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02 October 2007
LAS
VEGAS & NUMB3RS interview de Charlie CLOUSER
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.
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