Horner on Avatar

As we continue our Kickstarter to record early 1980s James Horner TV movie scores—please contribute, if you have not done so already!—I wanted to share this interview from FSM Online that we also included in the Best of FSM book, thanks to Tim Burden.

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To say that James Horner is one of the best and most successful film composers of the past three decades is probably an understatement.

Avatar is a monumental achievement in cinema, and the project was almost ten years in the making. When James Cameron told the press he would be changing the way we viewed cinema, he wasn’t lying. And James Cameron has openly stated that James Horner’s music has given his film its heart and spirit.

We had exclusive access to James Horner when he was over for the world premiere in London and he chats to us now about Avatar and a few other things besides.

Tim Burden: First and foremost, James, many thanks for talking to us here at Film Score Monthly. We’re all very excited at this score to Avatar. It’s tremendous. Congratulations.

James Horner: Thank you very much.

TB: I’d like to touch first of all on the terrific 11-minute war cue which literally is epic. I know this scene in the film, obviously a seminal point in the film, and it’s a lot longer than 11 minutes. So you’ve obviously edited this down. Is this a special arrangement? And did you do this all in one take?

JH: One take, one session. I usually do long cues, I’ve always done long cues as one long [take], whether they’re eight minutes or 12 minutes or whatever. It just adds to the magic for me. And you get a real sense of what the movie is going to be like when you watch a 12-minute sequence.

It doesn’t matter what the sound effects end up being, but you get with the director sitting there, you can see what 12 minutes of the finished movie is really going to be like. And I find that really exciting.

TB: You state in the CD liner notes that Avatar has been one of your toughest projects. Can you maybe chat to us about what challenges you actually came across on this project?

JH: Well, they’re all challenging in their own way. But in Avatar, Jim asked me to do things that were almost non-musical. And I had to somehow translate that into music and be able to give the music, say a lot of things with the music that normally music wouldn’t have to say. Words would be used. And instead of words, we used music to say that.

And the music had to stay very understated and very quiet and serene, but it had to say it and very clearly. And so the music ends up being a very important character in the film because it ends up being the emotional heart of the film, whereas all the hardware stuff takes care of itself. The inner glow of the film is all taken care of by music.

And the music can’t be just ordinary film music. The music has to have this weird glow and life and sort of strangeness of its own and be very accessible. And that was quite a challenge.

TB: With Avatar being your third project with James Cameron now, can you maybe tell us how your process with him works? Did you start in the early pre-production stages with James, like on storyboards?

JH: We were working in all formats. There was very little storyboarding. It was mostly working with scenes, shot scenes, even though they were very rough. But I had material from early on to be thinking against and running ideas by. And we would be working with moving scenes from early on.

TB: The orchestration of Avatar is very dynamic—special focus on brass, percussion, choir and electronics. Do you enjoy writing for these large-scale projects, or do you prefer the intimate ones of which you’ve done quite a few over the years?

JH: Yeah...

TB: I suppose the trick to an extent is if something is big, impressive on screen, the trick is to make it come across as more intimate.

JH: The trick is to try and keep something big on screen, unless it’s literally called for, trying to keep it intimate and quiet and very small, yet having it perhaps performed by a lot of people or a lot of things, but giving it a life.

But you’re absolutely right. The trick is to keep large forces under control so it doesn’t just sound like some big Germanic opera. It has to sound small and contained and very heartfelt. And a lot of the things in Avatar were designed to be performed that way, even though a large number of people were taking part.

TB: This year has been an incredible year for film music, and I chatted to Simon Rhodes about it there actually the other day. The fact that so many great releases of your older scores have finally seen the light of day, thanks to Intrada, Film Score Monthly. And I know you and Simon both had a lot of input in these. Are you proud of the releases? Are you pleased with the finished results?

JH: Believe it or not, I haven’t had a chance to listen to any of them because I’ve been working and I never listen to anything while I’m working. They would come in while I was working on Avatar, but I haven’t listened to any of them and I’m not even aware of all the ones that have come in.

TB: Okay, fair enough. You don’t want to be distracted by your older works, and you want to keep in the now and look forward?

JH: Yeah.

TB: It was a great shame that the planned Titanic concerts didn’t actually happen in the late ’90s, early 2000s. I know they may have been just rumors, but can we look forward to a concert with James Horner and the LSO? No doubt it will be a tremendous success?

JH: I never fully expected the Titanic concerts to happen. That was sort of a mass hysteria Hollywood thing. I never quite expected that to happen. That was one of those things.

A concert with the LSO could always happen, that would be lovely. And who knows, that may happen in the future. I just hope Avatar is successful and that everybody likes it. I just think it’s such an amazing movie the way it turned out.

TB: I’m interested to know, is James [Cameron] very musical at all? Or is he really subject to your muse as such?

JH: No, he’s very musical. I mean, he doesn’t know the Italian terms for things or the German terms for things. But he’s very musical in terms of being able to pinpoint sounds and remember sounds and say, “[It] got louder there a minute ago. Why isn’t it getting louder there again? And didn’t we have horns or something 15 minutes ago?”

I mean, he’s completely literate with music. And the fact that he doesn’t, you know, say it in fancy-schmancy musical terms means nothing to me. He completely gets it. And we communicate in those kinds of terms all the time.

TB: Many of your scores are heavily influenced by a lovely Celtic twang. Now, where does your love of Irish music actually stem from?

JH: I think it’s probably in my background. It comes across in a lot of scores I write. I don’t know if it’s a Celtic thing.It’s a winsome sort of quality I have, this sort of thing that comes out in my in my writing. And I don’t know if it’s—it probably is most easily recognizable as Celtic, but it comes out whether I’m writing for a trumpet line for an American thing. It’s just this sort of quality that is sort of built into the way I write melodies.

TB: With the effective song, “I See You,” we just wondered what drove you to choose Leona Lewis?

JH: She sang a lot of the words that were used in the story. And she is such a beautiful singer. And, I just thought, summed up for me all the themes that I had used in the film. And I just couldn’t have made a better choice in terms of the singer.

TB: James Horner, many thanks for your music and your time today. And all the best for the Oscars next year. We look forward to hopefully seeing you accept your third statuette.

JH: Well, thank you very much. I hope so. But I’m very sort of superstitious about all that stuff. I’m just happy that the film turned out well.