Martinez shows a clip from “Drive,” another ‘love scene’, this one set in a lift and in which Ryan Gosling shares a kiss with Carey Mulligan before stamping through someone’s head.
“This is the calm before the storm. The kiss is the softer moment before the action begins. It is a ‘happy couple’ moment. I used an instrument called a Cristal Baschet for this scene, which is played with wet fingers. My parents took me to MoMA when I was 10. This made me want to be a musician, and a weird musician. It was the instrument that got me the job on ‘Drive.’ It was a great conversation piece and when Refn saw it, he said it had a nice religious quality. I still don’t know what he meant, maybe that it sounded like someone was going to get their head crushed! It was appropriate for the scene and Refn was the first director to say he wanted to use the instrument.
Martinez’s work has often been compared to that of Vangelis’s “Blade Runner” and Brian Eno’s Apollo album.
“It happens more and more that contemporary music is placed into the rough cut of a film as a reference for the composer to follow. I’ve been beaten over the head with ‘Apollo,’ for the melancholy and sweet end-of-story vibe, although I was very influenced by Brian Eno as a film composer. For the video game “Far Cry 4,” I got fired and replaced by Brian Eno, which was kind of flattering. It’s like your wife cheated on you but it was with Brad Pitt — a badge of honor!’
“As a composer, you almost always see the first cut of the film with temporary music in. Would I like to see it without? It can be useful, or it can turn evil. It’s a great tool with Soderbergh, because if I tried to imitate his temporary music he knows I will screw it up in an interesting way. He’d always put in crazy stuff. For “King of the Hill,” he used John Williams, who is like my opposite. Soderbergh said, ‘I know you can’t do Williams, but you’ll figure something out.’ It was the same with “Contagion,” where he used Ennio Morricone’s score to “The Battle of Algiers.” It’s a musical world I know nothing about, but he used it as an idea, to take from it what I could.”
“But I’ve had bad experiences where directors wanted it to sound very similar to their temporary music. That practice becomes pure evil a on a cosmic creative level — on a personal scale it is somewhere between defecating and dying. When directors ask for something like ‘Drive,’ that’s uncomfortable because I don’t want to do it and I don’t even own it. It’s usually the studio that owns it. Is it legal to copy yourself? I’m not the copyright police. So if you use John Williams’s music and don’t expect anything close, we will be OK.”
On his success as a composer,
“‘Drive,’ was very successful. The soundtrack album was successful on its own. It was a check worth cashing. I’m pretty eager to repeat the experience, whatever the recipe. It helps that the film was great: the performances, editing, the sound department. The crinkling gloves and a lot of subliminal things made the film a success.”
“My most successful collaborations have been repeat customers, I’ve done 10 films with Soderbergh and four films with Refn. I do my best work with those guys —monogamy has its advantages. There’s a telepathic communication you don’t get with people you work with for the first time. I like my long-term collaborators because they often want to do a different type of film every time. Soderbergh’s second film was “Kafka,” an east European thriller period piece, a huge challenge, an exciting project for me to stretch and get out of my comfort zone. Other than that, composers are hermits, with pizza slipped under the hotel door at 5 o’clock.”
We’re shown a fight scene from ‘Only God Forgives.’ Ryan Gosling is this time pummelled into submission. Martinez’s score rises with the arc of violence.
“For this film, the supervising sound editor was also a composer, so he had a lot of ideas about musical sound design, a lot of textural things that also functioned as music. So we were like ‘Who’s going to do what?’ The rule: if it’s pitched I get to do it; if not, it’s the sound department.”
I rewrote the music for this scene six times as it was the most difficult in the film. I had to use what I call shortcuts to originality. We all learn by imitation, and I’ve probably not outgrown that. I use two disparate ideas and put them together and it passes as original. Refn wanted something simple, sparse, poetic, a battle against God, — again I don’t known exactly what he was talking about. I thought of religious music, of using D minor, of using elements of Philip Glass, of using Ennio Morricone’s twangy guitars. I used a Thai instrument called the pin, and a little splash of Goblin, a group that scored Dario Argento’s horror films. By putting them all together I had something that sounded original.
On his awareness of young musical artists and playing festivals,
“It would be good to hit the space bar for an hour. I would like to perform live, but for the most part, I just hit things with sticks. The era of the professional musician is coming to a close because it’s so difficult to make money off a record. Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers told me they couldn’t make money that way, so they have to tour. Film is a way to make a living for a musician. Rock and roll and hip-hop have gained greater acceptance in Hollywood. I’m not too current or hip with what the kids are doing.”
Are there any helpful tools to enable communication between a director and composer?
“I hate to say it but a temporary score is a great tool if it is not abused, if it doesn’t grow deep roots or people get attached to it. Musicians talk about music in a very specific language and directors often don’t. It is more the composer’s job to speak about music in everyday language — to ask a director, ‘Why do you want music in this scene?’ ‘What do you want to achieve dramatically?’ ‘How can the music help that?’ In a perfect world, temporary music is a good way to do that.”
“A director says something like, ‘It’s got to be brown, slinky and heroic.’ I ask, ‘Do you mean Danny Elfman? Sometimes it’s useful to have musical examples. Soderbergh doesn’t even talk to me anymore, at most it’s a text message saying, ‘That was cool, keep going!’ Communication is 99 percent temporary music. It tells you placement, where to start and stop. It’s not a hard-core style reference, just a jumping-off point. It tells a lot about the general vibe — it is the composer’s job to make the communication flow, to talk about it in dramatic terms. It wouldn’t be in musical terms because I wouldn’t even understand you then.”
“Example is a great way to talk about music. If I thought it was 90 percent writing music and 10 percent talking about music, I’d say I now realize that’s inverted. Music is a slippery and ethereal thing to talk about. It’s easy to be confused. One instance of director/composer communication was with Soderbergh on ‘Contagion.’ He wanted the opening to sound more like Mahler. I didn’t know what that meant, so I asked a friend. I tried it and Soderbergh said, ‘No, I don’t want that at all, I’ll come over to your house.’”