MRH: Your other recent film score, The Punisher: War Zone (2008), has got to be one of the most daunting if not intimidating films that you’ve done because it’s a very large scale orchestral score, and I wonder if that particular sound was something that the producers wanted, or was it something that you suggested?

MW:    I think that from the beginning they wanted to do an orchestral score. There ended up being some prominent electronic elements in the score, but it’s definitely a symphonic score at its heart, and when I saw the film for the first time, I thought there was really no other way to approach this, given how the character is portrayed in the film.

 I’d worked with orchestras before on other films, and I was excited about the prospect. The most daunting part was that the schedule was really short, so everybody had to kind of hunker down and get it done. The writing itself took about three and a half weeks, and then we had about ten days to record it and mix it.

MRH: I noticed the dominant instruments in the score are brass, and I really liked the way you create these smooth transitions between the different brass instruments, and suggest a kind of gothic, brooding atmosphere without actually being very heavy.

MW:    Thanks, I’m glad you noticed that. It was a conscious decision. Since we were using a large orchestra, I made a decision very early on… I thought it would be smart to stick with just strings and brass so I could cover a lot of ground melodically and emotionally with the strings, and leave the brass for the more thematic, bigger, macho moments of the score.

It’s a dark but heroic and mournful, stoic sound. I just felt that once we had started going down that road we should keep it up, and we ended up using a really large orchestra with just brass and strings.

MRH: I think what I like so much about the score is that you don’t saturate the soundtrack with the might of the orchestra. There’s a great deal of restraint that’s applied to a lot of passages, and many cues are very quiet, with a focus on a few nuances. Those cues aren’t sound design or atmospheric filler; you get a sense that they have direct and dramatic function, but the orchestra is applied with a great deal of restraint.

I found that surprising because in comic book-styled films and films derived from graphic novels, the traditional, formal approach tends to be to use the force of the orchestra, and I don’t know if that’s just because there’s the influence of Danny Elfman’s Batman (1989), where you have to be gothic and big, or whether it’s a sense that ‘I’ve got a huge orchestra, and I have to do something with it.’

MW:    My approach for scoring has generally been less is more in most situations. There are times when you have to deploy the orchestra and really use it at its full capacity to get a point across, but especially in this portrayal of The Punisher, Ray Stevenson plays the character very reserved, quiet, tormented, and forceful; he doesn’t say much, he’s very attuned to the modern Punisher comics that are out now, and the character is driven by something in his emotional core - the death of his family – that leaves him in a very morally ambiguous place.

Even though he’s doing his Punisher thing, he’s kind of a machine; he makes snap judgements about guys, but when he’s not doing that, he’s locked in this personal emotional hell, and I thought to best illustrate that was to use an approach that was quieter; something that was diametrically opposed to the action and plays to his theme and the many aspects of his character. It’s important to bring that out.

“Vigilante” is a very weird place to be for a character, because people both abhor you and root for you at the same time, and I wanted the audience to remain in the center, and a restrained approach to music highlighted that. Also, by not taking it over the top, it doesn’t take the audience out of the movie; I thought that was really important.