Popularity: 0
Vote:   | All of a sudden I found myself doing things like 'Robot Monster' and 'Cat-Women of the Moon,' and I didn't know what the devil was going on. But if you're going to do a really bad movie, at least you do one that is at the top of the all-time bad-movie list. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Bernard Herrmann was extremely innovative. Waxman had a superior dramatic sense and was also very open to different kinds of things. Rosza for the grandeur of his concepts. David Raksin brought a peculiarly American voice to film scoring. The others had middle-European sensibilities. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Cecil B. DeMille indubitably saved my professional life. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Henry Wilcoxson was the associate producer on that movie and was a really profoundly religious man. I was getting very tense about it and Henry said to me, 'Just stop trying. Just wait for something to come to you.' And of course that made me relax and made it possible to move ahead. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Hollywood was a great club. I think it was a difficult place for actors. They were very competitive in the star world. But for those of us involved in the creative side of things it was a great club. We were very interested in each other. All the other composers were very helpful when I first went out there. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I did 10 years of comedies and 10 years of Westerns. I really like to stay away from car chases. I prefer the more intimate film. You have a much more direct association with the emotions. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I had formed a friendship with an Irish producer called Noel Pearson. He was a theatrical producer but I had always said to him, 'One day you'll do a movie and I want to do the score for it.' His first film was My Left Foot. I did him a favour and he did me a favour. He got me out of the comedy world into the real world. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I had to appear before a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee. They wanted to know if I could identify communists, but how could I know any communists if I didn't attend any Communist Party meetings? |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I have always approached every film as an individual. My brief to myself is, 'How can I do the best thing for this film?' I don't really worry about time constraints. That was what I was always concerned with. I didn't worry about whether I had enough time to make something complex. There are 24 hours in a day and sometimes you use all 24 hours. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I made my way on to a grey list, a black list even. That's something I'm very proud of, actually. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I personally preferred scoring the more delicate films that deal intimately with people's lives, like To Kill A Mockingbird, The Age Of Innocence, Rambling Rose, and of course Far From Heaven. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I spent my entire time with adults. I wasn't particularly good with my peers. I went on every vacation they ever took. I was with them every summer. My father was a school teacher and so we used to have every summer off. We used to go to Woodstock, New York every summer. We were very bonded as a unit. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I thought in terms of the enthusiasm of doing it. I didn't think about whether I was ready. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I try to keep myself fresh. I don't want to get bored. I've really sought to do a variety of things on purpose. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I used it when I came to The Magnificent Seven. I like the film. But if you watch it without music it is slow, strangely enough. It develops very slowly. I learned my lesson from de Mille. I thought, 'I'm going to infuse this film with energy.' And it worked. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I would do the occasional score. I thought it was the most thrilling thing. It was instant. You made the music and they played it right away to millions of people. I found it thrilling. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I'm generally pessimistic about the dumbing down of America - especially with summer movies. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It was a great way to work. In those days, you had to be there. It was your world. It was your club. Your friends were there, your associates were there, your security was there. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Most people don't know I did one Western really early on with Henry Fonda called The Tin Star, but that didn't tag me as a Western composer - what did was my score for The Magnificent Seven in 1960. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | My influences later on were rather different. I inherited Bach from my father. I remember being literally dragged along when I was 10 to see a performance of St Matthew Passion. Ten is a rather tender age for that sort of thing but I was intrigued by it. I was brought up by Bach. I think my orchestral influences somewhat later are rather different. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | My parents were from Middle Europe - basically from the Ukraine and what is now Belarus. So, yeah, my sensibilities were Middle European sensibilities. My grandmother used to sing songs to me from her Jewish background but they were Middle European songs, basically, and that's what I heard a lot of as a child. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | No vacation from practising. But that was fine. I don't know how I felt about it when I was 10 or 11. No, I can actually. We lived in Paris for a year in 1933. I remember enjoying the idea of finding a piano teacher in Paris. Certainly by the time that I was 14, I was pretty sure that I wanted music to be my life. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | One of the things that happens in the business is that success is a very strange thing in that if you are involved in something very successful the next person wants you to repeat it. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | That's the whole point. That limits the value of the award. Sometimes you wonder where the nominations came from. Basically, the Academy Award for music is an appreciation. It is not the Pulitzer Prize. It's nice if you get the Oscar, but it doesn't make you a great composer to get it or a poor composer to lose it. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The first question I ask myself is Why is there music in this film at all? What's it doing here? Then your questions get more and more specific. For example, you decide one scene will have music and another one won't. Obviously you discuss that with the filmmaker, and there may be some disagreement. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The way that studios were organised, they gave you tremendous support because everything was there. Your orchestrators, your copyists and your orchestra - they were all there. The head of the music department was also a composer. So you had a lot of guides there. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | There's no way I can compete with someone who can write rap or rock and roll. Nor do I wish to. But I've always kept up to date with music changes. I worked very hard not to type myself. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Today you have something like A Film by Joe Harry. That is patently asinine and ridiculous. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Victor Young had been hired to write the score for the dances of The Ten Commandments but he became very ill. You were then hired to write the score. But at the same time you'd written The Man with the Golden Arm score. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | When I left the army, I would have liked to have done this kind of work. I made some feeble attempts but they weren't interested in me. It was one thing for the Air Corps to pay me to do this but quite another for a major broadcaster to be interested. And they weren't. So I went back to concertising. I gave concerts, mainly on the East Coast. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | You wouldn't think it would but my parents were really balanced about that. When it came time for me to be out of the house and out on my own they were very supportive. |