They didn't give Waltz anything to do. After netting one of the few actors today that could possibly play Blofeld, they wrote the most banal lines and reduced his role to a minimalist presence, apparently part of the fear of being "over the top."
Nicely summed up; such a wasted opportunity.
I’m so glad that they’ve brought in Phoebe Waller-Bridge to work on the script for NTTD. All bodes well!
{[] They brought in an actor who could get away with chewing up the scenery and just made him talk, the only variety being he was either seated or standing.
Personally I don't think Blofeld didn't have good lines in SP, and Waltz did a good job. Particularely the SPECTRE board meeting and the meteorite room scene was good. The main problem is the adopted brother angle.
Great news!! For me anyway ) With Zimmer's involvement the hype around the score probably just doubled.
This is one instance where Zimmer and Company's reputation for unoriginality and cribbing from others might be a good thing.
Please feel free to do your best "homage" to the classic Barry scores. -{
Great news!! For me anyway ) With Zimmer's involvement the hype around the score probably just doubled.
This is one instance where Zimmer and Company's reputation for unoriginality and cribbing from others might be a good thing.
Please feel free to do your best "homage" to the classic Barry scores. -{
Their best known for cribbing from themselves and each other. I hope you're right and they'll take Barry's style and just add their modern synthesised percussion to it.
Zimmer's one of the biggest names in the soundtrack industry - it might work out well, let's wait and see / hear.
Considering the amount of 'creative differences' causing people to leave this production, hopefully it will actually improve the movie.
I’m so glad that they’ve brought in Phoebe Waller-Bridge to work on the script for NTTD. All bodes well!
{[] They brought in an actor who could get away with chewing up the scenery and just made him talk, the only variety being he was either seated or standing.
Personally I don't think Blofeld didn't have good lines in SP, and Waltz did a good job. Particularely the SPECTRE board meeting and the meteorite room scene was good. The main problem is the adopted brother angle.
What do you see as his great lines? In the board room, he mostly just sat in the shadows. In the meteorite scene, he mostly just stood in the shadows.
Zimmer and his team can crank out a score in a couple of months time. They probably didn’t have many options given the time constraints (good people in any profession tend to be busy). I’m sure they are paying a premium for Zimmer, and he is a big name, so it won’t hurt the image of the film. Unfortunately, my guess is it’ll be highly generic.
I'm guessing Zimmer already has some unused compositions that he'll adapt for this score. I don't know that I'd call Zimmer's work generic -- his scores are immediately recognizable as his own or at least his company's. Newman's sonic wallpaper seemed more generic to me.
I had a student who worked for Zimmer. The guy works all the time for fear of being replaced by someone cheaper in an industry that values youth. That's a reason he buys music and has so many people working for him to produce it. I'm guessing he's going to turn in a bravura soundtrack because he recognizes the prestige and historicity of Bond, especially at a time when they're almost the phenomenon they were in the 60s.
As Matt S said previously, it wouldn't be that difficult for a composer to bring the classic Bond/Barry style to a score. My gut feeling based upon what little has been out there is that EON wanted something more traditional than what Romer was going to do. Zimmer has created some outstanding / memorable scores and he certainly has tons of support at his disposal. Zimmer's Dark Knight scores were excellent and memorable and he has an incredible resume. Hopefully, Zimmer and his team will bring that level of excellence to Bond.
I'm guessing Zimmer already has some unused compositions that he'll adapt for this score. I don't know that I'd call Zimmer's work generic -- his scores are immediately recognizable as his own or at least his company's. Newman's sonic wallpaper seemed more generic to me. .
To be clear, I was not accusing Zimmer of being generic (and I agree about Newman). What I was attempting to suggest is that I fear, given the time constraints, he may have no choice but to produce something that is not instantly recognizable as Bond, i.e, generic genre music.
In any event, I am very interested to see what he does. And we can trust it won’t be bizarre or disastrous, so that’s always a positive.
Zimmer and his team can crank out a score in a couple of months time. They probably didn’t have many options given the time constraints (good people in any profession tend to be busy). I’m sure they are paying a premium for Zimmer, and he is a big name, so it won’t hurt the image of the film. Unfortunately, my guess is it’ll be highly generic.
I should take them less than a couple month's time. So many people will be working on the soundtrack that it will take less than a month. For Remote Control Productions it's so much of a creative process as it is a technical one. Zimmer (probably with some help) will do something like come up with a suite of music, present it to Barbara and Cary (and probably Daniel), and if they like the direction of it the score will be completed in no time at all by a team of composers and orchestrators. Zimmer runs a factory, so it doesn't take so long.
But even someone like Jerry Goldsmith could write and finish an entire score in a week with the help of orchestrators, and Goldsmith's simplest music was more complex than anything Zimmer has ever done.
I don't believe that time will be an issue either for the same reasons that Matt S stated. My hope is that Zimmer, understanding that his name is going on a Bond film.....a series which has a legacy of great classic scores (minus maybe 3 or 4 but I won't open that can of worms) will be motivated to do something outstanding. Plus, what composer wouldn't want to have the James Bond Theme at their disposal to fall back on (well maybe not Dan Romer ) ?
Is it safe to assume that the theme song will already have been produced, and independently from the score?
I would assume it is done. There's no reason for it not to be, since they've had a title for a while. If Zimmer is willing to put melody in his score (which he has done little of with recent action films), maybe he'd incorporate the title track. He's not opposed to using music that others have written, since he frequently collaborates with other composers.
Is it safe to assume that the theme song will already have been produced, and independently from the score?
I would assume it is done. There's no reason for it not to be, since they've had a title for a while. If Zimmer is willing to put melody in his score (which he has done little of with recent action films), maybe he'd incorporate the title track. He's not opposed to using music that others have written, since he frequently collaborates with other composers.
It certainly might speed things along, lol. We'll see how it turns out!
Forgive me if this has been posted on here before, but I think with the recent news of Zimmer composing No Time To Die, i think this article has some new interest attached to it. This is Zimmer writing about John Barry, shortly after Barry's death.
"When I heard that John had died Jan. 30 at 77, I instantly recalled his tune for The Quiller Memorandum, which is probably not one of his better-known scores. I can remember where I was when I first heard it, much as I can remember where I was the first time I heard his music for Born Free. Here's the thing: I cannot remember the stories of those movies in detail, but I remember the tunes. Sometimes the reason we have such deep and lasting emotional connections to movies is the music, and everything that made the mood of those movies work was from John. The melody is what keeps you tied to a movie forever, and he wrote some of the greatest melodies.
My favorites are more obscure than Out of Africa, Dances with Wolves or the James Bond film scores for which he was so famous. I will admit, though, that we looked at On Her Majesty's Secret Service when we were doing Inception and were just blown away by the musical innovation. I loved Hammett and the way John created a melancholic and nostalgic sense of time and place. I also loved Zulu; the whole score is based on one short motif, so strong and so bold.
Like the work of all good composers, everything John wrote was elegant and came from his own point of view. He was a Yorkshire man, and even in his brightest work, you could always see the moors and the fog. Even his cheeky stuff had an underlying darkness.
John was part of a particular era in London, an era when the city had so much to say to the world. Ridley Scott would tell me how he used to hang out at John's recording sessions. He'd say, "Wow, John Barry's doing a session. Maybe we can sneak in and hear something." But for me, it was more like, "Maybe I can sneak in and learn something." I learned from him that moody is good. There haven't been that many deserving film-music legends. John truly was one of them."
They didn't give Waltz anything to do. After netting one of the few actors today that could possibly play Blofeld, they wrote the most banal lines and reduced his role to a minimalist presence, apparently part of the fear of being "over the top."
I thought Andrew Scott was underplayed too, after seeing his portrayal of Moriarty in Sherlock , I was expecting more
Zimmer and co. have been successful (and respectful) at adapting others iconic music into their own in the past. Examples being the rousing version of the 'William Tell overture' from the finale of the Lone Ranger score and using the same CS-80 synthesizer Vangelis did when composing Blade Runner 2049. They'll likely bring the same amount of respect to a Bond score.
After reading these last few posts and taking a closer look at Zimmer's past work (and his tribute to John Barry) I'm feeling pretty good about Zimmer doing NTTD. I just don't see Zimmer screwing this up. I believe Zimmer and his people step up for Bond.
Forgive me if this has been posted on here before, but I think with the recent news of Zimmer composing No Time To Die, i think this article has some new interest attached to it. This is Zimmer writing about John Barry, shortly after Barry's death.
"When I heard that John had died Jan. 30 at 77, I instantly recalled his tune for The Quiller Memorandum, which is probably not one of his better-known scores. I can remember where I was when I first heard it, much as I can remember where I was the first time I heard his music for Born Free. Here's the thing: I cannot remember the stories of those movies in detail, but I remember the tunes. Sometimes the reason we have such deep and lasting emotional connections to movies is the music, and everything that made the mood of those movies work was from John. The melody is what keeps you tied to a movie forever, and he wrote some of the greatest melodies.
My favorites are more obscure than Out of Africa, Dances with Wolves or the James Bond film scores for which he was so famous. I will admit, though, that we looked at On Her Majesty's Secret Service when we were doing Inception and were just blown away by the musical innovation. I loved Hammett and the way John created a melancholic and nostalgic sense of time and place. I also loved Zulu; the whole score is based on one short motif, so strong and so bold.
Like the work of all good composers, everything John wrote was elegant and came from his own point of view. He was a Yorkshire man, and even in his brightest work, you could always see the moors and the fog. Even his cheeky stuff had an underlying darkness.
John was part of a particular era in London, an era when the city had so much to say to the world. Ridley Scott would tell me how he used to hang out at John's recording sessions. He'd say, "Wow, John Barry's doing a session. Maybe we can sneak in and hear something." But for me, it was more like, "Maybe I can sneak in and learn something." I learned from him that moody is good. There haven't been that many deserving film-music legends. John truly was one of them."
Thanks for posting that. I believe OHMSS to be Barry’s finest work, at least where his Bind scores are concerned. I’m also encouraged by Zimmer’s compliment regarding the melodies.
I'm guessing Zimmer already has some unused compositions that he'll adapt for this score. I don't know that I'd call Zimmer's work generic -- his scores are immediately recognizable as his own or at least his company's. Newman's sonic wallpaper seemed more generic to me. .
To be clear, I was not accusing Zimmer of being generic (and I agree about Newman). What I was attempting to suggest is that I fear, given the time constraints, he may have no choice but to produce something that is not instantly recognizable as Bond, i.e, generic genre music.
In any event, I am very interested to see what he does. And we can trust it won’t be bizarre or disastrous, so that’s always a positive.
Good point. I'm guessing, though, that Zimmer or his people already had in mind ideas long before being called for NTTD. I can't imagine a film composer watching a Bond film and not imagining how he or she would do it.
They didn't give Waltz anything to do. After netting one of the few actors today that could possibly play Blofeld, they wrote the most banal lines and reduced his role to a minimalist presence, apparently part of the fear of being "over the top."
I thought Andrew Scott was underplayed too, after seeing his portrayal of Moriarty in Sherlock , I was expecting more
The Craig Bonds have had the best casts since the Connery days -- bonafide actors -- and they're largely left with little to do by underwhelming scripts, the exception bring Casino Royale.
Forgive me if this has been posted on here before, but I think with the recent news of Zimmer composing No Time To Die, i think this article has some new interest attached to it. This is Zimmer writing about John Barry, shortly after Barry's death.
"When I heard that John had died Jan. 30 at 77, I instantly recalled his tune for The Quiller Memorandum, which is probably not one of his better-known scores. I can remember where I was when I first heard it, much as I can remember where I was the first time I heard his music for Born Free. Here's the thing: I cannot remember the stories of those movies in detail, but I remember the tunes. Sometimes the reason we have such deep and lasting emotional connections to movies is the music, and everything that made the mood of those movies work was from John. The melody is what keeps you tied to a movie forever, and he wrote some of the greatest melodies.
My favorites are more obscure than Out of Africa, Dances with Wolves or the James Bond film scores for which he was so famous. I will admit, though, that we looked at On Her Majesty's Secret Service when we were doing Inception and were just blown away by the musical innovation. I loved Hammett and the way John created a melancholic and nostalgic sense of time and place. I also loved Zulu; the whole score is based on one short motif, so strong and so bold.
Like the work of all good composers, everything John wrote was elegant and came from his own point of view. He was a Yorkshire man, and even in his brightest work, you could always see the moors and the fog. Even his cheeky stuff had an underlying darkness.
John was part of a particular era in London, an era when the city had so much to say to the world. Ridley Scott would tell me how he used to hang out at John's recording sessions. He'd say, "Wow, John Barry's doing a session. Maybe we can sneak in and hear something." But for me, it was more like, "Maybe I can sneak in and learn something." I learned from him that moody is good. There haven't been that many deserving film-music legends. John truly was one of them."
Thanks for posting this, this is fantastic. While I like a lot of what Zimmer does, none of it says 'potentially Bond' to me, but from this article I think Zimmer will respect the canon of Barry Bond music and rather than an electronic dirge, we'll get good OHMSS inspired melodies - "he [Barry] wrote some of the greatest melodies" - that sort of comment is really encouraging.
I think Zimmer is excellent news. He’s the biggest and best working full time in the industry so even just some of his thinking on it is likely to be to the benefit of the film. I’d be amazed if he fails to make it feel epic, powerful and dangerous.
Raine would be capable of taking anyone's music and orchestrating it like Barry's. But that's not an orchestrator's job. An orchestrator assists the composer with the composer's vision and is not there to give the music a different sound. This has to be up to the composer.
To be fair, Barry's sound is a very, very easy one to copy. I have only minimal training in orchestration, and I could easily give any piece of music a Barry-esque orchestration. Any composer and orchestrator working together can achieve this sound if it's what they desire.
This is Barry's music in a few words: His compositions have simple melodies made up of a lot of repetition to make them catchy and comforting. He uses simple chord progressions and frequently makes use of ostinatos. He uses major and minor chords with a few signature extensions that give them the Barry sound. They're orchestrated with a low fifth. He likes the Lydian mode. He uses a lot of syncopated rhythms, frequently in the most basic definition of syncopation. He liked to punctuate melodies with big orchestra hits (though not usually from the iconic synthesizer samples). He sometimes would use ethnic instruments to play his melodies, and these would not always come from the same part of the world as where the film he was scoring takes place. He used them so well that you'd never question that an Eastern European instrument was being used for a film that takes place in Asia (or something to that effect).
Barry had brilliant ideas, but he was not a particularly advanced composer (something he has in common with Hans Zimmer and many of those who work with Zimmer), but his music was expressive and he knew how to use music in the most basic way to set a mood. His genius came from knowing how to make small changes in rhythm, tempo and orchestration to create a mood.
Most importantly, Barry had an original, signature sound. I could easily write new music in Barry's language. (And it's not because I've been examining his music for decades; any good composer could do it after watching one film he composed). You'd think it's a long-lost Barry score (or perhaps a rejected Barry score). Being able to write music in that style isn't special. What's special is that he invented his own style. Inventing something uniquely their own is why any artist is remembered. And it's why no proper artist wants to copy another, though we know in film music it's common these days for composers to be asked to copy others.
David Arnold respected the Barry Bond sound, copied the Barry Bond sound, but he did something of his own with it. I'm not a good enough composer to do enough of my own with Barry's style. We need someone else who can take Barry's style and do their own thing with it. That will make it sound like a Bond score, but not a pastiche of one.
Great post: I’ve been looking for a breakdown like that for a while.
Comments
Personally I don't think Blofeld didn't have good lines in SP, and Waltz did a good job. Particularely the SPECTRE board meeting and the meteorite room scene was good. The main problem is the adopted brother angle.
This is one instance where Zimmer and Company's reputation for unoriginality and cribbing from others might be a good thing.
Please feel free to do your best "homage" to the classic Barry scores. -{
Their best known for cribbing from themselves and each other. I hope you're right and they'll take Barry's style and just add their modern synthesised percussion to it.
Considering the amount of 'creative differences' causing people to leave this production, hopefully it will actually improve the movie.
I had a student who worked for Zimmer. The guy works all the time for fear of being replaced by someone cheaper in an industry that values youth. That's a reason he buys music and has so many people working for him to produce it. I'm guessing he's going to turn in a bravura soundtrack because he recognizes the prestige and historicity of Bond, especially at a time when they're almost the phenomenon they were in the 60s.
To be clear, I was not accusing Zimmer of being generic (and I agree about Newman). What I was attempting to suggest is that I fear, given the time constraints, he may have no choice but to produce something that is not instantly recognizable as Bond, i.e, generic genre music.
In any event, I am very interested to see what he does. And we can trust it won’t be bizarre or disastrous, so that’s always a positive.
I should take them less than a couple month's time. So many people will be working on the soundtrack that it will take less than a month. For Remote Control Productions it's so much of a creative process as it is a technical one. Zimmer (probably with some help) will do something like come up with a suite of music, present it to Barbara and Cary (and probably Daniel), and if they like the direction of it the score will be completed in no time at all by a team of composers and orchestrators. Zimmer runs a factory, so it doesn't take so long.
But even someone like Jerry Goldsmith could write and finish an entire score in a week with the help of orchestrators, and Goldsmith's simplest music was more complex than anything Zimmer has ever done.
I would assume it is done. There's no reason for it not to be, since they've had a title for a while. If Zimmer is willing to put melody in his score (which he has done little of with recent action films), maybe he'd incorporate the title track. He's not opposed to using music that others have written, since he frequently collaborates with other composers.
It certainly might speed things along, lol. We'll see how it turns out!
"When I heard that John had died Jan. 30 at 77, I instantly recalled his tune for The Quiller Memorandum, which is probably not one of his better-known scores. I can remember where I was when I first heard it, much as I can remember where I was the first time I heard his music for Born Free. Here's the thing: I cannot remember the stories of those movies in detail, but I remember the tunes. Sometimes the reason we have such deep and lasting emotional connections to movies is the music, and everything that made the mood of those movies work was from John. The melody is what keeps you tied to a movie forever, and he wrote some of the greatest melodies.
My favorites are more obscure than Out of Africa, Dances with Wolves or the James Bond film scores for which he was so famous. I will admit, though, that we looked at On Her Majesty's Secret Service when we were doing Inception and were just blown away by the musical innovation. I loved Hammett and the way John created a melancholic and nostalgic sense of time and place. I also loved Zulu; the whole score is based on one short motif, so strong and so bold.
Like the work of all good composers, everything John wrote was elegant and came from his own point of view. He was a Yorkshire man, and even in his brightest work, you could always see the moors and the fog. Even his cheeky stuff had an underlying darkness.
John was part of a particular era in London, an era when the city had so much to say to the world. Ridley Scott would tell me how he used to hang out at John's recording sessions. He'd say, "Wow, John Barry's doing a session. Maybe we can sneak in and hear something." But for me, it was more like, "Maybe I can sneak in and learn something." I learned from him that moody is good. There haven't been that many deserving film-music legends. John truly was one of them."
This article was from a 2011 Time's Magazine.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2046069,00.html
I'm glad he mentioned OHMSS soundtrack.
-Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
I thought Andrew Scott was underplayed too, after seeing his portrayal of Moriarty in Sherlock , I was expecting more
Thanks for posting that. I believe OHMSS to be Barry’s finest work, at least where his Bind scores are concerned. I’m also encouraged by Zimmer’s compliment regarding the melodies.
Thanks for posting this, this is fantastic. While I like a lot of what Zimmer does, none of it says 'potentially Bond' to me, but from this article I think Zimmer will respect the canon of Barry Bond music and rather than an electronic dirge, we'll get good OHMSS inspired melodies - "he [Barry] wrote some of the greatest melodies" - that sort of comment is really encouraging.
https://twitter.com/HesselHVisser/status/1214678004791697410?s=20
Great post: I’ve been looking for a breakdown like that for a while.
Love the 'double 0' link in it; nicely done
But remember that there were shooting outside and a chase in the streets...
Have you seen the ring?