Did you just get back from scoring Shanghai Noon?

Yeah, we did that in Northern London, which was a blast. It's a period piece that takes place in 1850, basically in the West, but it starts out in the Forbidden City in China. There were a lot of elements: the whole Far Eastern influence for example. I used the U.K. Chinese Ensemble for a while over there. A lot of the score is very traditional, old western period stuff, which was fun. I also mixed a lot of hip stuff in it and had almost the same rhythm section I used fifteen years ago back when I was with Elton John and touring there. So I was able to see those guys, fantastic players, and it was a little reunion. As for the score, you can never tell what some of these good musical canvases are. This Jackie Chan film was a fantastic canvas, with so many elements. There was a lot of action stuff, but the mixing and set up of the picture with this imperial guard, and the princess who's kidnapped, allows you to follow this character through the music as he runs into a different world. It was interesting in that aspect; at the beginning, there are some movies you can't wait to get into, but this wasn't one. It turned out to be fabulous though. I also got to do it over a long period of time, which was nice; you usually don't have that. I was also doing The Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis, and Rob Cohen's The Skulls. The director of Shanghai Noon, Tom Day, is a first time director, so he'd come by with his vintage photographs, and he was so serious about it ' which was nice, before he gets jaded by the town! It was nice he was showing me all these western and Forbidden City shots.

You're also working on Passion of Mind.

That's coming out the same time as Shanghai Noon! You couldn't have two more different scores. They had shot this film with Alan Berliner, who had done the French film, Ma Vie en Rose. Paramount Classics was doing it, and they asked me to score it. It was one of these odd situations where the director had his French composer and it clashed with them, so it had to be sensitively handled. Mostly I was left on my own, and you can't get a better situation than that. I turned out to be really happy with it; I finished it a while ago, but they're just now releasing it. I'm happy with both of those scores, which is nice; that's not usually the case. The people over there, like Rudy Vitale at Paramount, were just great; I had a different take on the music than what may have been their intent, and it's very hard to get guys over to your side sometimes. They just really gave me creative support and let me do my thing. I thank everyone in the end, including Alan.

When you find yourself doing a genre movie like Shanghai Noon, do you ever draw on your past experience in a genre, like Dragon in this case?

I'm not going to say that I don't; if you do the Jackie Chan thing, they might say they want a score like Dragon, which is used so many times for so many things. I try to not do that. I think there's only one cue in that movie where I almost did a Dragon thing, at the beginning when there's a classic train fighting sequence. I almost did a takeoff of Dragon, like I was sending the character up. It was one of those kind of things where you look to something in the characters to inspire you. Otherwise it's a very different score.

Tall Tale kind of went in that direction, but would this be your first real western score?

Tall Tale was definitely a western, I thought. There's stuff I did in Last of the Mohicans that went in that direction, and also stuff in Indian in the Cupboard with that character, the cowboy who came to life in the cupboard. I handled that like a straight western.

Is the film itself treated like a straight western?

Oh yeah; although when they first get to the west, there's kind of a hip groove undercurrent to the score, a gut-string guitar thing I wanted to keep. I didn't want to spoof it too much, but if you heard the music on its own, there are other elements under the traditional score. I treated Owen Wilson's character the same way; he's not a traditional western characters, almost like the boy next door with a cowboy hat. I had to do something a little different for him, just fun stuff to give it a different flavor.

The Skulls is your most recent Cohen film; you've done four together so far?

Yeah ' Daylight, Dragonheart, Dragon, and The Skulls.

Doesn't he have another one in the works now?

Yeah, I think it's shooting soon. We haven't started talking about it yet.

What kind of working relationship do you have with Rob?

Oh, we have a very close working relationship. He's been great to work with. He really focuses on the music end, and also the mixing of his pictures, he does a good job. Sometimes that's not the case with some directors; you never know. We spend a lot of time with the music. The Skulls was a little bit different of a situation; we had less time because of the schedule, and he shot it in Canada. Usually I'll be there while he's shooting, and that wasn't the case here. I have a really close relationship with him.

His films are so radically different from each other. That must be nice to have a director who lets you branch out.

Yeah, he gives me a free hand. Once you do a few films with someone, you have a kind of shorthand you use, depending on what it is. I don't think he's been given his due; he's a really good director and great to work with.

A lot of people think your scores tend to be divided between very light ' Beethoven, Kindergarten Cop ' or very somber, such as Diabolique, which could have gone campy but didn't at all.

When you do comedies and they're halfway successful, you get sort of typecast, but that was by chance in my case with all the Ivan Reitman things and The Mask and My Cousin Vinny. But if you listen to the scores, you can hear something that's not very funny at all. In The Mask there's a dark, harmonic undercurrent, and in all those comedies I do, one could be led to believe that my interests are in other areas. When I get a chance to do something like Diabolique, I'm dead serious.

I think it's a shock for people to hear the score for While You Were Sleeping, which is 'frothy,' but then at the exact same time you did Citizen X.

That's why I like to do those things. This last period with Passion of Mind allowed me to treat the music so different from something like Whole Nine Yards, which is jazz oriented. I like working on situations that keep the juices going. I love comedies ' they're much, much harder to do than anything else. Once you decide what the movie is, where are you going to take it? If you're doing a period drama, it's usually obvious where a scene needs to be supported, and in comedies it's not.

And now for that obvious questions: how do you feel about your music turning up in so many trailers?

Yeah, in every trailer it'll be from Gettysburg or Dragon. The biggest one ever was Come See the Paradise, 'Fire in a Brooklyn Theater.'

Until Dragonheart; that's taken its place.

That took over with the AMC theater spots! It's funny how when I do a big epic kind of score, no matter how the movie does, that music is out there. Gettysburg is everywhere, and Dragonheart. It's funny. I did a picture called The Quest, which Jean-Claude Van Damme directed. That music wasn't really serious ' though he thought it was a serious film ' but that epic music I did, to a rough cut, just shocks me every time I hear it somewhere else. You can do this music in a true, emotional manner for what you're doing, but then when you see it to something else and know what you wrote it for, it's kind of mind boggling.

You see Patch Adams walking around and hear Dragonheart'

Yeah, and you say, can't they use something else?!

It's become fun trivia to identify that music.

Most people who hear this stuff don't know it, though. There's a half a dozen pieces of mine, for action or epic movies, which are invariably used in almost every trailer.

You're getting paid for this, right?

It depends what it is. A lot of times for 30 second TV spots they'll try to get away with not saying anything. Sometimes they'll change the trailer music from TV, especially if they try to make it seem lighter. Most of the time it hopefully finds its way back to you.

So you're cool with it?

Yeah, well, it's nicer when it's from a picture where the end result was good rather than one where it wasn't. The directors are the ones who get upset if their picture didn't do well. They keep hearing their music on the Super Bowl, you know? They're not getting anything so I'll get these calls: 'How can they use this music?' 'I don't know, man.' They don't know that the publisher or the studio who owns it and the composer are the ones who can benefit by it, so I'll just say I don't know what I can do, you know? At the beginning it was a little offensive, especially the trailer thing. If I go to the movies and out of six trailers, three of them have my stuff, come on'!

Is there a favorite score that stands out for you?

Really, no. I'm doing a little picture called Head Over Heels, and there are three cues in this: one is the opening, a Gershwin takeoff; the second is a violin solo, a really hysterical scene; and then a '40s Muzak-y jazz kind of thing. I love those cues. There are cues in each film you're writing, and that's what you're excited about. Right now I'm enthused about those three. There are moments in every thing you do; maybe the whole score doesn't turn out how you wanted it, but for me it's about what you're doing. In the midst of whatever you're doing, sometimes they screw around in the mixing process, and it kills you ' but once you do it, you've gotta let them have it. Like in every other aspect, the directors want to control it ' but they can't put your hands on the piano. When they get the final score, they want to do something. All you can do is hope for the best and hold on to those moments where you sat alone and heightened the comedy or the drama or the romance of the scene. That's what excites me. I love Diabolique, for example, and I was really freaked out when that picture just went nowhere. I thought that one was going to happen. The music goes the same way as the picture, which is why it's nice to have the soundtrack.

That's one of the few scores that was mentioned by almost every film critic, though.

It wasn't just a certain homage to a genre or to Bernie Herrmann; it was very much in a French Impressionist mode, Debussy-style, but few people picked up on it. A guy on NPR said that this was the best score of the year and played it, and then he went over the musical motifs and how it was developed, before he even said the title. It wasn't noticed because the film was treated like a joke in a way. 'Diabol-eeek?!' There was a blast being able to see Isabelle Adjani and write to her, I have to say. There are some scores that get you really excited, and you try to be original and turn these filmmakers on to something different they hadn't thought about. Sometimes it ain't there in the end because they get scared. The better a picture previews, the less chance you're going to have of adding a really creative, original element. If there's not music here and they got an 82 rating, they won't want it when you get your hands on it. That's how the process goes. It's very hard with the preview situation and computerized editing, pictures can be changed right up until the last second. You have to really do the best you can under the circumstances and move on. It's great that this whole soundtrack area exists. I remember a great story: there was a little scene in While You Were Sleeping where the girl's dream is to get her passport stamped and go to Italy. I did a really subtle, on the nose Italian twist in the music, and everybody loved it. But the director took it out and put the love theme in there. It's on the soundtrack, though, and he called me later. It wasn't in his temp, and it wasn't that it was such an original idea, but it was unique to the scene, to the character, to the picture. They didn't go with it just out of fright. Not anything against him, but this happens a lot. People in this area will all tell you the same thing. Everyone has to fight against doing the expected in this business and try to be a little more original. In the last few things I've done, the most incredible thing I've gotten away with is the opening of The Whole Nine Yards. It's a baritone sax solo while this guy's brushing his teeth. Knowing everything that I know, in a million years, I would have said they wouldn't go with that. I told Jonathan Lynn that I still can't believe that music opens that movie. It takes place in Montreal, so I went from this little accordion piece to this sax, and it astonishes me that it's still there. I also gave them an alternate, a straight bluesy thing I thought Bruce Willis might respond positively to, but they shocked me and loved the original. It's such a little thing, maybe a minute of music, but that kind of stuff keeps you going through the other ten times when they don't. Not only that, but they even lowered the sound of the electric toothbrush so you could hear the music better! To me that's a minor miracle. Jonathan's a really bright guy, and he was willing to take whatever chances that someone might be put off by this bizarre music.

VERY special thanks to Hanna Bolte & BMI and to Randy Edelman for taking some time out of his very busy schedule.