JOHN OTTMAN (2008)
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On the one hand, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear John Ottman praise the films of the seventies, because for several composers – John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Michael Small, and David Shire, to name a few – that decade not only gave them opportunities to write some of their best work, but expand their technique and draw from classical, experimental, minimalism, or electronic mediums for modest and big budget productions.
Williams’ Black Sunday (1977), Goldsmith’s Coma (1978), Small’s Klute (1971) , and Shire’s The Conversation (1974) will always remain favourites as well as scores worth studying because their distinct construction is inspiring for filmmakers, composers, and editors. The tone and style of The Usual Suspects (1995) reflects that same emphasis on plot and characters, but Ottman’s editing and score were also part of a fine collaboration with director Bryan Singer and writer Christopher McQuarrie.
In Valkyrie (2008), Ottman re-teamed with Singer and McQuarrie, and served as the film’s sole composer and editor in the trio’s first film together since The Usual Suspects.
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Mark R. Hasan: In your collaborations with Bryan Singer, you’ve edited and scored increasingly complex productions, and I wonder if it’s become a little bit easier to balance those major roles as composer and editor, and are better able to apply your organizational skills with greater precision, now that you’ve done quite a few really huge budget films.
JO: To tell you the truth, because doing both these tasks is not the norm in the business, it really hasn’t gotten any easier. In fact it was probably the hardest on Valkyrie because we continued to tweak and edit the movie for the longest time.
We had scenes that we hadn’t shot yet that we were owed very late in the game, and we were doing that while I was trying to write the score, and I had to write music ahead of time before I saw the edited scene.
I was constantly torn in a million directions when I was trying to write the score, and I was the only editor on the film; I didn’t bring a second person on, so this was probably the hardest job I’ve had. Literally was reduced to tears because of time for this movie, and then as you get old, of course you need more sleep, and it becomes even more difficult. I used to be able to do this with three hours of sleep a day, but there’s no way I can do that anymore.
MRH: For Valkyrie, I wonder if you did any musicological research, and if you drew some inspiration from the restrictive atmosphere that existed for composers under the Nazis at the time?
JO: I did a lot of research on the characters in the movie to find out their background and who they were – mainly the conspirators in the film – because I firstly approach music from an emotional point of view, and I also knew that, even though it was set in World War II, it’s basically a suspense thriller.
From the first moment that Bryan Singer and I talked about the music, we were on the same page, in terms of ‘Lets not make the score like Winds of War (1983); let’s make it a thriller score,’ so I just figured that I really wouldn’t be required to call on anything that I would call cliché (musically) from the period.
Even in the big moments in the movie, I avoided snare drum for militaristic things, and I used logs being dropped on the floor and totally different things. We didn’t want the film to be clichéd at all; we wanted to be historically accurate, of course, but the score gave Valkyrie that slightly modern edge we were looking for.
MRH: That approach reminds me of the seventies scores written for those suspenseful, historically driven thrillers that came out at the time, and the big wave of war films.
JO: You’re feeding me the exact next comment about the score. The funny thing is, Tom Cruise, Brian Singer and screenwriter Chris McQuarrie and I are all pretty much in the same age group, and we all believe that the films of the seventies were the greatest films ever made, and the scores of the seventies were the best film scores, so I knew going in that (knock on wood) there wasn’t going to be too much of a battle, in terms of going the seventies score route, which is what I normally do anyway. That’s where my sensibilities come from, but then I write stuff that doesn’t feel dated; I find a way to update it for today.
MRH: One of the best scores for me of the seventies is The Boys from Brazil (1978). It doesn’t deal specifically with material from that era, but it definitely was an attempt to try and musically extend the Nazi regime to the present day.
JO: That’s an awesome score. What Jerry Goldsmith did with that waltz.
MRH: It’s a great waltz, and one of the most evil waltzes every written. I mean, the film is part of a genre I call Nazi sleaze because it’s a thriller film, being somewhat based around historical facts, but at the same time it has this undeniable sleaze factor; the characters, the villains, are just so scummy, and the film evolves similar to a bodycount thriller.
There’s a certain style of music, certainly in the case of Boys from Brazil, where it can satirize the arrogance and the pomp and circumstance of the Nazis, but there’s also a danger where a score may not glorify the regime, but it gives them a bit of a regal tone.
JO: There is that fine line, although had we had scenes like that, I totally would have done that, but Valkyrie basically centered on the bombast of the Germans. It really is an internal movie, and very much like The Usual Suspects, with enclosed locations; the film focuses on the conspirators most of the time, so there really wasn’t a lot of opportunity to have a lot of irony with the score, in terms of the large-scale officers.
Any scenes that we had like that were really the officers working on behalf of the resistance movement… so there was almost some euphoria in the music when the German reserve army is taking over and securing Berlin, which was part of the plan of the conspirators.
MRH: I’m just curious if you’ve ever seen any of the propaganda films of the era, either German or for that matter the Soviet films?
JO: Yeah, we saw a lot of those because there is a radio broadcast in the film (typical propaganda stuff that’s in the backdrop of several scenes) and I wanted there to be music. I did do some research [and we used] some of the music that we found.
MRH: The music scores of that era, both the German and Soviet, were geared specifically towards grabbing any reluctant audience member who was not feeling particularly nationalistic, and making sure that by the end of the film he or she was completely indoctrinated, or hopefully indoctrinated with the sights and the sounds of that particular regime.
JO: Absolutely. They were extremely nationalistic and pride-inducing; not too much unlike the American of the time as well (we did the same thing) but I would like to think that ours were less propaganda and more fact.
MRH: What I like about Valkyrie is how you captured tension using sounds that evoke the clipped discipline of the military machine without actually being heavy-handed.
JO: Anytime you hear the huge percussion is when the reserve army is securing sections of Berlin. Basically it’s a very pulsating score, and the challenge was to make a lot of music not feel like a lot of music. The sound really required a constant heartbeat, and that’s what the score really became in the movie, and it was my job to design the music to be able to be intertwined with the sound effects and so forth.
Being the editor, I’m in charge of the final dub, so I would often have a lot of peaks and valleys in the score, ebbing in and out of the sound effects when it would feel like I was over-doing it, yet we found the music always had to be there on this particular type of movie.
I’m a big believer of ‘less is more,’ so I was surprised how much music I had to write, but we found that whenever we stopped that musical pulse, the film just wasn’t as exciting anymore. It’s part of the challenge of doing a film which is very enclosed, very plodding, and has a lot of dialogue. It’s very much like The Usual Suspect: to keep things feeling more exciting than they necessarily were visually.
MRH: A suspense sequence has a life of its own, in terms of structure and rhythm, etc. When you’re spotting a sequence and you recognize that it has its own driving, brooding identity, does that influences how you write the more melodic parts of the score?
JO: Absolutely. I mean I’ve said many times in the past that the best film scores are ones that when they’re taken away from the film, you can sense a sort of musical story being told, especially in the more melodic scores.
Valkyrie isn’t a particularly melodic score, but it sort of evolved because the trick of the music and the trick if the movie is to slowly evolve from a suspense thriller into a tragedy, and the music had to sort of push all the entertainment buttons for the suspense, but then slowly pull you along into the tragic nature of the movie; so it slowly becomes more melodic as the film goes on.
The soundtrack album is different from the movie. You’ve got to make an album more exciting to listen to, so it’s completely out of order with the film. The opening cue in the album, “They’ll Remember You,” is actually the end title piece of the movie, because that’s where the film is headed.
You’ve got to have a master plan for the score. I used really small motifs that recur whenever specific types of things are happening in the film, like a sort of ostinato I got on the low strings that recurs every time the conspirators are plotting.
MRH: One of my favourite examples of that would be John Williams’ Black Sunday (1977), because it’s a really simple theme. It’s addictive, it gets you going, it propels a scene, and Williams keeps layering and texturing each permutation.
JO: I can’t believe that I don’t even know that score, but that’s classic film scoring, which I try to keep alive in what I do. The movies aren’t exactly the same things they used to be, so you don’t have as many opportunities to push that musical agenda… but I try, and it really depends on the type of movie.
MRH: Your end title music really feels like an elegy both for the leading conspirators that were executed, as well a class of military officers who did not begin their career under the Third Reich, and had a totally different viewpoint of war, how one behaves towards enemy combatants, and a certain kind of honour that was completely thrown own once the Nazis came into power.
JO: I wanted the end of the movie to feel like some heroism had occurred; [I wanted the audience] to feel the sacrifice, and to walk out of the theatre feeling these guys were heroes… I didn’t know how to convey that musically, because the end scene of the movie is very emotional.
So basically to make a long story short, it suddenly hit me that if it was choral, it would feel like a piece of music that I could reflect upon the honour and the heroism of their sacrifice, but even the choral music sounded too cheesy, because it was all ‘Ooos’ and ‘Ahs,’ and then I realized it’s got to be lyrics in German, and it would be awesome if somehow it could reflect loosely about what they did.
A friend [suggested] Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied II / Wayfarer’s Night Song II,” a little poem about birds falling silent in the woods. The last phrase of the poem is ‘Soon you too will be at rest” and it just gave me chills. It wasn’t on the nose, which I liked about it, and it enabled me to basically have lyrics, which to the American audience will sound like gibberish but it will sound pretty, and the Germans would hopefully pick up on it, so that’s how the idea came about.
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KQEK.com would like to thank John Ottman for discussing his latest work, and Melissa McNeil at Costa Communications for facilitating this interview.
For more information on John Ottman, visit the composer’s website HERE.
To read an earlier interview with John Ottman regarding Urban Legends 2, click HERE.
All images remain the property of their copyright holders.
This interview © 2008 by Mark R. Hasan
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Related external links (MAIN SITE):
CD: Boys from Brazil, The (1978) — Valkyrie (2008)
DVD/Film: Usual Suspects, The (1995)
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