Interview: Composer James Newton Howard on Shyamalan, Melody, and Perfect Cinematic Moments
In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
James Newton Howard is the Emmy- and Grammy-winning composer and nine-time Oscar nominee behind the original scores of over 100 movies, including The Fugitive, The Dark Knight, the Hunger Games and Fantastic Beasts trilogies, and many more.
His new album Night After Night: Music from the Movies of M. Night Shyamalan features all-new recordings of music from his eight-movie collaboration with Shyamalan, which includes Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village.
James spoke with our editorial director Kevin Prchal about what compelled him to revisit his work with Shyamalan, what makes a great melody, his writing process, the most underappreciated instrument, working with Terrence Malick, and much more!
This interview has been slightly edited for content and clarity.
1. What’s the James Newton Howard origin story?
I think the James Newton Howard origin story is different from the Jim Howard origin story, who I was for a long time. I started piano lessons when I was 4. Pretty good pianist. Studied till I was about 18, got a piano performance scholarship from USC, and dropped out about two months later because I just didn’t want to practice the piano anymore, and I was really becoming interested in popular music and rock and roll. So I kind of disappeared into the wilderness for a couple of years before I was asked if I wanted to audition for a pretty terrible band in 1972 called Mama Lion. We actually recorded a couple of albums, and I learned a lot from doing that: being in the studio, watching how it worked, enamored by all the gear. That band broke up, but there was some extra studio time that was already paid for and I asked if I could use it. I recorded a very primitive solo album in 1973. I think they are probably 25 copies, and I think I have 20 of them that are still shrink-wrapped.
Then I started working as a session musician. I became a little bit busy and then I ended up joining Elton John’s band, which is a whole other long story. But in 1975, I played my first gig with Elton in front of 80,000 people at Wembley Stadium. From then on, I was doing a lot of session work and working with orchestras. Elton gave me the opportunity to do my first big orchestral arrangement, one with the London Symphony Orchestra on the song called “Tonight” from the Blue Moves album. After Elton ended the band and I left for a while, I was getting a lot of jobs as an orchestrator before I finally took a really goofy movie called Head Office. I think that was in 1984, so I’m approaching my 40th year of doing movies. And as soon as I worked on that movie a little bit, I knew I had found my life’s work.
2. Congratulations on the release of Night After Night! Of your very prolific and celebrated body of work in film, what compelled you to revisit your work with M. Night Shyamalan?
Well, all of those scores have something in common. There’s a quality to them that was the beginning of a different kind of minimalist writing I started to do more during that period of time. I always felt there was a certain DNA about them. Less ornamental but still melodically driven. And after I did the last piece with Night, which was After Earth, it occurred to me every now and then that this would be an interesting album to explore. I’m not going to say reimagine, because I really didn’t imagine—I just kind of explored them. I found that if I wanted to connect these ideas, I needed a substantial amount of new material to make that work. Otherwise it’s just a mashup.
So I started working on that concept of taking the scores from each one of the eight movies and just messing around with them, finding ideas I had started that I couldn’t finish because of the nature of moviemaking. You could be scoring a very intimate scene and then a car crashes through the wall, and all of a sudden that idea has to be terminated.
3. We’ve had the album on repeat since its release. The lushness of the orchestration is unreal. What’s a choice you made this time around that you didn’t with the original scores?
I took out all the scary bits and I made it piano-centric. But not a lot other than that. I didn’t want to deviate radically from the heart of the music I was trying to explore, so I would say most of the vocabulary or the palettes are pretty much the same.
4. Shyamalan praised you for the strength of your melodies. What makes a great melody?
Two things. One that attaches to the film emotionally and is telling the same story that the director is telling. Second is being memorable. Many times melodies come to me relatively easily after I’m immersed in the movie. Not always. I’ve presented melodies over a main title, for instance—not with Night necessarily but all the time—and you think, well, I know it’s going to work in the main title. And sometimes that didn’t work, so I had to find other places because you want the main title, ideally, to be explored further in the movie. It kind of promises what’s to come. But I’ve had to dig deep and find other bits of the score that would work in the main title because what I thought was going to work didn’t work. One notable case was in the first Fantastic Beasts movie. I came up with an idea of the main title that isn’t used anywhere else in the movie, but it did stamp the movie as you’re being invited into an exotic experience, not just a fantasy. And that’s what I want.
5. I’m a songwriter as well, so I’m curious about your writing process and routines. Do you, like me, discreetly hum melody ideas into your Voice Memos app in public restrooms, or do you have a special space and time for that?
I’ve dictated, I’ve hummed while driving, I’ve sung. But I don’t think I’ve ever used anything that I hummed or sang, because where it really happens for me is after total immersion in a movie. So I do it in my studio. That’s kind of the only way where I can find a great melody. And that becomes really a process of improvisation. And not just improvisation, but improvisation to the extent where after doing it enough you become better equipped to recognize when you’ve improvised something worth repeating. And then I write it down on my little easel over here and just try to add to it and play it. But it doesn’t come to me in one big long idea.
6. For our money Unbreakable is one of the best and most underrated movies of the 21st century. You’ve said that experience taught you to be more disciplined. What does discipline mean for a film composer?
You try to keep the main idea consistently through the movie as much as possible. You don’t want to wear it out, but you try to keep it alive. I get a knee-jerk response to every imaginable scene and I can usually come up with something really quickly to solve it. But Night didn’t want me to do that. He didn’t want me to use just my knee-jerk response and treat these movies like a traditional thriller. Obviously there’s thriller music in all of them, but he wanted me to use as much as possible the singular idea that he would recognize. Also, in the orchestrations there’s very little ornamentation. Most of those scores are blocks of beautiful chords that some other figure is playing over. Just simpler. I’m always wondering, especially in those movies, how I can express this with a third less notes.
7. Another film we absolutely love is The Village. The scene when Ivy is holding out her hand, the monster comes into focus, and Lucius sweeps in and grabs her hand as Hillary Hahn’s violin soars is one of the most perfect cinematic moments I’ve ever seen. What’s a scene from any movie you’d personally describe as a “perfect cinematic moment”?
When Maurice Jarre’s first theme comes in Lawrence of Arabia. That is just mind-boggling. There’s another theme where he looks off in the distance and on the horizon he sees this black dot, and it’s Omar Sharif in this great shot that takes about a minute. Beyond that, John Williams… I can’t answer that without studying for about two hours, because there are so many. I feel like there were definitive cinematic moments when Tom Newman did The Shawshank Redemption, which was very influential for me. And I thought Hans’ score to Gladiator was amazing.
8. A new M. Night script lands on your desk and you love it, you’re ready to go. Where does the collaborative process between the two of you go from there?
We haven’t done this together for quite a while, but lots of phone conversations first and then immediately fly out to Philadelphia. Hang out for a few days, drink a little bit and talk about the movie, usually with a music editor there. Tom Drescher, who did a lot of the music editing on those movies, he’d fly out as well. We talk through scenes. Maybe if I’d written a couple of demos, I’d bring those with me and say “How do you like this?” and play them and we’d make a little traction there.
Then it just becomes carpentry, going back and forth with each other and the ideas: we like this part but don’t like this part. Then there’s just the arduous hard work of structure and trying to make him happy and me happy at the same time. And me being deeply disappointed when he didn’t like something. I remember a time on Signs he said, “I don’t think that’s the right idea.” And there’s a pause and I said, “Night, I am profoundly disappointed.” And he started laughing because he thought that was such a silly thing to say. I got over it very quickly and rewrote it. I’m really thick-skinned about this now. That’s just part of the gig. You have to be or at least pretend like you’re friendly even when you want to assault somebody because they’re asking you to rewrite it.
“I’m always wondering how I can express an idea with a third less notes.”
9. How would you contrast that relationship with your Terrence Malick collaborations?
Working with Terry is an absolutely unique experience. Months of time can be spent discussing one idea with Terry, and listening on the phone like three times a day to pieces I’ve been working on. He’ll call back and start discussing and expand the conversation to philosophy. It’s quite time-consuming but it’s the only way Terry gets happy.
I walked into those movies with Terry with eyes wide open. I knew he was going to use tons of classical music, which I think is fantastic. And I achieved something I really wanted to do, which is write a theme for a Terrence Malick movie. The theme that really stood out to me was Days of Heaven, that Saint-Saëns piece with the aquarium. That was magnificent, but it was still Saint-Saëns. So I felt happy that I could get an original theme in a Terrence Malick movie that really hung in there. But such a lovely man. I adore him. Just talking with him is such a trip.
10. What’s the most underappreciated instrument?
I remember when Hans and I were doing Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan said, “I don’t want any bassoons.” Somehow we were talking about woodwinds and bassoons, and I think he meant it half-seriously. But people shy away from woodwinds now. The new Hunger Games score is heavily scored with woodwinds like bass clarinets and low-bass flutes and stuff. More along a Bernard Herrmann kind of orchestration. But an oboe… I think a lot of directors are afraid of strong emotion in sync with the story, so they shy away from that. I think they want to achieve the emotional impact with electronics and synths, which I employ as well and I think is a perfectly valid way. So I’m happy to do whatever works.
11. This month we’re covering whodunits, and The Fugitive is one of the all-time greats. Is there a particular moment from that score that was memorable for you?
Well, I was terrified when I was doing that score. This was the biggest action film I’d been part of. Andy Davis had hired me for a movie called The Package and that was a big job too, but I wasn’t quite sure why Andy hired me based on my credits. But he saw something in me that he thought would work. We had a very short time to do The Fugitive. I think it was maybe six weeks. The one memorable moment for me was the helicopter scene when he steals the ambulance. I had put up some other music against that scene from composers like John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, and I was ready to just commit suicide because they were so great. Just scared me to death, but I just kind of took a deep breath and started charging in.
12. When you’re not composing music, what else do you love to do?
I love to be at home. We have a place outside of LA where we spend a lot of time. I love my work, so I will often choose to work when I could be out having some other kind of fun. But I like to go for hikes with my wife. She’s German and really hard to keep up with, but we do that. I’m not a stamp collector or a coin collector and I don’t do things like oil paint or garden. But this is fun for me, working here. I do enjoy traveling. I need to have that. I need to get away from this for periods of time because I do believe, even if you don’t know it, writing a huge, huge score takes something out of you. It just does. To do it repeatedly over and over is not a good idea. So I’m taking a break now from movies and composing more classical music, which I really am enjoying.
+1. What’s your question for us?
When did you start loving film music?
(Kevin:) You know, I was born in the ’80s and so Spielberg movies and John Williams scores practically raised me. But I think the real kind of kick-down-the-door moment for me was Jurassic Park. Never again will I be a kid seeing dinosaurs come to life before my very eyes. That was amazing. It’s an experience you never forget, and it’s that feeling I’ve been chasing as a movie lover ever since.