ELEKTRA-fying Film Music

Christophe Beck's unusually textured score for ELEKTRA is being heard in theaters this week, with a soundtrack album recently released on Varese Sarabande. The score opens with a heartfelt theme that achieves a notable emotive power not unlike the opening feeling of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. This is Elektra's Theme, which, like the titular heroine of the film, will go through a number of permutations and soul-searching challenges until emerging in the end as a fully drawn heroic melody. In the meantime, a variety of percussive and orchestral sonic atmospheres build layered patterns of musical textures, creating a unique sound design for this most recent of super heroes. In contrast with the thick aural grain of the more abstract materials in the score, Elektra's theme becomes the arc of the score that permeates the environmental material and, through the piercing emotion of her theme, continually refers to the heart of the character.

Beck, whose background came out of playing in rock bands during high school and college until he decided to enroll into the Film Scoring program the University of Southern California. Studying under the likes of Jerry Goldsmith at USC redirected Beck's career into film scoring, and he emerged into the world of television music during the late 1990s, reaching his first major success as the composer for BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER beginning with its second season in 1997. He also scored a number of other shows, including F/X THE SERIES, SPY GAME, and THE PRACTICE, but it was Buffy and it's eclectic mixture of orchestral horror music, heartfelt character music, and frequent allusions to alternate rock and pop that really emphasized the role of Music and allowed Beck's star to shine for the first time.

"One of the great things about that show, was that the palette was really wide," Beck said of his experience on BUFFY. "You would go within an episode from a tragic romance to intense action, and then sometimes entire episodes would have different feels."

Over the six [IMG3R]years that Beck was involved in the series, the musical approach to BUFFY gradually became more thematic and more self-assured. " When I first started out, I was just kind of feeling my way around, finding the right voice for the show," said Beck. "About midway through that first season I worked on, I started introducing recurring themes, and that became a big part of the show later on. And also I can tell that my second season BUFFY action material is not quite as sophisticated as what I was doing two years later."

When the spin-off series ANGEL was developed in 1999, Beck was initially brought on board as composer although he did not stay long.

"I worked for the first half a season on ANGEL [1999-2000] and then was able to hand the show off to Robert Kral [1999-2004], a fine composer in his own right, and who took over the show and did the remainder of the episodes."

While the same team produced and filmed the ANGEL episodes, making it feel much like a continuation of the BUFFY process, Beck did note some differences in the musical approach. "The tone of the show was different," he said. "It was a little but more adult. I don't know how much that necessarily is reflected in the music, but it was definitely a little bit darker."

When the ANGEL series first went into development, Beck demo'd his ideas for a series theme, but the producers instead chose the contemporary mysterioso motif written by Cami Elen & Holly Knight and performed by their group Darling Violetta, which had also appeared on BUFFY. "I love the theme now," Beck admits. "I really like what they chose!"

Starting around 2000, Beck made a conscious decision to try and wean his way out of television and into motion picture scoring, realizing his opportunities would be greater on the big screen. "I actually made a very specific decision at one point to just quit all my television shows," he said. "At the time I was doing BUFFY, and I was also doing THE PRACTICE, the legal show on ABC, and I just decided to quite the shows and go for films. I knew that I didn't have the time to really devote to marketing myself as a film composer, because I was busy taking care of two TV shows. And also people's perceptions of me would continue to be as a TV composer. It would give me a little bit of credibility to be able to go into a meeting and say, 'hey, I'm really making a strong move towards film.' Even doing all that it took a year or two before I really started getting films of any note."

Many of Beck's first studio [IMG4L]pictures were comedies, which quickly labeled him as a composer light comedy films like BIG FAT LIAR and light family action films like Jackie Chan's THE TUXEDO. While finding opportunities to provide darker scores for THE SKULLS II and III and the lush romance, UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN (which found his score released on CD by Hollywood Records, his first commercial soundtrack CD), his mainstay in films up until ELEKTRA has been in the realm of youth-oriented comedies, like AMERICAN WEDDING, SAVED!, A CINDERELLA STORY, WITHOUT A PADDLE, and 2004's Americanization of the French comedy series, TAXI.

The contrast in these musical opportunities and his recognition among filmgoers between the eclectic fantasies of BUFFY and the lighter touches in AMERICAN WEDDING have been distinct, especially in Hollywood where filmmakers love to pigeon-hole artists and composers find themselves often scoring the same types of films for years on end. "I would say there's a prejudice toward TV composers in the film world," said Beck. "I think it's true not just for composers but across the entire entertainment industry, and it's really a shame because the actual process of putting music to picture is pretty much the same, whether you're doing it on the small screen or the big screen. So I would say, specifically, doing BUFFY did not lead to me getting ELEKTRA. It's not like the director of ELEKTRA said, 'oh, he did BUFFY, let's hire him!' He was listening to my music and that's what ultimately made the decision for him. But I would say it can sometimes be a help. Sometimes I'm interviewing with young filmmakers who kind of grew up with BUFFY and who are fans of my work there, so it's starting to help me a little bit, but I would say that the prejudice the film world has towards TV is still very much in play."

The musical needs of a dramatic show like BUFFY or ELEKTRA and those of a comedy like CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN or GARFIELD, are notable, according to Beck. "The approach is always the same, and it involves a lot of experimentation and collaboration with the filmmakers," said the composer. "Besides the obvious tonal differences, in a comedy you're often scoring the scene and not necessarily a part of the whole score. Your mandate as a composer in a comedy is, in certain situations, to get as many people in the audience to laugh as much as possible. And that becomes a process of experimentation with different kinds of music to see what feels right, what feels funniest, and a lot of time that takes priority over having a cohesive score over the course of a whole movie. So comedy scores tend to be a little bit more eclectic, they vary more in style, they tend to hit things that happen in the picture a little bit more, and the cues tend to be a little bit shorter. Working in a drama gives you a different set of challenges, where your cues are a little bit longer, you need to have pieces with beginnings, middles, and ends.

The other obvious difference in scoring comedies is the increasingly prevalent use of pop and rock songs scattered about the soundtracks of these films, in which the composer's job becomes more to fill the gaps in between the songs than in crafting a progressive sound design to enhance the film's emotional layers, as in a drama. "A lot of these younger oriented comedies that I do, the soundtrack is a huge marketing tool for the companies that make the movies, so of course it becomes a very big deal. A lot of times there is some cross-pollination in the songs and the score, sometimes my job is to create a cue that functions as an introduction to a song."

Beck came on board ELEKTRA fairly early in the production process,

ELEKTRA.

© 20th Century Fox

Beck suggested an ideas that he'd had for some time that would involved pre-recording an orchestra and that manipulating those recordings with computers to produce a more abstract kind of sound design, which would then be mixed with a new orchestral recording to create the final score.

"That was difficult to describe, so I just told Rob I had this idea, let me just see if I can convince Fox to pony up some money for an orchestral session to do some sampling, and we'll see if he likes it." Bowman approved, and 20^th Century Fox "took a bit of a leap of faith and paid for that first session. I hired a couple of sound designers, and between the three of us, for a week of two, we just made all kinds of crazy sounds out of that material, and I just started incorporating those sounds into more traditional film music cue contexts."

From the initial orchestral session recordings, Beck and sound designers Mark Kilian and Bryan Carrigan created about 20 minutes of sound textures and music beds which were edited and manipulated to create both strange and familiar musical elements. That sound design was added to a later recording of an 83-piece orchestra to establish the film's final sonic texture, which becomes a compelling symbiosis of somewhat abstract musical ambiences and a more traditional, thematic film scoring approach.

"There are a couple of themes in the movie," said Beck. "The Main Theme is for Elektra, which starts out a little bit sad and mysterious and turns a little heroic towards the end of the theme. That's really the theme for Elektra's journey from cold-hearted assassin to a person with a pure heart. Then beyond that we have a couple of bad guy themes and a love theme."

As one of a [IMG5L]plethora of super-hero movies that have emerged lately (and ELEKTRA is in fact a direct spin-off of DAREDEVIL), there is always the concern of looking or sounding too much like the last super-hero movie. "There was a mandate at the outset to not have it sound like a comic book movie," said Beck. "When I first started experimenting with Elektra's Theme it was for the very end of the movie, that was one of the cues I wrote first. Up until that point, the only music that the director had heard was the more esoteric sound designy, orchestral sample stuff. And here I was at the end of the movie and that all felt kind of wrong, and I felt like we needed something just a little more traditional. That was also my first opportunity to write Elektra's theme, and it came out pretty heroic, and I was a little nervous before I showed it to him, but it ended up fitting because it's at the end of the movie. It worked out quite well, and then we were able to refer to that theme throughout the picture before that time."

As the score developed, Beck worked closely with Bowman to make sure he was in agreement with the style of the score as it took shape. "There were weekly meetings where I would play cues for the director, and we would talk about them in detail. Some cues appear in the movie in more or less their first draft, while with other cues I think I was on version eight or nine! That is often the case in a movie there are always a couple of cues that take me a bunch of tries to get, and also there was a constant process of recutting picture going on as well, so that meant a similarly constant process of recutting music to fit picture."

That was, in fact, Beck's toughest challenge in scoring ELEKTRA. Because changes in editing kept on occurring as Beck was both writing and recording his score, changes in the length and transition of cues continued right up to the last possible moment. "I'm told this is not atypical for these kind of movies, especially ones with so many special effects in them," said Beck. "There's constant picture tweaking."

Since completing the recording of ELEKTRA last November, Beck has returned to the world of romantic comedies, scoring THE PERFECT MAN for Mark Rosman and ICE PRINCESS for Tim Fywell. In the Spring Beck will reunite with director Shawn Levy, for whom he scored BIG FAT LIAR, and will compose the music for Levy's prequel to THE PINK PANTHER.