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Even though Knowing is a completely different film than all his others, the Proyas trademarks are all there. From strange alien observers being darkly dressed to an amazing spaceship with intricate graphic designs to paradise lost and found, many of the visual concepts found in Knowing can remind you of the classic |
Your company's name is Mystery Clock Cinema, did you give it its name and was it influenced by Dark City? That’s my company and it’s actually been around for quite some time. A Mystery Clock is actually an antique object which usually takes the form of a female figure. Often it can be animals, but it’s usually a female figure who is holding a clock and a pendulum in one hand. It’s very finely balanced so that when you wind it up it just swings and keeps good time hopefully. Visually it’s the closest thing we’ve had to a perpetual motion machine, it’s quite magical the way it works and therefore it’s called a mystery clock because it’s a little bit of a mystery as to how it actually functions. You adapted Knowing for the screen, what music do you listen to when you’re writing and did that influence the score you wanted? That’s a complicated issue because of WGA arbitrations, etc…. I did a substantial amount of rewriting on the project and so did a Boston collaborator of mine, a writer by the name of Stuart Hazeldine, he did it even a great deal more than I did, but we’ve been arbitrated and neither of us will actually get a screen credit for the movie. It’s just the way the cookie crumbles unfortunately even though I deserved one and I think that Stuart certainly deserved one, but it’s just the way the arbitration works. When I was writing I listen to a lot of different stuff, I’d go mad considering the years that it takes me to work on a screenplay listening to the same thing over and over again. I’m going through a bit of an Arcade Fire stage at the moment. Flaming Lips are another band that I was listening to and then also a lot of classical pieces. We used Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 in A major, Op 92 (1811-12) 2nd Movement: Allegretto in the movie. At some point in the prep of the film I was listening to a lot of Beethoven pieces for some odd reason and that one stuck and it became Nic Cage’s anthem. He listens to it in moments of reflection and then it’s played in a fairly pivotal moment at the end of the movie. He actually listened to it while were filming, we played it back on the set for Nic and it certainly struck him. We were looking for a piece that could be his theme and originally I scripted it as a piece of blues music, but his character didn’t strike me as that kind of guy, a jazz or blues guy, he’s a professor and lives very much inside his own head. A classical piece seemed appropriate.
I often think of music certainly tonally as we’re working on a film. Each film is different so it’s really hard to generalize. I remember in
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I try to inject the correct inspiring direction into the process. In this instance I really did it more organically and I enjoyed it so much I think it’s the way we’ll continue working in the future. I really trust Marco’s instincts, so I let him run with the ball and there’s only the occasional cue that I’ll question and he responds very quickly with alternative versions. It must have been interesting hearing his Mock-ups take on a symphonic presence. His Mock-ups are very effective; they generally give you a very good impression of what it’s going to be like. There’s obviously nothing like an orchestra and I sat in with Marco and Buck for most of the orchestral recording sessions, as much as I could. I really enjoy that process. This incredibly lush, beautiful, and haunting score took shape in front of our ears. Nothing could give me the full impression and breadth of what he had planned. Even though we had a lot of time in this process, as always things change, edits change, something changes, and there were still a couple of cues that Marco had to very quickly re-compose, re-arrange, and re-orchestrate. There were a couple of cues that he had no time with. Because we recorded in Sydney we had to fly him out from Los Angeles, there were a couple of cues that he ran out of time to Mock-Up for me, so I hadn’t even heard a Mock-up for them and I had no idea what he was going to do. I really heard them for the first time with the orchestra on the scoring stage; I was blown away! This included the one cue we played with incessantly right to the very end, the final cue in the final scene of the movie called What kind of score did you envision? The movie is made very strongly from Nic’s point of view and the characters are kind of on the same track with him together. They walk down his pathway, they join him on his journey and then there are the antagonists in the movie. Marco created the perfect world; this atmosphere and a mood. There are themes that define relationships more than specific characters. There’s a very strong thematic device for Nic’s character and his son, which is this very strong relationship that runs through the whole movie, it’s a reoccurring theme that comes in again and again and evolves through the movie right up until the final act of the film and it becomes something quite rich at that point. When you say “a mood,” it underscores a normal father and son relationship that opens up the door to a growing tension with the son’s discovery. Yes. Like the rest of my movies it’s a mystery, and it’s a mystery that when it opens up it becomes quite grand in its scale. Pretty much all of my films have the same concept. One of the reasons that Marco and I are so compatible creatively is that he understands those dynamics really well and he’s working wonders at heightening those dynamics, so Knowing is more of a slow burn than anything I’ve done in the past and it really starts off in a somewhat lyrical and very naturalistic style that’s very character driven. It evolves; it takes a step up every now and again and becomes something grander, bigger, and continues to escalate. Marco really heightened that quality in the film and retained the tension extremely well, so he managed to create emotional dynamics, keep the audience on the edge of their seats, and that’s all a thriller director could ever ask for. Marco is the first composer you’ve collaborated with on two films. What fascinates you about him? I’m pretty demanding of what I expect from the music and Marco completely delivers each time, he takes it to a whole other level. There’s something compatible about our styles, the music and the image fits really nicely together. When you discover a collaborator like that you totally embrace it. Up until Marco I haven’t worked with a composer on more than one project, but I have collaborated with quite a few other people in other key area of my films, such as editors and directors of photography. Once I find them I like to hang onto them because it makes a short hand and we can build upon the foundations of what we’ve already created. With Marco it’s a much more intense process because music is such an integral part of filmmaking. The way he affects my films is wonderful to behold. As long as I can keep making movies, as long as they keep letting me do them, I’ll certainly keep working with Marco for sure. |
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What are the key parts in Knowing where the music and film became one, a total fusion of ideas? Is that what a score should do for a film? It is very much the life blood of the film, it’s the pulse of the movie, there’s no question and particularly in my movies I believe strongly that’s the function it should take. In I, Robot I thought it was more a kind of in your face overtly cinematic movie with a little bit more of that technique than Knowing. Knowing is supposed to be a naturalistic, creep up on you story, that evolves into something other than what you think it’s going to start off being, so the music is still the life blood in both films very strongly. In Knowing it’s a little more insidious in the way it functions, it creeps up on you a little bit more, you shouldn’t be as conscious of it. It doesn’t announce itself as much and that’s correct for the movie, which probably results in a more subtle and nuanced score. I’ve listened to I, Robot after we made the film, that’s always a very telling thing, is when you go back and you listen to a score without the movie playing. You’re much more conscious of the style of music. Film music definitely changes the chemistry for each one of my films. All of my movies are sort of doing similar things and the scores are trying to do similar things, but they are doing them in very different ways. Knowing was designed to be a very simple film, it’s not technically, but in terms of its mechanics and emotions, it‘s clear, simple, and refined. I, Robot and |
Marco scored this over in Australia, what is the difference between scoring your picture in Obviously the orchestras here are nowhere near as experienced in terms of performing music for movies as they are in You said, ‘I like to play my music loud in my films.’ That’s definitely the case in The Crow, That’s true and we still play it loud. Marco at times came into the mix and goes, ‘Don’t you think that the music’s a bit loud?’ I’ve never actually heard a composer actually say that, but there you go (laughter). It’s hard sometimes to find that right balance as to where the music should see it and we sometimes go backwards and forwards a little bit. For me, particularly with big action based scenes, loud scenes, to a certain extent you have to decide whether the sound effects or the music are going to win in the mix. I don’t think both can win often in the final mix, you really have to go for one or the other. Again I think it’s a question of experience, the more you do the more experienced you become, but there are certain scenes in Knowing where I just decided that there are no sound effects, it’s all music or there is no music it’s all sound effects. We made that decision early on. Could you give me an example with just music? There’s a sequence at the end of the film where |
What is the critical part of the scoring process that makes the music work with the film? It was really working with the Mock-ups, but we had many conversations as the new scenes would be cut. We’d send versions over to Marco so that while we were editing in What do you love about film music? I like themes in film music. I’m a big fan of big old fashioned scores. There’s just something about that that really stirs my emotions. We don’t get to do a lot of that anymore and some movies don’t warrant it, but the notion of doing a big old fashioned epic with some appropriate theme playing over the landscape is something I’d dearly love to do one day. To me movie music is about heightening the film and taking it to another level. Just like with Marco, that’s why I’m so pleased to work with him because he manages to do that with my films. When the music warrants it, it takes on its own lifeblood as well and that’s a wonderful thing to behold. Knowing is available on DVD and BluRay right now.
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