Words Without Music: A Memoir (49 page)

The first thing I thought was Good lord, it’s exactly like the people I knew who worked at Dover Garage!

SCOTT RUDIN, THE PRODUCER
of
The Hours
, asked me if I was interested in writing the score for that film. I already knew that there had been two other composers but I didn’t know who they were. Scott asked me if I wanted to see the movie with the scores he had rejected, and I said, “No, I don’t want to hear it. Give me your rough cut without any music in it at all and let me write the music.”

The Hours
, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham, is the story of three women living in three different eras: the writer Virginia Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman, who is seen during her life in the 1920s and then at her suicide in 1941; a 1950s Los Angeles housewife and mother played by Julianne Moore; and a woman played by Meryl Streep who is living in New York in 2001 and is preparing a party for her friend who has AIDS.

I saw right away that the issue with the movie was that the three stories were so distinct from each other that, like a centrifugal force, they pulled you away from the center and made it difficult to keep your attention on the movie as a whole. It seemed to me that the music had to perform a kind of structural alchemy. Somehow, it had to articulate the unity of the film.

The job of the music was to tie the stories together. What was needed were three recurring musical ideas—an A theme, a B theme, and a C theme. The suicide of Virginia Woolf, for example, was always the A theme. That was always her music. The B theme was always the music from Los Angeles, and the C theme was always New York. The movie progresses A, B, C, and all six reels follow that plan. Basically, it was as if a rope had been threaded straight through the film. It was a conceptual idea, and it could be realized by the music. It worked, but it wasn’t so easy to accomplish.

I don’t think there was really any other way to do it. I never heard the other scores, so I don’t know what the previous two composers had tried. Being the third composer on a film is very common in Hollywood. Often two composers, or sometimes three or four, will get fired and other people are brought in, until the studio decides it’s the right music. Fortunately for me, and for the film, I think, Scott Rudin saw right away what I was doing. He liked it and he stuck with it.

Scott is extremely intense and very opinionated, but, as abrasive as he could be in terms of presenting his ideas, the films in fact got better because of him. That was true on every level.

Very often when I worked with him he would say, “That’s wonderful. I loved the music. But there’s one little thing that bothers me.”

As soon as he said that, I knew I had to rewrite the whole thing.

He would press his point, but he began from a point of appreciation, which I liked. He always listened to me, and I always got a fair hearing for what I wanted to do. I wasn’t commanded to do something, I was persuaded to his point of view and, most of the time, his ideas were right. They prevailed not because he was the producer, but because his ideas improved the movie. And that was not only in the music, it was also in terms of the editing, storytelling, and acting.

After
The Hours
, I did
Notes on a Scandal
with Scott, another film on which he was, again, a very hands-on producer. But unlike a lot of producers who are hands-on, he knew something about film. He knew what made films work.

At one point, I asked him, “Scott, why don’t you just be the director? You do everything anyway.”

“Oh no, no, no,” he replied.

He insisted he could never be a director, and yet he often seemed to usurp that position. In any case, as the producer he had a very decisive role in the two films I made with him. I liked the films and I liked working with him.

I HAVE NOW MADE CLOSE TO THIRTY SOUNDTRACKS.
There were others that I enjoyed working on, though perhaps not as well-known. David Gordon Green’s
Undertow
, Neil Burger’s
The Illusionist
, and
Taking Lives
, directed by D. J. Caruso, are among them. My all-time favorite is perhaps the least known of these—Christopher Hampton’s
The Secret Agent
. I thought Hampton’s adaptation as well as his taut, no-nonsense direction totally captured the obsessive and sinister aura of the Joseph Conrad novel.

Another favorite is Errol Morris, with whom I worked on three films—
The Thin Blue Line
,
A Brief History of Time
, and
The Fog of War
. I found Errol to be one of the most brilliant directors, extremely funny at times and terribly eccentric. Like Godfrey in many ways, Errol has redefined the relationship of the viewer to the subject matter, and as I feel about Godfrey, I’m always ready to work with him. The experience, though confusing and sometimes trying, is always rewarding.

The director I found the most surprising was Woody Allen. I worked with him on
Cassandra’s Dream
, and he completely left me alone to place the music in the film. He welcomed my suggestions as to the temper of the music as well. In fact, that is very much the way I work with my opera, theater, and dance collaborators. My sense is that if I believe in their ability and talent, the best thing I can do is get out of the way and let them do their work. Woody seems to work in much the same way.

THOUGH FILM SCORING HAS NOT BEEN THE MAIN THING
I was doing for the last thirty years, I have generally found it interesting. The writers, directors, actors, and a few of the producers can be enormously talented. Even though the marketplace mentality is always present, it is still possible to make films of real quality and integrity. That they are mainly “industry” films does not mean they are necessarily made in Hollywood.

I have often compared film scoring to opera composing. I’ve done a fair amount of both. More than other performance practice, films combine elements of image, music, movement, and text. Skills acquired in one easily translate to the other. I will add to these reflections about film work just a few points:

The first is quite simple. If the movie or opera is actually telling a story, I’ve learned to leave it alone or, at least, not get in the way. If there is no story, I will not impose one, but instead allow another of the performance elements to assume a larger role.

Second, I’ve learned how to “underscore” the voice—either spoken or sung—by letting the actor or singer assume the central role at that moment. Sometimes that requires the instrumental parts to play a secondary or tertiary part. However, it’s also quite possible to double up the vocal parts with solo or accompanying instruments and, in this way, to actually extend the range and depth of the sung or spoken parts.

The third point is the hardest to describe. It has to do with that imaginary “distance” I mentioned before that exists between the spectator-listener and the film or opera. I’ve found that the music can absolutely define that space. In the end, it is a psychological space. The closer the spectator-listener is to the “image”—sound or visual—the less choice he has in shaping the experience for himself. When the music allows for a distance to exist between the spectator-listener and the image, then she will automatically bring her own interpretation to the work. The spectator travels the distance to the image herself, and by moving to the image, she has now made it her own. That is what John Cage meant when he said that the audience “completes” the music. Modulating that distance precisely is an acquirable skill. Talent, experience, and some innate sensitivity will still be needed.

CANDY JERNIGAN

D
URING THE TEN YEARS WE WERE TOGETHER, CANDY AND I ALWAYS
felt that something was going to separate us. We didn’t know what it would be, but we both knew that somehow we would become separated.

We would speculate about it. “Maybe you’ll be on a boat or plane some place, or I’ll be, and the boat will disappear, or the plane will crash,” we would say. We thought it would be a kind of incidental tragedy of modern life, like a car accident. This feeling bothered us, and we talked about it not frequently but not infrequently either. It was something that would come up, like a shadow that we lived with.

I first met Candy Jernigan when I was flying from Amsterdam to New York in 1981. I had been working in Europe, and she was changing planes on her way back to New York from Berlin. Candy was already sitting down in the plane when I got to my seat next to hers, and she seemed preoccupied with reading a magazine, pretending not to notice me at all.

Over the next ten years I would sometimes ask her, “How was it that you were sitting next to me on the plane?” but she never would tell me. Apparently what had happened—related to me later on by people to whom she told the story—is that she recognized me, and when she found out I was on the plane, she went up to the person whose seat was next to mine and said, “Mr. Glass is a friend of mine, would you mind changing seats with me?” As I was sitting on the aisle, the seat next to me was not a seat that was hard to swap, because people never want to sit in the middle. Not surprisingly, that person switched seats with her, and by the time I sat down it was a fait accompli.

It was a rather daring thing to do, and as I got to know Candy I could not imagine that she was that kind of person. But she knew my music, and she wanted to meet me. Once I met her, I never wanted to let her out of my sight.

In a funny way she never wanted to talk about how we met, and yet the meeting itself was remarkable, because it was a meeting of two people who somehow knew that they wanted to be together, and she knew that before I did. Why she knew that, I can’t say, but we began talking and there was an immediate rapport, as can sometimes happen. There was a flow of intelligence, an almost poetic way of talking, that we fell into almost immediately, so we didn’t need to talk about very much. It turned out that she had recently separated from a man she had lived with for a long time, so she was alone. I was not alone, but from the moment I met her, I was suddenly in a place where something very unexpected but profound had happened in my life, and that was the presence of a person with whom I would spend the next ten years.

Candy’s hair was long and raven dark when I met her. Later on, at different times, she might dye it orangish, or purplish red, but that was a passing thing. She wasn’t tall, maybe five foot two, and she wore glasses with black plastic frames. She liked to wear vintage clothing, a lot of black, with black tights and big, wide black or red belts. Her style showed a sign of taste but not of wealth. She was always able to look distinctive without spending very much money.

Candy’s grandmother on her mother’s side was from China, a fact that no one in her family talked about for some reason. Candy only discovered this when she found her mother’s passport and learned that her mother was born in Shanghai. She also found a photo of her mother as a little girl being carried in a palanquin with her grandmother. If you knew about Candy’s Asian ancestry, you could see hints of it in the shape of her face and in the quality of her skin, which had a kind of porcelain transparency.

By the time our plane reached New York, we were reluctant to part, though I was really in no position to make any arrangements to see her again, because at the time I was married, and it wasn’t something I wanted to get out of or change in any way. But it became impossible for me to think about
not
seeing this young woman again. I happened to have an apartment downtown in the East Village that I had used as a studio, so instead of going home, I went to that apartment on Fourteenth Street between First and Second Avenue. Candy happened to be living on First Avenue and Eleventh Street, so I was just around the corner from her. That wasn’t planned, but that’s how it was.

Candy was twenty-nine and I was forty-four, which doesn’t seem like such a great obstacle, though at that time it seemed she was very young. Many things might have bothered me, but nothing to the degree that could dissuade me from immediately pursuing this friendship, and in fact, from then on we were hardly separated. There were some very uncomfortable and unhappy moments when my marriage fell apart, without my meaning it to, but without my being able to stop it. It did take a little time to straighten things out. It wasn’t very easy, and it wasn’t very happy for anybody.

Candy was a painter, and her friends were painters, writers, dancers, and musicians, the same kind of people I had worked with all my life. That was her world, too, one that sustained her and seemed to fill every minute of the space and time that she had. Her day job was working for Paul Bacon, a celebrated book cover designer. When I met her, she was working in figurative oil painting, but soon thereafter she went into different kinds of painting and art making. Her work was part of a different art movement than the one I grew up with, which was abstract, heavy-duty masculine artists like Mark di Suvero and Richard Serra, who were making large powerful pieces in public places.

Candy was making art that was much closer to the casual inclusion of materials that you’ll find, for instance, in Robert Rauschenberg’s work. With Rauschenberg, he always asked the question “Can this fit into my painting?” and the answer was always yes.

Like Rauschenberg, Candy also followed the gesture of opening up the canvas or the artwork to anything that you could put in it, but she did it in a different way, so that her work became a form of documentation. She would find objects, which could be as unalike as a cooking pot that had been run over by a truck, crack vials she found on the street, and a dead rat she had stuffed and mounted, and then she would ask the question “Is this art?” In her case, the answer she gave was “Let’s just put a frame around it.”

We were living together very soon after we met. I had the kids, Juliet and Zack, plus two cats, and she had two huge blue-and-gold macaws who were fiercely loyal to her and just fierce to everyone else. She became very close to Juliet and Zack right away, and the four of us spent a lot of time together. For a couple of years, we lived in a kind of haphazard way. She had an apartment a block and a half away, where she would go to change clothes, and I had my own apartment, a small place where the four of us managed to live together.