Composer News (Or Not News)

In light of the recent thread on the Music forum, I went a-Googling on what news as any there is towards the film's composer. Beyond the Aston, I'm probably more interested in this side of production. According to Variety just the other week:

Composer David Arnold: From ‘Good Omens’ to Another Bond Film?

Quote :

Could David Arnold return as composer to the James Bond series?
It was the obvious question to pose while he was talking about Amazon’s new “Good Omens” miniseries, for which he has composed the elaborate score.
“It’s a no-news situation,” Arnold told Variety about 007. “I’ve heard nothing. But my pencil is always sharpened for him if James comes around again. But if he doesn’t, I’ll be as excited to watch the new film as anyone else. I still love him, and I love all of the team over there.”

Arnold composed the scores for five consecutive Bond films: three with Pierce Brosnan (“Tomorrow Never Dies,” “The World Is Not Enough,” “Die Another Day”) and two starring Daniel Craig (“Casino Royale,” “Quantum of Solace”).
With singer Chris Cornell, he co-wrote “You Know My Name,” the theme song for “Casino Royale,” and earned a Grammy nomination for it; he also received a BAFTA nomination for that score.

Arnold has scored more 007 films than any composer since John Barry, who scored 11 Bonds between 1963 and 1987 including such classics as “Goldfinger,” “Thunderball,” “You Only Live Twice” and “Diamonds Are Forever.” A handful of other composers have done one apiece, including Monty Norman (author of the original “James Bond Theme”), Marvin Hamlisch (“The Spy Who Loved Me”), Bill Conti (“For Your Eyes Only”) and Michael Kamen (“Licence to Kill”).

Arnold stepped aside when director Sam Mendes came aboard to helm “Skyfall” and “Spectre” in 2012 and 2015 and requested his frequent musical collaborator Thomas Newman for both. Newman received an Oscar nomination and won the Grammy and a BAFTA for his “Skyfall” score.
The still-untitled 007 adventure, being referred to only as “Bond 25,” has begun shooting with Craig reprising the role for the fifth and probably final time.

The Bond films are essentially a family business, so any final decision about a composer is always up to producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson.
Director Cary J. Fukunaga has worked with several different composers in the past, including Marcelo Zarvos (“Sin Nombre”), Dario Marianelli (“Jane Eyre”), Dan Romer (“Beasts of No Nation”) and T Bone Burnett (“True Detective”), so no single musician pops out as an obvious choice – which may leave it open for Broccoli and Wilson to suggest a familiar name.
“A lot of things have to happen before something like that [the composer] gets decided upon, and I’m not sure they’ve started thinking about it,” Arnold said. “These things are incredibly complicated.
“It’s flattering to be asked, because that means people think you might be half-decent enough to have a go at it. I have a huge debt to them [the Bond producers] and I still love the character. I was as happy watching the last two as I was writing the previous five,” he adds. “So it’s a win-win for me.”

“Good Omens” is the latest of several television projects to occupy the London-based composer. In partnership with Michael Price, he scored 13 episodes of the Benedict Cumberbatch series “Sherlock,” winning an Emmy in 2014 for one. He and Price are again working for the “Sherlock” team on a new adaptation of “Dracula” for BBC and Netflix.

He has also penned a song with frequent lyricist partner Don Black for an animated adaptation of the popular British children’s book “The Tiger Who Came To Tea,” slated for a Christmastime airing in the U.K. He and Black wrote the main-title song for “The World Is Not Enough,” the end-title song for “Tomorrow Never Dies” and other tunes for such artists as Shirley Bassey and Scott Walker.

He spent “the most joyous six months” working on “Good Omens,” he says. A favorite moment: writing a lullaby for demon Crowley to serenade the baby Antichrist to slumber. He talked to writer Neil Gaiman about the gentle kind of songs that the Sherman brothers once wrote for “Mary Poppins” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” — “the genuinely sweet Disney sort of atmosphere of innocence to try and get a child off to sleep.

“But what if Walt Disney was possessed by Satan? Like Satan trying to be nice,” Arnold says with a laugh. That became the template for the entire score, he says: “Whenever there is something angelic, there is something demonic alongside, and vice versa – something that might be sweet and innocent, but ever so slightly corrupted by the dark side.”

https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/james-bond-david-arnold-composer-good-omens-1203232043/

I expect Arnold to return, but I would prefer EON keep looking for more composers.

In all honesty, I don't think Bond films need a recurring composer anymore. John Barry was exceptional, but I'd be much more excited musically if EON did a revolving door technique to make things more interesting from film to film.

Fresh blood composer wise would be ideal. Someone like Desplat or Iglesias. Arnold not returning wouldn't be the worst thing.

Of course I'd love for Arnold to return if it meant more Bond music like TND, TWINE, DAD or to a lesser extent, QOS.

However, since Benjamin Button, I've long hoped for Desplat to be given a one-off gig of composing a Bond score. Also Dario Marianelli after Anna Karenina and Atonement. Alberto Iglesias would be good, actually. I tend to have his Tinker Tailor... score on infrequently.

I kind of hope that were he to return now, Arnold would give us something akin to his Brosnan fare as by now surely Craig's Bond has 'returned'?

Hilly wrote:

I kind of hope that were he to return now, Arnold would give us something akin to his Brosnan fare as by now surely Craig's Bond has 'returned'?

One would think so, yet he's not on active service at the beginning of the film. So probably not.

I would hope no return to the Brosnan template for Arnold. I felt he really overused the Bond theme during that era, as if using it as a crutch. It's better when used sparingly, preferably during moments that call for it as Barry did.

So when, for example, Bond checks for bugs in his hotel room in Istanbul? That called for the Bond theme?

As much as I like Barry, I'd never been that keen on how he used the Bond theme. The same, lighter rendition that popped up in the Moore/TLD years, or using the original version during the Little Nellie/raid on Piz Gloria sequences, for example, seemed lazy. I much prefer Arnold's use as a celebration of something Bond just did (i.e. the leap out of the window in TWINE, using the hook on the chopper in TND, or in a rather Barry-esque application of the theme, as Bond arrives in Germany.

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang wrote:

So when, for example, Bond checks for bugs in his hotel room in Istanbul? That called for the Bond theme?  

As much as I like Barry, I'd never been that keen on how he used the Bond theme. The same, lighter rendition that popped up in the Moore/TLD years, or using the original version during the Little Nellie/raid on Piz Gloria sequences, for example, seemed lazy. I much prefer Arnold's use as a celebration of something Bond just did (i.e. the leap out of the window in TWINE, using the hook on the chopper in TND, or in a rather Barry-esque application of the theme, as Bond arrives in Germany.

On the contrary, I'm very much against the scenes where the producers (not Barry) spliced in the DR. NO recording of the Bond theme instead of using newer material. That FRWL is probably the silliest of the reuses, as you can literally hear the sound mixing dialing up the volume in a way that's unsubtle.

In fact, here's a video I edited, taking out the DR. NO Bond theme and restoring the original music that Barry composed for the Piz Gloria battle.

That was all Peter Hunt. I agree with Barry but I also agree with Hunt in some ways.
I don't think you could bring the original theme back though I'd love to. however you can always place it in the main trailer as Binder did for all the 70's-80's trailers to perfect effect.

"007" must come back though. That would be one of my first stipulations as a director after ensuring we actually finally make a story about 007 again.

Heck, I think using the original theme in the 80s trailers hurt the series to some extent, giving the impression it's an old creaky series that needs to be put out of its misery. It was smart of them to stop using it from 1995 and on.

I have no expectations "007" will ever come back. I think that was just something Barry kept bringing back every now and then but never truly stuck.

Nice work on editing the scene, MP, prefer that to the finished product.

I agree that edit does work a lot better. Must have been a nightmare, trying to get the dialogue without the music attached.

MP wrote:

Heck, I think using the original theme in the 80s trailers hurt the series to some extent, giving the impression it's an old creaky series that needs to be put out of its misery. It was smart of them to stop using it from 1995 and on.

Yeah, not a big fan of the older trailers for this reason. As Hilly and I discussed in another thread, Barry should have indulged more in film-specific renditions of the theme because when he did (i.e. AVTAK) it worked so well. Might have pumped more energy into their marketing material too.

The trouble is that Binder did the titles and kept them in feeling old-however the more you study them the more obvious it becomes that they were endearing in a way and reassuring. Plus it is interesting to see his innovative use of bringing in the gunbarrel in different ways with the custom intros and then seeing the new footage of the film with the classic theme.

They did use some alternates at times. The LALD trailers use the OHMSS version of the theme to great effect while TLD uses the LALD version and makes it work as Martin made that recording quite ballsy.


I agree that I don't exactly know how you'd do it now, but if it were me I'd figure out some way to work "007" back in.

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang wrote:

I agree that edit does work a lot better. Must have been a nightmare, trying to get the dialogue without the music attached.

It was actually extremely easy! I took it from the 5.1 DVD mix and basically extracted the center channel, which was completely absent of music, with only sound effects and dialogue. This method doesn't always work, as a lot of films still have some of the score bleed into the center channel like with GOLDENEYE, where I had to try to hide some of the score during the tank chase and exploding pen but you could still hear faint sounds of the score. My next video is putting John Barry music into the casino scene in GE, and having listened to the center channel of that mix THAT'S going to be a nightmare to try to splice in the music and hide the Serra score.

Would be interesting to see but I love Serra's classical piece in the casino. We Share The Same Passions might not scream James Bond but it's a lovely track and creates such a beautiful ambience.

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang wrote:

Would be interesting to see but I love Serra's classical piece in the casino. We Share The Same Passions might not scream James Bond but it's a lovely track and creates such a beautiful ambience.

I love Serra's score, even ranking it as the best Bond score from the last 25 years of the franchise. Yet Barry scoring for a Bond film he was absent for is always one of my favorite "what if" Bond stuff. LTK, GE, and CR are the ones I would have liked to hear Barry work on. In fact, with TWINE having so many allusions to OHMSS I wonder how tempting it would have been of Barry to bring back the OHMSS theme.

At some point I'll splice in his 1995 recording of the OHMSS theme into the snowfield chase in TWINE.

Indeed CR needs all the help it can get to feel like a Bond film.

Makeshift Python wrote:

Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang wrote:

Would be interesting to see but I love Serra's classical piece in the casino. We Share The Same Passions might not scream James Bond but it's a lovely track and creates such a beautiful ambience.

I love Serra's score, even ranking it as the best Bond score from the last 25 years of the franchise. Yet Barry scoring for a Bond film he was absent for is always one of my favorite "what if" Bond stuff. LTK, GE, and CR are the ones I would have liked to hear Barry work on. In fact, with TWINE having so many allusions to OHMSS I wonder how tempting it would have been of Barry to bring back the OHMSS theme.

At some point I'll splice in his 1995 recording of the OHMSS theme into the snowfield chase in TWINE.

I look forward to that vid, Python. Indeed, tantalising what ifs about Barry returning post-TLD. LTK is the obvious one for me as much as I don't mind Kamen's score. Goldeneye would be incredible, some splashes of Daylights (re: Airbase Jailbreak) with a '90s feel' and yet I'm not sure if he would've brought the OHMSS theme back for TWINE or maybe in my mind it's so intrinsically linked to Lazenby, as to be his theme almost.

This was a bit tricky, but I did what I could.

Nice work, MP. The Barry fits pretty well.

Some observations -

There are more Brosnan close-ups in that sequence than I remembered.

Early on in the sequence, a wide shot shows that the parahawks are causing explosions nowhere near Bond and Electra.

Close-ups of the pilot of the first parahawk to follow Bond into the trees have a distinct lack of treetops in them.

Still find it irksome that Bond tearing its 'chute is all it takes for that particular 'hawk to go out of control to the extent it does, especially when it's already been shown how easily they can be jettisoned.

Indeed, goes pretty well with TWINE. Nice work MP.

A composer has been found.....Dan Romer.

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/bond-25-composer-dan-romer-cary-fukunaga-1202154760/

T.A. Ferguson wrote:

A composer has been found.....Dan Romer.

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/bond-25-composer-dan-romer-cary-fukunaga-1202154760/

Not happy with this at all. Arnold should have been brought back. He is the only one who gets John Barry, and brings enough of those sounds into a Bond film which has been severely lacking in Craig's past 2 outings.

From the examples I've heard, it sounds like Bond 25 will be another moody Newman type job, which I'm sick to death of. I was really hoping Arnold would have returned. It was the one thing I was holding out for (that, and some unused Fleming scenes).

So I'm already disappointed now by Bond 25 from the choice of composer. Here's hoping we at least get a few lifted Fleming scenes (although again, wishful thinking.)

I really think the producers need to sell the franchise on to people who know what they are doing with Bond. I think Babs and Wilson's time is up.

Cubby knew he needed to stick with Barry whenever possible, and he also knew he had to still rely on Fleming, even during the 80's when the novel titles dried up. Short stories and scenes were still heavily relied upon. Other than CR, we haven't seen any Fleming scenes adapted since LTK in 1989. Instead, we've had to suffer poor attempts at `Fleming re-imagined' by P&W.

Arnold had his fun in the sun for a good decade, so I'm more than open to seeing new composers come and have a crack at it. Unless your name is John Barry, I don't think Bond should have a sole composer anymore. I'm always appreciative of new blood.

Blunt Instrument wrote:

Nice work, MP. The Barry fits pretty well.

Some observations -

There are more Brosnan close-ups in that sequence than I remembered.

Early on in the sequence, a wide shot shows that the parahawks are causing explosions nowhere near Bond and Electra.

Close-ups of the pilot of the first parahawk to follow Bond into the trees have a distinct lack of treetops in them.

Still find it irksome that Bond tearing its 'chute is all it takes for that particular 'hawk to go out of control to the extent it does, especially when it's already been shown how easily they can be jettisoned.

There's a lot of oddities with the scene. Like Bond's game plan: "Head for the gully, I'll lead them into the trees", because if he assumes they're there to assassinate her, I'm not sure why he'd not realize they could just split up and go after two targets. But I suspect that dialogue was planted simply so Bond could never come to the realization that he was the target all along and they were working for Elektra.