Brad Fiedel

"What’s really interesting about music and the audience, whether that’s a soundtrack audience or a listening audience… of course, we’re talking about soundtracks. My music was really designed very, very much to go to the image. I was never thinking about people listening to it without the image. There are some composers whose music really lends itself to pleasurable, interesting, listening, and sometimes, that music has been created and made listenable a little bit at the expense of the service of the movie; in other words, the ego of the composer. If you get in there and say, ‘Wow, this will sound so great with the orchestra and it’ll sound great on the soundtrack album,’ and maybe they can actually end up doing too much and writing ‘too many notes’ (laugh). I’ve always been surprised that people enjoy listening to my soundtracks, because I felt like I was part of a team – the filmmaking team. I always loved movies and I just happened to have the skill to create sounds and music and that’s just what got me on the team, but it was always about the movie. I think part of what makes a piece of music your favorite theme has so much to do with the movie and the impact it has, and of course, the synchronicities that occur."

"There were certain sounds in the 80s that were not, in my mind, desirable as a composer, because they kind of called attention to themselves in a nuts-and-bolts kind of way. Like, “pee-owww”. Oh, there’s that sound again, you know? A saw-tooth synth sound. But I really think that our job is to use whatever exists in the world, or even create an instrument for a score because there’s nothing in the universe that sounds like what your imagination is wanting for that film. Electronics and computers help that, but sometimes, literally, you have to take a piano string and string it across some kind of open box and bow it with a cello bow or something. You have to come up with a new sound, and that’s always fun."