MRH: After you recorded the main instrumental parts, how much time do you spend layering in the electronics, doing the processing and refining everything until you get that balance for the final score?

MW: It’s all done at the same time. Process-wise, I come up with the programming part of it, the sample part of it, all the manipulations in terms of plug-ins and things like that, and the performances. When the cue’s done, the cue’s done; all the elements are there, and then it’s printed and then I give it to the mixer.

In this case it was Gustavo Borner who’s mixed a lot of Tyler Bates’ and John Murphy’s stuff that’s very hyper with a lot of electronic, rock & roll, and things like that. He’s really deft and bringing out a lot of the details and different elements, and making sure that they all play the proper role in the mix, but it’s kind of a gestalt process for me: I don’t do one thing and then add another; they’re all working together at the same time.

MRH: It’s interesting that you mention Tyler Bates, because in terms of a similarity, you both share this natural ability to balance all these different elements from acoustic, classical, blues, and electronic together. Everything is really beautifully orchestrated, and you can hear all the fine elements, whether it’s bongos, cello, and so on. It’s a great skill.

MW: Thanks, I really appreciate that. Tyler and I get bashed for that sort of thing a lot because it’s not a very purist approach to doing film scores: to be able to draw from both the electronic world and the acoustic world, and kind of see them both as their own entities.

You can do an entire score electronically, you can do an entire score acoustically, but I know for myself, and I know from the conversations that I’ve had with him, it’s something that when we approach it, we look at it as one complete palette.

It’s ‘Where am I going to draw sounds from?’ I’ve got these two things together that in my head somehow I can hear it overlap, and that’s just how I’ve evolved as a composer because I grew up dabbling in both as opposed to one or the other.

MRH: Probably Tyler Bates’ breakthrough score would be Get Carter (2000), which I still think is one of the best things he’s written, because it’s that perfect balance with rock, electronics and jazz. If you listen to one cue several times, you notice little subtleties, and that’s why I think it isn’t fair to denigrate that style, because it’s difficult to do.

MW: Yeah, it’s very hard, and I try to fight the good fight with people as much as I can and say there are a lot of instances where I’ve actually found composing the electronic part of the score much more difficult than doing the acoustic part.

[For Drive Angry, I recorded piano]. As I slowly took it apart, I was doing different things with it: hitting it with different mallet instruments and bouncing metal off it and recording it, and putting it into ProTools and trying to make instruments out of those sounds. That’s a very labour-intensive process, and it’s a totally different methodology.

In one way, the symphony’s palette of sounds is kind of limitless if you’re out there as a thinker…but you always know what you’re going to have when you walk into a room: you’re going to have a brass section, you’re going to have a strings section, you’ll have woodwinds, and you’ll have percussion.

There might be some extraneous instruments, different forms of ethnic winds or percussion instruments that are non-standard, [but] you basically know what you’re going to get sound-wise, so the interrelationships between those instruments [is] what you’re working with.

When you go into electronics, it could have a synthesizer, and you could be pounding the wall with a hammer and record that, and suddenly that becomes an instrument… It can become very daunting, so I find [the concept of fusion] gets set aside by a lot of people who are acoustic purists as being not valid film music for some reason, and that’s just not true; it’s actually very hard to do.