MRH: Maybe it’s just my impression, but I also found the scores have little homages to veteran action composers, like Jerry Goldsmith, John Barry, or even Danny Elfman, which I thought was really delightful.

BM: Yeah, if you didn’t catch some of the Goldsmith ones, man... For you to call them small homages is a compliment. Thank you... We grew up listening to Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams and Alan Silvestri and Basil Poledouris who are the five composers I think of. (James Horner and Danny Elfman a bit, too.) This is the sound that made me want to be a composer in the first place, and now I get to go back and play around in this language, and it was a thrill.

MRH: I think Silvestri was a key player in that big sonic action style. Much has been written about Die Hard (1988), and Michael Kamen definitely wrote one of the definitive action scores, but Silvestri had this knack for creating these amazing sounds with huge orchestras and gorgeous brass, but at the same time there was always a sense of humour in his writing, and I also got that in your score. I wonder if that is one of the hardest things to do: you’re writing action music, but make the audience aware that they should be in on the joke.

BM: I got used to is as we went along. It was a real challenge for me in the beginning, especially when you look at the project I’m coming from: Battlestar Galactica, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Caprica.

These are pretty stark series, and in fact with the Human Target 3-disc set that just came out (thank you La-La land Records), there’s some sketches that I put on (I’ve never released my sketches before), and you can hear my struggle with this.

You can actually hear in my first demo for Human Target that the rhythm is all there, the instrumentation is all there, but there’s something in the melodic and the harmonic structure that you listen to and you go, ‘That kind of sounds like Battlestar, that sounds kind of like Sarah Connor. There’s a darkness to it,' because I couldn’t actually believe that they really wanted the series to go in that full direction.

In fact, I was writing the theme sketches before I even saw the pilot; it was just around when I got the job that I was messing around with some ideas... [When John Steinberg] heard my 6th demo, he said ‘This is good. It feels like an action show, but it doesn’t feel fun. I want the audience to always know that it’s okay to have fun with this show.’ When I heard him say that, I said ‘Okay, I think I know what we need to do.’

If you look at that thirty-second title sequence, you can hear all these different emotional threads that I pull out and highlight in the score: there’s parts of it that feel pretty fun, and when I want the score to be really fun, that’s the part of the main title that I draw from. There’s parts that are more dramatic, and when I want a big emotional impact, I pull from the second part of the theme. I really felt that once I got that theme down, it was like the perfect seed from which the score could grow.

MRH: With a number of the shows that you’ve been working on, the episodes per season vary between 6 and 18, and I’m curious if a lower run makes it easier for you to both develop the music style for the show, and plot specific points where the score better represents the evolution of characters.

BM: Yes, and actually for me, Human Target is the pinnacle of this episodic growth because I had a showrunner who intimately understands thematic orchestral music.

Let me give you a few examples. In an early part of Human Target, some characters get mentioned, and if you didn’t know better, you would never have any idea how important those character arcs would become, and as I was doing the episode, Steinberg said to me ‘Hey, this little mention here is going to become a big deal at the end of the season... We’re going to find out more and more about [this girl], so can we write her a love theme now?’ and I thought ‘Write her a love theme? We don’t even know anything about her!'

Just because he mentioned that she exists, and because I knew these things were coming, I planned out all these character themes in advance... Although it certainly must have happened, but I can’t think of another time where you heard a character theme stated strongly in a TV show for a character you don’t even see for 5 or 6 episodes.

Those character themes get stronger and they develop, so that by the time you actually see these characters in the last episode of Season 1, when you hear their themes when they walk onscreen, I think even if you’re not aware of the music, it sounds familiar, and you don’t even know why. There’s a familiarity. It’s like ‘I know this person, I know who this person is,’ because you heard that theme 6, 7, 8 times, and that’s something that is so fun for me. That to me is a level beyond just scoring the action in a scene; that’s more about the subtext, and that’s something only music can do, and I was just so grateful to have the opportunity for that kind of really deeply woven character theme approach to a TV series like this.