Nicholas Meyer, between the score and the screen

TAMBIÉN PUEDES LEER ESTA ENTREVISTA EN ESPAÑOL!

FANT 28: Bilbao Fantasy Film Festival. May 2022. I interview Nicholas Meyer after his press conference at Bilbao City Hall. I am the last one to talk to him, which allows me to ask different questions than the previous interviewers. It is a challenge: to speak with a film director and get him not to talk about himself. He has collaborated with some of the greatest film composers and I am interested in what it was like to work with them.

Meyer is an articulate man with an encyclopedic knowledge. He speaks slowly, with perfect diction. You can tell he loves to tell stories. I am worried because he has a lunch date and I do not want to take up too much of his time. But he invites me to take it easy. An achievement for someone who wears two watches. Leather straps, white dials. One watch on each wrist: “The time here and the time at home.” There is no need for further explanation.

Óscar Salazar

INTERVIEW

You wanted to write a Sherlock Holmes musical as a teenager.

When I was a kid, the big hit musical in New York was a show called My Fair Lady. Everything was about My Fair Lady. My Fair Lady is based on a play by George Bernard Shaw called Pygmalion. It was very evident to me that Pygmalion was stolen from Sherlock Holmes.

We have Henry Higgins, who lives at 27A Wimpole Street with Colonel Pickering, who is just back from India. Henry Higgins is a deducer, he tells people from their speech where they’re from. It was awful lot like Sherlock Holmes with Doctor Watson just back from Afghanistan at 221B Baker Street.

I thought, if Pygmalion made a great musical, then shouldn’t Sherlock Holmes make an even better musical? That was my big idea. Then they did it. It was called Baker Street, with Fritz Weaver and Martin Gabel. It flopped.

Well, you did write The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, with music by John Addison.

In fact, on the first page of the screenplay, it says the music is by Bernard Herrmann. So Herbert Ross went out and hired Bernard Herrmann. And Bernard Herrmann died. Then Herb asked me who should write the music and I said John Addison, because I loved the music for Tom Jones.

Obviously, music in Holmes is terribly important because he’s a violinist. When Billy Wilder did The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, he used Miklós Rózsa’s Violin Concerto, which I thought was a brilliant idea. Brilliant.

And that might be the reason why you wanted Rózsa for Time After Time.

No, I just loved his music. I have a huge collection of music. I grew up with music, that’s what I lived for. Friedrich Nietzsche said: “Without music, life would be a mistake”. I collect a lot of music and I collect a lot of film music. I have like 40 Rózsa albums.

With Time After Time, I thought the music really should express the point of view of a man from the past. If he hears rock ‘n’ roll, it’s like a sound effect of modernity, but the rest of the time his sensibility should be from the past.

The other element, when I was thinking about composers, was somebody for whom fantasy was congenial. I remembered The Thief of Bagdad and that’s how I got to Rózsa.

Your next film is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It was James Horner’s first big opportunity for a studio.

We couldn’t afford Jerry Goldsmith. Later on, by the time I did Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, I couldn’t afford James Horner either. The way back then is people auditioning would send you a cassette. I drove around Los Angeles listening to different music and a lot of it sounded the same to me. The thing about Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann is the voice. You could hear their voice no matter what they were doing. With James, I heard a voice and I brought him in to talk to me.

Directors and composers have a hard time because they don’t speak the same language. The good news in my case is that I could speak in musical terms because I’ve grown up with it. The bad news for me is that, because I am musical, I sometimes get lost in listening to the music and not clearly understanding what it is or isn’t doing in relation to the story. I sometimes think that’s lovely, and the producer might say it’s lovely, but it’s not scary or whatever.

It doesn’t work. Good music, but not for this.

Exactly. Everybody in Hollywood has two professions: show business and music. We all know about music. Even if we don´t.

James and I had a very similar sense of humor. We understood each other. I wanted it to be nautical. I said think Claude Debussy, think La Mer. And James knew what I was talking about. That’s really important because you don’t want to be at the end of the whole process, the music comes in and you’re going, this is just so wrong from what I want or what may be needed.

You worked with Horner again on Volunteers.

The cue that I loved was the building of the bridge. I think I played him some music from Dimitri Tiomkin’s Land of the Pharaohs. I loved what he did.

The thing is finding places for where music belongs and where it doesn’t belong. A really good film composer will tell you where to keep or leave it out where you don’t need it.

Something they don’t do now. There’s music everywhere.

That’s from back in the 40s. It was poured over like ketchup from the beginning to the end of it.

When George Bizet wrote Carmen in 1875, it was a musical. There were long stretches of spoken dialogue. After he died, it all had to be sung, and Ernest Guiraud made the recitatives. But this was a very bad idea, because Bizet knew when they were talking and when they were singing. For example, in act one, when Carmen is under arrest, Don José says don’t talk and she starts to sing.  Once they’re already singing, you lose the whole idea. So when music works and when it doesn’t work is very important. To me anyway.

Sound always dominates picture. Always. If you show a little girl jumping through a field of sunflowers and then underneath you play Frédéric Chopin’s Funeral March, that girl’s going to die of an incurable disease. She’s doomed. Sound always wins.

You had a bit of a fight with ABC when you were putting together The Day After.

I didn’t want any music in the movie. I didn’t want anybody feeling that I was using music to influence anybody’s emotions. I didn’t want it to be a good movie, because I thought, if it’s a good movie, then people talk about the movie and they don’t talk about the subject. I wasn’t going have anybody say the music was gorgeous. All I wanted was music at the opening for the credits over Kansas.

I didn’t know when I picked Virgil Thomson that he was from Kansas. I picked so the right music, and I didn’t even learn until later. He was still alive and lived at the Chelsea Hotel in The Village in New York. I called him up and said I would like to use The River for the opening of my movie. He said OK, but you cannot change the orchestration.

Then I realized I needed someone to sync it up and conduct it. I knew David Raksin because I used to have tea every week at Miklós Rózsa’s house and David would be there sometimes. I called him up and said I have a thankless task for you, I want you to conduct this opening theme for me.

I show him the movie. He comes out of the movie and he’s crying. He goes this is so good, you must have music, you have a budget for it, let me write the other cues. Then I made my big mistake and I said fine, but I’m not going to use it. Basically we recorded the Virgil Thomson at the opening and I didn’t use the rest. David was really mad at me.

How did you come to John Scott for The Deceivers?

Great score, great score. This all goes back to these teas at Rózsa’s house, because the other person who would come every week was Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s son, George. His wife, Gloria, recommended John Scott to me.

And Michael Kamen for Company Business?

The truth is that I don’t remember. I was living in London. He was living a few blocks away. I think I met him socially when I lived in London. Something like that, but I don’t remember. He was a lovely man. I think he did a good job. I’m not sure I did a good job.

You just mentioned that you couldn’t afford James Horner for Star Trek VI.

We tried to get The Planets for the main theme. Paramount’s lawyers wanted the rights to The Planets forever, but the Holst estate said you’re crazy. So I was starting over again and switched from The Planets to Firebird.

Cliff Eidelman was very young. We had a terrific time. That was an amazing score because it’s completely different than every other Star Trek score.

It’s interesting because I knew Leonard Rosenman. I just had dinner with his wife at his house less than a month ago. Judy, very nice woman. I had known her very briefly before. He was an enormous talent, Leonard.