Daniel Messé, co-founder of the folk band Hem, talks about his new musical adaptation of the 2001 film Amélie... and about how "the secret of Hem" is that their songs have always been theater songs.

Hem's Daniel Messé on his new project: Amélie, A New Musical

Randy Newman's score for Cars 3 takes him back into the world of talking race cars—and toys and bugs—of Pixar, which he's serenaded since the beginning (with Toy Story in 1995). He resonated with the film's story about aging, infusing the score with some personal "rumination and worry," and director Brian Fee says "nobody could have done this score but Randy."

Randy Newman comes home to Pixar with his score for Cars 3

Gael Garcia BURN-al

Willem Dafoe Without Context

I visited Elfman in his Los Angeles studio as he was preparing to leave for Prague to premiere his new violin concerto. In the interview, you’ll hear how a high-school dropout and self-taught musician became one of Hollywood’s top film composers, why Danny Elfman eats your low opinions of him for breakfast, and why his strange, circuitous path from rock star to film composer has now led to him crashing into the concert hall.

Danny Elfman

Black Panther is Ludwig Göransson’s biggest canvas yet. It’s a giant action-adventure superhero movie, with huge fight scenes and urban car chases. Most of it is set in the fictional African country of Wakanda, which is built with stunning futuristic technology. The score is full of big themes, African musical traditions, and even more hip-hop. If you weren’t aware of Ludwig Göransson before, you sure are now.

Ludwig Göransson

Sandy DeCrescent has been the go-to orchestra contractor in Hollywood for almost 50 years. When John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith or James Horner or Henry Mancini were ready to record their latest film score, they called DeCrescent first. Based on the score’s specific needs, the composer’s preferences, the budget, and a number of other factors, DeCrescent would put together the crack ensembles who performed the now-immortal music for Jaws, Back to the Future, E.T., Schindler’s List, Titanic, and Toy Story—and hundreds and hundreds more.

She’s now 79 and mostly retired, and she only makes exceptions for two clients: John Williams and Randy Newman. She’s seen the whole industry change, for good and for ill. When she started out, she was a lone woman in smoke-filled rooms filled with men—and pretty much right away she determined to fix that. Computers and digital technology radically changed the nature of recording and synchronizing film scores. During her heyday, DeCrescent was doing 55 to 65 scores a year on Los Angeles stages—but during the past two decades, a lot of the work has gone overseas, mainly to London but also to places like Prague and Bratislava, where it’s much cheaper. Still, the ensembles playing your favorite film music are now much more diverse thanks to her. And when John Williams needs an orchestra for his next film, Star Wars Episode VIII... it’ll be Sandy DeCrescent he calls.

Sandy DeCrescent

Peter Weir didn’t even hire a composer for his breakout film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and he only licensed existing music on his follow-up, Gallipoli. But soon after that, he started a beautiful artistic marriage with French composer Maurice Jarre, who provided moody, heavily electronic scores for a string of films, from The Year of Living Dangerously to Witness. Even when he did hire a composer, Weir continued to license existing music tracks all along the way, and he used some of those tracks for critical moments.

This is the 20th anniversary of The Truman Show, which starred Jim Carrey as a man who was cast, as a baby, in the O.G. reality show—where everyone around him is an actor and everything is a lie... and he has absolutely no clue. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time, and even though I’m usually one who complains when a director tracks their movie with existing music rather than hiring a composer to write custom-tailored score, The Truman Show soundtrack is a perfectly-calibrated, masterfully used collage of old and new Philip Glass music (Glass actually has a cameo in the film), a gorgeous Chopin concerto, a heartbreaking piece by the Polish composer Wojciech Kilar, and some original score by Australian composer Burkhard Dallwitz.

Weir and I talked about the power of the 20-year-old film, my own personal history with it, Weir’s unique philosophy about music in films... and so much more.

Peter Weir

Director Damien Chazelle and composer Justin Hurwitz are each only 33-years-old—but they already have three Oscars between them. They were good friends, bandmates, and roommates in college at Harvard, and after a few short projects they came out swinging in 2014 with their first feature collaboration, Whiplash, which starred Miles Teller as a drummer running through the gauntlet in an elite and incredibly intense jazz school.

They kept the jazz theme going, but in a much brighter key, with La La Land—the smash hit technicolor musical starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Hurwitz composed all of the songs (with lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul), including the Oscar-winning “City of Stars.” He also wrote the candy-colored, retro score.

For their third big outing, Chazelle and Hurwitz decided to fling far away from jazz and into outer space. First Man stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, the pioneer pilot who took humanity to the moon, but whom most of us know almost nothing about. Hurwitz got involved at the earliest stages, and it shows. His score, a masterpiece of melody that features unconventional instruments (for modern film music) like solo harp and theremin, is woven deeply into the way the story unfolds. Ryan Gosling used it as inspiration on set, Chazelle edited sequences to it... and the result is one of the very best scores of the year.

Damien Chazelle and Justin Hurwitz on First Man

Think of Pressure - Andrew Lloyd Bowie Mercury

I blab about film music on the radio (NPR, Classical KUSC, KPCC) and in words (Los Angeles Times, Variety). Sometimes I blab about things other than film music. Sometimes.

tgreiving