THE BEAUTIFUL MYSTERY OF MAKING MUSIC FOR FILM AND TV

Alan is a film and TV composer living in Calabasas. His latest project is Netflix Original movie “The Most Hated Woman In America”, starring Academy Award winner Melissa Leo. Find out more about Alan at www.alanlazar.com

Often folks ask me what I do as a film and TV composer, and it’s rather difficult to explain in just a few words. Some have romanticized views of me sitting alone in a dark room, the spark of creativity alight, spewing out beautiful melodies effortlessly. Perhaps there are a couple of moments like that in the whole process of creating music for a movie, but there’s also blood, sweat, tears and various forms of procrastination. What follows is a description of a sort of general process I’ve observed in my work on many films and TV shows, but what is particularly wonderful about my job is that each experience is quite different, and I keep on learning new things even though I’ve been doing it for decades. Having this openness and flexibility in one’s process is probably the key to much work as a creative person or artist. One has to be very careful not to get stuck in one’s way of doing things previously. Making music is not like working on an assembly line in a factory. You constantly need your senses tuned to completely new approaches.

Composing for film or TV can begin very early in the process, at an idea or script stage, or I can get called in quite late into the journey when the directors and the producers are in the final stages of making their movie, that point at which music can either make a good film even better, or can perhaps be held responsible for saving a bad film.

I prefer to get involved very early on because good music, like most creative work, benefits from a long process of “slow cooking”. I see myself as a magpie. Excuse the bad jump from cooking to bird images, but they both are quite apt. Magpies are adept at picking up lots of small shiny treasures, and ferreting them away in their nests. The more time you have to collect treasures in the creative process, the more treasures you’ll have, and the more beautiful your nest will be at the end of the day. That process of collecting little musical treasures, be they fragments of melodies, or rhythmic ideas, or little hints from other pieces of music about the direction one should go in, or something in the story, or the characters, or the plot, which gives one a vague sense that the music needs to fulfil a very particular sort of emotional function, because that’s what music for images is really all about at the end of the day, creating emotion…. Or ideas about instrumentation, be they single instruments or a general type of sound, be it orchestral or electronic, or a certain blend, or a certain genre, or perhaps another genre mixed with another, or a style from a certain region, or country… well, all of these little musical treasures are collected by reading the script, and talking a whole lot to the director, and editor, and sometimes the writer, and sometimes the producer, and letting them just express themselves freely about the film, and what’s important about it to them. It’s important this talking does not have to be in any sort of specifically musical language. A lot of people feel intimidated speaking about music, and I feel a very important part of my job is to get people comfortable talking in whatever language they feel most comfortable in, be that a language of story, or character, or plot, or thematics, perhaps spoken in a very fragmented way, or perhaps in a very structured and academic way. It’s my job to take the speech of my prime collaborators, and try and find ways to turn it into musical language. It’s not their job to do that.

Oh, I’ve forgotten, the most important way to collect musical treasures for me is to sit around on a piano or keyboard and just sort of plunk away, sometimes rather aimlessly. I’ve written a novel or two as well as composing, and the process of writing is similar in one very important way… you have to just sit down and do it, and not avoid doing it, although that can be quite difficult. You might create a whole lot of really bad writing, or bad music, one day, but there’s likely to be a couple of treasures in there that inspire you, and form the basis for something bigger. So you might throw away a whole lot of your initial work, and you can’t be attached to it. But if you avoid doing it for fear of creating something bad, you’ll never get anything, and you’ll be stuck. I still struggle to get myself to the keyboard every day, but once I’m there a sort of relief happens.

Sometimes I’ll get particular inspiration from a certain sound or instrument sample, but in general I think I write the best music on the piano. It’s all about the inner structure of the music then – it’s a melody and chords, and I can orchestrate in a whole lot of different ways later, but if I write it on a piano it’s a whole lot more likely to be sound structurally, rather than dependent on a certain sample to sound good. If it’s a good strong melody on just piano, it’ll hopefully stand the test of time.

A lot of people ask what is that actual process of coming up with a melody. How do you do it? That is the most mysterious part of what I do. I don’t really know. Melodies do just kind of pop into my head at random times, sometimes induced by sitting and tootling away at the piano, but sometimes when I’m driving, or showering, or lying in bed at night. I pretty much constantly have music in my head, whether it’s my own or someone else’s. I live in fear that my head might be empty of melodies one day.

So, I’ve hopefully done my job as a little musical magpie, and then I’ll start stitching all of my little musical treasures together up against the picture, and trying different combinations of them to see what works. This can take weeks. Finally I’ll get to a point where maybe 30 or 45 minutes of the movie is scored, and I feel like I’ve made something good.

Then comes a very critical moment, a scary moment, when I need to share the work with the director or whoever else is the key creative in the process. This can go a number of ways. Sometimes they love what I’ve done. This is more likely with people I’ve worked with before, because I know kind of intuitively what they like or don’t like, and they’re always there skulking around in the back of my head approvingly or disapprovingly while I’m composing.

A lot of the time, directors might have a really hard time listening to the first draft of the score, because often they’ve had some temp music stuck in their cut, which they’ve subconsciously grown very fond of, and I have to wean them off it. I give them an Advil sometimes to cure them of temp love (yes, I really do!) Often a director comes in to listen to the score with a lot of expectations because their whole epic journey of making a movie is coming to an end soon, with the music as the last chance to make it as good as it can be, and there’s a lot resting on it for that director. Finishing a movie is kind of like jumping off a cliff. I directed once and I can tell you that it’s horrible finishing a film, because there’s this huge vacuum where you had a piece of work which meant everything in your life for a couple of years. The music is the last chance to rewrite your movie a final time.

Sometimes they might really hate what I’ve done at that first session. Once or twice I’ve had to throw it all out and start again. That was tough. And scary, but it also galvanized me and the director landed up loving what I finally did.

Mostly, it’s somewhere in between. A sort of average is for a director to like about 60% of my initial draft of that first part of the movie. That gives me a whole lot of clues about what to focus on as I remove and rewrite the bits they didn’t like, and also write the score for the rest of the film. Focusing on what really touches the director in the work I’ve done is the most important clue for the direction of the rest of the score. And I keep on doing that again and again, sometimes through 5 or maybe even 10 sessions with a director until they love every single cue. At that point the score is very distilled, very honed. It has a very particular sound. I’ve figured out the melodic style, the tone, the instrumentation, the rhythmic underpinnings, they deep thematics that reside in the heart of the director, and the music is right there with him or her.

Oh, by the way, this is all with samples up until now. I try not to record anything live until the director really likes the score in sampled form. This is mainly because of the budget constraints operating on most scores today. Particularly if you’re using orchestra, you don’t want to spend a cent until the director is happy with the sampled score, so you can get the biggest orchestra for the longest period of time, because hiring an orchestra is very expensive, and you don’t want to have to rush too much in that session.

So finally there’s a sample draft of the score the director’s happy with. The editor and producers have various amounts of say in this depending on the film. I always try and make everyone happy if I can, but with greatest respect for the auteur, or central creative force, whoever that may be.

Then begins the final stage of the process - recording live musicians, and that can vary from just a few to a full orchestra. This is often one of the most exciting parts of the process, because a good musician can interpret one’s melodies and chords in ways you never expected, and add a whole new emotional dimension to your score. Building relationships with wonderful musicians is a very important part of a film composer’s job, as they can elevate and enhance your work significantly.

One of the most important final touches on a score is the mix of the music. Again, a good mixer can bring another level of emotionality and quality to your work, and building relationships with good mixers is vital.

And then it’s done. One has strong feelings about it. I always worry when I like it too much. Looking back, my best pieces of music have not felt very good to me once they were finished. As a great artist once said, good art is never finished, just abandoned. One only really knows for oneself if one is happy with one’s work a few months later, when one’s mind is clear and fresh and you can sit down and listen to it again. Then you know if you’ve created something good or not. It doesn’t feel good when you realize you could have done better.

The best moment of all is watching the finished film up on a big screen with an audience. When you can feel your score moving people, when you can feel their rapt attention to a good movie, and you know your music is a big part of it, when you feel totally swept away and immersed in the world of a good film, and your music has bonded like steel to the images, it is the best feeling in the world, and makes everything worth it.

Find out more about Alan at www.alanlazar.com