soon turned out to be quite the nightmare for Horner. In a recent
interview, the composer recounts at length the situation of The New
World. Horner quite blatantly says that Malick is a great
cinematographer, but is a lousy director. Apparently whenever Horner
wrote and recorded something, Malick would take up his scissors and
change the scene so that the cue would have to be recorded again,
only to have the same thing happen once more. As a means to battle
this climate, Horner decided to compose suite-like movements of the
music to be inserted where needed, but even that was not really
functional. Horner says that Malick had absolutely no idea of how to
properly tell a story, rather just opting to edit one scene to a
completely irrelevant place ("Scene A would be followed by Scene C,
and then would come Scene F, T, Z, G, and then again A and B"). One
tantalising example was when Horner wrote a lengthy cue to correspond
to a particularly impressive scene. After the scene was played out
and the music recorded, Malick thought it sounded great and some of
the musicians were even in tears afterwards, but the director again
habitually took the whole scene apart and threw much of the music
away or placed it elsewhere. The ultimate blow came when Malick
decided to discard considerable chunks of the score and replaced it
with Wagner's Das Rheingold prelude and Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto,
making the whole thing a musical mess." (Horner's exact words
were "musical mish-mash").
Malicki'm glad that most of his music was replaced. Hanz Zimmer's score for THIN RED LINE is far superior. james horner is mediocre.
Posts
