Thomas Newman

“It's always easy, I think, to raise the importance of a scene through the addition of music. But it's very awkward to end it unless there's a door slam or a gunshot or something that just takes you right out of it.”

“It's a practical matter. If you're useful to others, you'll be hired.”

“The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.”

“I think I compose as a listener: improvising and listening back excites me because I get to ideas that never would have occurred. Then I bring in the computers and samplers... and I begin to loop and process and change them.”

“The thing about the creative process is it's so chaotic.”

“Whatever you say to yourself about it being just another movie, and you're going to do the job you always do, it ends up being a 'Bond' movie and a sense of what it is to put music to James Bond and to honor the music that exists.”

“The golden age of Hollywood was the conceit of the movie and the style of the movie.”

“The idea of creating film scores was terrifying for many years, into my 30s. It struck me as a career of doing 30-page term papers the night before they're due.”

“I'm a huge fan of not overemphasising with music.”

“I know what my taste is, and I do like my touch on the piano.”

“I think as storytelling has changed, you know, it's kind of turned into kind of hyper-reality movies.”

“We're all shocked by new ideas, and we're less shocked when we hear them again. And less shocked when we hear them a third time.”

“In 'Saving Mr. Banks,' the challenge was just transitions. Time transitions from 1961 to 1906; how do you follow a character in one environment to another? And sometimes these transitions were quick, so how do you do that?”

“Robert Altman was a very jovial guy and obviously a famed improviser and perhaps less effective in post-production, which is like the crystallising process. So I found myself at sea often with him because we'd have conversations about what music is, and in the end, I don't know how interested he was?”

“In general, I probably have a shy nature. So the idea of poking out with my music is probably not something I want to do.”

“I had ideas. A lot were good, but in many ways, I had no idea or experience about how to carry them out.”

“With film music, endings are often more difficult than beginnings, because a beginning is an underline, a way of exciting a moment, and then you have to find a way to dissipate that.”

“There are moments when I invoke my dad and think about him on the podium, but in a very positive way. I don't feel at all intimidated by him. I feel like I've found my own voice.”

“You can always hear a director saying, 'Well I don't really know what this piece is saying, so therefore, I reject it.' There are any number of things you can anticipate going wrong, and sometimes they go right. But I think the things you like most are the things that get rejected first. That's just how things work.”

“In live action, sometimes a mood or a feeling can go on for quite a while. Animation is a lot more effort. There are a lot more notes.”