Logo text
It’s the boiling point scenario every film composer sweats over: pitching your ideas to a first-time director.
In many recent cases, this could be over the phone or via Zoom. For John Powell, who on this day in early January was sitting two feet away from Pierre Coffin, Illumination’s chief executive. Minions and monstersIt was personal.
“It’s a very dangerous moment,” Powell says of that pivotal moment. “Things could go very wrong.”
Coffin reached out to Powell, a prominent animator known for his scores How to train your dragon and a partnerTo work on it first Minions film. It was going to be the first feature in Despicable me The franchise was not scored by Heitor Pereira. Powell had flown to Paris and met Covin at the Illumination offices, listened to his wants and needs, watched the film, and then began writing. Powell, who remained in town, showed up a week later with some musical cues.
“I told him, ‘Well, maybe it’s time for you to come and listen to some things,'” Powell recounted. “This moment is the difference between talking about music and then listening to it.”
It’s a moment that’s either magical or embarrassing, where the thumbs up or back to the drawing board. The reason for subjecting himself to personal judgment is to ensure that Coffin was giving his honest assessment. “He would have said one thing, and his body language would have told me how uncomfortable he was if it wasn’t really right for him and if he was trying to be polite. And we didn’t really have time for that.”
Powell needn’t worry; The coffin liked what he heard. In early April, less than three months before the film’s July 1 release, Powell was at Sony’s Barbara Streisand recording platform, providing direction and feedback while leading an army of recording engineers, mixers, arrangers, and music editors.
Minions and monsters It sees pint-sized yellow troublemakers in 1920s Hollywood trying to make a creature feature. The film is an “all-encompassing musical,” according to Powell, and it allows the composer to immerse himself in different styles and eras that he wouldn’t normally be able to. Powell attempted to combine the Golden Age of Hollywood and its musical traditions into one piece of music, name-checking Franz Waxman (Bride of Frankenstein, Sunset Boulevard), Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone with the Wind), Carl Stalling (Looney Tunes), Bernard Herrmann (mental patient) and John Williams (star wars) as an inspiration. And sure, why not add some Alexander Borodin and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky?
(Although he wasn’t able to hire the guys who worked on those films, he’s clearly happy to have some of the guys who composed the music on them) Moving and strange!which had music by Stalling’s successor Richard Stone.)
Then Powell cranked everything up to 11.
“Overly sentimental, over-the-top, over-the-top, scripted. It’s just over. It’s all over,” he says with a laugh. “It helps elicit laughter [but] It would be too dangerous if I was doing a serious movie.
Powell points out that in the Golden Age of Hollywood, dramatic music was the norm. Now, 70 to 80 years later, the language of cinema has changed, and so has the audience’s understanding of it.
“You’ve gotten to the point where you have to do it very carefully now,” he points out, talking about the over-the-top music. “Until you get a call from Pierre who says, ‘I want you to do this thing,’ and I said, ‘Are you sure?’ “And he said, ‘Oh yeah, sure.’ It’s not like anything else. Minions film.”
It was a massive concert session, a rare sight in Hollywood studios at a time when most recordings moved not only out of Los Angeles but also out of the country due to tax breaks and other economic factors. For nearly three weeks, pure decadence in the time frame of film music, the theater was filled with over 80 musicians (30 violinists alone!) who played and played back cues. On some days, 25 additional brass players were brought in. Some days there was an extra beat. Then there were the days with a 60-piece choir.
“I hope that everyone who reviews the result will use the word ‘tolerant’ because it was, by God,” he says, laughing.
He says the recording of this musical score could only have been done in Los Angeles, where talented film musicians can be found in one place.
“One of the things I said to the musicians at the end was: ‘Thank you for your time.’ And I was saying that a lot to everyone in the booth as well. It’s like we didn’t just pay you for your time during these (three) weeks. We paid you for the years and years and years and years it took you to get good enough to be here. And that was the value.”
Check out the feature Minions and monsters Result below.
