James Horner: The Empire Interview The late, great composer, in his own words

Two months prior to his tragic death, Empire sat down with James Horner to look back on his incredible body of work. Here, we present the legendary composer in one of his final interviews.

You had your first break with Roger Corman. How was that?

The Roger Corman experience was wonderful. Roger said, “Here’s $4,000. I want a 90 minute score.” You have to solve that riddle. You have to be as inventive and resourceful as you can be. You are acting as a composer, conductor and most importantly a producer. I’d been a composer, I ‘d been a conductor. The hardest part was how do you get what Roger wants for his movie for $4,000. That was the best skill I learned. I ended up doing maybe five Roger Corman movies. Battle Beyond The Stars was the fusion movie that put me on the next step of the ladder. It brought me to attention of Paramount and Star Trek.

For Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, how did you approach the legacy of Star Trek music? 

I’m not a TV person. I never saw the series. I knew the theme. I did go to the sessions with Jerry Goldsmith while I was working at Corman. I knew Jerry and I wanted to see what big sessions were like. I used to go to John Williams’ sessions.

I remember not being impressed emotionally with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I was impressed with Jerry’s sound world but it wasn’t a film Paramount particularly wanted to follow. They wanted me to change direction. [Director] Nick Meyer is a very literate person. I knew the effects would take care of themselves, I knew the battles would take care of themselves. What really I wanted to focus on was the relationship between Kirk and Spock. That hadn’t really been done before.

At that time, there was not going to be a Star Trek III. It hadn’t been formulated. I remember the ending changing when Star Trek III was in the pipeline, so they knew how they had to fuse together. It held us in very good stead that I had focused on that relationship music in Star Trek II because you really sense the loss going into the end of Star Trek II and then Star Trek III. That’s how I got started in that world.

You then went on to do Aliens with James Cameron...

In total, I had less than two weeks to do that score. Jim Cameron, who I met at Corman, is very hands-on. When he came to do Aliens at Pinewood, the unions slowed his process down by 3000 per cent. What he thought you could do in a certain amount of time, he was not able to do. His editorial team was not keeping up. I was in London, ready to go, but the film wasn’t ready for me. I had to start writing and the copyists physically weren’t able to hand-write the music. It became a physical thing: can we get this score done in time?

I was used to writing under weird time crunches with Roger and in weird situations, so I could do it but it was stressful because the stakes were much higher than a Roger Corman horror movie set on the beach. Now we are talking about Aliens, a sequel to stunning movie, and a very different movie, a war movie. What Jim kept stressing to me was this was not an abstract sci-fi movie. It was marines in space. That’s the score that I wrote. It was done in a very short period of time.

So were you reluctant to work with Cameron again for Titanic? 

We both went off into different styles of films. He didn’t need an orchestra; he was more into synth stuff. Music was more incidental, less emotional. But when it came to Titanic, Jim was taking a huge risk, a period romance. He was completely out of his genre. It was all about trust. We both really wanted to do it. It was about not making it old-fashioned, making it emotional in a clean way that didn’t sound like an old Hollywood movie. That was the whole aesthetic. The first thing he said was, “No fucking violins”. Of course there are violins, but I knew what he meant.

I saw the movie and I had an immediate emotional reaction to it. I went home and wrote five themes and they are the same five themes that are in the movie. Nothing changed.

Is it true that you wrote ‘My Heart Will Go On’ in secret? 

I did. He did not want it to be a Hollywood movie that had violins soaring away around it and a song pasted in at the end. But when you see the last scene of the movie, my job is to keep the audience in their seats and not let them off the hook. It’s my personal belief I should never let anyone put their coats on. They have to be as in it as they can be. As I started writing this eight-minutes sequence, I was saying, “How am I going to do this? Just another orchestra reprise?” It had to be very intimate, very emotional.

My first thought was just voice. I was doing these vocalisations of the themes from all of the films and I decided to see if I could have words written. I was still minding my orders — no song. It started to coalesce into something that I thought might have a life of a song and I proceeded secretly with Celine until the time when Jim felt comfortable enough with his own film. The day finally came when I played it for him. He played it for his family who loved it but he was still not convinced. It took him another month-and-a-half to be convinced. We took it to New York and previewed it and the audience was in tears and tatters at the end. That’s when he decided the song would be in the movie, when he realized it was a cinematic tool and it wasn’t a gimmick. He had to see it with an audience to believe that.

While you were composing the score to the film, the outside world still thought the film was going to be a disaster.

We talked about that at night. I’d go over to his house. He’d work all day. The world was falling in around him. It was supposed to be a July release, an August release, then early September. Basically he said, “Fuck it, it’s going to be a Christmas release, it will give us two more months to cut this thing.” He had had Arnold Schwarzenegger come in and look at it and Arnold said, “This is great!” Jim would take the film at night and he’d re-cut everything the editors had done and not keep a log. So in the morning, the editors would come in and there would be a whole new film in front of them. They were all scrabbling. The only one who was in on this process was me.

He said, “We are so screwed.” I said, “You are in a perfect position. The movie is going to turn out great and no one knows except us. When this movie comes out, it is going to change everybody’s perception because they are going to be so surprised.” It ended up doing that. I just had confidence in the movie and the story. Jim was caught up in the gnashing and to and fro. The studio was so hard on him.

And you reunited for Avatar?

In a certain way, it’s a science fiction effects movie. And in a certain way, it’s very conventional: it’s a love story and I had to fuse the two. But fusing the two in a movie like that was much harder because the language Jim was looking for was something he’d never heard before. Yet it had to be a language that would be accessible to an audience. We tried a lot of experiments with instruments. I found wonderful soloists that I used, but it was a fusion world of synth and sampled sounds that I then recoloured slightly and played myself into the score. I did it as opposed to hiring a brilliant outsider because I knew what Jim was after.

Did the studio trust Cameron more this time round? 

The battles he had with the studio were so atrocious. It was like he was starting with people he had never worked with before. Instead of trusting him, having gone through the whole circuit with him, they lost confidence in Avatar. They would not put any money into advertising. There were never any ads. That was a word of mouth movie.

It was so astounding. To be in on the screaming matches between the two heads of the studio and Jim was so extraordinary. They thought it would be a huge failure. When we were dubbing the movie, going into 20th Century Fox every day there were no Avatar ads. Alvin And The Chipmunks 2 was opposite the studio! The studio thought if they advertised it enough they would make up a tiny percentage of what Avatar would lose. That is how Hollywood works.

Away from James Cameron, you’ve collaborated a lot with Ron Howard. How was working with him on Apollo 13? 

There’s a nobility and a restraint to it. That’s probably my aesthetic; Ron is a little bit more gung ho than I am. I fly myself and I know a lot of pilots. They downplay what they do and I wanted to bring that nobility. Jim Lovell is so low-key, a down-to-Earth normal guy but what he’s done is so extraordinary. Ultimately, my job on that film was to tell the story in a noble, understated way but principally to make the audience forget they knew how it turned out. Titanic was a similar thing. I love that.

How do you make an audience forget about that?

There is a key point in that movie where they return to Earth and due to an anomaly in the Earth’s atmosphere, they go out of radio communication as they are re-entering. There is this magical two minutes where the score has to suspend the belief — maybe they didn’t make it? It was a pulse that fades out to nothing, then it explodes when they make contact. It was very emotional. It worked on Ron and it worked on an audience and it worked on Jim Lovell. He started crying. It was a unique experience because he was seeing it as an audience member. I had done my job.

You reteamed with Howard for A Beautiful Mind.

I wanted to come up with a looking-through-a-kaleidoscope quality. I came up with this thing on four pianos that sounds so beautiful. It so reflected the mathematics. There are a couple of key sequences where that was used. It was very important to create the beauty of mathematics and what he saw within that. I also think that’s one of Ron’s best movies.

Ron did a Western called The Missing. He wanted to try and do something that the movie didn’t do. I knew from day one that it was never going to happen but I didn’t know how to tell him. No matter if God wrote the music, it wasn’t going to happen. The movie wasn’t spun right. Too safe, not gritty enough, I could never solve that problem for him. I think he resented it, although I told him I couldn’t. We went on separate paths. I think it was unfortunate.

With Glory, did you do a lot of research into the era?

Nothing. I never do any research into the era. It’s in my mind’s eye. I do it from what I think it might be. If I had to write something for a Bulgarian women’s choir, I’d do it from what I imagine that to be. Glory to me was about Denzel Washington’s character, the nobility of it. I’d never done a Civil War movie. There are certain scenes in that movie that I’m so proud of cinematically.

What I wanted to do was find a unique colour for it so it wasn’t a war movie. That’s why I used the Boys Choir Of Harlem. There was something true about that. They have a unique sound. There was something so innocent about that sound. If you choose the right colours, it doesn’t matter what the notes are. The colours paint themselves. When the orchestra was listening to playbacks when the boys are singing, it had that effect. It’s really extraordinary.

There is a great deal of love for your Braveheart score. 

Braveheart was one of my best collaborations. Mel was unbelievable to work with. I had done one movie before with him. He knew what kind of freedom I needed. He didn’t meddle. There were certain scenes he had no music for that he thought played great but I thought could be better. At the end of the movie for the disemboweling scene, they had temped it with all different types of music but when they previewed it, the scene repulsed people. Mel tried recutting it. I said to Mel. “Let me treat this differently. Let me write this as a lullaby.” The choir comes in and it was suddenly so reflective. The audience, instead of being repulsed, was crying. Mel cried. It’s so great when you have a filmmaker who is so wrapped up in it, is so close to it and can get to a different state of mind watching it.

Could you pick a favourite score from your body of work? 

There are bits and pieces of a lot of films that I’ve done that I love. I wouldn’t say any one film is the best. I think Braveheart was where I was relied on for so much and had so many massive problems to solve. Titanic didn’t have problems. There were actual cinematic problems with Braveheart that had to be solved that could only be solved with music. That’s the magic of how I work.

Interview by Ian Freer