Fighting Fire with Fire

Composer Edward Shearmur discusses his REIGN OF FIRE score on the occasion of the film's DVD release

By Randall D. Larson     November 26, 2002

Composer Edward Shearmur hadn't tackled dragons before scoring this year's fire-breathing hit REIGN OF FIRE (released last week on DVD), but he had tackled just about everything else. One of the first assignments the British-born composer was handed as he was making a name for himself in Hollywood was 1995's TALES FROM THE CRYPT feature, DEMON KNIGHT. He dealt with sympathetic deformities in Peter Medak's 1977 TV-adaptation of THE HUNCHBACK, and complicated romances in WINGS OF THE DOVE. He accompanied the relentless passion of hybrid aliens in SPECIES II, rejoining Medak. He faced kickboxing babes on CHARLIE'S ANGELS, walked the runway with MISS CONGENIALITY, and cross-examined the mental patient who called himself K-PAX. He met THE GOVERNESS in 1998, composed a BLUE STREAK in 1999, and more recently has dwelt with THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and endured THE SWEETEST THING. Flying, inferno-throated dragons taking over a post-apocalyptic world was just the next logical step, right?

Shearmur's music [IMG3R]for REIGN OF FIRE seethes with a discordant yet rhythmic tonal ambience. It is lavish and heavily layered, constructed of unusual instrumentation and oblique rhythms. He eschews melody, for the most part, in favor of an omnipresent and often oppressive sound mass that characterizes the oversized menace of the dragons even when they are not present on screen, just as it favors the subterranean, cavernous hideaways of the band of Englishmen seeking refuge from them. Low, doom sounding brass tonalities and resolute, beaten percussion riffs echo out their dismal existence until the overconfident prowess of the American military renegades comes to their aid, heralding a touch of martial heroics in the music. Throughout, the music fumes and roils languidly like the eager firebreath and twitching tails of gigantic dragons preparing to prowl the night skies.

It took Shearmur some doing to come up with a musical approach both he and director Rob Bowman felt was appropriate to the film. "Through a fairly long process of writing, and just seeing how much music the film would take, we came to this very abstract approach, musically," says Shearmur. "It's a style that is certainly familiar to anybody who is interested in modern film music we weren't doing anything that nobody's done before, but I think probably the nature of our orchestra and the way we used it was slightly different from the way people normally go about things."

Bowman had made it clear to Shearmur that he hated violins, of all things, so the score had to minimize the number of violins, and make up the sound with the lower basses. Shearmur's orchestra performed the score with only sixteen (instead of the usual 32) violins; supplanting the missing players with sixteen violas, sixteen cellos, and ten double basses, lending a low-end weight to the music that was emphasized by the brass.

"We were essentially using each color of the orchestra independently of anybody else," Shearmur says. "The strings did one thing, the brass did something completely different, and the winds were like the pinch hitters that'd just come in to make weird noises and then would leave again. There was very little musical interaction between the colors of the orchestra, and it meant that you could make something that was very, very in-your-face and hard hitting."

The score [IMG4L]also relies on an uncommon use of electronics paired with these standard instruments to achieve an unusual sonic texture. While REIGN OF FIRE is a futuristic film, it captures an ancient, mythic quality, a technology-less future with a rugged post-apocalyptic feel. Shearmur used a lot of electronics to create the feeling of a separate time, yet made sure they didn't sound techno or spacey. The electronics supplanted some of the orchestral material in order to give the music a subtle "not right" sound, removing a degree of familiarity to the palette that worked well in achieving an atypical sound design for the score. "Because the film was futuristic, we were able to use a lot of electronics without sounding anachronistic," says Shearmur. "Rather than write a big movement for the orchestra, we'd let electronics do that. Or if there was going to be an atmospheric pad, we'd take out the strings and have something that was kind of a warped representation of that same idea."

Shearmur also used a lot of modified musique concrete, or "found sound" sound effects used musically to give the music an unusual, futuristic/primitive quality. "Rather than use percussion in a traditional way in the orchestra, we'd record sheets that we'd scrape and clank, or we'd drop chains into buckets or use door slams and squeaks," says Shearmur. "There's one cue where I have the squeal of train brakes. We sampled those sounds and then we used them to help spice up what could be fairly familiar sounding musical gestures."

Shearmur's score derives not so much from the interweaving of thematic ideas, although a few minor themes do recur, but instead from the layering of musical atmospheres to create an oppressive and often claustrophobic mood suitable to the visuals they accompany. "There's a little thematic material that we used to identify the children and sense of hope that they embodied," says Shearmur. "There's also a small 5-note motif that refers to the dragon, or the impending doom that the dragon represents. Rob was very keen that whenever there wasn't a dragon on screen, you felt the menace."

Beyond the

brooding menace of the dragons and the atmospheres of a pallid future, Shearmur also depicted the action of the heroes, both the British resistance fighters and the American military renegades, in broad, musical terms. "As soon as the Americans turn up in their tanks, for that whole central section of the film, the score does take on a very militaristic feeling," says Shearmur, "or at least until they've all been blown to bits! The opportunity when they first came in to write a big, military, deus ex machina entrance was fantastic! That's one of my favorite cues in the film, just because to write big-boned, big-muscled music like that, especially after a film like K-PAX, is a great opportunity."

As with any film assignment that is heavily-dependent upon CGI visual effects, Shearmur had to imagine what a lot of the film would look like, since the effects were not all completed while he was writing the score, taking his inspiration from notes and drawings instead of the finished look of the dragons or the film's landscapes. "That was the first time I'd ever encountered having to imagine what's going to be on the screen instead of having all the information right there," he says. "It's tricky. The first time I saw the film with all the completed effects was when they premiered it. It makes a big difference, because there's so much information that is lost and that you could otherwise key into, but it seems to be the nature of filmmaking these days. All of those elements come together at the very last minute, so half the time you're just closing your eyes and hoping for the best."

With REIGN OF FIRE completed, Shearmur is going to eschew dragons for a while, or at least the legendary kind. His next score is CHARLIE'S ANGELS 2. Dragons of a different sort, I suppose.

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