Laurence Rosenthal on Young Indiana Jones

An Interview with Laurence Rosenthal by Thomas Karban
Originally published in Soundtrack Magazine Vol.11 / No.44 / 1992
Text reproduced by kind permission of the editor, Luc Van de Ven

Mr. Rosenthal, you have come to Munich to record your new scores for the YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES television series. What was the overall concept? For what reason were three different composers involved?

Originally I was asked by George Lucas to compose the music for the entire series, but then very quickly it became apparent that there was so much music and so little time that it was humanly impossible for one man to do it all. So a young composer was brought in, Joel McNeely, to help out, to do some of the episodes. Now in fact he was so tied up on certain shows - for example an episode about early Jazz, in which he is an expert - that we had to bring in a third composer to make it - Frederic Talgorn. I am doing all I can. We are recording five shows while I am here. In most of them Lucas likes a lot of music and so most of them have 30, 40 minutes of music. For a 48-minute episode that means the music is almost constant.

Were these totally different composers chosen because you all have the same agent, Gorfaine & Schwartz?

Well, it's possible. I think it all began because John Williams recommended me to Lucas. So Lucas got in touch with my agent and when it became necessary to find another composer it was natural to ask them for support. (Gorfaine & Schwartz is probably the biggest agency for composers in Hollywood). That's what happened, I think. But it seems logical to me that all 3 composers came from the same agency.

This recommendation by John Williams was not the first one. I heard that he did the same for METEOR.

Yes, John was supposed to do METEOR but he couldn't do it. So he recommended me. We have a great mutual admiration. He is a wonderful man. Really a first-class musician.

But in your music you don't pay any musical tribute to the Indiana Jones features…

This was specifically Lucas's wish. He wanted to disassociate himself from the series except that it is the same character. But the approach to these shows is so different from the features that he didn't want the same style of music, he didn't want John's theme. He just wanted a whole new idea. And the series itself is more lyrical in the sense that the episodes have to do with a young man's growing up and with his encountering a number of remarkable and celebrated men of that period. So the style of these shows is quite different. Some episodes which take place during the 1914-1918 war are very violent. In fact those are mostly done by Joel. I have been mostly involved with the ones dealing with Sigmund Freud, Diaghilev, Picasso, Lawrence of Arabia and so on. Otherwise every really exotic score was done by me, for episodes set in Egypt, Kenya, Mexico, India, China, Spain and whatever.

I heard you didn't like some of the scripts…

Some of them were heavy on war sequences. I don't always enjoy doing that. When we did the episode set in Mexico it had a great deal of violence. It was very interesting for me because it had a very moving quality, but it wasn't so much violent as it was sad. And that was what George Lucas wanted emphasized. If you work on a battle scene, the only thing you'll hear is machine guns and cannons firing - the music will barely be heard. Then you feel that all the efforts you're going to will be for nothing. If one episode doesn't appeal to you, I think it's not a major thing. I am really interested in human relationships. Sometimes when it's pure action it is one-dimensional. When you have a relationship between people it's richer, and gives you a chance for finer shadings.

It seems that each episode has its own musical concept…

That's true. It's quite unusual for a television series because it does not follow a certain formula. Not only does every show usually take place in a different locale with its own special ethnic atmosphere, but also every show has a kind of idea, a special theme. For example one of the shows that I'm doing takes place in Vienna in 1908. This one is really about the subject, What is love? There is a remarkable scene when Young Indiana and his father have dinner with three noted guests who are Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. And there is a long conversation about love. There the music is rather fin-de-siècle with echoes of Strauss and Mahler.

Another episode takes place in 1917 in Barcelona, where Indiana Jones - working as a spy - gets a job, arranged by his old friend Picasso, to appear in a ballet of Diaghilev Scheherazade. So there the musical style is a combination of Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky, mixed with a lot of flamenco guitars. That is a comedy, you can see it is a pastiche, so of course it's a whole different sound.

The one I did for Africa is very, very lyrical with some African drums. In the episode where he meets the young Krisnamurti in 1910 we use a certain amount of traditional instruments and the score echoes this musical style. In the episode which takes place in Petrograd during the spring revolution of 1917 the music is very Russian in feeling. For a composer like me this is a very interesting project because if you are interested in all kinds of nationalistic and ethnic music, which I have always been, it gives you a chance to experience with all of these idioms, to try and filter them through your own musical language and come up with something that is new without falling into old formulas.

My own feeling about film music would be that there should be no music at all unless the film absolutely needs it. If the film plays by itself - why add music? Why do you need music? It is only when music can produce a new dimension, then it becomes really interesting because then the music contributes something. As long as it is merely underscoring it does add a certain excitement. You can always tell when you are looking at a picture without music, it seems quite clear then where music really makes a difference. George Lucas has his own feeling about this and the films John Williams did with him are absolutely loaded with music. Lucas seems to love a kind of musical description that is there all the time, that is constantly commenting and supporting what the eye sees.

That's a very operatic approach.

My approach for a long time was to go for spare use of music. And then when the music appears it has a certain power and when it stops the silence has a certain force. But you can’t do that with certain subjects. You can't do that with George Lucas because that's not what he likes. And these films are his concepts. He wrote every story. One has to admire his extreme sensitivity. When we ‘spot’ the films his approach is extremely precise, “You know at that moment when the change takes place the music should reflect this”, etc. He is very specific. But his contributions are very useful because he has a sense of what the music will add to a certain scene. I worked with Marvin Chomsky for example (PETER THE GREAT, ANASTASIA), he is a totally different kind of man. He is a different personality but in his way he is also very specific about what music should add. I have also worked with directors who have practically nothing to say. They simply note, “Well, you know what will be most stable here.” They don't have a clear idea of what the function of the music will be.

Was all the music for the Indiana Jones Chronicles recorded here in Munich?

The very first one, which was a two-hour telefilm, was recorded at the Skywalker Ranch with members of the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera House Orchestra.

That must have been very expensive…

It cost a gigantic amount of money and they decided they couldn't afford to do the whole series over there.

Your first experience with a German orchestra was in 1958 for DARK ODYSSEY…

DARK ODYSSEY was a small, low-budget movie. There was very little money to record the music. It was a kind of package deal. I even had to finance the travelling costs from the budget. For this reason I decided to go to Vienna to record the score over there. There was a strike in America at the time which was not a strike against independent producers but against major studios, but as I came to Vienna they thought I was trying to break the strike. So they refused to record my music. Then I went to Munich to record the score with the Graunke Symphony Orchestra. They didn't care about the strike, and they did a good job, but there was a certain lady there who didn't trust me; she forced me right at the beginning of the first recording session to give her the money for the musicians - in front of the entire orchestra. That was really embarrassing but the orchestra was on my side. When the session was over one cue remained unrecorded and the musicians said, “Come on, let's do it.”

You returned to Munich 20 years later to compose and record your score for BRASS TARGET.

I really thought that was a very good film. The director John Hough and I agreed about the fact that the score should be lean, light and short, but very powerful, when it makes an appearance. When we had made the first cut, 6 executives from MGM came over to Munich and we ran the picture for them. A few weeks later they called me when we were back in Los Angeles, they had just done a sneak preview and they said to me, “Well, we think the music is wonderful. But there is only one problem: there isn't enough of it. We think there should be more.” I said, “Gentlemen, the reason you think it is so good is because there is just the right amount of it. That's what makes it so powerful.” But they said, “We don't agree with you. There should be more.” They let me understand that if I didn't write more music they would find someone else who would. I thought, if anybody is going to write more music then it better be me. So I added more music to it. And it's the only time in my life I read a review in a newspaper which said, “The music was intrusive and there was too much of it.”

Your last big assignment before the Indiana Jones Chronicles was the STRAUSS DYNASTY mini-series. There's a huge portion of original score.

When the producers were speaking to Marvin Chomsky about the film, and he wanted me to be in charge of the music, their reaction was, “Why do we need a composer? We have Strauss, Offenbach, Lanner… The music is already there.” But you can't just take a handful of Strauss music and throw it at the film. It still has to be shaped, arranged, made to fit the film. There were many sequences like the 1848 revolution: what would you play here from Strauss? The fact is that I did find a revolutionary march that Strauss actually wrote; so of course I used that, but you couldn't just play the march. Also, there were all kinds of dramatic situations going on. So I decided at the beginning that I would try to base every cue in the film upon some kind of melodic elements drawn from one of these other composers. In almost the entire film, even when it seems like a dramatic cue, I would try to weave in some element of their music, I'd only be there as a kind of co-ordinator, somebody who brings all these elements together and fuses them into one kind of musical fabric. Sometimes I would have to do a bit of suspense music (something which was quite unmelodic) but almost everywhere you look you'll find behind it some source taken from Strauss material.

But your own personal style shines through all the time.

You find that I use the same harmonic modulations that I do in other films? It's interesting that you are saying that. Of course it's true. But to do everything for 12 hours strictly in the style of those other composers would not have been very interesting. It is a film, not a literal reproduction of that period. Just as the screenwriter himself would not be able to avoid certain 20th Century points of view.

Were you there when filming began?

No, by no means. There was a great deal of music which had to be pre-recorded, principally the early waltzes from Strauss Father and Joseph Lanner. So I was brought in long before shooting began, to work out an entire musical programme for the film. I came to Vienna and we had a Viennese conductor because the ORF (German TV station) insisted that we should have an Austrian conductor for Strauss. When the music was to be recorded I had to be there because a great deal of the early Strauss exists only in a very primitive form. So all of it had to be re-arranged, re-orchestrated, trying to stay as close as possible to the style of that period (1810/1820).

Then after all the playbacks were done they shot the mini-series. Unfortunately they couldn't afford to keep me there, and I couldn't afford to stay there for eight months. Finally it would have been useful for me to be there because they had many musical problems that I could have helped them to solve. But there was no way to help that, it wasn’t practical. At the end, when filming was over, we came together again and started all the post-production and underscoring. There I had an additional problem. For example, at the very end there is a scene where they are playing a waltz which is also danced on the screen. This sequence was shot to a particular DGG recording - and then it turned out that they had no rights to use this recording.

It may have been too expensive…

Yes, it was expensive, and there were other problems. So I had to conduct this waltz and the Blue Danube like the original recordings; you can't move freely, you're bound to do exactly what they did. However it was a fascinating project and for me it was fascinating research. That was what interested me most: to discover so much of Strauss's unknown work. Pieces like the Fantasy on Russian themes, pieces that I never heard before, as well as many of the polkas from Lanner and Strauss senior which are almost unknown - even in Vienna.

How did you conduct this research?

I was introduced to a man named Franz Mailer who is still the head of the Johann-Strauss-Society and a real expert. He knows every piece that Strauss ever wrote. We had long meetings together and talked about the film. I said for example, “We need a kind of gallop from this period, but if possible in a minor key.” He was extraordinary - he went out of the room and two minutes later he was back with exactly the kind of score I needed. There was a huge amount of research.

May I ask which projects you have turned down?

Mostly I don't even remember. There were always films which were too violent or too disgusting. I wouldn't like my name on them. And even more to the point: I wouldn't want to spend 6 weeks looking at these images. I have most recently turned down a mini-series by a very well-known author of bestselling novels about Hollywood. I felt it was cheap, exploitative, shallow and stupid. I would never dream of wasting my time on something like that. I would have nothing to say musically.

(This is an excerpt from a much longer interview, published in German in FM-Dienst.)