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What the hell happened Pawel?

.....and ends with an 'R'...

AR?

So much drama!! Thought that was FSM's territory.

Intellectually limited?

Yes, it was a discussion about The New World and how Horner described the director in an interview a few years ago. That interview (which also attacked Gabriel Yared) annoyed me very much, because a composer said about his director that he can't direct at all except making nice camera angles and that he's cold to the point of not understanding emotions at all.

Let's set aside my emotional approach to The Thin Red Line, also as a movie. The fact that Badlands was a fantastic piece of art, too. Horner said that he got very angry when asked about emotions of a scene, Malick was telling him that this scene is not really about emotions. Horner kept asking: "What about then?!". That means that Horner has no sense of metaphor at all. Now, where's the problem that led me to think that it means that it's Horner who is intellectually limited:

Terrence Malick almost did a PhD in philosophy, which fell apart due to a conflict with his thesis supervisor in Oxford. His subject was "The Concept of World in Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Heidegger". To a layman and to many intellectuals in the human studies, Heidegger and, in particular, Wittgenstein are particularly unreadable philosophers. Not only Malick was writing a thesis in them, but he also translated a major text by Heidegger and was so sure about his translation that he published it in bilingual edition. Whoever had to deal with Heidegger's text knows that he had a specific command of language which led him to a rare creativity in creating new terminology, which his concepts demanded (basically existentialist thought, but put through a very precise methodology and going through understanding as a basic way of existence - we understand the world which we are in, therefore we are).

Now, I never watched a Malick movie in context of the philosophy of particularly Heidegger's, but his poetic sense of visuals and narration definitely has to do with his philosophical background. Horner has a finished PhD in music. That means, if the Anglo-Saxon system has anything to do with ours, he had to go through a course in philosophy at least twice. Did he get what he learnt there? Does he remember anything from it? Artistic studies in Poland have a very high intellectual background. A metaphor is not just a linguistic gimmick, it's also heavily philosophical concept defined by, among others, Aristotle.

Why doesn't Horner have any idea for understanding that visuals have so much more to say than just telling and propelling a story forward? Thor would have a lot to say here, but to be completely honest, I usually avoid that kind of cinema except Malick and Ridley Scott, I don't know why, but I am somehow not open. Anyway. Horner seems to have freaked out that he has to approach a scene differently than he's used to. Malick has the weird tendency to re-edit his movies ad nauseam. That's true.

Let's get back to The Thin Red Line. Zimmer told me himself that his Journey to the Line piece when put in the film "answered many questions about the film" and how it should be edited (and that piece was written totally against Malick's requests). The score was cut somehow by Malick, including replacing a Lohengrin homage with Charles Ives and other minor stuff, but is basically left intact. That's one thing.

The second thing is that while the process must have been hard for all of them, other composers working with Malick (I've heard Morricone had a grudge about the way Days of Heaven was treated, but the FSM liner notes say completely different and the only piece that was written scene-specific was left in that particular scene per Morricone's request) had nothing but great stuff to say about Malick even if they acknowledge how hard it is. Desplat, mauled even more than Horner, still says good things in interviews. Horner cried out basically judging a director as a person, because he was unable to work with him.

And I'm afraid that it was an intellectual problem. Horner didn't *get* Malick's idea and couldn't work them out. What he did was writing a more restrained twist on his regular narrative technique, while at least Zimmer and Desplat (I haven't analyzed the structure of Days of Heaven yet, I do own the FSM release though) left their usual gimmicks at home and especially Hans had to reinvent his process and language for the score. Tree of Life also (as heard on album) features some new material for Desplat.

In that same interview Horner said that Yared's score to Troy was rejected by the producers... because Yared doesn't know how to write epic music. He also criticized Wolfgang Petersen for not asking him to score Poseidon (which he wouldn't have taken anyway) and his general approach to film.

Except The Thin Red Line, I was talking about how Horner criticized Malick rather than what he criticized, because to be completely honest, my only exposure to Terrence Malick cinema is right now Badlands and the much-seen The Thin Red Line (which I watch every single year or I regard the year as wasted, really - yes, I am a fanboy of the movie). I intend to amend that this year. This can of course render my criticism of Horner's approach invalid, but still. I don't like how he voiced his criticism. The general meaning of it (Malick maybe should indeed have made the film more traditionally, that's a criticism also voiced by Sean Penn regarding Tree of Life; a friend of mine who also wants to direct movies called The Tree of Life the most traumatic experience of his cinema-going life and that it almost made him go see Transformers just to see anything *happen*) may be well right, but the way he *said* it makes me think it's all Horner's fault in this regard.

That said I love The New World as an album and I do think it's one of his best albums. I don't really own that album, but when opportunity comes, I intend to amend my lack of it.

Did Hans have experience in pure arthouse cinema before he scored The Thin Red Line though?

I think there's a question of semantics over whether Pawel's very well-considered points above could be summed up in two words as meaning Horner is "intellectually limited", but I certainly understand what he means. It's not the same as saying the guy's thick - I know that most people who don't like Terrence Malick films are thick*, but that's not what "intellectually limited" means.

I think Horner excels at certain things. Of all the Hollywood film composers, he's the one who gives me the greatest sense of looking at the big picture - those long cues he writes, which are generally done without click-track and aren't synced to hit points, can flow so beautifully through scenes, even action scenes. He really thinks about what he's doing. He's got great technique, too. But like Pawel said, unlike Zimmer, Horner couldn't change his own style to fit with Malick, which is surely part of the job description of being a film composer. His problem seemed to be that Malick didn't give him any direction at all, but Zimmer (and Morricone) managed to work around that and see lots of their music within their Malick films, even if not all of it was necessarily used as they had intended. Horner couldn't see that The New World just isn't a film with a story that goes from A to B to C, with characters who are not easily described with one little phrase. Whether that makes him "intellectually limited" I don't know, but it certainly reveals a limitation of some kind to his thinking - which ultimately made him the wrong composer for the film, though the fact that so many people were scratching their heads when his original hiring was announced shows that it always seemed so, which may also reveal a certain limitation (or lack of knowledge) to Malick's thinking. It's hard to believe that the kind of film that Horner usually scores would be the kind of film that Malick would watch. Ron Howard is pretty much the anti-Malick, in other words (though to be fair, Howard's other favourite composer was also hired by Malick and did his best ever work for him).

*I'm only joking!

To add: I do admit that my reaction to the whole thing was a bit emotional.

Well, OK, but I base it on more than one thing:

1. Horner with notable exceptions isn't a composer famous of restraint. He basically goes very intense and to the point of being saccharine. That has already changed, fortunately, as showcased by an unfairly hated Enemy at the Gates and his scores for Vadim Perelman, both of them. I think that House of Sand and Fog is also a terribly underrated work and really forgotten.

2. Horner has a share of very intelligent scores. Apollo 13 is for me his most intelligent one, because he chose restraint (finally!) and decided to base his musical narrative on scoring the jump cuts between the three locations - space, the Mission Control and Lovell's household. He did that in an unusually subtle for him way - by using percussion to underscore those synchronization points. But I wouldn't call that a very intellectual approach.

That said I have the feeling that scoring films is a way more intellectual process than some composers would even admit. Choosing the right thematic material and where to use that theme directly (most recently I was in awe of the final shot of War Horse underscored by the war theme, it's a brilliant movie, because the return to the idyll of the beginning of the movie is underscored by a final melody that gets us back to all the dramatic experience the horse had to go through to get back to the idyll - brilliant move by Williams, a very emotional and subtle way of telling us "it's great now, but he was in hell") is rather an intellectual than emotional choice. I have worked with a composer and I think that's the way it is now.

3. Horner due to the editing changes in the movie and due to the discussions he had with Malick, remembers the process as traumatic and was speaking of it in highly emotional terms. Malick is a philosopher who worked on a heavily metaphorical and poetic philosopher.

I agree that calling him intellectually limited was going too far, but I am very deeply connected to Malick's The Thin Red Line and being so clueless about how to work with that director and actually blaming the director for him and not even taking into consideration that the director might be right was something that was some of a blow.

I aim at being a director myself and to be honest if what he says is true about the process, James Horner would get very fired from the movie, because he wasn't really willing to discuss, he was just shocked and ended up attacking the director, rather than looking back at the process as a learning curve.

It somehow rubbed me in the wrong way.

Not that I'm aware of?

For the record, I think Horner's THE NEW WORLD (Malick's version of it, anyway) works beautifully in the film, alongside the classical pieces.

That's one way of putting it, I guess.