MRH: Because you’ve worked with Jonathan Mostow on 4 films, you must have an established shorthand, and a special understanding of his use of score.

RM: He and I have a shorthand and an understanding of what works, and what we like. Obviously one of the big things with a director is that you have the same aesthetics; when you look at a piece of music against picture you get the same sort of feeling and same reaction, and I think John and I are really in key in the that respect, and in tune with each other, and thankfully he keeps coming back.

MRH: It’s interesting that you mention that you had a strong background in synthesizers. During the ‘synth heyday,’ a lot of synth scores were written for films and TV, and there were some attempts to transpose a more classically written orchestral score to the electronic realm. One of the earliest examples of that approach was Jerry Goldsmith’s Runaway, which doesn’t really hold up as well as it initially did when it came out.

RM: Yeah, I agree with you. I think the other one that I worked on that was another attempt was Witness (1985) with Maurice Jarre, when he tried to do the whole orchestra with Kurzweil synthesizers.

MRH: Witness has aged better. It has some really unique sounds.

RM: That’s an observant thought. I think it’s also musically a classic score, with classic melodies. The Barn scene [“Building the Barn” on the soundtrack album] is something that will stand the test of time. Now that we went through the synthesizers scores and went back to the big orchestras stuff, the hybrid thing is the norm, which Hans Zimmer and his troops [helped pioneer and advance].

Surrogates could’ve been an opportunity to really go for an electronic kind of score, but I really didn’t feel (and neither did John) that that was really the essence of the movie… We took an orchestral approach, maybe in the style of Bernard Herrmann or something, updated with modern rhythms and percussions, and [in spite of] big drums and things for all the chases and stuff, some of the string effects that I did were really very old fashioned.

MRH: There are certain sounds that do put audiences in a ‘futuristic’ mindset, and there’s that danger where you can make it too spacey, and the score no longer has any links to a reality, which allows the audience to bond with the characters. How do you create a balance in the music that hints at a different time period, yet remains accessible so the drama and characters feel contemporary?

RM: I don’t think that I was aware of trying to really make it sound futuristic at all because it was sort of a modern day future; it wasn’t fifty years in the future.

Maybe the challenging thing about the movie for audiences was to understand what time frame we are really in. Things seem very present day but [Surrogates is] supposed to be set in an advanced futuristic society, so I was never asked to make it sound anything more in the future, or electronic…The interesting thing about the story, which hopefully came across, is that there was an emotional quality to Bruce Willis’ character and his wife that I don’t think would’ve been served well with no electronic approach.