I'm always looking for places to place a nice theme here and there. So there isn't a lot of room to go bombastic. So it's a much more interior approach.īut really, this is about a man who's suffering privately and is looking for redemption. Composers and directors, we all seem to be wanting to express the same emotions and feelings without tons of notes and loud music. I think newer films tend to play a little more subtext. Why do you think that sensibility has changed? In the heyday of the ‘50s and ‘60s, there’s a lot of horns and bombast, whereas this is much more downbeat. ![]() It’s a much more contemplative take on a Western score, which a lot of modern Westerns have started to adopt. So we went much more along those lines, and whatever thematic stuff just evolved much more slowly over the course of the movie. It’s Wichita Falls in the middle of winter-it’s dark and snowing. In the end, what I wrote for the front was much more austere and cold and lonely. It was just the wrong emotional tone for the scene, and frankly the whole movie. Paul said, which was absolutely true, was that that theme told us everything about the person that we might know by the end of the movie. I originally wrote a piece that we ended up trying to use in the opening titles of the movie, when Kidd’s getting dressed in the shadowy backstage before he goes out and starts reading the news. What didn’t work out about them, and did you have to change your approach for the finished score? Paul really responded to them, even though, oddly, in the end, they didn't turn out to be right for the movie. We had a lovely visit, and I wrote a couple of themes. I got a call, they sent me a script, and I went out and visited them in New Mexico. And I certainly would jump at the chance of working with him. I've always wanted to work with him,” which I found incredibly flattering. , I wasn't there in the room but Billy may have mentioned to Paul when they started, “Have you thought about music? What do you think about James?” Paul apparently said, “Oh, I love James. We really hit it off, and since then, we've worked on a number of films together. ![]() I've worked quite a bit with the editor of the movie, Billy Goldenberg, and one of the first movies that Billy edited on his own was a movie called “ Alive” that Frank Marshall had directed back in the early ‘90s. What’s the story of how you got together on this project? This is the first time you’ve worked with Paul Greengrass. sat down with Howard to talk about his decades of scoring, how COVID is impacting the film music business, and the haunting sounds of “News of the World.” ![]() In that way, it’s not unlike the father-daughter dance at the film’s core, loaded with melancholy and bittersweet possibility. But the absence of that expected grandeur works in the film’s favor-it’s a smaller score, filled with off-key pianos and slightly broken strings that dance awkwardly around each other until they find a curious equilibrium. Largely absent in Howard’s score are the thrumming fanfares and sweeping strings of classical Westerns, replaced by a deeply introspective sound that matches Greengrass’ bleak, bittersweet approach to the frontier. It’s a different kind of old-fashioned Western, one marked by recitations of the nation’s news more than sandstorms and gun fights, though the film itself has plenty of both. With “ News of the World,” now in theaters Howard returns to the Western genre for the first time since “ Hidalgo,” this time taking a more contemplative mode to Paul Greengrass’ adaptation of Paulette Jiles’ 2016 novel about a widowed Confederate captain ( Tom Hanks at his warmest and most stentorian) tasked with returning a mute German girl named Joanna ( Helena Zengel) to the only family she has left. His scores are as versatile as they are austere he’s as comfortable with the delicate strings and rhythms of something like Terrence Malick’s “ A Hidden Life” as he is with drum-heavy bombast in franchise films like “ The Hunger Games” or “ The Dark Knight.” Howard has composed music for over a hundred films, collecting a whopping eight Oscar nominations along the way. Whether you know it or not, you’ve heard a James Newton Howard score.
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