Horner could score noms with "Mind", "Iris" scores

Of the many elements contributing to a movie's success and adding to its Oscar and Golden Globes potential, music is one of the most important. In the case of Universal, DreamWorks and Imagine Entertainment's drama "A Beautiful Mind," James Horner's music is a valuable asset that director Ron Howard puts to impressive use. "Mind," produced by Brian Grazer and Howard, is likely to be a major contender in a number of prime awards races, including music. "Mind," which Howard talked about in Wednesday's column, stars Russell Crowe, Ed Harris and Jennifer Connelly and was written by Akiva Goldsman. It opens in nine key cities Dec. 21, expands Christmas Day and goes wide Jan. 4.

It's possible that Horner could wind up competing with himself this awards season with the score he composed for Miramax's drama "Iris," directed by Richard Eyre and starring Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent and Kate Winslet, which begins its Oscar qualifying run today in New York and Los Angeles. Written by Eyre and Charles Wood, "Iris" is a Mirage Enterprises, Robert Fox, Scott Rudin production. Produced by Robert Fox and Scott Rudin, it was executive produced by Anthony Minghella, Sydney Pollack, Guy East, David M. Thompson, Tom Hedley and Harvey Weinstein.

Horner is certainly no stranger to Oscar and Golden Globe voters. He was honored with two Academy Awards and two Golden Globes for his work on James Cameron's "Titanic" -- best original score and best original song ("My Heart Will Go On"). Also to his credit are five additional Oscar nominations and four additional Golden Globe nods. And then there are the six Grammy awards that he's won, including one for "My Heart Will Go On." A full list of Horner's film scores is really too long even for a column that runs as long as this one does, but a few to note are those done for Ron Howard's "Apollo 13" and "Cocoon," Wolfgang Petersen's "The Perfect Storm," Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" and "The Man Without a Face" and Edward Zwick's "Courage Under Fire."

"I was just so thrilled when he asked me to do it," Horner told me, referring to Howard and "Mind." "I knew the story (Goldsman's screenplay is based in part on Sylvia Nasar's biography about mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr. and his battle against schizophrenia) and I thought this is one of the projects that should get made and that Scott Rudin or somebody would buy up the rights, but that it would never get a green light anywhere. And then I heard while I was doing "Grinch" (Howard's 'Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas') that Ron was doing it. He discussed it with me and asked me if I would do the music, which I was, of course, agreeable to. And while we were working on 'Grinch' we sort of were in our minds thinking about the world beyond 'Grinch.' He was supposed to go right into production or prepping on 'A Beautiful Mind.'

"All through the production (of 'Mind') he and I would talk maybe once every 10 days about the music. I wanted to do write a piece of music that somehow was an under score, wasn't like a movie score sanitizing this up and down and up again story. I didn't want to write just a movie score. I wanted it to be a little more interesting and somehow fuse more with the character (of Nash). I started coming up with musical ideas that I thought were an abstraction of what the world of mathematics is like. I played all this stuff for Ron and he and I sort of both moved forward in a complete agreement as to what it would be. Even on the final scoring sessions, there were never any surprises really for him. It was just a question of him finally hearing the finished orchestrations as opposed to hearing the score for the first time because he'd been made so aware of what I was after all through the process."

Did Horner work differently with Howard on "Mind" than he had on "Grinch?" "Yes," he replied. "He left me much more alone on 'Grinch.' 'Grinch' was on auto-pilot in a certain respect in that we both knew what we had to do. We both knew what had to happen at the end. And there weren't a lot of liberties I could take. I had a certain sort of job to do and I had to service the film. And he knew that. So, consequently, our discussions were more like, 'What do you think of this song in that scene as opposed to that song that I had written in that scene?' or 'What about a main credits song?' or 'Is there any way of doing this without it seeming over the top?' It was those kind of conversations. It was more mundane music conversations, and I didn't contact him constantly to get his thoughts on ideas because it was much more straight ahead and a little bit more conventional in terms of the way we approached it."

With "Mind," however, "everything that I was doing I wanted to be much more unconventional and I wanted to give the impression with a relatively small sized orchestra of the world of mathematics and the processes that go on in one's head because I was very involved in math," Horner explained. It's like a kaleidoscope. You look into a kaleidoscope and you twist the end and there are very slowly changing patterns. But the patterns never really repeat. It's just these constantly beautiful geometric patterns that keep rearranging themselves. To me that was very much John Nash's world. And I wanted to somehow convey that this lofty ideal in terms of music. What I really did was (write) it for five pianos and voice, but mostly five pianos. It was a very intentional thing. I wanted to give this (sense) of tremendous movement and energy, creating these slowly evolving patterns because his mind works a zillion miles an hour. He slowly can decipher codes or think numbers or do things in his mind and I wanted to somehow have the music - without it being music, so much - amplify that without it just seeming like a movie score. (I had) to take a lot of risks and when I do that I need the filmmakers' involvement so that there are no gambles taken without them knowing and being part of it. So that was a big difference (in terms of) how I worked with Ron on this as opposed to 'Grinch.'"

Although Horner started very early in the filmmaking process on "Mind," he said, "as it turned out due to editing, availabilities of actors, shooting schedules and stuff like that, I really only had --it seems unbelievable now -- (a short period in which to work). I was officially signed two months into the production and they were on a fast track. But I didn't start getting finished timing notes until about two weeks before the scoring session. Very, very late in the game. They loved what they were hearing and they were trying to get the scoring sessions moved up because they didn't want the movie to be out there (and being seen by) the press with the temp music on it anymore. They wanted the finished music in it and I was constantly trying to figure out how I could get it written and recorded and cut in (to the movie) in time for them to get what they needed given that I had only really started working with finished locked film 12 days earlier. It's always like this though. You look at the movie and you're talking every day (but) you can't really start until the film is relatively locked because if you are writing a sequence and they change the sequence then the music no longer fits and either they have to cut up the music like crazy or they have to have me rerecord the music, which is an added expense. So very often I just have to wait until they're done playing (with finishing the film) and then I go do it. But by the time they were done, it was so close to the recording schedule and when they needed the music (that) I really only had about 12 days to write it."

Having heard and enjoyed Horner's score when I had an early look at "Mind," I should note that it would have been impressive just for him to have gotten something written and recorded in 12 days time. To have put something this good together so very quickly is one more reason why the music merits awards consideration from Golden Globe and Oscar voters.

"You need walks in the park," Horner added by way of explaining how it might be nice to be able to work. "It isn't like that, at least not for me. I work very intensely and I don't wait until the last moment. I'm not that kind of a person. I work on it as soon as I can even if it's only thematic material that I can't really do anything with because I don't have lengths and I don't have sequences in my hands. When I work on a movie, I very seldom (take a lot of time). Even if I have 10 weeks, I think I would do most of my work in two or three. I'm just so focused. I don't do anything else with my life. I don't stop at five. I just start writing and I just don't stop until I've painted the entire canvas. It's a very painterly process for me. (It's) like hanging a huge canvas in front of me and I start. And you just live there 24 hours a day until it's pretty much done, going back and forth -- left side, right side, adding color here and there till it's done. I don't sort of do it in a conventional sense."

Asked about the song "All Love Can Be" (with lyrics by Will Jennings), sung over the film's end credits by Charlotte Church, Horner told me, "I wanted to use Charlotte's voice from the very beginning -- particularly her voice. She's a very gifted musician. She has a mature girl's voice. She doesn't have an opera singer or young-woman-aspiring-to-be-an-opera-singer type voice. And there's to me quite a big difference. It took a while to get all the legal stuff out of the way. She was in the throes of changing record labels, etc. I wanted to use her voice phonetically as a sound running throughout the score, as a sort of a human element. She wasn't singing words in the score. She was just singing musical phrases, but because it's a voice it somehow makes it feel a little more human than if an oboe plays it or a violin section, which is more conventional. She's used more and more towards the end of the film. And at the end of the film, I thought it would be nice to write a distillation for the end credits that started with her voice singing sort of the main theme of the film and going into a continuation on into the rest of the end credits. It focused the feelings at the end of the movie, which is sort of magical, and was very human, very simple. The main issue was just convincing Ron and Brian both that I wasn't being too commercial. I assured them I wasn't writing a commercial song. This would have no business being on the Top Ten or it has no business being hustled like that. This is totally a classical composition to be thought of as a movie cue."

Howard and Grazer, he explained, "didn't want a song at all. They wanted the movie to be very real. And that was another conversation we had during the scoring all through it. My sensibilities are that every time you add a piece of music suddenly it's not real any more -- it's a movie. I was always being coaxed into scoring something even though I felt music might be sanitizing it. There's always this fine line between, 'Do you put music in?' or 'Do you leave music out and have it be just a little bit more real, but perhaps not have an audience be as connected with what's going on?' But at the end of the film they didn't want a song initially because they were afraid it would be perceived as the usual Hollywood thing (a pop hit intended to promote the movie through airplay on radio stations). I was worried about it, too, but less so. And I said, also, we're dealing with an artist here (Church) who is not Britney Spears. It's going to be very quiet in nature and cinematic and not commercial. They were on the fence. And then I recorded it and we stuck it in and it comes out as the last orchestral cue of the film after the Nobel Prize (is awarded to Nash) and then she starts singing. And they loved it. All the fears went away. That's how that ended up being like that and where it is.

"It's funny. I look at a movie like this and at the end I'm so much part of the filmmaking team I don't think of me doing the music anymore. I think of me being part of Ron's team to try to make it as good a film without being aware of all the scenes or any one particular piece. The way I work with Ron, we all lose a little bit of whose responsibility is which. The editor makes musical comments and I make editorial comments. It's an interesting, very fluid process and whatever makes the movie the best. I didn't want to have the movie end and have everybody feel like they'd get up and clap and leave the room. I wanted the feeling to go on an extra five minutes. It's not the kind of movie you get up and clap. It's the kind of movie you sort of think a little bit and you sort of leave. And I think we did that. That was a lot of what I was after in the end credits. The way the end credits sort of end, it doesn't come to a conclusive chord. It's sort of a moody thing that sort of fades out to nothing. That's all very intentional."

Not only does Horner have "Mind" in release this holiday season, he also has Miramax's "Iris," for which he composed the music, which features solo violinist Joshua Bell. "I had been asked to do a couple of other big films, which I passed on (including) 'Harry Potter' and 'The Lord of the Rings' because I really wanted to work with Richard (Eyre) and I desperately wanted to do Ron's movie," he said. "Those are movies that mean something to me on a very basic level. Those are really like art films as opposed to commerce films. But I never work on two movies at the same time. So I did 'Iris' first. And Ron and I would talk every 10 days and I'd say, 'Well, when are you going to get something for me to write?' It was always, 'Well, any day now we'll have something in.' It just worked out that I was in London finishing 'Iris' and then I came back and started writing and finished 'A Beautiful Mind.'"

Did working on "Iris" differ much from working on "Mind?" "I'd never worked with Richard before," Horner said. "I'm sort of a throw-back. I find it so much more gratifying to work on a film for somebody who's got some inkling of how the world in theater goes or something else besides just a movie. And I knew of his long career (in British theater) and I knew Iris Murdoch's work. It wasn't so much the life story I was involved with. I was involved with the cast. But more than that, I wanted to work on a film that was basically a theater person's first big film. That to me was very important. I like to be there when somebody's taking a lot of risks with their career. I like that. The film's a wonderful film. It's a fairly straight-ahead story, but it's very cleverly edited the way one goes back and forth and back and forth in time. But that is its main abstraction. "Otherwise, it's a fairly conventional story in that it obviously goes from some point in her career to the end of her life. It's just a question of where you go back in time and how you delicately tether the young girl to the old woman, etc. I was not involved so much in the filmmaking because that was all his and his editor's decision making. To me it was just solving how to eloquently and elegantly go through a cue and then in the middle of it suddenly you're back 30 years. I decided to use a violin solo in that score because, again, I wanted sort of a storytelling instrument. I didn't want to do it with just a standard orchestral score. I wanted to have some unique quality to it -- some quirkiness because she was a very quirky woman who was very advanced socially for her time. And even after her death, I wanted to give it that quality. I did the violin solo for that element, which Richard liked very much."

Focusing on how he worked with Eyre, Horner recalled, "We met four or five times and we'd talk every couple of weeks, but he trusted it, as he would say, 'into my capable hands' and God help me if I make a mistake. I would tell him what I was after and I knew that he wanted it to be a certain lightness and certain quality and it had to be sad in places and do what it had to do dramatically, but I desperately didn't want the score to be another one of those sad English beautifully made movies -- all stunningly made and beautifully acted, but still of this sort of English formula. I didn't want this to be just the story of this woman's life and she dies and (for it to be) scored in that lovely, nice BBC quality that most of those scores have. I wanted this to have a quirky quality that gave her some real personality and lives on after she's gone. That to me was the biggest hurdle -- not to sort of duplicate that English sad film. I didn't want Richard's movie to be that. "We talked about it at length and I said, 'It would be so easy for Dame Judi Dench to have that kind of a sad ending. I think we should do something that's quite different from that.' I (had to solve) something for me, which was her personality and how to carry music across the old Iris and the young Iris without literally just changing keys and changing styles of music and how to have something that's more timeless. That was to me the challenge in that movie."

Martin Grove is seen Mondays at 8:35 a.m., PT on CNN and heard weekdays at 1:55 p.m. on KNX (1070 AM ) in Los Angeles.