Average Filmtracks Rating: 3.15
Average Viewer Rating: 3.2
Number of Reviews: 108
Number of Votes: 208,861
Number of Comments: 2,597

"I respect Jerry Goldsmith very much, but hope my music isn't too similar. One is always influenced by people one respects, and I'm very influenced by quite a few classical composers, and admire their work very much, so people always think they can pigeon hole my music by saying, well, it's this or that. Most of the films that I've been doing are, in fact, adventure, horror or whatever, and those are the kinds of films Goldsmith does." - 1982, on criticism that his music resembles Goldsmith's

"My trick is that the films are all so different. I have no high ambitions to win 35 Academy Awards. I just try to be the best at what I can be and work on the best movies I can and not get too wrapped up in the day-to-day ups and downs of it, which is difficult enough." - 1995, on his craft

"I learned long ago that the vagaries of the Academy are uncontrollable, and that you'll end up committing suicide if you think your fortune is made by them. It's very flattering to get nominated, and it means a lot to me. But the score has a deeper personal meaning to me than that." - 1997, on losing the Academy Award to Il Postino in 1996

"What appeals to me about writing film music is that each project is completely different from the other. I could have chosen to another Star Trek or two or three Star Treks because I was certainly asked, but I wasn't interested after doing a couple of them." - 1992, on film composers being chameleons

"I had been asked to do a couple of other big films, which I passed on, [including] Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, because I desperately wanted to do Ron's movie [A Beautiful Mind]. Those are movies that mean something to me on a very basic level. Those are really like art films as opposed to commerce films." - 2001, on choosing his assignments

"I'm a throwback. I know all about the machines, and I work with programmers I've worked with for years. They know my tastes and predilections. When I work with synths, I don't want what you think of it as synthetic sounds. I want very organic sounds that I can manipulate. The orchestral stuff, I write at a desk and orchestrate, and then send it off to the copyist. The synth stuff, I play ideas to myself on the piano, and notate ideas, but most of it happens by coloring in, like painting, at the actual recording session, because I play everything myself on a MIDI keyboard. I have an idea, I know how it's going to work in the timing. It's all mathematically perfect, but in terms of fine tuning it, it doesn't happen until I actually get there and I start playing in the parts myself." - 1998, on scoring without a state of the art studio