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Composing for Film: An
Interview with Film Score Composer Keith Kehrer--Page 2
MBADC:
So obviously for a film score each scene would have a bit of music X number
of minutes long. In the end would all the bits of music fit together in a
cohesive theme, or are they really separate entities when you write?
Keith Kehrer:
I think if you’re a good composer, it will hold its own apart from the
movie. What I did [for Standalone ] was I wrote six pieces of music, and
they were pieces of music that might have been short, but they were pieces
of music unto themselves. And I could have taken them and expanded them out
and made them longer. For the last film, there were pieces of classical
music that we used, there were pieces from a techno band that we used, there
were pieces that I wrote which were not very much alike even though I used
the same palette—I used the same set of instruments for most of them.
MBADC: How
many minutes of music are required for the average film? Written, and then
in the finished film, approximately?
Keith Kehrer:
You may write an hour’s worth of music and to whittle down to quite possibly
20 or 30 minutes. I’ve seen movies with more music, mostly action films
where there’s not as much dialogue. If there’s more dialogue, then probably
around 20 minutes of music…It depends on the film, really. In action films
you hear a lot more music. Some are written almost like sound design. So if
you watch a movie like Fast and Furious, it’s a lot of almost techno and
sound design and a constant barrage of music and sound effects. Whereas a
movie like Sleepless in Seattle uses lot of songs and maybe 20 minutes worth
of underscore…You’d think that would be easy, but it’s really not. [laughs]
MBADC:
[laughing] No, because editing is hard when you’re passionate about
something. It’s not easy.
Keith Kehrer:
[What] the director Sean Hagen and I did on Standalone was, we
sometimes we would say ‘OK, listen, I love the strings that are going on in
that particular piece of music, but we need to get rid of the hip hop drums
and whatever, and just do the strings under the scene for this particular
piece.’ So there’s a lot of mixing and matching going on, but I might take a
small portion of it, or even just a piece of it, like say, only the guitar
part if that’s all that’s needed. Or, ‘just do the drums here. Don’t do the
rest of it.’ And he would make meticulous notes as to what he heard, and I
would send him different mixes with different things muted out. And it would
be just the strings, or just the piano, or the piano and the strings, or the
percussion piano and strings. [Then] he would sit with a Quick Time movie
and lay it over and see if it worked for the scene and whether it went with
the dialogue and went with the flow of that particular scene. Then he’d give
me notes saying, “Start in here, end it here,’ or ‘Fade it out here,” and so
on. So we were pretty meticulous about where things went once we got going.
MBADC: What
was the process of doing Standalone? How did you begin?
Keith Kehrer:
[laughs] Trial and error! The director and I, this is our first full-length.
I’ve only done short films where he just needed a short piece. What we had
originally sat down to do was, was done as a spotting session where you look
at the film, and you say, ‘I need music here, I need music there, I need
music here.’ We also sat down with other films and listened to how they used
their music, and I made notes as to what he liked and what was working in a
particular scene that might have parallels in his movie. And that was very
helpful, like, ‘Oh that needs a poignant little theme.’ We decided there was
a buddy thing going on between the two main characters, and you need
something poignant. So my main theme, the piano and everything came out of
that particular idea, which came from Training Day…There was this particular
piece that went throughout Training Day, and it was kind of poignant. It got
a little rougher as they got into it because it started out with him and his
family, and then it was Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington in the car, and
that was still a buddy moment, but a little more raw and harsh. But it was
still a bonding moment, so you need some kind of bonding music. And that’s
what kind of influenced that particular piece. What he liked about my
original demo was, I had a lot of percussion and hybrid kind of stuff, and
that’s how that came about.
MBADC: How
did you meet the director? Was he someone you knew long before, or…?
Keith Kehrer:
I met him through a tip sheet, and I found out later that the guy who
co-produced Standalone had sent out an ad that he hadn’t told him about and
next thing Sean knew, he was getting all these demo CDs. He had no idea, and
it was like, “Where’s all this stuff coming from?” He told me he hired me
mainly because of this one piece on my CD, and also because I was
persistent. I called and called until I got a meeting. Once we sat down and
talked with each other, we knew we were going to work together because we
got along really well, and there was a good chemistry between us.
Keith Kehrer Page 3
Keith Kehrer Page 1
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