Search Results for : Anniversary Interviews

Avalon: A 25th Anniversary Conversation with Barry Levinson and Randy Newman

Avalon is one of a handful of deeply personal films from my childhood. I remember watching it on VHS at my grandparents’ house in Del Rio, Texas. It became a kind of family tradition—every few years we’d pull it out and have a good cry. The fact that it’s a movie about family traditions, and generations, and the passage of time just makes it all the more poignant.

The somewhat downbeat heartbeat of the film is Randy Newman’s elegiac score—a masterpiece of waltzing ghosts, trumpet requiems for vanished childhoods and fallen ancestors, and the kind of soulful, melancholy solo piano writing that Newman does better than anyone else.

Little Women: A 20th Anniversary Conversation with Thomas Newman and Gillian Armstrong – Part II

Read Part I.

Little Women soundtrack“Gillian always had a great sense of music,” says Newman. “Do you remember a movie she did called Mrs. Soffel? Mark Isham did the score, and it was an amazing use of music. It was clear to me that Gillian had developed ears and she was interested in new sounds and all that. I wanted to do Mrs. Soffel back in the day, and Little Women was like 11 years later. Gillian was always a director I had my eye on, just because I loved the way she used music.”

Little Women: A 20th Anniversary Conversation with Thomas Newman and Gillian Armstrong

Little Women is one of those scores that just sounds like liquefied Christmas. You put it on and snow starts falling, the smell of pine and burning wood fill the room, and you’re suddenly transported to Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House in Concord. The music tells its own story—about growing up, family bonds, painful losses and reunions, the passing of seasons and the unforgiving march of time—all set in the particular period of 19th century New England.

Driving Miss Daisy: A 25th Anniversary Conversation with Bruce Beresford

Five years before writing his Oscar-nominated music for The Lion King, Hans Zimmer was the hot new kid on the Hollywood block. His synthy, contemporary score for Rain Man turned industry heads and occasioned his first Oscar nomination. And so it was that when Bruce Beresford directed Driving Miss Daisy in 1989, the powers-that-be at Warner Bros. decided Beresford’s regular collaborator, Georges Delerue, wasn’t nearly as sexy a choice as the young German making big digital waves.

But let’s back up a bit.

The Jungle Book: A 20th Anniversary Conversation with Bobbie Poledouris

jungle book poster1994’s The Jungle Book was the first time Disney turned one of its classic animated films into a live-action feature. Starring Jason Scott Lee as adult Mowgli, Lena Headey as his love interest, and Cary Elwes as the British baddie, the film was a surprisingly dramatic retelling of the Rudyard Kipling story, and featured exotic sets and locations, an effective blend of mature emotion and play, and an impressive supporting cast that included John Cleese and Sam Neill. The film was directed by Stephen Sommers, then only 32, who’d just made another delightful literary adaptation—The Adventures of Huck Finn (featuring my favorite Bill Conti score)—and would go on to make The Mummy films.