{"id":2424,"date":"2011-03-02T22:41:35","date_gmt":"2011-03-03T03:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=2424"},"modified":"2011-03-02T22:41:35","modified_gmt":"2011-03-03T03:41:35","slug":"michael-wandmacher-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=2424","title":{"rendered":"MICHAEL WANDMACHER (2011)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Return to<\/strong>: <\/em>Home <\/em><\/a>\/ <\/em>Exclusive Interviews & Profiles<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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Drive Crazy<\/strong> is Michael Wandmacher\u2019s latest film score for director Patrick Lussier (after My Bloody Valentine 3D<\/strong>), but it\u2019s vastly different compared to his prior work in the horror realm.<\/em><\/p>\n

Piranha 3D<\/strong> (2010) is an orchestral & electronic gnashing of sounds meant to accent the feeding frenzy of prehistory piranha fish, whereas Cry_Wolf<\/strong> (2005) is a largely electronic, and is built around a simple melodic hook that reflects a group of doomed snotty students trying to solve a series of nasty murders when a prank goes very, very wrong.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lussier\u2019s car-friendly film is about rage on the road, the raging revenge of a grandfather named Milton (Nicolas Cage) determined to save his daughter from a satanic cult, and people going through life with rage and intolerance for others (if not humanity as a whole) \u2013 making Wandmacher\u2019s blend of heavy bluegrass and rock letter-perfect.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Mark R. Hasan<\/strong>: Drive Angry<\/strong> is your third 3D film, and you\u2019re probably one of the few composers to have scored so many in the format, if not in such rapid succession.<\/em><\/p>\n

Michael Wandmacher<\/strong>: It\u2019s true\u2026 and if [director Patrick Lussier] keeps going the way he\u2019s going, that\u2019ll probably be a trend that continues.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: Was Drive Angry<\/strong> a project that Patrick had already lined up after making My Bloody Valentine<\/strong>, or was it something that was on his mind and had yet to be written?<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: As far as I know, the story (and I\u2019m paraphrasing this, and culling it from Todd Farmer, the co-writer) was Lionsgate had turned down the idea of doing a sequel to My Bloody Valentine<\/strong>, and so Patrick and Todd weren\u2019t really sure what was next after that.<\/p>\n

It was just odd to them that with a film as successful as My Bloody Valentine<\/strong>, [Lionsgate] wouldn\u2019t want to do a sequel, so they just decided they were going to sit down and write a script, and do a spec and see what happened\u2026 Millennium Films decided they wanted to make it. Nicolas Cage loved the script, got attached, and off they went. It was just a straightforward turn of events.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: And did Lussier ask you to score the film with some advance ideas, or were you brought onto the project when they started filming?<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: I was brought on right away. Patrick usually likes to assemble his team pre- and post-principle photography as early as he can, and if I\u2019m available and he wants to work with me, he\u2019ll try to get me signed on before they even start shooting\u2026 In this case there were pre-records involved, so I had to do some arrangements before shooting even started.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a bar scene in the film where I had to take the song \u201cSandman\u201d by the band America and re-arrange it as a bluegrass song that was being played in the bar. It\u2019s actually very appropriate to the film, but it was something where the band was actually performing the song during the scene, and there are actually quite a few cutaways to the singer and the performers.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: Was the bluegrass song something you suggested or did it came out of your discussions with Patrick?<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: It was originally Patrick\u2019s idea to do a bluegrass style version of something. We went through a bunch of songs. We were trying to find things that were appropriate to the script, appropriate to the characters, and also trying to find songs that were available and that we could afford. Once we had read the lyrics and found out [\u201cSandman\u201d] was available, that seemed the most appropriate.<\/p>\n

He just wanted it to be more upbeat, so we changed the tempo quite a bit; it\u2019s a very traditional bluegrass ensemble, and we inserted the lyrics and made it work.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: Nicolas Cage has a certain screen presence and acting style. Were there any aspects of his performance that inspired you to change the original concept of certain themes and cues?<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: I don\u2019t know if it affected my scoring process so much as I guess I was lucky\u2026 We knew from the get-go \u2013 you can even tell fro the title \u2013 that there was nothing subtle at all in the movie. Everything was going to be very much in your face; very aggressive, straightforward\u2026 It was all about making it as big and gnarly and forward moving with a lot of momentum as possible.<\/p>\n

The big nod in the movie was to tip the hat to seventies and early eighties kind of AOR album rock<\/a>, as opposed to the really over-produced, alt-rock type of things that people are listening to now. It wouldn\u2019t have felt right in this movie; it\u2019s just not that vibe.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: What I like so much about the bluegrass combination \u2013 electric guitar, acoustic guitar, really fat electric bass and drums \u2013 is that you can come up with the nastiest groove imaginable, making a sequence really edgy in a way that\u2019s not really possible with electronics.<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: No, it\u2019s very basic, it\u2019s very primal, and it speaks to a lot of people on some level\u2026 It\u2019s a very charged kind of music, and at its core it\u2019s very simple, but it\u2019s also the foundation for so many other forms of music.<\/p>\n

Even the bluegrass things that we did in the bar were very<\/em> traditional, in the sense that I did the original lineup, which is mandolin, acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, and a very small trap kit. It\u2019s not even a drum kit; it\u2019s somewhere between a hambone kind of thing and a drum kit\u2026 Blending those two approaches made for a lot of fun. It was very different from doing anything I\u2019ve done before.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: You can take those same instruments, particularly the acoustic instruments, and make them menacing, or incredibly tender.<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: Where I was using the acoustic instruments, I would either process them heavily during moments when Milton (Nicolas Cage) was interacting with bad guy Jonah King (who\u2019s played by Billy Burke); there\u2019s kind of a supernatural element going on [and] it was almost demonic at points.<\/p>\n

[For] the moments that he was sharing with Piper (Amber Heard) or just expressing regret or remorse or nostalgia or anything like that, where I\u2019d been using an electric cello in one case, I\u2019d use a real cello; or instead of using an electric guitar, I was using an instrument called a guitarviol<\/a> which is a hollow-bodied instrument that looks a lot like if you smashed a viola and a guitar together around the neck. You play it with a bow, but it\u2019s threaded and fingered the exact same as a guitar, so it has a very natural acoustic presence, but it\u2019s different.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: After you recorded the main instrumental parts, how much time do you spend layering in the electronics, doing the processing and refining everything until you get that balance for the final score?<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: It\u2019s all done at the same time. Process-wise, I come up with the programming part of it, the sample part of it, all the manipulations in terms of plug-ins and things like that, and the performances. When the cue\u2019s done, the cue\u2019s done<\/em>; all the elements are there, and then it\u2019s printed and then I give it to the mixer.<\/p>\n

In this case it was Gustavo Borner<\/a> who\u2019s mixed a lot of Tyler Bates\u2019 and John Murphy<\/a>\u2019s stuff that\u2019s very hyper with a lot of electronic, rock & roll, and things like that. He\u2019s really deft and bringing out a lot of the details and different elements, and making sure that they all play the proper role in the mix, but it\u2019s kind of a gestalt<\/a> process for me: I don\u2019t do one thing and then add another; they\u2019re all working together at the same time.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: It\u2019s interesting that you mention Tyler Bates, because in terms of a similarity, you both share this natural ability to balance all these different elements from acoustic, classical, blues, and electronic together. Everything is really beautifully orchestrated, and you can hear all the fine elements, whether it\u2019s bongos, cello, and so on. It\u2019s a great skill.<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: Thanks, I really appreciate that. Tyler and I get bashed for that sort of thing a lot because it\u2019s not a very purist approach to doing film scores: to be able to draw from both the electronic world and the acoustic world, and kind of see them both as their own entities.<\/p>\n

You can do an entire score electronically, you can do an entire score acoustically, but I know for myself, and I know from the conversations that I\u2019ve had with him, it\u2019s something that when we approach it, we look at it as one complete palette.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s \u2018Where am I going to draw sounds from?\u2019 I\u2019ve got these two things together that in my head somehow I can hear it overlap, and that\u2019s just how I\u2019ve evolved as a composer because I grew up dabbling in both as opposed to one or the other.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: Probably Tyler Bates\u2019 breakthrough score would be Get Carter<\/strong> (2000), which I still think is one of the best things he\u2019s written, because it\u2019s that perfect balance with rock, electronics and jazz. If you listen to one cue several times, you notice little subtleties, and that\u2019s why I think it isn\u2019t fair to denigrate that style, because it\u2019s difficult to do.<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: Yeah, it\u2019s very hard, and I try to fight the good fight with people as much as I can and say there are a lot of instances where I\u2019ve actually found composing the electronic part of the score much more difficult than doing the acoustic part.<\/p>\n

[For Drive Angry<\/strong>, I recorded piano]. As I slowly took it apart, I was doing different things with it: hitting it with different mallet instruments and bouncing metal off it and recording it, and putting it into ProTools and trying to make instruments out of those sounds. That\u2019s a very labour-intensive process, and it\u2019s a totally different methodology.<\/p>\n

In one way, the symphony\u2019s palette of sounds is kind of limitless if you\u2019re out there as a thinker\u2026but you always know what you\u2019re going to have when you walk into a room: you\u2019re going to have a brass section, you\u2019re going to have a strings section, you\u2019ll have woodwinds, and you\u2019ll have percussion.<\/p>\n

There might be some extraneous instruments, different forms of ethnic winds or percussion instruments that are non-standard, [but] you basically know what you\u2019re going to get sound-wise, so the interrelationships between those instruments [is] what you\u2019re working with.<\/p>\n

When you go into electronics, it could have a synthesizer, and you could be pounding the wall with a hammer and record that, and suddenly that<\/em> becomes an instrument\u2026 It can become very daunting, so I find [the concept of fusion] gets set aside by a lot of people who are acoustic purists as being not valid film music for some reason, and that\u2019s just not true; it\u2019s actually very hard to do.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: I\u2019m actually surprised that there\u2019s such a substantial amount of music on the Drive Angry <\/strong>soundtrack album. Is that a reflection of the 50-60 mins. worth of music you composed?<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: Total score I wrote over 100 mins. Some cues got taken out, but I think the full score for the film was probably between 85-90 mins. Actually, I had to take out a lot to get the running time down to where it didn\u2019t bore people to death.<\/p>\n

[Patrick] likes to do a lot of music, and he likes to keep a tone established from the very beginning of the movie. He feels that music is really important to maintaining the tone in the film, even if it\u2019s really quiet and at points imperceptible, he always wants to keep something in there that will keep you transported into the world of that movie, whatever it happens to be.<\/p>\n

In some cases it might be some strange atmosphere or just little particular sounds you might hear in the background, and then in other moments the music just completely takes over the movie, but either way he likes to have a lot of music. In this case there wasn\u2019t a lot of budget for songs, so I had to cover a lot of spaces that in a bigger budget [they would use songs]. I would love to have heard a bunch more songs in the movie but the budget just wasn\u2019t there for it.<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: What is your next project?<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: Right now I just started a television show called Breaking In<\/strong> that premieres April 6. I\u2019ve three films coming later this year, none of which I can talk about yet because I\u2019m still waiting for the deals to get done with the casting, and as soon as the actors are locked in I can talk about it, but right now I have to keep my mouth shut!<\/p>\n

MRH<\/strong>: It\u2019s a busy year.<\/em><\/p>\n

MW<\/strong>: Yeah. It\u2019s like I tell people, I\u2019m in a happy paradox because I know the work is there and it\u2019s coming; I just can\u2019t say anything about it yet.<\/p>\n

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KQEK.com would like to thank Michael Wandmacher for discussing his latest horror score, and Beth Krakower at CineMedia Promotions for facilitating this interview.<\/em><\/p>\n

Visit Michael Wandmacher’s website<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Our 2010 interview<\/a> with Michael Wandmacher regarding Piranha 3D <\/strong>(2010).<\/p>\n

and<\/em><\/p>\n

Our 2008 \/ 2009 interview<\/a> regarding My Blood Valentine <\/strong>(2009) and The Punisher: War Zone <\/strong>(2009).<\/em><\/p>\n

All images remain the property of their copyright holders.<\/em><\/p>\n

This interview \u00a9 2011 by Mark R. Hasan.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Related links:<\/em><\/p>\n

Film: \u00a0Drive Angry<\/a> <\/strong>(2011)<\/p>\n

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Related external links (MAIN SITE)<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Film: \u00a0My Bloody Valentine 3D <\/a><\/strong>(2009) —\u00a0\u00a0Piranha 3D<\/a> <\/strong>(2010)<\/p>\n

Misc: Breaking In<\/a> <\/strong>(IMDB entry)<\/p>\n

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Return to<\/strong>: <\/em>Home <\/em><\/a>\/ <\/em>Exclusive Interviews & Profiles<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Return to: Home \/ Exclusive Interviews & Profiles . Drive Crazy is Michael Wandmacher\u2019s latest film score for director Patrick Lussier (after My Bloody Valentine 3D), but it\u2019s vastly different compared to his prior work in the horror realm. Piranha 3D (2010) is an orchestral & electronic gnashing of sounds meant to accent the feeding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,57,319,320,4212],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-D6","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2424"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2434,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424\/revisions\/2434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}