02 October 2007
Resident Evil: Extinction, interview with Charlie CLOUSER by Christine BLANC
Le virus
expérimental mis au point par la
toute-puissante Umbrella Corporation a
détruit l'humanité, transformant la
population du monde en zombies avides de
chair humaine. Fuyant les villes, Carlos,
L.J., Claire, K-Mart, Nurse Betty et quelques
survivants ont pris la route dans un convoi
armé, espérant retrouver d'autres humains non
infectés et gagner l'Alaska, leur dernier
espoir d'une terre préservée. Ils sont
accompagnés dans l'ombre par Alice, une jeune
femme sur laquelle Umbrella a mené autrefois
de terribles expériences biogéniques qui, en
modifiant son ADN, lui ont apporté des
capacités surhumaines. Depuis le laboratoire
d'Umbrella, le Dr. Isaacs les surveille. Il
est prêt à tout pour retrouver celle qui
représente l'accomplissement ultime des
recherches de la firme, la seule personne qui
rende possible la mise au point d'un remède :
Alice. S'ils veulent avoir une chance, les
survivants doivent échapper à la fois aux
morts-vivants qui infestent le pays et à
Umbrella Corporation. Pour Alice et ses
compagnons d'infortune, le combat ne fait que
commencer...
Dans ce troisième opus
de la saga Resident Evil, l'humanité est en
voie d' "Extinction", c'est bien le contraire
qui se passe pour le talent de Charlie
CLOUSER. Le compositeur de la trilogie SAW
explose littéralement tant il accumule
projets et succès! Pour preuve cette
partition pour le moins percusive de
Resident Evil: Extinction, dans laquelle
on retrouve avec plaisir la patte de l'ancien
musicien des Nine Inch Nails, atteignant
aujourd'hui de nouveaux horizons.
How
and why did you come to film music?
In
the eighties, before my years in Nine Inch
Nails, I had worked with a composer named
Cameron Allan, doing programming and such on
his scores for the final season of the CBS
series "The Equalizer", as well as
on a few TV movie-of-the-week projects. Since
the music was totally electronic,
instrumental, and fairly ambient and
experimental, I felt it was a good fit for my
talents and interests. I started doing films
with SAW, and James Wan and I hooked
up partly because he had used a bit of nine
inch nails in his temp track, and when he
found out that an ex-nail was getting into
scoring, we found each other pretty quickly.
Do you have any
mentor? Are you inspired by a composer in
particular?
Well, I certainly learned a
lot about this from Cameron Allan when we
were doing TV, who has a pretty unusual take
on things, and my interests are pretty
scattershot when it comes to music. I tend to
like certain scores more than certain
composers... what floors me is when the
combination of the music, story, acting,
editing, and all of that stuff just CLICKS
into place and puts the viewer somewhere
they'd never go just by listening to the
music or watching the picture alone. So I
tend to like specific moments in composer's
resumes... Daniel Lanois' score for "Sling
Blade", Brad Fidel's "T2"
score... but recently I have heard a lot of
things I like.... John Powell seems to have a
cool mix of programming and orchestral stuff,
Marco Beltrami's "I, Robot" and "T3"
scores were simple, direct, and very
effective, and of course Harry
Gregson-Williams sprays interesting things
around all of the films he does.
How do you choose a
project to work on?
I tend to gravitate towards
things that will give me a balance between
things I know how to do, and things that are
going to be a challenge. For instance, James
Wan's last film, Death Sentence, had
a lot of cues that I pretty much knew what to
do, like the drum-solo beat-downs or
electronic chase grooves, but it also had a
bunch of emotional cues, which were actually
temped with songs, and so that was a bit more
of a mountain to climb to get right. In the
end, those cues were some of the best ones in
the film, and although they had very few
elements, they were a pain to get right
because they were so delicate and fiddly.
These are the cues that felt like I was
learning something by getting them right...
if it was all just super-violent beat-downs
and electronic dirge grooves, I think I'd
start to get bored.
ABOUT RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION FILM MUSIC
How did you come on
Resident Evil Extinction?
With only five
weeks until the final dub, I came on kind of
later than I would have liked to, and I had
to hit the ground running!
What direction were
you given from the producers and director?
Well, at the
first spotting session, everyone was saying,
"Disregard this temp track, we don't really
like this..." and "We really don't like the
big, melodic themes, but we DO want a big,
slamming, Hollywood sound...", so I had to
come up with a game plan right on the spot,
which we hashed out in conversation right
then and there.
Can you explain your
stylistic and thematic choices?
As much as I loved the
Beltrami and Manson score to the first film
in the series, I thought that their
synth-and-drum-machine industrial darkness
really sounded like it worked best when the
action was underground, in the tunnels of
Raccoon City, and there are not many scenes
like that in this film; most of it takes
place in broad daylight in the desert. So, I
thought that we'd need more "outdoorsy"
sounds, acoustic instead of electronic, and
so I assembled a percussion kit of metal
junk, rototoms, and other "brash" sounding
drums, and used that for all the drum
attacks, instead of more programmed,
electronic sounds. In those few scenes where
we do travel underground, the sound of the
all the instruments change to more of an
electronic, dark, and claustrophobic sound.
It's a little hard to hear but in those
scenes where we take the elevator down into
the tunnels, a sort of electronic curtain
descends on the sound and follows us around
Raccoon City.
LAS VEGAS & NUMB3RS
What are the
similarities and the differences between the
composing from TV and composing for film?
With a show like "NUMB3RS",
I actually treat it just as I would a short,
action-packed feature, but I do take
advantage of the repetitive, episodic nature
of the series as time goes by, by reusing
certain signature sounds from week to week.
When I scored the pilot, I did a
full-strength production, with the full
complement of massive drum beat-downs and
scary sounds made just for that project. As
the series went on, we'd add more and more of
these full-strength cues to the pile, and
certain ones then became signature methods of
identifying a given place, such as the FBI
headquarters or the main character's homes,
and we could then refine and reuse these
cues, making each week's version a little
different and a little better. We developed
favorite ways of exiting to a commercial, or
ending the show on a warm, homey note, and
these became templates that the editors could
cut picture against. On a film project, aside
from a main theme that may appear two or
three times in various forms, it's very rare
if I can use something more than once in a
project. In the film "Death Sentence"
I was able to base five or six cues on the
same piece of music, but that was fairly
unusual for me.
How much time did you
have to compose an episode, and how would you
describe your music for NUMB3ERS and
LAS VEGAS
?
We usually have the luxury of
an entire week to come up with 30-40 minutes
of score for each show. "Las Vegas"
averages about 30 minutes of score per
episode, and "NUMB3RS" is basically
wallpapered with music, so for me it's
usually 40 minutes of score per episode, for
a grand total of at least an hour of score a
week. The score for "Las Vegas" is
like a japanese-texmex-scandinavian-luau,
just completely all over the map. One minute
it's splashy, fun casino jams with crazy
horns and turntable fx, the next it's
legit-sounding slinky pink-panther jazz, the
next it's full-darkness suspense and action
cues, and then there's just a ton of goofball
comedy moments, little bumper cues, and of
course someone's heart gets broken in every
episode, so there's always a solo piano
tearjerker or two. It's been great experience
though, sort of a musical bootcamp, attacking
all of these different problems every week.
The score for "NUMB3RS" has a much
more unified sound, but we've developed
stylistic flavors that are each associated
with a particular place, activity, or mode
the show goes through each week. There's
still a pretty wide range of styles, from
awkward doofus comedy to hostage-drama
takedowns, but I try to make the sounds,
tones, and keys much more unified than in a
wacko smorgasbord like "Las Vegas".
What would you really
like to do next?
I don't want to get stuck
doing ultra-violence, even though it's good
clean fun, so I'm becoming more attracted to
projects that I might not know what to do
right off the bat, things that are a little
outside my background. I mentioned "Sling
Blade" before, that's a perfect example
of the type of film that I am itching to do,
something that would take a bit of figuring
out, something that needs a bit of a lighter
touch.
1. Main Title
2. Stupid Crazy
3. I'm So Sick [T-Virus Remix]
4. My World
5. Duality [Project Alice String Remix]
6. Losing
7. One Love [Extinction Remix]
8. Deathcar
9. I, Suicide
10. White Rabbit [SPC Eco Mix]
11. Paralyzed
12. Laser Tunnel
13. Asleep on the Frontlines [Appliantz Remix]
14. Catch Me
15. Contagious
16. Scenotaph [Dja Infected Remix]
17. Sixth of June
18. Wrecking Itself Taking You with Me
19. Convoy
Special Thanks to Jane LAMB
;-)
