We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now.
Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.
Usually one or two things happen: Either you have an idea straightaway - the sort of sound that you want or the instrumentation or one particular sound that you want to feature - or you don't.
You know, nobody eats in England. Three or four pints of English beer a night fills you. I can't say I'm very impressed with the food in America. it's all sort of bland. Like turkey sandwiches.
I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.
My favorite work is The Full Monty because I got an Oscar for it. But it was really hard work at the time. Sometimes comedy is not a bundle of laughs to actually do.
Sometimes in films it's nice to have violins on either side, rather than on one side, so you've got more of a stereo picture with the violins. Sometimes it's good to have the basses in the middle.
It's really the sound of the voices, the sound of the words, the sound of the sound that we're interested in.
Obviously in Art of Noise, I'm just part of the group, and when I do film scores, it's always in collaboration with the director and other people involved.
I wanted to make a classical piece that was actually designed to be a CD, not designed for performance.
I think that music has an endless life.
Composers are always going back to the past.
