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TOMB RAIDER: Composer Graeme Revell

The outré and the exotic have been comfortable habitats for composer Graeme Revell over the majority of his career. Of his more than 60 films scores since 1989, over one third can be considered either science fiction or fantastic horror thrillers: films like CHILDS PLAY 2,THE BRIDE OF CHUCKY, THE CROW, BATS, SPAWN, FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE; and more recently, a flurry of science fiction adventures, PITCH BLACK, RED PLANET, TITAN A.E., DUNE. His latest score, the big-budgeted fantasy-adventure video game adaptation TOMB RAIDER, may be one of his most lavish to date. Remarkably, he composed it all in less than two weeks, after the film's original composer was pushed off the project.

Composing is a time-consuming businessespecially composing for films. One not only has to come up with melodies that will develop and interact with one another, then devise which instruments are best suited for the emotional tonality one is trying to accentuate musically; but one also has to accommodate the specific timings of the motion picture to make sure the music starts or changes or stops according to the editorial tempo. Writing and orchestrating 70 minutes of music can be a daunting task.

But Revell had been eager to do this score for some time, and jumped at the chance when it fell into his lap with exactly 10 days free on his schedule.

"I had been tracking this project for a while and my name has been in the mix all along," says Revell. "Some people had wanted to use me right from the beginning, and I also asked my agent to keep following it because it was something I did want to be involved in, and when it came back around I was already in the hat."

What the producers wanted when Revell came on board at the last minute was a big score that would use diverse music to underline the film's various locations (from the Angkor Wat temples in Cambodia to Iceland standing in for Siberia), while also accommodating the use of popular songs.

"They wanted the music to create a different ethnicity for the different environments," says Revell.

With most of the songs interspersed throughout the film with little dramatic effect, Revell composed music that either skirted around them, or in at least one big scene, merged with them.

"There's a big set piece where the bad guys break into Lara Croft's house early in the picture, and Chemical Brothers have a big track there, but it only goes through the first half of the scene," says Revell. "They didn't want to change suddenly into a different style, so they needed someone who would stay in their groove for the whole motorcycle chase and the second six minutes of the scene. They also wanted someone who could pay off the big orchestral stuff needed in the end of the movie."

Classically trained, Revell came out of Australia after scoring the cult favorite thriller,DEAD CALM, back in 1989. His disturbing, mechanized scorewhich employed such textures as a cello, African percussion, soprano voice, and the sounds of human breathingcame to the attention of American film music agent Richard Kraft, who located Revell in Australia by calling everyone with Revell's surname until he found the right man.

That brought the composer to America, where he soon got his first hot assignment, Tobe Hooper's science fictionesque thriller, SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION. His main title was a version of the "1812 Overture," using flamethrowers and flack bursts; elsewhere he made use of an electronic mix of natural sounds and synthesized music, all treated harmonically; and his musical climax used the sampled sounds of four opera singers multi-tracked and overdubbed to form a 30-voice Wagnerian-cum-Industrial Music choir.

Revell's proclivity for the bizarre and unusual seems well suited: before becoming a composer and musician, he worked as a nurse in an Australian mental institution during the early 1980s. Revell even formed an experimental pop band with one of the patients, playing the kind of electronic music that has since become known as Industrial Music.

Maintaining a vast electronic library of sounds, Revell has put them to good use in a variety of ways, creating musical textures out of sampled instruments and natural sounds. Preferring the unusality of these electronic recreations over the tried-and-true orchestral or synthesized music of the '90s, Revell's early soundtracks revealed an eclectic creativity and a penchant for experimentation that was particularly suited for the horror genre. Preferring to avoid the kind of clichéd orchestral sounds heard in many horror scores, Revell has proved that his electronic arsenal has been a great advantage.

"Instead of using the violins with a suspended 7th or something like that in a tense moment, I tend to use an effect sound instead," Revell said back in 1989. "On SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, for example, I was using the sounds of a wine glass instead of a violin, with that kind of grating top to it. The final result was probably a little like Bernard Herrmann's theremin. Another thing I used was feedback run through a harmonizer."

Revell finds this approach fresher and more interesting than opting for the usual tremolo violins or low brass.

"I think this is a new way of handling some of the basic legwork that you have to get through in film scoring," he said. "I try not to pulpit the cliché if possible."

In the ensuing years as his assignments have become larger, Revell dabbled more often in orchestral scoring, often times merging symphonics with his synthesizers to create a dynamic texture and tonalitythe dramatic and emotive punch of orchestra mixes with the stark otherworldliness of his electronic samples and his own inclination towards industrial eccentricity in music. He merged that predilection with rock and roll Gothism inTHE CROW, providing a fully realized fusion of angelic voices, Arabic flutes, saxophones, electric guitar, and various other instrumental textures into a score as complicated and scalding as the film's neo-punk-Gothic modern comic-bookish reality. In a complete turn around a few years later, Revell composed purely orchestral scores, such as his heroic adventure music for the animated TITAN A.E. and his lavish, exotic music for the Sci-Fi channel miniseries, DUNE. Revell must have surely felt he'd truly arrived in 1999, when he joined the ranks of top film composers to have a score rejected: he was hired to score THE 13TH WARRIOR, which he composed and recorded, but then found it unused and replaced by a new score by Jerry Goldsmith at the insistence of filmmakers who'd apparently sought Goldsmith all along.

PITCH BLACK was a return to electronic music, with a low-budget score performed almost completely by synthesizer; only the presence of real horns gave the score an acoustic tonality.

"That was a fairly static movie," Revell recalled. "There's not much action going on in it, partly because it's not a big budget picture, and it was a challenge for me to try and inject pace and a pulse to the movie."

Revell's percussive score aided the film's sense of claustrophobic apprehension, contrasted with a kind of tragic heroic theme for the Vin Diesel character.

The opposite may be said of the fast-paced, furiously adventurous, comic-bookish TOMB RAIDER. But it came with its own set of challenges, not the least of which was a time frame even severe for a fast composer like him. Originally, Michael Kamen (DIE HARD, EVENT HORIZON, IRON GIANT, X-MEN) was signed to score the film, but he wound up encountering creative differences with the filmmakers, and the next thing he knew, he was off the project and Revell was inwith ten days to go until recording.

A further complication on this score was that the music would be recorded in England. Revell didn't have time to fly to the recording session because he was still working on his electronics in Los Angeles. His orchestral material had been written first and shipped to England for the recording while he continued finalizing the electronic parts that would be joined with the orchestra in the final mix.

"I didn't have time to do the pre-mixes of my electronic playbacks the first time around," says Revell. "So I sent the orchestral music to England where they recorded it."

Revell would receive the recorded music overnight and would review it and see how it worked with his electronic tracks. If necessary, some cues would be recorded over. This was made even more difficult when the filmmakers reshuffled the last reel of the film, requiring extensive rewriting to match the new timings and new location of scenes he'd composed earlier.

The final weekend of recording, May 26-27th, found him at Capitol Records where a direct phone connection was established with the recording studio in London where he could hear the music as it was being recorded.

"That was much more satisfactory," says Revell. "It was almost like being there, because I could then do what I normally do, and that's make changes and refinements as I hear them rehearse. I would never again do it the way we did it the previous week!"

After TOMB RAIDER, Revell's next genre assignment was a return to the CHILD'S PLAY series, THE SEED OF CHUCKY. He had scored the second and third installments of the horror franchise, almost satirizing himself in THE BRIDE OF CHUCKY by taking all of his own personal musical cliché's and twisting them into a frantic and perverse score.

"We recorded BRIDE OF CHUCKY in Canada with an orchestra of forty-five, says Revell. "They had very little money to devote to orchestra. What I did was map out all these blocks of material, and we inserted them. I was actually thinking very much that on TOMB RAIDER. Probably even three or four years ago it would have been impossible to pull something like this off in that time. But the loops and sample banks and the contemporary way of writing have really made it possible. The trouble is, though, if you use those same loops too many times you end up repeating yourself the same way. Using the same bag of tricks can get any composer into trouble."

Coming up next for Revell is HUMAN NATURE, a new film written by Charles Kaufman, author of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. French director Michel Gondry directs the film.

"It's a bizarre comedy, and I got to write a really retro score using all these old Mellotrons and Oberheimsvery much inspired by Raymond Scott from the 1950," says Revell. "That was just fantastic to pour all of these old sounds out of the woodwork and write a main theme for whistling! It was really cool, and such a change for me."

Both Revell's scores for TOMB RAIDER and HUMAN NATURE will see release on CD. TOMB RAIDER appears in stores on June 24th; HUMAN NATURE not until the film's release this coming November.