Tyler Bates | Composer

Get Tyler: An Interview with Tyler Bates

By working on "Get Carter" you had an opportunity to take a recognizable and respected theme and re-approach it. How was it to take someone else's work and mold it to be your own?

I enjoyed it because I liked Budd's original score which I think is an interesting work of music in and of itself. He wrote the score nearly 30 years ago and recorded the entire bit for a meager 400 pounds. This includes songs, vocalists and an eclectic cast of musicians. I have a great deal of respect for any artist who doesn’t allow money to govern the extent of how far they will go to achieve the ultimate end results. I thought the opportunity to arrange Roy Budd’s theme for the year 2000 was great fun. Additionally, the visual style of the film lent itself to many interesting sonic possibilites, so I was able to incorporate a lot of unique elements into the piece as well as changing the melody instrument. Budd originally played it on a harpsichord. I used a marxophone to give it a different sound. The director and I talked about acquiring the rights to rearrange and re-orchestrate the original Budd theme early on in the project. I had yet to have the opportunity to do a project like that, so I seized it!

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Kristopher Carter | "Batman Beyond" (2000)

Talking Beyond: with Kristopher Carter

You recently went to the Sundance Institute - what can you tell me about that program?

quote-leftRobert Redford started the Sundance Institute about 20 years ago to help foster the careers of up and coming directors and screenwriters. Recently they added a Composer's Lab to their curriculum. Like the filmmaker program, it was a fellowship - they only chose six people out of many applicants, so it was quite an honor to participate. We traveled to the Sundance resort in Utah, and studied for two weeks with a lot of great film composers. Carter Burwell came out, as did Shirley Walker, Mychael Danna, and George S. Clinton. We also got to meet that year's directing fellows - we were paired up with them, and scored the experimental short films that they shot for their program. It was all very much in a demo format - we were provided with a simple synth setup and had to crank it out in a week! It was a very inspiring program.

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Alfred Hitchcock | Director

Peter Bogdanovich interviews Alfred Hitchcock, 1963

You never watch your films with an audience. Don't you miss hearing them scream?

quote-leftNo. I can hear them when I'm making the picture.

Do you feel that the American film remains the most vital cinema?

quote-leftWorldwide, yes. Because when we make films for the United States, we are automatically making them for all the world--because America is full of foreigners. It's a melting pot. Which brings us to another point. I don't know what they mean when they talk about "Hollywood" pictures. I say, "Where are they conceived?" Look at this room--you can't see out the windows. We might just as well be in a hotel room in London, or anywhere you like. So here is where we get it down on paper. Now where do we go? We go on location, perhaps; and then where do we work? We're inside on a stage, the big doors are closed, and we're down in a coal mine: we don't know what the weather is like outside. Again we don't know where we are--only within our film, within the thing we're making. That's why it's such nonsense to talk about locale. "Hollywood." That doesn't mean anything to me. If you say, "Why do you like working in Hollywood?" I would say, because I can get home at six o'clock for dinner.

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Director / Screenwriter, Allison Anders

Allison Anders Interview

Q: What is Four Rooms about?

quote-leftIt's four friends telling four stories in one movie, but it's different from other anthology films because it has a connecting character who develops throughout the film. That's Ted the Bellboy, played by Tim Roth. It's New Year's Eve: he goes into these four rooms, and each room is directed by a different person: me, Alexander Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, or Quentin Tarantino. And terrible things happen to him. Actually he makes out best in my room because he gets laid by Ione Skye!

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Francis Ford Coppola | Director, Producer, Screenwriter, Composer

Francis Ford Coppola - Up to "The Cotton Club"

You served your apprenticeship originally with Roger Corman working on horror movies. Was that a good apprenticeship?

quote-leftOh yeah. Aside from the fact that it was the only apprenticeship possible, the only way to gain that experience. Nowadays there are many people like Roger making so-called exploitation films. But in those days there was nothing other than Roger, and I was lucky to become his personal assistant, and he assigned me many many different jobs, from editing and writing to being a sound recordist, cameraman - you name it, I did it for him. And although the pay was, of course, very very poor, what you gained in experience and confidence more than made up for it.

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