MRH: One of the best scores for me of the seventies is The Boys from Brazil (1978). It doesn’t deal specifically with material from that era, but it definitely was an attempt to try and musically extend the Nazi regime to the present day.

JO:  That’s an awesome score. What Jerry Goldsmith did with that waltz.

MRH:  It’s a great waltz, and one of the most evil waltzes every written. I mean, the film is part of a genre I call Nazi sleaze because it’s a thriller film, being somewhat based around historical facts, but at the same time it has this undeniable sleaze factor; the characters, the villains, are just so scummy, and the film evolves similar to a bodycount thriller.

There’s a certain style of music, certainly in the case of Boys from Brazil, where it can satirize the arrogance and the pomp and circumstance of the Nazis, but there’s also a danger where a score may not glorify the regime, but it gives them a bit of a regal tone.

JO:  There is that fine line, although had we had scenes like that, I totally would have done that, but Valkyrie basically centered on the bombast of the Germans. It really is an internal movie, and very much like The Usual Suspects, with enclosed locations; the film focuses on the conspirators most of the time, so there really wasn’t a lot of opportunity to have a lot of irony with the score, in terms of the large-scale officers.

Any scenes that we had like that were really the officers working on behalf of the resistance movement… so there was almost some euphoria in the music when the German reserve army is taking over and securing Berlin, which was part of the plan of the conspirators.

MRH: I’m just curious if you’ve ever seen any of the propaganda films of the era, either German or for that matter the Soviet films?

JO:  Yeah, we saw a lot of those because there is a radio broadcast in the film (typical propaganda stuff that’s in the backdrop of several scenes) and I wanted there to be music. I did do some research [and we used] some of the music that we found.

MRH:  The music scores of that era, both the German and Soviet, were geared specifically towards grabbing any reluctant audience member who was not feeling particularly nationalistic, and making sure that by the end of the film he or she was completely indoctrinated, or hopefully indoctrinated with the sights and the sounds of that particular regime.

JO:  Absolutely. They were extremely nationalistic and pride-inducing; not too much unlike the American of the time as well (we did the same thing) but I would like to think that ours were less propaganda and more fact.

MRH:  What I like about Valkyrie is how you captured tension using sounds that evoke the clipped discipline of the military machine without actually being heavy-handed.

JO:  Anytime you hear the huge percussion is when the reserve army is securing sections of Berlin. Basically it’s a very pulsating score, and the challenge was to make a lot of music not feel like a lot of music. The sound really required a constant heartbeat, and that’s what the score really became in the movie, and it was my job to design the music to be able to be intertwined with the sound effects and so forth.

Being the editor, I’m in charge of the final dub, so I would often have a lot of peaks and valleys in the score, ebbing in and out of the sound effects when it would feel like I was over-doing it, yet we found the music always had to be there on this particular type of movie.

I’m a big believer of ‘less is more,’ so I was surprised how much music I had to write, but we found that whenever we stopped that musical pulse, the film just wasn’t as exciting anymore. It’s part of the challenge of doing a film which is very enclosed, very plodding, and has a lot of dialogue. It’s very much like The Usual Suspect: to keep things feeling more exciting than they necessarily were visually.