With a lot of action scores, you're competing with a lot of noise. Say there's a big explosion: the music would conventionally have a lot of Hollywood-style percussion or brass, because that's the only thing that will cut through.
I go into the whole composer thing quite open to keep on going and keep on trying different things because you never know... the next idea you have might be the one.
It's true, most of my days are spent alone in a dark room! I don't really want anyone to see me trying and failing to nail the 40th take of a simple piano cue.
When I was growing up, I loved the films where you'd start them and the score might sound really odd at first and really different, and then by the time you finish, you can't imagine it being any other way.
Fear is one of those really primal emotions which you don't want to have incredibly exciting modulations and complex harmonies and all that kind of stuff.
In the mid-2000s, I kind of accidentally became a music editor.
A lot of the music editing job is communication and working out what a director really wants the music to be.
I worry about technical details - did I mix the cello half a decibel too high? Things like that.
My house was full of music. My main memories are of the record player at home: it was all Beatles and Rolling Stones, and we danced around the living room; that started me off on instruments, and I've done nothing else ever since.
I like expansive stuff that has a lot of space in it, like some of the early Pink Floyd albums.
The realisation that, depending on where we changed from one note to the next in a melodic line, the music could subtly influence the entire meaning of a scene in so many ways was like a door opening to this amazing new world for me.
For me, anything can be music! I can get huge enjoyment and be moved totally by the purity and perfection of some Renaissance polyphony, but equally I can feel emotion in the expectant hum of a big old guitar amp just before the strings are hit.
Every one of us has a response of some kind to music, so I don't think it's fair to ever judge what is proper and what's not.
The great composers I worked with along the way, I always felt they were filmmakers more than composers. They would talk about the story rather than the music.
