By MICHAEL AUSHENKER | Contributing Writer
When you see “Jason Bourne”—the latest in the Matt Damon-starring espionage feature films opening this weekend—you know you’re in for an immersive experience: The thickening tension … the quickening pulse … the deliberate stops … that sense of dread.
Sure, this could refer to the thriller’s story beats but it also applies to the sonic storyline, courtesy of film composer John Powell.
Since 2002, Powell has crafted his compositions from his Pacific Palisades home studio. His music has fueled all four of the Damon-toplining Jason Bourne movies, including the original, 2002’s “The Bourne Identity,” helmed by “Swingers” director Doug Liman; and “The Bourne Supremacy,” his first collaboration with filmmaker Paul Greengrass.
Working with Liman and Greengrass on this franchise led to him also scoring Liman’s “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (ground zero for the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie union) and Greengrass’s sobering 9/11 drama “United 93.”
“They’re very different people but both amazing people and directors,” Powell said of Liman and Greengrass. “Paul comes from a documentary background; Doug comes from the independent world. When we were working on ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ he said, ‘Yes, we have $150 million but this is still an independent film.’”
Greengrass asked Powell to screen his documentary “Bloody Sunday” about the 1972 Northern Ireland massacre, as background.
“It just absolutely blew me away,” Powell said, even as it dawned on the composer that there was a complete absence of music in the 2002 doc. When it came time to score “United 93,” Powell’s tact was less is more.
“The only argument he and I had was ‘Do you really need music?’” Powell recalled. “I was a little worried about manipulating people. It was there but not kind of pushy.”
Watching “United 93” while creating its minimalist score proved as difficult for Powell as it was for many viewers to watch the well-done yet heart-wrenching real-life thriller.
“Truthfully, I only watched the film once [while working on it],” Powell said. “I would just watch it and turn down the sound.”
Crafting a soundtrack varies (as does genre and tone) from movie to movie, but part of being a great composer is identifying the importance of when to soften things almost to a stop as much as where to embed a swelling crescendo.
“I probably was firing on all cylinders early in my career where now I’m more focused,” Powell said. “The composer should always be the last person in the cinema to understand what’s going on.
“If I understand the film because I’ve seen it 10 times the danger is you push people [as opposed to] gently leading them.
“There’s nothing worse,” Powell said, than “making a touching moment too grand that hasn’t been earned.”
The London-born Powell facetiously attributes his entry into film composing to ADD.
While a struggling musician back in his native England, Powell jammed on keyboards in a soul cover band called The Fabulistics.
“I couldn’t stick to one kind of music,” Powell said of why he drifted into scoring.
Powell insists he’s more suited to the interiors and isolation of his profession (“I’ve never been a performer. I prefer to be behind the curtain.”). Even within the composition realm, Powell initially had no Hollywood aspirations.
“I never really intended to go into film music,” said Powell, who segued into film composing from creating music for 30-second commercials at the behest of Hans Zimmer. He was working on a project at the same ad agency as Powell and bonded with him as he worked on some of Zimmer’s arrangements.
That said, film soundtrack work appears embedded within Powell’s DNA; transmitted to him at an early age from his father, Jim Powell, a tuba player in the Royal Philharmonic who contributed to the soundtracks of British comedies (“Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines”) and World War II movies (“Battle of Britain”): “He’d take me to the park or to the film sessions sitting me in the brass section. As a young kid, I was exposed to a lot of that. I guess it all came flooding back [by adulthood].”
As a cinephile, Powell realized Elmer Bernstein was the composer behind two of his favorite scores: “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Great Escape.”
“It all sounded exciting and heroic to me,” he said.
While his father certainly became proud of his achievements, Jim Powell spurned his son’s ambitions in a backhanded away.
After a young John attempted Bach on his violin in the kitchen, Jim “dutifully listened to me play and said to me, ‘You’ll make a good plumber.’ He was kind of saying to me to be a composer, you’re not good enough as a player.”
Both his father and his late wife shared that bluntness that kept him from getting a big head, even as he won the Academy Award for his “How to Train Your Dragon” score and was nominated for its sequel.
“They were not very into people thinking they were geniuses,” Powell said. “They didn’t like people who were pretentious.”
Even after Zimmer’s encouragement, Powell took the slow plane to Hollywood.
“Most people would have rushed to come,” Powell said, however, he was knee-deep finishing a small chamber opera for a German audience called “An Englishman, An Irishman and a Frenchman” (about W.H. Auden, Oscar Wilde and Jean Cocteau).
“I wanted to get my muscles a little stronger before I came [to Hollywood],” he said.
There is no wasted experience in Powell’s past. His punishing deadlines scoring the TV series “High Incident” gave him the alacrity and confidence to tackle his breakthrough big studio project, John Woo’s 1997 John
Travolta-Nicholas Cage sci-fi thriller “Face/Off.”
One of DreamWorks’ earliest animated features, 1998’s “Antz,” spawned Powell’s long association with the studio.
Yes, there are times when sections of a Powell soundtrack has been scratched wholesale after a producer or studio chief has chimed in. But that’s the nature of the Hollywood beast, Powell explained.
“You’ve got a lot of people involved,” he said. “It’s a collaborative world.”
While developing the “Train Your Dragon” score, in which Powell goes for straight and dramatic, there was a point in the development of the Vikings-populated animated feature when the instrumentation of his Scandinavian-inspired score proved too dark and foreboding and DreamWorks chieftain Jeffrey Katzenberg prescribed Enya. In other words, lighten it up. This was a case where there was a thin line between a 4-year-old wanting to watch the movie or run from it, Powell said.
“It was very conscious for Jeffrey Katzenberg to be much more for the Harry Potter audience,” Powell explained of the Oscar-lauded “Dragon” features. “He wanted it more mature. We had to tone that very carefully. We definitely trying to make it more mature.”
If anything, animated features such as the “Rio” and “Kung Fu Panda” cartoons can become a sandbox in which Powell can play with a variety of toys. Dragon was a fun place for Powell to musically explore his Scottish heritage (which centuries ago crossed paths with the Vikings, later followed by the Normans), plus add some Jewish Klezmer rhythms and Russian harmonic orchestra. “Kung Fu Panda 2” melded grandiose Ennio Morricone-style Spaghetti Western flavor with Chinese flourishes and even a suite resembling the caper music straight off of David Shire’s “Taking of the Pelham 1-2-3” soundtrack. “Rio” and “Rio 2” were “great fun,” said Powell, who collaborated with Sergio Mendes and Janelle Monae.
Of all the soundtracks he’s worked on, Powell deems 2006’s “Happy Feet” his most creatively challenging (more so than “Happy Feet 2,” which Powell also scored.)
“‘Happy Feet’ was very, very complicated because the whole structure of the film, the high and low songs, exactly how it all fit together; that was the biggest jigsaw puzzle,” said Powell, who spent nearly four years and 10 trips to Sydney making this film. That said, director George Miller (of “Mad Max” and “Babe” renown) became “a wonderful educator. My sense of drama improved after working with him.”
Misfortune struck the Powell household when photographer Melinda Lerner—his partner of 29 years and mother of their 16-year-old son Oliver—died on March 6 at age 56 from complications following a bone marrow transplant. Last month, Powell hosted a huge celebration of his late wife’s life, replete with Fabulistics reunion and a gallery exhibit of 70 Lerner images, at Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles.
“She had an edge,” Powell told the Palisadian-Post last month. “She was a straight-talker, really authentic. She would find this way of subverting ideas. It almost wasn’t intellectual but instinctual.”
After Melinda fell ill, Powell decided to scale back his grueling pace (“When you’re doing four films a year, you work three months on each film”) so he could spend more time at home with his ailing wife. During that period, he noodled on a passion project. The World War I-set oratorio ultimately premiered at Royal Festival Hall in his London hometown. However, because of his wife’s illness, Powell could not attend the engagement. Coincidentally, Lerner passed away on the exact day “A Prussian Requiem” premiered.
On “Jason Bourne,” which Powell also worked on as Lerner fell ill, “it got brought down to a very minimal state,” per Greengrass. “The reduction of orchestra was keeping with [‘The Bourne Identity’], too. It’s kind of unconscious.”
When asked about the most frustrating aspect of his profession, Powell evokes “the temp.” The notorious temporary track built in a film’s earliest iteration can also become a composer’s biggest irritation as a movie’s powers-that-be “get used to it. It’s very difficult sometimes to write different.”
Sometimes, when Powell goes to the movies, “you can literally watch the film and you can tell which other film it came from” as a bad composer might be aping another composer’s soundtrack elements to approximate a similar effect. This kind of musical tit-for-tat “makes it boring for me to watch but it stops invention from happening they’re not trying anything at all.”
Powell singles out fellow Palisadian Thomas Newman as “an example of a music that has almost become a genre.” With Zimmer, “he’s one of the few people who is able to reinvent things” and does so every few years; to the point where the iconic Newman and Zimmer orchestral strains become temp-track fodder.
Sometimes, a good cliché is in order, though. With the “Ice Age” sequels, Powell went completely bonkers, drawing on his inner Carl Stalling to amp the musical proceedings to a Looney Tunes level. With “Kung Fu Panda” and “Ice Age,” “the soundtrack cliché that sometimes accompanies a gag” becomes a big conspirator in defining the cartoon’s humor.
“Soundtracks is a language that we learn,” Powell said, and elements from its lexicon, be it John Williams’ “Jaws” theme or Bernhard Herrmann’s “Psycho,” become a shorthand in our collective vernacular.
“One of the things I learned early on about animation that parents are going to have to listen to hundreds of times,” Powell said of such animated fare, which often become akin to electronic babysitters. So if something turns out a bit too pat, “I need to make it better.”
Soundtracks make for a musical wonderland. As Powell put it, whether it’s rock or soul or jazz, Stravinsky or Haydn, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or the best of Aretha Franklin, “I equate them exactly the same. It all does the same thing for me. I can’t distinguish between these types of music.”
As for Powell’s own offspring, Oliver, despite holding the rare position of being the son of the composer behind so many of the soundtracks his peers grew up with, has yet to exhibit any familial interest in film scoring.
Recently, Powell came across a photo of Oliver as a boy with Blue Man Group on a 20th Century Fox scoring stage as Powell was readying the soundtrack for 2005’s Robots.
“They weren’t blue, they were normal [in the recording booth],” Powell noted with a chuckle regarding the Las Vegas act.
In fact, this month’s premiere of Jason Bourne represented the first time Powell could take his son to the opening of one of his adult-targeting films. A touching moment, well-earned.
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