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- : : Films : : - |
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 C’est
la pire catastrophe que Springfield ait connue, et
tout est la faute de Homer, de son nouvel animal
familier - un cochon - et d’une fuite dans un
réservoir rempli de déjections… Une foule folle de
rage se dirige droit sur la maison des Simpson. La
famille parvient à s’échapper de justesse, mais ses
membres se retrouvent rapidement séparés après
s’être disputés.
Cette fois, plus que jamais, les citoyens de
Springfield ont toutes les raisons d’en vouloir aux
Simpson. La catastrophe a attiré l’attention du
Président des Etats-Unis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, et
du chef de l’Agence pour la Protection de
l’Environnement, Russ Cargill. Sous prétexte de
contenir le désastre, Cargill va révéler sa vraie
nature ainsi que ses véritables objectifs, et
mettre au point un plan diabolique qui menace
l’existence même de la ville...
Alors que le destin de Springfield et du monde
entier est en jeu, Homer se lance dans la plus
grande aventure qui soit : sauver la planète, mais
plus difficile encore, obtenir le pardon de Marge
et rassembler à nouveau sa famille !
Après 18 saisons, 400
épisodes et d'innombrables récompenses et prix dans
le monde entier (dont 23 Emmy Awards et le titre de
«Meilleure série télé du XXe siècle » décerné par
le prestigieux « Time Magazine », « Les Simpson »
ont franchi le pas du grand écran et sont
aujourd'hui les stars de leur tout premier film. Ce
qui était essentiel car il fallait bien la taille
d'un écran géant pour saisir l'infinie bêtise de ce
pauvre Homer !
Mais il a ses fans, et parmi
eux le compositeur Henry Jackman. Aux côtés de Hans
Zimmer, il a su transmettre sa passion pour cet
univers loufoque au compositeur de Pirates des
Caraïbes, tout en lui apportant une qualité
nouvelle qui sied à ce nouveau format.
Quand un petit chanteur de
St Paul débarque dans une famille d'américains
moyens...
credit photo: veroniqueroblin.com
 Can
you tell me about you, your training and your
background?
I’m 33 now. I
started playing the piano when I was 4 and then I
probably had piano lessons about a year after that.
When I was 8, I went to a very monasterial English
school which is the choir of St. Paul’s cathedral.
From the age of 8 to 13, I was singing as a
chorister at St. Paul’s cathedral. I mean matins
and evening songs and all the holidays, singing
Tallis and Palestrina, all the traditional English
church music. After that, I got a music scholarship
to go to Eton College. There I didn’t sing so much.
I played the French horn in the orchestra, and
carried on studying the piano and composition. At
the age of 18, I completely abandoned all my
classical training; I bought a computer and started
doing electronic dance music. I pretty much ignored
classical music for quite a long time. I went to
Oxford university, but the time I got to the third
year, I left because I was becoming more interested
in actually making records instead of writing
essays about 13th century music which is what the
course mainly consisted in. It’s very traditional
and I got very bored with it and I started making
records instead. That would be the quick history of
my, actually, institutional education. That was
fine, but I preferred being in the real world
working with musicians. On top of that, I had my
father, who is a composer and an orchestrator, and
my uncle, who is a recording engineer. So I had two
sets of education at the same time. The interesting
point is that, from 21 to 29, you wouldn’t know I
had that training because I was very involved in
pop music. But it’s not that unusual for classical
kids to end up experimenting a bit.
How would you describe your musical style
during your 20s?
It’s an interesting
question since from 20 to 28, I was considered as
someone lost! Making dance records was a kind of a
reaction against my classical training. And I don’t
think I found my style then since I worked in so many
different styles. It was an apprenticeship in a way.
If you have a classical training, in order to find a
style that you’re comfortable with, you’trying to
synthesize a whole lot of information. And then if
you start getting involved in electronics, then
you’re incorporating a whole lot of textural
information –Brian Eno and things like that, colors-
in order to understand how those guys make very
beautiful sounding electronic music. So, if you
listen the stuff I did during this period, it’s all
over the place, depending of who I’m working with.
The very first time I did something that managed to
incorporate all these influences was an album I made
called Transfiguration which had orchestra in it with
elegant orchestration and electronics and vocals. It
was like a sort of a combination of all the things I
had learned in the previous years. So it was probably
the first time it all came together.
Crédit photo:
Christine BLANC
How and why did you come to film music?
It came
from Transfiguration. I spent two years making this
album and I said to my manager at that time : “if I
stand under a bus and die tomorrow, the only thing
I’d really want anyone to hear would be this album
because everything up until then was trying to find
my way”. My manager being a good sort of a women,
somehow got a copy of the cd on Hans Zimmer’s desk,
not long after I finished it, and he listened to
it. I hadn’t really thought about film score but
when most people listened to Transfiguration, they
told me: “you shouldn’t be messing around with pop
music. You should be doing film music, because it’s
very panoramic, it’s bursting out of the pop
structure and kind of moving to film music. Yet I
had done nothing in the field of film music,
nothing for tv, nothing for picture. And when Hans
Zimmer got to the third track of this album, he
picked up the phone, called me up and said : “Yes,
Henry, I’m listening to your album. I’m doing a
little movie called The Da Vinci Code and I’d like
you tp work on it because your album sounds great.”
And that was my first gig to picture!
That could have been worse!...
Yes! (laughing) But,
you know, you can be skilled in music, but doing
things to pictures, it’s not just about writing
music, it’s about a million of other things and I
obviously had no experience in that. But I survived
the experience!
Do you think your very rich background in
matter of both orchestral and electronic music
facilitated your integration within the Remote
Control Production system?
I think so, because
if you look at Hans, he’s overly capable of
delivering Wagnerian orchestrations, in the most
traditional sense. But the guy grew up as a synth
genius. If you walk into his studio in Remote
Control studio, the first things you see is a dozen
of synths, up to the walls. He’s not old school,
he’s completely plugged into electronic music. He
understands production, too. And even if I was a
novice on Da Vinci Code, my role was to bridge the
gap between sound design and orchestra. So I would
be doing texture stuff and a little bit of
orchestral stuff. And after that, I went crazy
doing orchestral stuff! So, yes, I think that what
makes Hans and I get along together is that mixing
of classical and electronic music. Take the
upcoming Batman film for example. We’ll have this
sense of danger and darkness with the double
basses, along with electronics. But it’s
electronics that fits with harmonically moving
classical music. It’s not just about loops. You
have to see in both camps what’s going to work,
what’s appropriate and what won’t gonna date very
quickly.
How would you explain the role of a
composer of additional music in a film scoring
process?
It depends
very much. It can be a light involvement or an
extremely heavy involvement. In The Simpsons, I had
a much stronger involvement. In a way, Hans is the
captain of the ship. Nothing is gonna come out of
Remote that isn’t in someway guided by him. It’s
like during the Renaissance, you had schools of
painting. Before Raphael became famous, he would
have a whole bunch of artists and there would be a
certain style coming out of that. But there was a
figure at the top that would subtly infuse the
style to this particular house and to various
people within that, who would one day emerge and
set his own kind of thing. I think that at Remote,
it’s a bit like that. It depends. On Da Vinci Code,
I sort of felt that Hans was doing the whole thing.
For The Simpsons, he wrote a tune for Homer Simpson
which is so perfect in capturing his personality.
He did that on the piano. He did a piano mock and
gave it to the director who found it sounded pretty
cool. But not being a musician, he couldn’t quite
see it. So I came in and made a 6-minute orchestral
suite based on that tune and exploring different
ways. And then the director said : “OOOh, it’s
gonna work!” So it all depends. Hans has different
relationships with his composers, he knows what
they’re good at and if he feels that you have an
understanding on something, he steps back and just
lets you do your thing. He’s very flexible.
 Was
it easy to go from Pirates of the Caribbean to The
Simpsons Movie?
Not at first. You won’t get any xylophone
on Pirates! So you got used to working in the same
palette of orchestration and also of harmonic
language which you’ve got to get rid of really
quickly. Instead of just going straight to the
movie and writing the cues, the good process for
that is just composing suites, six- or seven-
minute pieces, away from the picture, just to
develop and to experiment. You might write
something of no use at all that won’t make it in
the movie. But then, the music editor can take
these things and chop them into the movie to see if
that style feels right and that is very useful. And
that’s a really useful way of getting under the
skin of the movie before you actually do the cues.
Then it becomes clear what is working and what
isn’t working; what’s the style that makes you feel
that “it is” The Simpsons and what style makes you
feel not. We struggled very early about that. We
all knew the theme and I started doing the
orchestration. And because I’m so familiar with the
Simpsons language and it has a language, musically,
that’s already established because of the TV show,
I was so much in that area, sounding quite like the
TV thing.
We
were listening to it and Hans said: “That’s cool
enough. That’s what people expect. But I think we
could raise the bar and do something a little bit
different.” So we spent an entire day listening to
Prokofiev. But that’s not because The Simpsons
score sounds like Prokofiev. His point was: there’s
a lot of light, not comedic, light, playful
orchestrations in classical music that are a little
bit “high-bar”, a little bit more “concert hall”
than common TV style music. So we spent time
listening to various pieces of Prokofiev that have
very colorful, very radical, almost amusing
orchestration. It’s typical of Hans to get the bar
a little higher. It’s a film, it’s not TV. We
should be ambitious. Just because it’s Homer
Simpson, it doesn’t mean it has to be goofy. It can
be goofy but a goofy-meets-Prokofiev goofy, or a
goofy-meets-Prokofiev-Gershwin goofy, as opposed to
TV goofy.
So, you were a fan of the series, right?
Yes, I’ve seen tons of the episodes. But it’s a
double-edge sword. You know that there is an area
that you possibly can go, because, just like
everyone else in the world, you know what The
Simpsons is. But the downside to it is, if you know
it so well, you don’t move away from the original
music. And that’s what Hans worried about. It’s not
that he doesn’t like the series, but he’s not an
expert on it. So he felt quite all right to go
away. There is some advantage of not knowing too
much about that. Because it’s so unusual to do a
movie where there’s already so much baggage that
people are bringing to the movie. Because they’ve
potentially seen hundreds of hours of these
characters, and they’re already familiar with tons
of the music and the animation. So you’ve got to
raise the bar a little higher because it’s a movie,
but you can’t go crazy so that the people can say :
“that’s not The Simpsons”.
Why do you like The Simpsons?
I would say that Matt Groening has got kind of a
“narcotic” sort of humor. There are so many
witticisms and jokes. But The Simpsons Movie being
a film, it has to have a story, actually, otherwise
you’re not gonna last the 80 minutes of it. But
there are so many jokes and a lot of wit, and some
of it is parodying the dysfunctional American
family, some of it is parodying just general human
weaknesses, like a classic satire. Thus, Homer is a
hopeless father, he’s selfish and fat and
indulgent. I just think it’s a refreshingly
satirical look on the American family. But it also
has warmth to it, that’s the other thing. It’s not
biting and unpleasant a satire that you’re left
feeling cold. You can make a list of all the
dysfunctions of Homer and his family, but actually
in the end, it still feels quite warm and amusing.
And I think that’s why it’s universal. There are
Simpsons all over the world. It’s not just about
America. It’s just about a very average, average
family.
Do you know why they hired Hans Zimmer for
that film, and not Danny Elfman or Alf Clausen?
I have no idea. That’s a very good
question. All I know is that a lot of people wanted
Hans Zimmer to do the score. That’s not an unusual
thing! But in this particular case, the logical
thing would have been to ask Danny Elfman. I may be
wrong, but I think that maybe Jim Brooks, the
executive producer, took on some directorial role
in the movie. Maybe, he and Hans worked together
before. Jim has a very strong sense of confidence,
like an ability to work closely and express himself
with ideas. And he had a very strong sense that
Hans would be a good partner for that process. And
the fact is that conversations between Jim and Hans
were always productive. So I would suspect it has
something to do with Jim’s confidence in Hans.
How did you deal with the Simpsons theme?
We used just the one from the original series. It
would have been unconceivable to do an entire
Simpsons movie without using it. For the opening
credits, I took the tune and did a completely
different orchestration on it, which was actually
really good fun. Then, there’s a rock band,
standing on a platform in Springfield lake, so I
made like a rock version of the same theme. So we
did use it right at the beginning just to establish
with the audience : “don’t worry, this is The
Simpsons, the Simpsons that you know and love,
simply re-orchestrated.” In other parts of the
score, we also used it to represent Springfield as
a whole. In the movie, when the people are
threatened by an ecological disaster, when there is
a sense of that we need conceptually a tune to
represent the whole community, then occasionally
that theme was slipped into the score, representing
Springfield in general.
How did you orchestrate it?
It’s not orchestrated a million miles away. I kept
the bass, played at double bass and cello in
pizzicato because that’s the essence, rhythmically
and harmonically, of the theme. Then I deliberately
forgot the original arrangement, keeping the tune,
that such a recognizable one. I just gave it a
slightly big band feel, with some staccato saxes
and muted trumpets.
You told me about Homer’s
new theme, created by Hans Zimmer. Can you tell me
about the other new ones?
 There
was a theme to represent the environmental
protection agency. It was sort of the baddies, the
Darth Vaders, with Russ Cargill as the head of the
EPA. He’s the one who takes the decision to seal
the dome. He represents the threat that’s gonna
destroy Springfield. So we initially got a classic
somewhat military theme for him, created by James
Dooley. But this character ended up being a bit
more complicated than we imagined. First, we though
we’d keep using that theme, with a big
orchestration in the vein of Gustav Holt’s Mars
Planet. But as the film progressed, Jim became
convinced that that was being overplayed. As well
as being threatening, he was also an annoying
bureaucrat. He wasn’t actually Darth Vader. This
guy was like a wormy bureaucrat. In fact, we ended
up using some material for him that came from the
suite that I wrote, something less declamatory, but
more kind of sneaky like his political machinations
creeping up on Springfield subtly. The first 32
bars of the suite I wrote have an ostinato at the
bass, and then we began using more Prokofiev
harmonies with the strings pizzicato that were a
little bit off, a little bit wrong. So we used some
of that while he’s going to see the President at
the White House to present him every option. We got
a combination of “threatening”, “declamatory” theme
mixed with a sort of a more bureaucratic busy-body,
a little bit less “in your face”. Before that, it
was a little bit absurd: you imagined Darth Vader
whereas he hasn’t got the same screen presence as
Darth Vader at all! In the end, it’s more about a
texture than a theme you can actually write down.
It’s more like a feel that we accidently discovered
worked quite well with that character. Then,
there’s something that Atli Örvarsson wrote several
months before we started doing the music. He wrote
that just away from the picture. I think he called
it Lisa’s theme and the Simpsons guys all loved it.
And they started to use it the temp score, in which
it worked fine.
Can you tell me about some
specific scenes you were in charge of?
The differences between Pirates of the Caribbean and
the actual movie is that, instead of having
continuous long cues that last, say, six minutes,
here you’ve got twenty seconds of music and then
Homer Simpson can burst into the door and say
something ridiculous. So, it’s a very challenging
process, not to get fragmented because you have to
get out of the way for comic moments. So, often, cues
are 20-22-second long and gap! It’s very broken up.
But actually, there is one cue that became very clear
it would be quite a long cue. Half way through the
movie, when it becomes clear that it’s Homer Simpson
who is responsible for the ecological disaster, the
whole of Springfield gather together in a violent mob
to come and get him. The cue begins quite early on
with the mob arriving at home, and it’s a long
sequence where they get chased and they jump across
from one house to the next, to Flander’s house, and
they jump in a car, and the car gets lifted up by the
mob. Then they’re gonna get hanged and then they hide
in a tree house, and the mob is putting it down. It’s
a big five-minute thing, and I got put onto that one
quite early. That kind of cue was very, very well
temped. The music editor, Dan Pinder, did a fantastic
job of getting a good shape, a good idea of where
things should be moving, where the feeling of action
should start, the feeling of suspense. He spent a
long time on that cue getting a good structural
shape, even if the actual little beats of music they
used weren’t necessary right. It’s a bit like sending
a scout out over the hill before you actually invade
with the army.
As you said it, the orchestration is very
elaborate whereas the design of the Simpsons has
always been very simple. How did you deal with that
difference?
There are a couple of ways to answer your question.
The first is : just experimenting. For instance, when
Hans started talking about this idea to raise the bar
and use a little of Prokofiev and Gershwin, he said :
“you just have to try. Let’s go and see what
happens.” So, when I wrote the suite, we went and see
if that worked with the picture. And it did! It
didn’t make the film pompous. It didn’t feel like we
were trying to impose some inappropriate concert-hall
values on the American simple cartoon. It somehow
worked. And the second answer is : you really have to
disappear in a way that you never did on Pirates of
the Caribbean. And the jokes really have to dictate
that. There is some elaborate orchestration, but at
the same time, at key jokes and key moments, when
there’s slapstick humor, things that are
quintessentially “Simpsons”, it’s all about the
characters and you quite literally just have to get
out of the way. There is often no musical solution to
Homer’s ridiculous behavior. And some of the jokes
appear so suddenly that they would be too
overproduced if you would have continued the cue.
That would have become too invasive. So I think part
of the trick of reconciling something as visually
simple with some symphony orchestra is actually be
how discrete you are. If you listen carefully, there
isn’t that many cues that last a long time
continuously. It’s a combination of good judgment and
discretion and getting out of the way. You’re not
going to impose yourself on these four animated
characters in a way that is irritating or distracts
from the Simpsons we all know and love.
You seem very enthusiastic about this
production…
Definitely!
Was it different, working on the Simpsons,
from any other movie you did?
Be it on Da Vinci Code
or Pirates of the Caribbean, the powerhouse is the
director. Both Ron Howard and Gore Verbinski know
what they’re doing and the film is their
responsibility. On the Simpsons, that was a little
unusual. It was much more a collective work. These
guys have been doing the Simpsons for quite a long
time and they know what they like and they know what
they do (which they’ve been doing for years). So,
during the meetings we had, you’d got Matt Groening,
Mike Scully, Al Jean, etc. They have an idea and one
of the guys would write something down on a pad, then
one other would do a quick sketch and someone else
would give another idea, etc. It’s a like a film
tank. They don’t stop bouncing ideas to each others.
I didn’t do a million movies, but it’s quite unusual.
Can you
tell me about your projects?
The next
thing may be the Nixon/Frost movie, based on the
famous play. There is also The Darknight. It would be
another James Newton Howard/ Hans Zimmer
collaboration because it was very successful the last
time and it worked out really well. That is a
ferocious combination of talents, to be honest. If
you’re a director, you’d be lucky to have one of
those guys doing your score. To have both of them at
the same time, that’s incredible! I remember the
first opus when I was doing Da Vinci Code. At the end
of the film, just after Gary Oldman says he had never
had a chance to say thank you, and Batman goes : “and
you never need to”, there is a massive widescreen
shot of Batman standing on top of some building. It’s
an incredibly inspiring shot and they got an amazing
music then. And then, I discovered in the end credit
that that was Hans and James Newton Howard’s
collaboration, two of the greatest Hollywood
composers! No doubt the next movie will be done the
same way!
If you could choose a film to do, and a
director…
I’ve always loved
Ridley Scott movies. I really like patient movies,
without a lot of dialogues, developing slowly,
visually and poetically, which is often not very
fashionable. Not that many blockbusters can take that
risk : they need action and all that. Take Maximus in
Gladiator. Instead of wasting dialogue scenes to set
up how much he loves his wife, it’s all done
poetically. It’s a very important piece of the
emotional information, explained without dialogues.
So it leaves more room for beautiful cinematography
and beautiful music! Another film I totally loved
(not the critics!) was The New World by Terence
Malick. That’s my kind of movies. Nobody says a word
during the first ten minutes! And the first cue is 11
minutes of Wagner before anything happens. It’s a
beautiful shot of Virginia. I love that movie. By the
way, Hans worked once with him, on The Thin Red Line.
I love that sort of movies. In brief, if there’s a
film I would have loved to do, it would have been The
Mission. It would have been an honor, because it’s a
beautiful movie with an incredibly serious
theological and cultural content. I’d love to have
this kind of opportunity to inspire the audience just
with beautiful music, without having to get out of
the way because of dialogues or sound effects.
My last question is crucial… do you like
donuts?
That’s a very good
question! Fairly enough! In fact, I’ve never eaten
donuts in England. But when I moved to LA – I think I
was working with Seal at the time- and he asked me :
“do you want a donut? –No, I don’t eat donuts!” And
he goes: “No, no, no. You have never tried crispy
cream donuts, trust me! Let’s got in the car and get
some. You’re gonna love them!” And I have to say, I
think I had about ten of them! God knows what they
put in that, certainly really, really bad things. But
what an experience!
Merci à Jérémie NOYER -
http://www.media-magic.blogspot.com/
Merci à Isabelle - Warner Music
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C’est
la pire catastrophe que Springfield ait connue, et
tout est la faute de Homer, de son nouvel animal
familier - un cochon - et d’une fuite dans un
réservoir rempli de déjections… Une foule folle de
rage se dirige droit sur la maison des Simpson. La
famille parvient à s’échapper de justesse, mais ses
membres se retrouvent rapidement séparés après
s’être disputés.
Can
you tell me about you, your training and your
background?
