MRH: You wrote a very beautiful score for Basic Instinct 2 (2006), but I guess you’re best known more for heavy electronic scores, and I’m curious if there any particular electronic composers or groups that you particularly admire or perhaps influenced you?

JM:  That’s such a difficult question to answer.

MRH: For example, Danny Boyle has exploited your skills with electronic music, with Sunshine (2007) being one of your best works. It’s really beautiful.

JM: Thank you. I think there’s a lot of vintage British trip-hop I’ve always loved, from Massive Attack and Tricky and stuff like that. If left to my own devices, I’ll always kind of dig in to that style just because it’s something that I loved when it was happening. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped lovin’ that kind of style.

I think it’s actually very cinematic. It’s a style of music that lends itself to being very effective on the screen, so I’ll always be into that kind of stuff, but there’s a lot of guitar bands that I love – I’m a huge Radiohead fan – I’m a bit of a guitarhead, really [but] I’m a bit of a mish-mash of stuff. I feel happy if I’ve done a big heavy guitar score or electronic score, but there’s nothing I like better that to sit down at the piano and write a bit more purely and write for an orchestra, so I’m a bit kind of schizophrenic, I think.

Whatever I did last I want to do the opposite the next time around, but you’re right – a lot of the things that people know me for definitely tend to be where I'm mixing up modern electronic stuff with strings.

I’m not a snob about stuff. If I feel I want to put a big trip-hop beat under some lovely choral thing I don’t really think twice about it; I just do it. It’s one of the nice things about not having a musical background; it’s all the same to me... You can be emotional with fantastic rhythms driving through the scene as you can with woodwinds... I just kind of grab whatever influence I see at the time, and I’ll do whatever is natural. I don’t want to over-think it.

MRH:  Your style is also recognizable. There’s something interesting that you do where if a score is based around a singular theme, you don’t whole variations of a theme, you’ll take maybe part of the bass line and build it into a wholly new cue, and you might take part of the rhythm and build yet another cue around that, and then you might take a fragment of the theme and do something different with it.

I think Miami Vice (2006) is a good example, and even Armored (2009), where you’ve got a main theme, but there are so many little parts where you’ve branched off and done very different things, and it’s very clever.

JM: I’m not sure if it’s clever. To me that’s natural. In a way it's kind of an inverse way of approaching something symphonically.

Modern film scoring is different to what it was 30-40 years ago. I don’t think it’s just me that’s doing that. I think there’s other guys doing that as well, but I just think the difference now is it’s a lot more open nowadays, certainly in the last 20 years where you’ve got people like me or Clint Mansell who kind of come out of rock n’ roll backgrounds.

We’re doing what’s natural to us, and it’s not always where we're building the architecture to a score, it’s not always the melodic thematic stuff that we pull from to do that. Sometimes it is a bass line or a changing rhythm or a sound. Sometimes I’ll just take a sound or something that for whatever reason sums up an element of what makes up the DNA of the score that I know is working, and start from that.

I think there’s a lot more leeway and a lot more license to be gotten with writing film scores nowadays. I think the [musical culture of] young directors that come on the scene is not classical. Their culture is Radiohead or Massive Attack or whatever it is that they grew up with, so there’s a familiarity sometimes when I do these things because I’ve got the same kind of cultural musical background with some of these directors.

It’s sort of osmosis; it would be more strange for me sometimes with one of these directors to sit down at the piano and say ‘This is our thematic language. This is how I'm going to interpret this in a chase scene or a love theme.’ It’s easier for them to go ‘Oh there’s that beat! Use that beat again.’ Or ‘There’s that bass line, let’s slow it down and make it grungy or make it threatening.’ So in a way I’m using the same clichés if you like, but they’re just in a different sort of language because things have changed, and we have a lot more leeway.

I like to work with young directors or first-time directors partly because of the energy they bring. I know that they’re going to have a sensibility that I can connect with. I mean, half the music I listen to is classical music, but it’s not necessarily where my head is sometimes when I'm [spotting] the movie with a young director whom you never know likes the same type of music.

If I know something’s going to be a kind of violent, edgy, testosterone driven guitar score like Armored was, then that’s where my head is completely for that space of six weeks where I'm on the movie. I will think in those terms and basically not worry too much about something being attached to each other thematically, or attached to each other rhythmically, or as rock n’ roll hooks… but you need the right director to do that; you need someone like a Nimrod Antal who can get it straight away.

MRH: You mentioned directors recognize that you have an edgy style and it’s a style that also lends itself to some really bleak stories about humanity under threat, whether it’s global, local or even on a personal scale, and it works very well, but I just wonder if there’s something from your end that you find particularly intriguing about these stories, or is it the filmmaker that finds your style matches their vision, or a bit of both?

JM: I think I’d be lying if I didn’t say it’s a bit of both. I’ve tried to figure this out myself.

When you sit down to start a movie, you’re thinking, ‘Why the hell did they ask me to do this?’ and you get the feeling that there’s 20 or 30 other guys within a 10 mile radius that could probably be doing it better. (I live in Woodland Hills where there’s a lot of composers.)

I feel like I go into character when I do some of those movies, whereas when I do something that’s very dark or apocalyptic or it’s heavily ironic or bleak, I don’t have to think about it. I’m kind of there straight away, so I’ve come to realize that I’m more in tune with the darker or edgier type of film, and I think my best work is with those movies, and I think people kind of get that.

Ihe irony is I actually want to do very European, melodic thematic stuff as well, it’s just people don’t often ask me to do that kind of thing… I like Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon a Time in America, all the classic Morrione stuff, Nino Rota, the really heavily melodic stuff. That’s actually the stuff I love the most, but people wouldn’t think that.

I think it’s the two extremes that I’m comfortable with… The very whimsical stuff I love, and the very hardcore violent stuff I love, too.