me and theoretically hires me and I watch the movie and he says. trusting me to react as a viewer, so to speak, as someone who has never been involved in the process of watching the film and give my version of what I see and very often the directors will say, well, that's not what I see. had in mind at that moment.

I shot everything with this in mind and I shot this and I shot that and I wanted this to happen, but when a viewer who hasn't been involved in the creation of the film looks at it, they have a completely different perspective and it's not like a composer of movies, you can't look at a movie from the director's point of view, you have to look at it completely objectively because that's the only way I can react, so I'm giving you a brief and very brief overview of what the world of cinema is like, try

composing

for people who may or may not understand what music does and what film music does and trying to make it all work together is a very complicated process and there is a lot of massaging that goes into this, as you can imagine, and Nowadays, with expenses much higher, movies are much more expensive than they used to be, the stakes are much higher, and the nervousness factor on the part of employees is much higher. it affects the audience in a certain way, that's all a very interesting way to be creative in front of a medium that doesn't really belong to you at all and you just react to it.