Tyler's Tremendous Tunes

By: Randall Larson
Date: Thursday, June 23, 2005

Before too much longer, Brian Tyler is going to find himself at the upper echelon of Hollywood film composers. His efforts over the last dozen years have demonstrated a remarkable proclivity toward orchestral melody and stylistic invention that has result in a wide variety of film scores in several different genres. Tyler's superior scores for FRAILTY, TIMELINE, CHILDREN OF DUNE, BUBBA HO-TEP, and GODSEND show a particular affinity toward music for science fiction and dark fantasy subjects. His

latest score, CONSTANTINE, suffered eleventh-hour studio alteration that brought in composer Klaus Badelt to overlay some new material onto Tyler's finished score, and the two of them accommodated the studio's request for a shift in tone. Tyler said that the studio decided at the last minute to shift the tone from the relentlessly dark tonality that he and director Francis Lawrence had originally established into something with a little more levity to it. Since Tyler has already recorded his music, the decision was made to leave most of it in the movie rather than summarily dumping and replacing it, which has been the case so often in Hollywood films [Tyler himself re-scored TIMELINE in 2003 after the original Jerry Goldsmith score had been rejected]. But there wasn't enough time for Tyler to reconceptualize an already-recorded score, so Badelt (K19, THE TIME MACHINE, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN) came in to work out some new ideas that were paired up with, or overlaid on top of, Tyler's intial ideas. The two composers worked together creating the score's final tonality and mix.

I spoke with Brian during the Spring of 2005, taking a detailed look at Tyler's film music career and what, in only seven short years, has become an amazing body of work.

Q: Having had the opportunity to listen to your original score for CONSTANTINE and comparing it to the final release, you had devised a very carefully developed score that's very introspective. Klaus is a great composer, but some of his material on CONSTANTINE seems a little bit jarring, tonally, compared to what you original laid down.

Brian Tyler: You've inevitably got a merging of styles on the final score, because now you have two voices instead of one singular voice. Klaus incorporates a lot more technology and electronics into his recording techniques, so it ended up being a more

collaborative effort. There are times where the movie really needed to have the tone we were originally going for, which was the choir doing these ancient styled thematic ideas with the orchestra. I went more towards ancient Sephardic music, because of the whole tie-in with Biblical texts. Instead of really going for the church-castle kind of medieval sound, I thought it would be interesting to go a little earlier and use more of a Jewish folk melody type of structure, and that was what the main theme was originally, but which inevitably caused it do be a bit more introspective and dark. That may have been part of the reason why we ended up going and modifying the direction.

Q: How did the film's metaphysical tonality play into your musical approach?

Brian Tyler: It was a key part. The idea was to step back and say: what if all this was real? That was the approach - that hell was on Earth and there are these half-breeds and this war that was about to start between God and the devil. All of that was taken extremely literally, and so that became frightening in more of a dramatic way as opposed to a horror way. The themes were approached as dramatic themes and dramatic music, as if it were a movie like NIXON or something, where it's very matter-if-fact - yes, the devil is here and he's almost like a politician, rather than more of a fun approach like HELLBOY or something. The approach was as if this were a filmed historical documentary about a war between God and the devil.

Q: How has the film's basic idea of good-versus-evil been served by your score?

Brian Tyler: The interplay between good and evil was personified, in this case, literally by the characters, because you did have evil as a character you had Lucifer as one of the main characters in the movie. And you have God in there, but in this case, they're a little bit neutralized with the idea that man is caught in the middle of this argument between them, so from a musical standpoint, there was a lot of gray area. Constantine had his feet in both worlds, a little bit in heaven, and a little bit in hell. He's a self-serving guy, he's a bit of a bastard, actually! So his themes were a lot more along the lines of a noir character.

Q: There's a tremendous cynicism about him that defines his character. The music plays that up as well.

Brian Tyler: Oh, for sure. There's no real heroic theme for him. You've got a character who knows he has months to live and he's been guaranteed that he's going to hell by the devil himself. What are you going to do with that?! It's not like we could burst into some kind of rock song every time he showed up!. We had to move away from the kind of heroic theme that you usually would have for a comic book character, and that's what I thought was interesting to move away from. That didn't feel right, so having old instruments, like the bansuri [bamboo flute] playing over these dark, old instruments. It is actually in a style of Sephardic funeral music, so we were reveling in the darkness! That's the direction we started with, anyway.

Q: At the same time you had these cues like "Humanity" and "John" and "Circle of Hell" which are very melodic and beautiful...

Brian Tyler: There's one in particular that's called "Resurrection" [on the Varese CD], and that is rather uplifting. It's got a bit of triumph to it, and you do see the good in John Constantine's character. To me that was the quintessential moment for him, as he sacrifices himself to hell in order to save someone else, which is ultimately how the devil ends up not having power over him. Another one I liked doing was "Black Smoke" [it's on the Varese CD but it's called "Into the Light"]. That used to be the Main Title; it's still in the movie but in a different part. The Main Title sequence doesn't exist any more. There was actually a very interesting sequence, but I think the studio deemed it was just too long, but it did introduce the characters.

Q: How did you get started in the business?

Brian Tyler: It was back in the mid 90s. I was always interested in film scoring, since I was little kid. My grandfather, Walter Tyler, was an art director and he definitely piqued my interest about film. He did the DeMille films like TEN COMMANDMENTS, that kind of thing. I actually have his Academy Award here in the studio,. And so even though it was a completely different field, and neither of my parents have anything to do with the entertainment industry at all, there was still kind of a love of film that started very early. I was a composer way long before I was a film composer. By the time I graduated from college, I had been working on these pieces that somewhat sounded like film music, only maybe a little more avant-garde. A director named Gabe Torres had heard some of them, and even though it wasn't film music, it was filmic, and he played some of it against this movie he was shooting called BARTENDER, which was a really dark drama. We met and all of a sudden I was scoring a film. Lucky enough for me, the score was recommended to the head of music over at 20th Century Fox, who loved the score, and he recommended me to someone, and boom, all of a sudden before I knew it the films started coming in!

Q: SIX-STRING SAMURAI was a score that seemed to first bring you to the light of day. What can you tell us about this assignment?

Brian Tyler: Interestingly enough, that film, being the first one that kind of broke for me, was very different than what I was naturally kind of doing at the time, which was more orchestral. But I'd always played guitar and drums and bass and all those instruments throughout my life, so when the director came along and said he wanted something really off the wall something that was a merging of APOCALYPSE meets Rock and Roll meets Russian music! I thought, "hey, this sounds really interesting!" I thought the movie was great and a lot of fun and I dove into doing a score that was a bit left of center.

Q: You have become especially adept or perhaps typecast? as a horror composer, with your first rate and truly frightening scores to TERROR TRACT (2000), FRAILTY (2001), DARKNESS FALLS (2003), and others. What do you feel music needs to do in a horror film that makes it different from, say, a drama, or a mystery, or a comedy?

Brian Tyler: When it comes to a real dark film, I think there are two ways. On

something like FRAILTY, you play the music very seriously, and the thematic content is quite dramatic, and I think that's what actually makes the movie scarier. In fact, I treated FRAILTY as a romance, in a strange way. It was the story of love lost, but in a family sense, and it was about betrayal and the heartbreak of loving your son but being evil, so the approach was closer to where you have that contrast between romantic music and the darkness, like VERTIGO, where the theme, if you listen to it, is almost a romance, but just a bit off. Where this changes is in a film like TERROR TRACT or DARKNESS FALLS where there is the element of the spectacular to it, and it's more like a roller coaster ride. You become more frightened because of what the music's doing. That can really stretch the techniques that the orchestra is involved with those kinds of films.

Q: You scored two episodes of STAR TREK ENTERPRISE in 2003. What was that experience like?

Brian Tyler: I'm a huge STAR TREK fan, so I had followed the musical history of the show from the first series, through NEXT GENERATION, DEEP SPACE 9, and VOYAGER. I have every episode of every series on DVD and have watched them many times, and I also loved the scores from the movies. So STAR TREK was really a part of me, in terms of what I've saturated over the years, and so I just wrote what I thought would be rip-roaring kind of STAR TREK-ish music. ENTERPRISE is a show that really never established any themes, because there's really no Main Title score piece (there's just that song). So for me, that left it open to really do what I would do if I were doing a STAR TREK movie. I approached it as I would approach any movie. I didn't put any less into doing those scores, in fact I really loved doing them, and it was my version of STAR TREK.

Q: Was there any relation between the two episode scores, musically?

Brian Tyler: There is a relation between the two scores, as a matter of fact, although they were separated by a few episodes. After I scored the first episode, my movie schedule was so hectic that I wasn't able to do more. But there was this one episode coming up about the discovery of the Borg, and I couldn't resist. Some of the themes that I'd written in the first one, themes for Archer and the Enterprise itself, crossed over.

Q: THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS was a hard-driving and song-dominated action score. How did that experience a contrast with what you'd done up to then?

Brian Tyler: FAST AND FURIOUS was mostly songs, so score-wise there wasn't much on my part. It was a fun, rip-roaring kind of car movie, more along the lines of an MTV kind of feel. SHADOW HOURS was a much darker version of that approach, which I did a year before. It was a totally electronic score live drums, guitars, and crazy, distorted feedback, a really thickly, densely tracked thing it was all score with only a few songs.

Q: In fairly straight-ahead pulsating action scores like that or even THE HUNTED or PAPARAZZI you've also found moments for lyrical introspection in these films.

Brian Tyler: Being able to find the emotional component is key to an action score. You always run into the danger of stringing generic action music together, and I don't think that can work. It really needs to have some kind of emotional component to it. Even when writing an action score like PAPARAZZI, I would write thematic material first and then extrapolate the rest of the score from that. THE HUNTED was actually a bit different, because it was conceived as a thoroughly modernistic score, in the classical sense, where it used a lot of 12-tone and things from the Schoenberg school of thought. It wasn't as obviously melodic, but at its heart there was something that had meaning to the director and I.

Q: Is it tough to find the heart of something in an action film when there's such a need for bombast and spectacle and sound effects?

Brian Tyler: There really is. You almost need a director who's willing to step in and allow you to do something that isn't just wall-to-wall noise. A tendency that's very dangerous in movies is when there's so much just loudness going through the whole movie, sonically, with everything from music to sound effects. It's like if you're at the mixing board and the levels aren't scratching the red at all times, it's almost like, "we have some more head room, why don't we just pump it!" But if you go back and you look at the Hitchcock films or the David Lean films, and they just weren't like that, and you didn't need it. The moments that needed to be big were big, and it made those moments bigger if there were quieter moments. I feel the same way about music. It's just being able to be heard sometimes amongst the four trillion tracks of ear-splittingly loud sound effects. Sometimes it can be a bit difficult.

Q: What were your initial impressions of the music needed for BUBBA HO-TEP?

Brian Tyler: That film was so utterly unique, there was just no way they could temp score it. I had seen it in an early form, and the door was wide open to do whatever I wanted. I thought the approach should be earnest, like an homage to Elvis; but it

wasn't doing Elvis. It has elements of Elvis-like music. It was interpreting the man, but was never making fun of him. It's not something that says this guy's a bumbling joke, let's make some comedic music. The themes were actually quite heartfelt - the kicker was in using instruments that would be a little more quirky. Although BUBBA HO-TEP was a very low budget movie, fortunately I could play all the instruments that we needed for the soundtrack, so I just played everything. I sat down at the drums and would lay those down first, then go and lay down the bass and a bunch of guitars and then I would sing all the choir parts, and somehow that gave it a bit of its own flavor too.

Q: What kind of process do you have to go through to make the recording when you're the performer and you're putting together something that sounds like a dozen players?

Brian Tyler: I use ProTools and I use it like an old fashioned reel-to-reel multitrack tape. I'll just hit Record and I will literally sit down and play one instrument, and then I'll rewind and play another one on top of it. There's no real computer involvement to be had. You just have to know the piece so when you're playing it. You have to conceptualize it as a finished product from the very beginning and then just make sure that you record it right.

Q: VAMPIRES: LOS MUERTOS (2002) contained another neat contrast between horror scoring and Latin styled music that gave the score a fresh and very likable flavor. How would you contrast the needs for, and differences between, the horror motifs and the more rhythmic, environmental tracks and how you merged the two as the score developed?

Brian Tyler: I think they affect each other a lot. It might be even easier if I would just sit down and come up with a theme that can then be played on the instrument of style of that region, but that's not really my approach. Somehow the melody needs to actually reflect the environment, which can make for some long nights, because some times it just doesn't come. But VAMPIRES: LOS MUERTOS is an example where the element of the nylon string guitar that comes in that certainly reflects the region. It wasn't quite as jarring as our original thought, which was to go with a really in-your-face electric guitar sound. It's a little bit more subdued than maybe one would think at first, but it was something that had a little bit of elegance and would contrast nicely with the more jarring orchestral horror elements.

Q: The guitar work almost put you at ease. It relaxed you so when those punches came up they were more effective than had it been an all-electronic or all-scary score all the way through.

Brian Tyler: Yeah, it does kind of lull you a bit. There's something that I do like about writing themes slightly more romantic for horror movies than would might think, because I think it puts you in a mood of kind of acceptance so those scares really kick in...

Q: That film was a kind of retake on John Carpenter's VAMPIRES, which he had scored himself. As a producer on LOS MUERTOS, did Carpenter have an input upon your scoring?

Brian Tyler: He was really supportive. I'm a big fan of his movies, and I have all of his scores, so it was a very cool experience. But from his perspective, he liked what I had done in other films. Instead of going with the electronic claustrophobic sound, which worked so well in THE FOG and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and HALLOWEEN, he thought that maybe I should just open it up and go with what he felt were my strengths, which was a little more width and some beauty to it.

Q: What was your approach to CHILDREN OF DUNE? You've captured the environment of Arakkis so well in your music. Were you familiar with the original books?

Brian Tyler: I'd been essentially working on that since I was twelve! I saw the original David Lynch movie, and I went out and I got the books. I was 12 or so, at the time, and what I did with my time was composing. So naturally any time I'd read a book, I would

write something for it. Believe it or not, the opening bars of CHILDREN OF DUNE was what I wrote for the book, years and years ago! I had written a bunch of DUNE suites that I never thought I would use, because of course they would never make a DUNE film, so I thought! And lo and behold, I did a film called PLAN B, which was all Big Band music, and that director landed CHILDREN OF DUNE. I could not believe it what fortune had passed my way! So when it came time to do that score, I had very much a head start, and it was something that I was so familiar with the Dune landscape and the characters and the different families, Atreides and the Harkonnens, and the whole universe of Dune. That for me it was a very comfortable fit.

Q: Did the Graeme Revell score from the first DUNE miniseries affect what you were asked to do on the second miniseries?

Brian Tyler: Not at all. I wasn't as familiar with it. I had seen the show when it came on not knowing that I'd be scoring the second one and thought it was real cool. They wanted CHILDREN OF DUNE to be a whole new thing, so there really wasn't a need to cross the two over, even though I thought the first one was effective. There was a nod to the original David Lynch DUNE in that I used the Prophet-V keyboard in one part, just as a background thing, just to connect the two! But the story of CHILDREN OF DUNE is different, tone wise, than DUNE. It combined two books Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, and it was more along the lines of a LORD OF THE RINGS meets GODFATHER epic story. The story widens and becomes huge. So where the first DUNE score that Graeme had done needed to be a lot more claustrophobic, CHILDREN OF DUNE needed to be, for lack of a better word, epic.

Q: What challenges did the miniseries format bring you as a composer on that score?

Brian Tyler: To me, probably, to a fault, I don't treat them any differently which made it difficult in this situation, since it was six hours! Basically, I just scored three connected films. It was almost like doing a trilogy kind of all at once.

Q: With that kind of musical landscape ahead of you, how to you begin to organize all your material to you have a starting point and a direction with which to go?

Brian Tyler: Baby steps, one foot in front of the other. Writing the character themes that you feel are the most important at the beginning, and then branching out from there. I needed to write different themes for the different political families, and that was something that I jumped into right away - The Atreides, the Theme for Chani. Paul's Theme ended up being used in all those trailers for other movies. But certainly, like any other movie, sitting down in front of the piano and coming up with themes, I did it for that just like I'm doing it to this day!

Q: A film called LAST STAND seemed to be a rarity for you a Western score. How was this experience for you?

Brian Tyler: Something I was very interested in college was studying Native American music, and that Native American folk melody came out in that one. I concentrated on that because of the storyline being about a Native American kid who saves this American Soldier's life, who was his enemy. That was something that was quite restrained, but it did harken a little bit to the old West, with kind of a SHANE vibe at times. Gabe Torres directed that.

Q: You were nominated for an Emmy for best score for the TV-movie, LAST CALL.

Brian Tyler: LAST CALL was a movie about F. Scott Fitzgerald. That was a very kind of very poignant and understated score, with a bit of a jazz element to it. It's a very dark, cold jazz, with a very restrained heartbreaking theme. Very haunting.

Q: The last couple of years, you've scored several speculative, science fictionesque films THE BIG EMPTY, THOUGHTCRIMES, and THE FINAL CUT. What kind of approach did these films need?

Brian Tyler: THE BIG EMPTY is in the SIX STRING/BUBBA HO-TEP camp, in that it's very left-of-center. Weird instruments. I played a lot of them, everything from a 1960s Stratocaster guitar mixed with tablas and other Indian instruments. It was an introspective, mystical score. [a soundtrack release is due soon from La-La Land Records.] THOUGHTCRIMES was more of a modern score for me. I used a lot more modern instruments and keyboard elements and voices. It had a very driving, underground, industrial feel, which I'd really only done on SHADOW HOURS until then. FINAL CUT is going towards more of what is a thematically structured film noir, mystery kind of score. I loved that movie, actually and it did not get a fair shake, that's for sure. The director [Omar Naim] is from Lebanon and he has a whole different perspective on things and the way he approached the music was quite unique. He really trusted me to do things that were very different from what you would think if you watched the movie. I had a very expansive, historical scope to the score where the story is actually quite contained and somewhat cornered.

Q: GODSEND was an unusual and reflective score. What subtexts were you trying to emphasize in your score?

Brian Tyler: Yeah, there are some ethical notions included in the score. There was also a dual layer to that movie, storywise, that was reflected in the thematics of the score. You have the heart of man, the soul of a person, but at the same time, man creates science to take away the soul, that kind of idea. So there's a bit of a collision

course between thematic, warm, melodic material and extremely cold, nonhuman kind of music. The technology is not so much in the music but in the style of how it's written. Sometimes you'd have something very heartfelt and melodic going and at the same time you'd have a very structured pattern governed by numbers right underneath it, in the sense that the serialists and some of these post-modern composers would do doing music by numbers and combining that with some soaring melodies, but then these almost random sample whole-numbered structured patterns appear in the orchestra underneath it, kind of clashing with it. That was fun to do.

Q: That style almost seems to characterize your whole approach as a composer. You've written so many different kinds of films with hugely varied styles, and yet at the core there's a sense of really underlining the subtexts of the stories and the innerworkings of the characters. That's obviously something that music does very well.

Brian Tyler: The heart of film scoring is to get inside the heads of the characters who are on the screen staring back at me as I sit at my piano. It always helps when you connect with them. But certainly with something kind of comes out of a theoretical idea that can be expanded upon a turn into something graphics, like sound waves that you can hear, that makes the job quite interesting and very challenging, as well as frustrating!

Q: Much of your filmography leans towards the science fiction, fantasy, horror subjects. Do you feel this has given you more opportunities to do interesting music than maybe would be needed for a comedy or a contemporary drama?

Brian Tyler: Certainly. With GODSEND you've got these contrasting styles, man versus science, or man versus nature, and the ideas of artificial intelligence creeping into it, and music is always better when it has a bit of contrast, when it has two flavors, sweet and sour, and comes from both sides. I think that's why science fiction scores can be so interesting. Some of our best scores have come from science fiction. PLANET OF THE APES, STAR WARS, ALIEN, all the way up and down the line. I love working in those genres.

Q: What's the new film you're doing for Bill Paxton?

Brian Tyler: It's a movie for Disney called THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED. It's a true turn-of-the-Century story about this kid that came up from the wrong side of the tracks. He's a caddy who eventually fights his way into the US Open Championship. It's just a really awesome kind of tale about that era. Creating a kind of epic tapestry of early Americana is something that I haven't done before, and I'm enjoying it a lot. It's got a very rich tapestry and is an emotional, thematic kind of score. I probably haven't been able to go to those areas of emotion since something like CHILDREN OF DUNE. There are really very few projects where you can just let it flow and compose straight from the start. My favorite thing is writing themes that just get inside your heart and really move you to a different place. That's my favorite thing about composing, despite how often I'm scoring dark films. I love dark films as well, but that's kind of the side of me that maybe not as many people know.

Q: How would you describe the music you have written?

Brian Tyler: It's probably my most emotionally thematic score. It's really wide open and very powerful, and sweeping, but at times very delicate. It's straight from the heart. There's no hiding in the corners with ambient noise score! It's all melody, and I'm really excited about that.

Q: What do you have coming up after that?

Brian Tyler: The latest one is another movie for Disney called ANNAPOLIS. It's about the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and about a guy who comes from the other side of the tracks and really doesn't fit in, and he has something to prove. It ends up being a showdown between him and a classmate, and turns out being a really epic boxing movie, as well. It's really awesome.

Q: Sounds like another opportunity for a heartfelt melodious score?

Brian Tyler: No doubt but it's going to have some muscle, too. There's a showdown fight that just has not been seen, so it'll be really interesting. I don't know what I'm going to write for that yet!

Recommended Soundtrack sources:
www.buysoundtrax.com  
www.intrada.com  
www.screenarchives.com  
www.footlight.com  
www.arksquare.com/index_main.html  (Japan)
www.intermezzomedia.com  (Italy)
www.moviegrooves.com

For questions or comments, contact the author at Soundtrax@cinescape.com