Howard Shore on David Cronenberg, ‘The Lord of the Rings’

Composer Howard Shore likes to sleep on it.

“I try to get in touch with my inner feelings,” he said at the Zurich Film Festival, explaining his preferred method of working.
 
“If you think about cinema, you go into a dark room and all this imagery starts appearing. You are in a dream-like state and I like to use that idea when I write music for film. There is some napping involved, you try to be very relaxed and imagine what the piece could be. And then I set to work with my pencil, creating the actual score to what I am dreaming,” he said.

“I don’t study a film: I listen to it. I listen to the rhythm of the actors, the sounds. I kind of imagine the visualization, writing to this more abstract idea in my mind.”

A three-time Oscar winner, Shore received the Career Achievement Award at the Swiss festival, where he opened up about his collaborations with fellow Canadian David Cronenberg and thrilled fans with tidbits about Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings.”

“The first recordings were done in a town hall in Wellington, New Zealand. Later, we had to use government-created sound mixing rooms. Mine had an unusual shape – it was like a coffin,” he recalled.
 
“I worked with [screenwriter] Philippa Boyens, who’s an expert on Tolkien’s languages and she helped me, very carefully, to use them. It was a way of putting into music the ideas Tolkien had in his books. Taking this poetry and song lyrics, and putting them back into the film. I think it gave it much more depth.”

Despite it being a trilogy, he approached “LOTR” as “one piece.”

“Because of the scarcity of paper after the war it was released in three parts. But it was created as one story and I approached it as one story. Peter was doing the same when he was creating the film,” he said.
 
“I always imagined it as if we were both holding lanterns in the dark. Sometimes I would follow him and sometimes he would follow me. We were supporting each other. That was our goal: to be as loyal to the book and to Tolkien as we could.”

With Cronenberg, he’s never trying to “illustrate any ideas in the script,” purposely leaving things for the audience to interpret. Jackson’s films posed a different challenge. 

“We started with the Mines of Moria. I worked on that over and over, trying to express the right ideas. I quickly realized that ‘Cronenberg techniques’ I had used for years were not going to work. Now, the music was used for the clarity of storytelling.”

He has worked with Cronenberg on 17 films, most recently on “The Shrouds,” which premiered at Cannes.

“He’s very generous.”

“We are good partners. On ‘The Brood’ [only his second score], ‘Scanners’ and ‘Videodrome’ we were using electronics in a very unusual way. ‘The Fly’ was very symphonic. We have tried different ways of using music to tell stories in film and that kept the energy going,” he admitted.

“Directors don’t tell you what they want. They express ideas through the making of a film. With Cronenberg, we have very little discussions about the music. It’s a very intuitive process. He lets me do everything I want to try.”

Over the years, Shore has also worked with David Fincher (“He allowed me a lot of creative freedom on ‘Seven,’ ‘Panic Room’ and ‘The Game”), Jonathan Demme and Martin Scorsese (“It’s a lot of fun working with him, because he’s very music-oriented”).
 
“After I did ‘After Hours,’ ‘The Fly’ and ‘Big,’ which were all successful, I was offered so many different types of films – precisely because of this range,” he revealed.
 
“That was the most fun: working with directors who create their own world.”
 
These days, he’s most likely to be found going through his vault, “releasing things that haven’t been released,” and fighting against unofficial “LOTR” live concerts.  
 
“I work with Alan Frey and he makes sure every conductor is well-versed in the scores and all the soloists are the ones we’ve approved. In the last 20 years, I tried to make it as good as it can be. I was careful not to let the music be played badly.”
 
He also keeps on communicating with the audience, from the stage and from the screen.
 
“You can have a dialogue with the audience the director is not even aware of. I had these phone calls early on in my career. The directors would call me once the film was out and say: ‘Oh, I get that now. I didn’t understand it at the beginning.’ They weren’t always aware of what was going on. I wasn’t necessarily aware of it either.”