James Horner Talks In-Depth about 'Avatar' Score
In the run-up to James Cameron’s hype-heavy techno fantasy epic Avatar, Film Music Magazine has posted a lengthy online interview with composer James Horner about the process of creating a whole new kind of music for the groundbreaking film, without losing sight of the techniques that worked so well for past Cameron/Horner collaborations. We’ve got some highlights for you below the fold...
Horner spoke to Film Music in a new installment of their half-hour podcast On the Score, in which he goes into extreme detail about the Avatar soundtrack, which he says Cameron wanted to be as 'revolutionary' as the film itself. He describes the main challenge in finding the delicate balance between providing a soundscape that moviegoers have never heard before, and keeping those audiences emotionally linked to the characters.
'Audiences seem to be much more capable of absorbing new visuals and things that are much more outrageous or avant-garde visually,' Horner explains in the interview. '[But] aurally, audiences are much more conservative... If I went as far as Jim did visually, and started to use all kinds of weird scales for the music and made it too avant-garde or too out of the box, I would be ungrounding the film… obviously I’m still writing film music, so it still has to appeal to a film audience in a conventional way.”
Avatar marks the third collaboration between Cameron and Horner – who first worked together on Aliens, before scoring mutual Oscar gold for Titanic. On the podcast, Horner talks about the challenge of bringing the world of Pandora and its inhabitants to life musically, and also discusses the current state of film music today. You can hear the whole thing at the Film Music website, so check it out!
