MRH : Today you've got a mixture of orchestral elements and electronics that are blended together and finished on a computer, but in your score, you rely on and emphasize the talents of the musicians, which isn't done as often. There may be a solo piece in a score for an artist to individually shine, but The Roost basically feels like a small handful of musicians performing what they know extremely well, and you can't help but admire their skill.

JG : I really wanted those guys to do it, and when I wrote the stuff, I had them in mind, because they do certain stuff very, very well. They're in New York, but they're known internationally for doing that kind of stuff. It was a great learning experience for me to work with players like that, and so fast. I've done other scores with them, like The Last Winter (2006) for Larry Fessenden [who also appears in The Roost, and is credited as Executive Producer].

For his prior film, Wendigo, Larry actually used sound design with ambient aspects, but in The Last Winter, the majority of the score is "musical score," which is what I've done. He also has this other guy named Anton Sanko do this ambient stuff. I did end up doing some ambient stuff for it as well, but I used more actual instruments. We have the bass ocarina in some parts of it, so we made these really weird, out of tune textures. My wife actually plays ocarina, and I would have her play just slightly out of tune, and we tracked it over fifteen times to make these weird clusters.

The film was shot in Iceland, although it takes place in Alaska. They're drilling for oil in the Arctic, and it's sort of an environmental ghost story, where one of the characters poses this question of ‘what if this stuff starts to contribute to global warming?' The permafrost is melting and these 'things' come out of the ground, and what would that be? That's' sort of what kicks the movie off.

So there's an opening shot of the tundra, and we ended up using this sort of tundra sound, where we had the bass player bowing the tail piece. The engineer set up mikes in a really weird pattern on the floor, and we also had it kind of against the wall to create this bass track to make this really bizarre sound. There's also more scordatura too, where he's detuned the strings in whole different places, and he's bending the strings as well.

For The Last Winter, Larry used some thematic score. With The Roost, Ti West kept telling me, ‘It's too musical. It needs to be more cacophonous.' He did like the craziness of the score. Larry's film is more tonally accessible. In addition to bringing in one member from the Flux Quartet, I had a bass player, and a brass quartet that consisted of one horn, trombone, bass trombone, and tuba. The Last Winter sort of looks back to his earlier film, Wendigo, and tends to reference the same creature, so for the creature we used this crazy brass sound.

MRH : Will the score for The Last Winter be released at some point?

JG : I have talked to different people about it, and there's a definite interest for it, so I think one way or another, it'll come out. I've gotten good responses from people here at the Toronto International Film Festival.

MRH : I think fans of the old Twilight Zone series will find The Roost particularly chilling, because you exploit the possibilities of chamber instruments much in the way composers like Jerry Goldsmith, Morton Stevens, Nathan Van Cleave, and Leonard Rosenman did. With some of their scores - episodes like "Back There," and "King Nine Will Not Return," in particular - you just don't want to listen to them through headphones if you're alone in the dark, and it's 2 AM.

JG : It's funny... The main teacher who I studied with and who I see myself extremely indebted to is Charles Fussell. He was very good friends with Virgil Thomson (he's actually the chair of the Virgil Thomson Foundation) and he went to school with Leonard Rosenman, and he speaks very highly of Lennie. He said Rosenman was a very talented concert composer, but Hollywood just wasn't into having you get your cake and eat it, too.

Now it's a totally different ballgame: you have a lot more composers who have these hugely varying backgrounds working in film. Some of those people even head over to concert music. It's like a total 180 from the way things were back then, but those guys were great composers. Even the British composers worked in TV.

MRH : I was surprised that several even contributed to TV productions and stock music libraries.

JG : A lot of them did, because there's so many government subsidized films. A lot of them did horror films and things like that. Britain produced a lot for film and television.

MRH : And documentaries and industrials.

JG : For me, it's really funny, because I like doing concert music as well, and I find that it keeps you on your toes; it lets you stretch. When you're working for a director, you have to remember: at the end of the day, you work for the director. If they want “X” and you want something else and you can't convince them at the end of the day, you're still responsible to deliver what they want.