05 February 2008
BIG MOVIE - EPIC MOVIE: Interview du compositeur Edward Shearmur
Rodney M. Liber producteur exécutif sur le projet, ajoute : "Chacune des superproductions que nous ridiculisons avait sa propre unité visuelle et son propre style. En les mélangeant toutes, nous nous retrouvions à gérer autant d'univers différents, qu'il fallait imbriquer dans un tout correspondant à notre vision. Nous mélangeons pas moins de vingt scénarios et tous les codes visuels qui vont avec !"
Un véritable défi de composer la partition d'un tel film! Un défi relevé avec panache, par Edward Shearmur qui vous explique comment il a essayé de composer dans "l'esprit" de Danny Elfman ou Harry Gregson Williams, sans perdre pour autant sa propre identité musicale.
Edward Shearmur - Gosh! It’ funny because in a lot of those cases I deliberately tried to kind of put what had been already written for some of theses movies out of my mind. When you’re on a film that parodies different styles you’re in dangerous territory already. So I didn’t really try to listen to what has already been written and to mimic it. I think you just try to work on the spirit: the edge of someone like Danny Elfman, Harry Gregson Williams’ music for the Narnia film has a very classic, fantasy quality to it and I think once you captured the spirit of these composers, the music just follows on from that. I really didn’t try to just take the ark of an existing melody and joke it down. It’s more about the spirit.
So,
from what material did you take your
inspiration?
As I said, it
would have been very dangerous for me to look
at the original materials too closely, and in
some cases, you know, I hadn’t seen some of the
movies they were parodying, which I think is
actually an advantage.
It’s a true challenge to resume the
spirit of a composer in keeping with your own
personality.
Once
you can identify the characteristic, of a
particular cue or a particular score that make
it special – in Danny’s case, they are
qualities in the orchestration, the use of
voices, a certain tempo, and a rhythmic style –
you’ve got that in the back of your mind and
you have the skill to make it authentic, but
it’s also very particularly applied to this
movie.
We can easily recognize the Harry Potter style
or the Narnia style, but there’s not much of
the Mediaventures style in your treatment of
Pirates of the Caribbean.
I just didn’t have twenty people programming
for me that could help deliver that. On this
film we didn’t have the resources to recreate
exactly those sounds. For the Mediaventures
stuff, orchestrally, we had a very limited
budget to work with. We just tried to make it
work on screen.
Can you tell me about the temp track
that was done for the movie?
Sometimes, they used the music of the film they
were parodying, but sometimes they had edited
specific cues when comic beats had to be
matched; it was just a way the comedy worked.
The film is of course a comedy, but you seem to
have treated all these styles with great
respect.
Thank you for the question. Generally for me, the music doesn’t want to work so much as a comic media. The comedy should rise out of the situation, out of the characters, and the music should be the straight guy in the drama. I worked the same way with Rowan Atkinson on Johnny English: the music was playing absolutely straight, trying to play the drama, and very occasionally we had a comedic gesture. That was the exception rather than the rule.
No, not really. I don’t know if I saw any of them around the time we were doing it. I worked for that film for a few weeks and I have just had fun with it. It’s not the kind of movie I would classify as being the most representative of what I do. Sometimes you find yourself doing something that’s out of you way, and Epic Movie was one of those.
Your music really stands by itself, and I wonder why they didn’t make a cd out of it?
You’re very kind. The film did ok at the box office but these days, the release of soundtracks and cds has changed a lot from what it was five years ago. It was just one of those scores that just works with the film. I’m really happy that it worked that way but soundtracks deals just don’t come these days as regularly has they used to.
I think it’s unlikely. I’m not sure about what the team of the movie is doing at the moment. I think they may do Scary Movie 5 right now or something like that.
I think one of the things that appealed me in doing it was the opportunity to kind of sample a lot of different styles and to treat then from a crossed point of view. There were things that were going on on screen that were terribly inspiring. Sometime, especially for a film music composer, it’s nice to find the mechanic of making this sound and working the right way. That’s really how I approached it.
