Called to Duty: An Interview with Graeme Revell
Written by Jonathan Shearon
December 1, 2005

Graeme Revell's career has been as eclectic as his music. Beginning with his first assignment on the thriller Dead Calm in 1989, Revell has established himself as the go-to guy for unusual genre scores that defy convention. I recently got the chance to talk to him at his Los Angeles studio about his phenomenal career, directing ambitions and his first forays into the world of video games.

Music on Film: According to your bio, you began your career as a classically trained pianist and French horn player as well as performing with the rock group SPK. Were you always interested in film music, despite or perhaps because of these early influences?

Graeme Revell: When my bio says that I was "trained", it was really very little actual training - mostly just childhood lessons and brass band. I was somewhat interested in film music, but it wasn't a driving passion. At some point, I did begin to find the genre fascinating. I was still doing the experimental SPK project, when around about 1982 I wrote an album called "Music for Impossible Films", not imagining anyone would actually ask me to write a film score. Then a few years later, my themes from that album were used as the basis for the score to Dead Calm, which worked really well. My music always had a very strong visual sense, I felt.

MoF: So the circumstances for that first score were quite serendipitous.

GR: Definitely. I was really just in the right place at the right time. Dead Calm was having trouble; they'd had three composers working on the film before me and nobody could come up with anything interesting. So really, I just got lucky.

MoF: For the sci-fi adventure Red Planet, you chose to use an interesting mix of opera, electronica and traditional orchestral underscore. Although eclecticism is sort of your trademark, why choose such an unusual combination of styles for what was a fairly traditional science fiction story?

GR: The director had a script at some earlier point which he felt was much more interesting and philosophical. The film then went through the studio process at Warner Brothers and got reduced to what he called a "schlep movie", where they land on the planet, they schlep for a bit, and then they get off the planet. His request to me was "Please Graeme - anything you can do to make this more interesting, more grand, more like what I originally wanted the film to be." It's really great to be given creative carte blanche like that. This kind if thing frequently happens, where you have a very difficult setup for a movie. I'm going through the same kind of situation with the score I'm writing now for The Fog, because although it's a horror movie, fog isn't inherently scary. It doesn't come around the corner and bite you. It certainly doesn't do anything very quickly, you know? In those circumstances, the music plays a huge role in the success of the film.

MoF: I've read that you were less than pleased with the final result of the first Tomb Raider film, due to a mixture of the ridiculously short time you were given to compose the score and perhaps just a lack of interest in the source material to begin with. Is it difficult to score a film that doesn't necessarily inspire you creatively with the images that are on screen?

GR: I wouldn't say that I was uninspired by what was on the screen. If anybody's going to play the role of Lara Croft, it has to be Angelina Jolie; she's pretty cute and pretty exciting. My problems on that film stemmed from the extremely short time I had to work on it. I was forced to use a lot of loops that were otherwise available to other people and I don't usually like doing that. It felt like I was cheating in some way, but when you have to write a score in eight days, there's not much choice really.

MoF: I suppose it's easy for an outsider to criticize a score like Tomb Raider, but it must be hard to be brilliant in eight days.

GR: I'm glad you understand that, because sometimes we do get criticized for not writing on the same level as Steiner or Goldsmith or somebody like that, but what everybody forgets is that those guys usually had six to eight weeks to write a score. That's a big difference from seven or eight days. Also, there's also the fact that even if we do have a locked picture, frequently it's filled with a lot of green-screen and you're not always really sure of what's going on in the film. That's what leads to generic padding and rhythmic patterns to fill up a scene. I recently had a conversation after the BMI awards where an older gentleman commented that I must feel a little sad that I'm not able to write long melodic themes like Rota and Morricone used to do. My response was that you just can't when you have a piece of picture that comes through the door with a hundred cuts in one scene. The picture is practically a strobe light in front of you. You have to go with what you see. That's the job.

MoF: One of my favorite of your scores is the spy-thriller The Saint, which features a beautiful, jazzy love theme that's sort of an homage to John Barry's theme from You Only Live Twice, which I thought was an ingenious touch for a spy film. You also returned to these jazz leanings in Out of Time, which has a distinct Caribbean flavor and Sin City, which is more of a gritty neo-noir. Is Jazz a style of music that you're interested in composing more of?

GR: It's strange, but not really. (laughs) I like to bend any genre - not that Out of Time was all that bent, but Sin City sure is. I do like the best jazz, but I'm not a jazz player or aficionado or anything. Out of Time was a fun one - basically I just got a lot of Cubans in a room and tried to stop them from playing! (laughs) For The Saint, I was really just trying to capture a 60s, British feel, and what better way to do that than quote a little of Barry's Bond.

MoF: Although they're ubiquitous now, serious and adult adaptations of comic books and graphic novels were quite unusual when The Crow was released.

GR: The genesis for many of the ideas in that film were derived from the rock guitar persona of the Brandon Lee character. There were a number of guitar riffs that eventually became a song and provided some of the themes for the movie. The original intention was that there would be a big rock theme song, but that never materialized in the final cut. The great thing about graphic novels like The Crow is that you're in a non-specific time and place, in this case the near future. So the question becomes: "What should that sound like?" There was really an attempt to make a complete soundscape that complimented the detailed environment of the film. When Brandon died, the film became very real for me, and so I wrote a nice little string elegy for his character. The whole score ended up being very eclectic.

MoF: Unlike the over-the-top histrionics of scores like Batman for example, your score for The Crow was somewhat more serious and melancholic. Was there ever a temptation to go with a big "comic book theme" on that film?

GR: Whenever I hear a theme like Batman - I dunno - Elfman's riff is very similar to "Maria" from West Side Story. That doesn't really excite me so much, you know? (laughs)

MoF: I always felt that the string elegy in The Crow you spoke of served to humanize the ultraviolence of the story.

GR: Well if you don't do that, in my opinion all you have is a fairly boring revenge movie. And revenge is not a particularly compelling motivation. I find myself in that situation on a lot of these films, where they're full of really dark violence, and so you have to find some sort of core of humanity, even if it's just a brief moment in the film.

MoF: For The Chronicles of Riddick, you were given the opportunity to revisit some of your themes from Pitch Black, although the two very different films. Do you enjoy reworking older material for new films, or do you find that it's a hindrance to the creative spark?

GR: (Director) David Twohy didn't suggest it, but my thought that I that not everyone who goes to see The Chronicles of Riddick is going to know about Pitch Black, because that was a much smaller sleeper film. But for the fans who were familiar with the character from the first film, this was a way to a make a connection between the two. Also, when you drop a character into a completely different arena, it's nice to provide some context, and the music was a way to do that.

MoF: Was your section of the score for Sin City a result of your relationship with Robert Rodriguez, for whom you also scored From Dusk Till Dawn?

GR: Yes, that's right. Originally, I think Robert was going to score the whole thing himself. Although he's a great multi-tasker, there's a point at which you can't do it all yourself. Even Robert Rodriguez can't do everything himself, as talented as he is.

MoF: Was Sin City a difficult film to score, since you had to share those duties with John Debney and Rodriguez himself?

GR: Robert gave me a terrific compliment while we were scoring Sin City, by saying that I had inspired him to become a composer when we worked together on From Dusk Till Dawn. The idea that he could take fairly ordinary instruments and samples and then twist the hell out of them, which is the way I tend to work, really appealed to him. For Sin City, Robert said that what he wanted was a frantic 21st century Conan the Barbarian, to which I said "cool, you've got the right guy". What's funny is that when I pitched him From Dusk Till Dawn, I told him what I wanted to do was a mariachi soap opera, and he said "cool, I always wanted to hear one of those". (laughs) So we think alike. Robert was very unsure about what instruments to use on City. I said that Debney could use the trumpet and I wanted to use the saxophone, because that's the other sort of "jazz" instrument, but only if I can use a baritone sax and make it sound like a dying elephant. He just said "cool".

MoF: Did you work closely with the two of them in a conceptual sense?

GR: When I first discussed it with Robert, we only spent two or three hours together. What he wanted was to conceive the three episodes as completely different musical vibes. We agreed that we didn't really need to have anything to do with each other in order to preserve that separation. John (Debney) actually called me while he was doing the string sessions for his portion of the score and asked if I'd like to piggyback on, but I decided that I would stay true to the brief and not meet with him so that I could do my own thing. I didn't want a lot of lush string stuff, because Mickey Rourke's performance was so raw and gritty and funny - I didn't want to gloss that up. It's funny - there were some comments on the internet saying there was such a great continuity to the score that we must have all worked closely together, but in the case of John and me, we never met until the premiere.

MoF: You worked on the action thriller Assault on Precinct 13 earlier this year and you've also recently composed The Fog. Both are remakes of John Carpenter films - is that merely coincidence, or are you just a really big Carpenter fan?

GR: Ah, yes … I'm the reincarnation of John Carpenter before his death! (laughs) But no, seriously it's just a coincidence. I do like his original films very much, especially The Thing. I remember seeing that film in Italy, with the dialogue dubbed into Italian - it was hilarious.

MoF: Do you reference his scores when composing for these new films?

GR: Even though I saw all the movies when they were released, I try not to go back and listen to them again so that I can take a fresh approach. He had his own very unique style, but I think the requirements are a little different these days.

MoF: Up until just a few years ago, it would have been unheard of for an A-List composer like you to score a video game. Are these newer types of media now as important as film in Hollywood?

GR: I'm not sure if they are yet in Hollywood, but everywhere else in the world they certainly are. It's a bigger business - much more successful. In the case of Call of Duty I wanted to do it because I never had the chance to write that sort of serious, heroic war music. I like challenging myself with new styles and genres. I've had a lot of fun with these two games.

They were really quite different from one another. Call of Duty 2 is a first-person shooter with British and American troops - very action oriented. In The Big Red One, you really get to know the characters; there's a lot of dialog and a lot of speech-making. It's a much more emotionally involving. It's was great to be able to do two things I had never done before.

MoF: Though you've worked on several film adaptations of video games, I believe that the Call of Duty series is your first foray into game scoring. Did you find writing music for games to be more or less challenging than film?

GR: It's a little hard to wrap your head around it actually, because you're not sure when the game players are going to get to a significant incident within a cue. That makes it necessary to design music that can be looped until the players arrive at that point. So you tend to design a lot of little two and four bar loops within the material.

Again, the two games were very different. On Call of Duty 2, they were able to give me Quicktime videos of the game, and so it was really more or less like film scoring. The other game was at a lower stage of development when I scored it, and they could really only give me verbal indications of what they wanted for a particular scene. I wasn't really able to see anything until after the music had already been written. It was a lot of guesswork, but it seemed to work out fine.

MoF: I understand that you are in the process of writing your first screenplay. What's it about?

GR: Actually, I've written two. The first one is with Working Title, a British company, and unfortunately just got put in turnaround about a month ago. It was the story of my band, when I first started in the music business. At the time I was also an orderly in an asylum with a group of mental patients. It's a comedy and a musical. People seem to think it's funny, so I think we'll get it made at some point. The other one I would like to direct myself. It's called Dante's Paradox, and it will be an indie film with an interesting, gritty set of actors.

MoF: So your interested in being a director then?

GR: Well, it looks like I may move in that direction.

MoF: Perhaps you are the next Robert Rodriguez.

GR: If only! (laughs) That would certainly be nice.

MoF: Much of your career to this point has been spent composing music for the science-fiction, fantasy and action genres. Is there a particular type of film that you would really like to score that you haven't been able to yet?

GR: The films that I like to see are quirky dramas with complicated, interesting stories. Films like Adaptation, Memento, Run Lola Run and Sliding Doors. I figure that if I'm not going to be chosen to score these kinds of films, then I'll have to write one and do it myself.

I did get to work on Human Nature, kind of a strange little film. But it didn't do any business. When a film isn't a hit, you just don't often get to return to that genre again soon. Rolfe Kent, a friend of mine, is a good example. His career was sort of going nowhere, and then he lucked into Sideways. Now he's in demand. You just really have to hang in there, and step up when you get the chance. Some of us get what we want, other don't. But I should complain huh? I just got lucky.

Special thanks to Tom Kidd at Costa Communications for this interview.

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