- Speaker #0
Les grands entretiens du musée de la Sacem, avec Stéphane Lerouge. At the Cannes Film Festival 2023, the Sacem music lesson celebrates a living legend of film music, the Canadian Howard Shore, double musical of David Cronenberg, accomplice of David Fincher, Arnaud Desplechin and of course Peter Jackson, the time of two out-of-proportion triptychs, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. In the middle of the meeting, Howard is joined on stage by one of his fetish filmmakers, Martin Scorsese. Five feature films and a short historically, Howard Shore is the composer who has the most blackened music paper for the filmmaker of Taxi Driver and the Franchise. Scorsese tells us how he decides if a film needs or does not have original music.
- Speaker #1
The movies I would get to make would deserve a score because a score is something that's a component of classical cinema in my mind. And I didn't think, no, these are homemade. We do them at home. I get my records and I hear a piece of music. And I mean, yes, Taxi Driver, I felt that was somewhat different because the character of Travis Pickle didn't listen to music. And I thought that... Herman's music was always quite extraordinary. But it took me a long while to understand which films, in effect, that we could work on as an actual score, scoring process, how to use a score in a film. I didn't know how.
- Speaker #0
In 1985, Shore and Scorsese meet on an unusual project, a nightly New York comedy in a Kafka atmosphere, After Hours.
- Speaker #1
For me, After Hours was a beginning again, and I sensed what, from the scores I had heard of yours, and the type of film that After Hours was, and that period of my life that someone... who had a sense of a new wave of music in independent films. And that was the key. And then the sensitivity of the language of music that he has in Places and Heart and that sort of thing. Well, the thing with what he did with the music in that, it seems very simple, but there's a... a slight sense of humor in there or maybe more than a slight sense of humor and it has a um a very pleasant tone yet there's a sense of danger in it um there's a sense of a kind of whimsical danger um which draws you in slowly in these themes uh and and i thought that was that was perfect for the picture
- Speaker #2
I would write on the sixth floor, I think, and then I'd meet with you and we'd play things. We were really working back and forth in the same building at that. All electronic score. There were no microphones used.
- Speaker #1
That's right.
- Speaker #2
In any of it. I was performing all the parts. Yeah. and recording it on a quarter inch.
- Speaker #1
This for me was the way to go. My whole work had changed. Everything was a whole new wave, a whole new page for me in making films. And this for me was an experiment that I trusted Howard with.
- Speaker #2
And we mixed it together too. I remember being in the dub, which I used to do with David as much as I could. But in New York, I remember being with you in the dub as we mixed it. It was a mono mix. I was using delays and I would rent little processors overnight. It's such a low budget. I had no real funds to do it, but I would rent equipment and experiment with it at night and play it for Marty almost like the next day. And one of the things I got going was this sound and I was kind of bringing it back and forth in the delay and that was creating that.
- Speaker #1
See, that was the suspense, that sense of suspense and mystery. yeah a mystery and getting more and more involved in the seductive suspense of it Now, I come from a time when I, you know, saw American cinema and European cinema, and I never thought I would have a film that was going to be scored. And I always made my own scores, in a way. Around the same time, I became aware of David Cronenberg's films. That's how we met. The Brood and The Scanners and Videodrome. And so we met, and this whole Canadian connection with Robbie Robertson. and Saturday Night Live and that sort of thing. And then I just became aware of your music in that. And then particularly in places in the heart, Benton's film, yeah, yeah. And then somehow, how did we meet to do After Hours? Because After Hours was a complete shift for me. I was going to do another film, and that fell through, and then another film. And so, in a sense, I was starting over, and I said I wanted to work with.
- Speaker #2
And we were both in the Brill Building.
- Speaker #1
That's it.
- Speaker #2
You were editing on a certain floor. Yeah. And I had a little kind of electronic studio.
- Speaker #1
That's right.
- Speaker #2
A sixth floor. That's right. And I would see you in the, Griffin introduced us.
- Speaker #1
That's right.
- Speaker #2
I used to wear a lab coat in the Brill Building.
- Speaker #1
Oh, that's right.
- Speaker #2
A little lab production going on. Yes. And I met you and we started to work together with them on after hours.
- Speaker #0
After months of watching his film without end, placing original music on his images is an indescribable experience for a filmmaker.
- Speaker #1
Scorsese seeks to define it with words. different elements, the different textures, the different senses of the drama, the character, and yet plays with the actual editing of the images. This is something that is very, very sacred, special.
- Speaker #0
In 2004, Scorsese offers to Shore a XXL Paris, composed a vast musical portrait of Howard Hughes, embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator.
- Speaker #2
For The Aviator, I found an orchestra, Flemish Radio Orchestra, because I was looking for the sound of early Hollywood. So I would try to match the sound of the orchestra to the film. And I found this orchestra in Belgium. In Belgium. And they had this German sound, which was because of all the immigration to Hollywood in the 30s. That's the sound, really, of Hollywood. it like an old An old European orchestra. And I was doing a concert in Antwerp. And in the rehearsal studio was an old cinema in a little town called Leuven. And so that's the recording of The Aviator. to capture the sound of silent film. You know, it's a great subject, it's a great period, I love that period of sound, you know. silent films into sound. And it's very rich with, you know, musical ideas. There was years and years of silent film that was never really silent over 30 years that always had music. I was always inspired with music from that period. So to be able to work in that particular film period of the early 30s.
- Speaker #1
When you say the music though, Howard, Which music do you mean from that period?
- Speaker #2
Well, a lot of French. composers were writing. Onegair.
- Speaker #1
Exactly.
- Speaker #0
Onegair.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. So. Ulrich.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. Once you do the research on it, we did so much. Right.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Speaker #2
We did so much research.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, that was great.
- Speaker #2
Because there's so much to listen to. The thing I also love about working with Marty is how much we do research and together we're really passing ideas back and forth together. And that's the process. And that might go on for six months. Yeah. Seven, eight, nine months.
- Speaker #1
how would use in the air the early how would use uh the aviator himself and something about the desert and the sky the plains um and the american southwest and the missions the architecture of the missions the um the tile roofs of the spanish haciendas and that sort of thing i remember we talked about that somehow and we used the castanets we used those spanish rhythms yes yeah yeah i didn't expect that i think you had said something but when i heard them when he lifts his hands to try to in the screening room you hear the castanets for the first time you know beautiful play off of you know marty's ideas you know like the use of the castanets and
- Speaker #2
He would mention certain things that were very musical to me and I would just take off.
- Speaker #0
On the infiltrators in 2006, it's a simple word pronounced by Scorsese, the name of an Argentine dance, that will put Howard Shore on the track.
- Speaker #2
People are all dancing around each other. They're all duplicitous. Yes. All dancing. Yeah. That's a tango.
- Speaker #1
That's a tango. But the tango, it's like the spider's web. And that ultimately, they're going to be destroyed. And the music. It is insinuating itself, and it's a game of danger. Right. Which I hadn't, I said, tango? What the hell is tango doing in this movie?
- Speaker #2
We've been tango all in that film. Completely. So much tango.
- Speaker #1
And you got this great guitarist.
- Speaker #2
We had four great guitarists.
- Speaker #1
Four, oh my God, they were amazing.
- Speaker #2
Four of us done with four great guitarists.
- Speaker #1
Oh my God.
- Speaker #2
And then we used very specific instruments. We auditioned many, many guitarists until we found a gibson from 1920 that played the main tango theme yeah that's right the sound of the wood the actual the instrument itself we had great time finding the ones with sound we liked from which guitar
- Speaker #1
1920 at gibson yeah
- Speaker #0
In 2011, Schorr will put into music a Scorsese dream, Hugo Cabret, tribute from cinema to cinema, on the transition between the mute and the speaking, with the magic resurrected by the venerable Georges Méliès.
- Speaker #1
But you know, Hugo has a whole other, certainly, cohesive feel to it. I think there's something very strong and monumental in the nature of not only the themes, but the orchestrations.
- Speaker #2
The themes in Hugo are very strong. I mean, even in The Aviator, the thematic idea you hear as the... H1 crashes into the field. I've developed that through the film. I mean, that becomes a major theme at the end of the film. Hugo themes are very distinct, and they're used in a really traditional symphonic way to scoring the film. I was writing for the Sextet, and I would record the Sextet in London remotely from New York. And Marty and Thelma are putting the sextet into the film. And then when I went to London, I orchestrated the whole film. But the themes and motifs were all put into the film in this small recording way, almost like the demo way, you know, the idea of using the demos.
- Speaker #1
and yugo was uh kind of a uh a learning experience for me too because it was three dimension and the three dimension added another whole layer to the storytelling. And actually, it affected me through the music too, somehow. When that camera comes down into the train and you hear this music with the snow falling, the music has a sense of emotion to it and a sense of a very, very, very precious fantasy to it, which is cinema itself. you know, the little images that move, you know what I'm saying? And there's this guy painting these little frames and this boy just looking at him. And, and when I was a kid, I was so fascinated by that. Just watching the frames go through a little projector, you know, and he captured that with that music. You get it right from the beginning and seeing it in three dimension was amazing.
- Speaker #2
Hugo said in Paris, so it has, there's a French feeling to a lot of the writing. and my love of France. So it came through in the yes and the music
- Speaker #3
I'm going to go ahead and start the recording. I'm going to start recording. I'm going to start recording.
