Music of the Apocalypse

Jeff Danna's career as a guitar player was sidetracked by a hand injury suffered when he was 21 years old. Turning to composition, Jeff began finding work scoring small, independent films in Canada. In 1992, he moved to Los Angeles to assume a career in Hollywood, scoring music for television and feature films. His efforts on the 1992 resurrection of KUNG FU on television led to additional assignments, including feature films such as O, THE GREY ZONE, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, and last year's THE GOSPEL OF JOHN. Danna has also collaborated with his brother Mychael Danna (also a notable film composer) on a series of Celtic music recordings, as well as on film scores such as GREEN DRAGON and this year's TV docudrama, THE MATTHEW SHEPARD STORY. While his hand injury precluded his ability to play live performances, Jeff still plays briefly for recording sessions. While hitherto known for his melodic compositions for drama pictures, Danna's latest score is for the sci-fi hyper-action thriller sequel, RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE.

The film was quite a departure from what Danna has done previously, but was a most welcome change for the composer. "This one was definitely a different place that I had gone musically, but that's sort of what makes it challenging and fun," said Danna. "If you're always doing the same thing, it begins to feel and sound stale. I was really enjoying the fact that I was doing something completely different than anything I had done before.

Before beginning composition, Danna immersed himself in horror film [IMG23R]of the past, something he hadn't necessarily studied before, to get himself into the right frame of mind. "I dove into that whole world," he said. "I watched a lot of the old films the classics of the genre to get caught up on the glossary, so to speak. I went back and looked at ALIEN, THE OMEN and things like that, just to see what the history was, and I looked a lot at what was going on right now. I usually try to do that whenever I get a project, so I rented everything I could find from the last five or six years and listened to that, just to make sure I didn't do the exact same thing that someone had just done. I tried to find some interesting way to combine this epic orchestral thing with this quite mean and distorted electronic vibe."

Danna got the assignment due to a prior relationship with one of the producers, Don Carmody, which whom Danna had scored the 1999 Tarantino-like actioner, BOONDOCK SAINTS. That score was something that Carmody felt would work for RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE, so he called the composer in. But Danna was only one of several composers who submitted material for consideration. "It was long interview process," Danna recalled. "There were a lot of guys up for it, so it was very competitive." Danna managed to survive the process and got the assignment, starting work in January 2004, which gave him a relaxed six-month working schedule. "That was the longest schedule I've ever had," Danna said.

Because the film was a sequel, it might have been expected that Danna follow the tone set by composer Marco Beltrami and rocker Marilyn Manson in the first film. But the producers were actually looking for something very different. "One of the first things they said to me was, 'We really liked the Manson/Beltrami thing for the first one, because that was very claustrophobic.' It fit - that whole movie takes inside The Hive, and it was a creepy and claustrophobic sounding score. But they told me, 'Now we're going epic with it. It's city wide, so we're looking for something a lot more epic, but also maintaining the same kind of sort of pulsing, driving electronic thing as well.' So they were looking to combine those two elements together."

Danna's score starts out very ethereally and mysteriously but quickly launches into a dynamic drive, riveted with electric guitars [IMG3L]and percussion that is eventually married to a very powerful, soaring orchestral motif. Ultimately, RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE is a very expansive score. It has a very dominant orchestral sweep while at the same time carrying on this pulsing, heavy-metallic drive from the electronics and the guitars. "The scale is a lot bigger than it was in the first film," Danna said. "The virus is out and it's across Raccoon City, and that was represented by the orchestral element, that increased scope. But it's still RESIDENT EVIL, and it's still this high-tech mutant world and it still needs to have these kind of very hard and digital sounding electronic things happening."

The score shares a little in common with video game music in its driving, action pulse. After all, RESIDENT EVIL started out as a video game and, although the needs of cinema are somewhat different from the kind of music necessary to support ongoing and escalating gameplay, the score does have something in common with its pixilated forebears. "That fact does sort of inform the movies it has to really, if you think about it," said Danna. "It probably lends to the fact that, with these characters in this film, a lot of the electronic and sterile, cold, hard sounds, make sense. They're digital. So it does grow organically out of a video game experience, but then I've also got to account for the emotion, which obviously isn't a big part of the game."

While there are a few recurring themes, Danna's score is more of an ambient, textural composition, centering around the usage of electronically samples acoustic sounds that Danna uses to create the film's unique sound design. "Thematically, there were only a few places where we sat down and said 'ok let's be thematic for this character.' And they were mostly monsters or creatures! Nemesis very clearly has his own theme, the Lickers had their theme, Ashford, the Scientist, has his theme. There are some themes but it's more of an overall film theme or an overall situation theme than it's a 'this character has this and that character has that.' Nemesis, of course, is the exception. He has very much his own sort of ponderous walking theme."

The bulk of the score and the bulk of the work that occupied Danna's six months on the project, had to do with establishing the electronic tonality that would hold the score together. "I made pre-records with done with musicians, well in advance, and then turned them into electronic sounds," Danna said. "Instead of using whatever stock synth patches were in my system, I would create my own electronic sounds." For example, there is a sound that dominates the Nemesis Theme, resonating within the furious pulsing rhythms that comprise the relentless motif. Danna describes it as a "kind of chewed up, nasty sound. I tot together a bunch of people with unusual instruments and had them all make noises that were kind of weird." Danna then sampled those sounds electronically and was able to use those sounds instrumentally as textures within the score. "I was going really electronic with them, using that as the food, if I can use that term, for the electronic sounds," Danna said. "I had a guy come in from Cirque de Soleil who had all this wild stuff, and he had these great big horns and all these bizarre things, some of them got into the movie as they are, but a lot of them were really manipulated. I just found that to be an interesting way to do electronics because you have half-man and half-machine, which is a perfect parallel to this film, where you've got mutants who are half-machine, so to speak, and half-human."

That's typically the way that Danna works, anyway. In RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE, it's especially powerful and effective, since Danna is, in effect, creating the film's environment with his score, and giving the film makers' visualizations and living, breathing, emotional life. "I like to take audio and sounds created either in the world, like the sound of machines banging together in a factory a sound, in other words, that isn't an electronic synth or else a sound played by a human, like some weird drums or something like that," Danna said. "I take those and then start to manipulate them and turn them into electronic sounds. In the Main Title of RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE, there's about a minute where stuff just floats around and is very weird and surreal, but none of it is electronic. It's all stuff I've taken and bent, but it all comes from a human source at some point. That's my approach to doing electronics you've got a better shot at not sounding like something else that way!"

Danna spent a long time getting his sounds together for this film. "Longer than usual," said Danna. "A score like GOSPEL OF JOHN, there was a warm-up period where I learned about the instruments of that period, and in other films I have done there is a period at the beginning where you gather your themes together. On this film I started with getting sounds and textures, and snippets of themes, but really I wanted to have a pallet of interesting electronic colors to start with. That was the first thing I did. That took quite a while. After I'd done that for three weeks or so then I got into having to actually start to write what would become the more musical, thematic material in the film." In addition to Danna's synth renderings and the orchestral recordings, percussionist Quinn came in and laid down a variety of percussion tracks that found there way into the score as well.

Creating a musical world is important in films, especially when they occur in environments as otherworldly as that of RESIDENT EVIL. This also permits the composer to be as outlandish and as bizarre as they can, composing music that would never work in a drama or other mainstream picture. That's one of the appeals of scoring science fiction, fantasy, and horror the opportunity to be as creative as you need to in order to create a vibrant sonic environment for the film.

"I'm a big believer that every film needs its own musical world," said Danna. "You think that would be an easy sell to the powers that be, on a project, but it isn't always. Sometimes people are uncomfortable with something that is completely different, or even somewhat different. So the first thing I try to do is to get everybody on board the concept of, 'we should do something here that's really different, and somehow very much RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE, and doesn't sound like a lot of other things.' I mean, it's obviously impossible to be completely original every time, but I just try and do this thing that will give it a setting that the film lives inside of. That's the first thing I do, whether it's with action scenes or with that weird, creepy, spooky stuff, to try and make it original and build the world that the people in the story reside in. And then, after that, if it's action, you can play action as action and be very aggressive and just go for it, or you can play off it a little bit sometimes, and just be a little more surreal or abstract. Mostly on this film, if it was action, I pretty much went with it, and I think it culminates in the Alice versus Nemesis cue which is sort of the energy high point of the film."

The unique thing about music in action films like this, music being the language of emotions, is that even when the score needs to be furiously action-oriented, composers can still bring in nuances of emotion that elevate the sequence beyond simply action. "You can do that, even if it's just fear or anticipation of our hero about to fall off the building in the middle of an action thing," said Danna. "The rule that I sort of follow is to try and always be as memorable and tuneful as possible. That's what I've tried to do in other scores. But if that's not appropriate for the film, then I try and just be as interesting and unique as I can."

As a melodic composer, writing action material devoid of melody can sometimes feel like composing with one hand tied behind your back. "Melody is the first place I generally go," said Danna. "I try and write something melodic and build from there, but in the case of a film like this I may start to build from rhythmic blocks or from textural blocks, instead. That does change where I might start from, but if it isn't the right call, then there's no point in trying to jam it in there. It's not the right thing for this film."

In terms of RESIDENT EVIL's action music, Danna's objective was to write material that at least didn't sound like everything he's already heard before. "I try and bring textures and sounds into it, because after all, there's not a lot of room for sensitivity or melody or even tight short strokes, so to speak, if you're really blasting through," he said. "But at least if I am going to blast away, then I would like to try and do it with some interesting colors and a lot of drama."

Danna composed about 90 minutes of music for the film. Most of it was completed before some sequences were completely locked. "I don't know if all the music made it into the film," Danna said. " wrote music for some scenes where I'm not sure what condition they (the scenes) finally arrived at the end of the film. They may not have needed music by the end." The soundtrack CD, which comes out September 28th from Varese Sarabande, retains 45 minutes of music.

The score was recorded in at George Martin's Air Studios London with the 75-piece London Philharmonia, the same group Danna and his orchestrator, Nicholas Dodd, had used for their previous score, GOSPEL OF JOHN. "Because a lot of the sound is electronic, it never really had to be only orchestral," Danna explained. "So there wasn't the need to go and get a hundred people together. The 75 seemed to be as big an offset to the electronics as we needed, from a skill point of view." The studio is located in an old church, which provided for an especially expansive resonance. "It's got that whole vibe, which I really love, the space in there," Danna said.

Danna's biggest challenge in the RESIDENT EVIL score was [IMG4R]found in his efforts in trying to make the orchestral world and the electronic world come together in a way that was interesting. "I wanted to use electronic elements that were really quite caustic sounding and sharp and ugly, with a lot of bottom in them, like the kind of bottom you usually hear in hip-hop records, a real bottom," Danna said. "But doing that also tends to wipe out anything that even seventy-five players will play. That was the toughest challenge, making those two worlds coexist in a way that was interesting and was complementary to each other, so the orchestra could still make it sound gigantic and epic when it needed to, but there could also be lots of this sort of cutting edge nasty stuff."

In addition, Danna had a lot of "creative input" from the production staff to contend with. "A film like this had a lot of players," he said. There were at least five or six people who were interacting with the composer, from Paul Anderson on down, providing notes and opinions about what the score should sound like. "There were a lot of voices to be recognized, from my point of view," Danna said. "That was one of the things I just had to figure out how to deal with, to make everybody happy when there was that many of them."

One luxury Danna had on RESIDENT EVIL was the lack of a strict temp track that the filmmakers wanted him to follow. "One of the things that attracted me to this project was, when I met with them, they didn't particularly know what they wanted to do, musically," Danna said. "Even the temp that they put in and there was a lot of it that didn't even have temp they weren't very happy with. It didn't particularly work, so that was sort of refreshing when I sat down to work."

Danna had the opportunity to share the problems of temp tracks with the filmmakers when they happened to ask him why so many scores all sound the same. "I have them my honest answer," said Danna. "What happens is you temp a film, you decide before the composer comes in what kind of music it should be, without your composer even being there, and then you'll find a score that sounds a lot like that, maybe something great and famous like Thomas Newman, and you'll put that in there and then you'll go the agencies and say 'you can give is something that sounds like SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION?' And then the agency will send forth all their guys who sound just like SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, and then you'll pick the one who sounds the most like that and you'll bring him in and say 'do this!' And then at the end you'll say, 'um, you know, that really sounds a lot like SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION...' Now, SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION is a great score, it's one of my favorites, but it isn't the right score for every film made! And I was really honest with them when I said this, and I told them, 'That's why you get this,' and they were saying, 'yeah, that's a good point! You should just go off and try and do something you think works.' So, once I actually got the gig, I was really quite into it, because they weren't banging on the door saying 'can this sound like THE MATRIX?' or 'can this sound like something else?' because they were quite open to things."

Danna enjoyed his excursion into these outer realms, with their more dynamic horrific sense of fantasy, and hopes to return again some day soon. "Films like this are a lot of fun, musically," said Danna. "There's a lot of room to be unusual, and if I can't be as tuneful as possible then my next favorite thing is to be as different as I can. It's great. A film like this, there's not really any ugly or weird noise that you can make that doesn't work. So that was where a lot of the fun came from, in this one. Also, it's got a fairly big scope, it's a city going to hell, basically, so you've got this pretty large canvas to work on. It was a good experience, that way. Different for me, from what I've done. I'm glad I did it, and I'd do it again, for sure."

Danna hopes RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE might open some doors for new kinds of scores in which he can really invest his creative musical imagination. "I'd like to work on the projects that interest me and have decent visibility," he said. "Usually films that are more visible have bigger budgets, and bigger budgets mean I can let my imagination go a bit more free. So I would like to go to more places where I can turn it loose and there's no financial of creative restrictions."