Composer Christopher Young

As prolific a filmmaker as you'll ever see, Christopher Young happens to be a musician. And a busy one, too: Young has provided the music to more than 100 films, creating or adapting scores to movies like "Spider-Man 3," "Hellraiser," "Wonder Boys,""Drag Me to Hell," "The Hurricane," "Species," "Rounders," and dozens of others.

Young will be appearing on the campus of Butler University Oct. 31, where his music will be featured in Butler's Halloween concert at Clowes Memorial Hall starting at 3 p.m., and he will be speaking and discussing his film music Friday, Oct. 29, 11 a.m – 12:30 pm, in Lilly Hall 112 (the Butler Symphony Orchestra rehearsal room) on the Butler campus.

Here Young talks about his musical origins, his process, and how "Hellraiser" is a romance as much as it is a horror film.

How did you get started in film? When I was young, I can’t remember a day when I didn’t have a song in my head. My life changed overnight when I saw the Beatles play on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” From that moment on I wanted to be nothing more or less than Ringo Starr. I was planning to pursue a career as a drummer, though my parents weren’t too thrilled with that idea. But I was doing a summer school session here in Boston at the Berkley School of Music, and got a chance to study with a hero of mine who was named Alan Dawson, who played the drums for the Dave Brubeck Band. I thought I was going to wow him out, and it didn’t quite go over as well as I‘d hoped it would. I walked out in tears, because all I could think of was doing something in music. Before I could count to ten I was starting to write things, arrange things. I was playing in jazz bands, so my first pieces were things I wrote for the bands. Then one day I was in a record store in Red Bank, New Jersey, and I saw this wonderful album in the soundtracks and musicals section in the corner called “The Fantasy and Film World of Bernard Herrmann.” So I took this record home and put the needle on and I said “Who is this guy, and what is he doing? This is what I’ve been looking for.” So I soon became obsessed with becoming a film composer. How did you turn that obsession into actual paying jobs?

Good question. The best thing I did was go to UCLA. I worked on a lot of student movies there. One of the most popular, proven, successful ways to get in is to do student films, and hope that they’ll remember you if they move up the ladder. Well, no one I worked with climbed up the ladder, but a lot of the people who worked on the movies went on to other projects, and those people would recommend me. By the time I’d left UCLA, I’d scored a couple of movies, and one of them was a film called “The Dorm that Dripped Blood,” which was in the 80s when horror films were really a happening thing. Can you talk a little about what good music can do for a film, and conversely what bad music will do?

Good question. It’s tough to say. The best scores are never so blatant in their dramatic attempts that it takes the viewer out of their experience. A great score is one that guides the viewer into becoming more closely connected to what they’re supposed to be feeling at any particular moment. It has to do it in a subtle way. You can’t do it in a blatant way, or it draws too much attention to itself and it becomes melodrama. This is the fine line the composer has to walk, which is writing music that is dramatic, but not overdramatic. You push the audience in a certain direction, to reassure you in your feelings at the moment. If you think you’re supposed to be sad at a particular moment, to reassure you that you are correct. You’re supposed to be invisible to a degree, right?

No one remembers the score. That’s the tragic thing about being a film composer, is we’re pretty much invisible. If you get attached to a hit movie, millions upon millions of people will hear your music in theaters. Right now as we speak, my music is playing in some theater in some movie in some country, let alone on cable, let alone people who’ve rented movies and are maybe watching at home. So my music is probably playing somewhere all the time. But no one pays attention to who does this stuff. And it seems like you stay pretty busy too.

Film composers are the most prolific filmmakers on the planet. Without a shadow of a doubt we write more than anybody else that I’m aware of through the course of the year. If you’re in demand you’re working on 4 movies, you’re going to be writing 4 hours of music to 5 hours of music a year. That’s the length of a Wagner opera. To do this in a year…he took 3 or 4 years. So we’re extremely prolific.

What is your process for creating a score? When you get the film, do you just get a rough cut with no music, or is there a temp track or something?

When you see a movie for the first time, very rarely is it naked, without music. What’s become common practice is the director will put in temporary music to represent what he’s looking for. We come on board, we see the film, it’s usually a rough cut, with temp music, and then I sit down with the director and find out what he sees the music as doing. Then I sit down and spend some time alone with the movie, and hopefully I get a copy of the movie without the music. If I’m lucky I’ll get to see the movie for the first time without music, and it allows my mind to wander. Then I start spotting…spotting is the word we use to describe where we choose to put the music in the movie, you know, where does it start, where does it stop, what is it supposed to be saying? Why is it here, why is it not there? Then the director and I will talk about it, he’ll tell me what he thinks, I’ll tell him what I think, and I’ll go off and start writing to those scenes. These things have to be mocked up, have synthesizer demos of these cues, have it sound as close as possible to what it will sound like for real, if it’s an orchestra score. Then the director comes over and starts listening to what you’ve done, and makes comments, and it’s about making his revisions from that moment on. What’s your favorite genre of film to work in? Or do you have one?

There’s a certain type of movie that I do more than others, but I’ve been very blessed not to be so thoroughly typecast that I’m only allowed to do one type of movie. I get more calls for horror films or thrillers. That’s sort of my meat and potatoes. But my favorite type of movies, like everyone else, is dramas. In my older age, I’m trying to get more connected to doing dramas. Those are my favorite types of movies, because let’s face it, they’re the kinds of films that affect people in more and more positive ways, and dramatic scores people remember. Do you have a favorite score from all of those you’ve done?

That’s a really hard question to answer. I’ve done over 100 movies. Different movies have different values for different reasons. I put them in distinctive categories: movies I’m trying to capture melody, themes where people can connect instantly and walk out of the room whistling. All of the dramas I’ve worked on fall into that category. The other category are films where I’m experimenting a little, the more avant garde type of writing I’m able to use in the spookier films, horror and sci fi, dark fantasy or black comedies, where I’m focused on experimenting more. But to answer your question, from a dramatic standpoint one of my favorites was a film that came and went last year called “Creation,” the story of Charles Darwin, a film that came out years ago called “Murder in the First,” starring Christian Slater and Kevin Bacon, that came and went. The film I just finished doing with Johnny Depp called “Rum Diary,” that was some combo stuff that was melodic, that was fun to do. Some spooky ones, definitely I would say “Hellraiser” was an important score. That sort of changed the perspective of who I was as a composer.

You mentioned “Hellraiser.” Do you watch some of these films and just reflect on them, or do you even have that luxury? Did you have any idea of how crazy this film was?

I didn’t know it was going to be a cult classic. I didn’t even think Clive knew it was going to be a cult classic. We all were hoping it would be. I was scared shitless, because I was working with Clive Barker, and I knew his reputation and his work, but the interesting thing about the movie is that Clive was very adamant about the score just being your typical horror score. I had just gotten done with the music on the second “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie, and he specifically said to me “I don’t want this to be another ‘Freddy’s Revenge.’ This isn’t just some horror story. This is a sick love story. It’s like a demented love story. If the audience doesn’t believe that Julia loves her husband’s brother so much and in such a sick way that she’d go out and kill people, we lose people. So the score needs to be creepy, but disturbingly romantic. It’s very different than the “Nightmare” score where Freddy was just out to kill people. We didn’t care that much about the people he was killing, but this film was all about this passionate romance between a living woman and a dead man. My favorite cues from that score, was the flashback where she remembers when she first met Frank, and it shows him coming to the door, them ultimately making love, and we’re cutting between her and the husband in real time bringing the mattress upstairs.