This is part of a series. Part 2c can be found here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=107824
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Return to Paradise (1998) - ****
Mancina; also orchestrated by Dave Metzger; album arranged by Christopher Ward
The first entry in what The Atlantic later termed the Asian Tourism Panic genre that started in the late 90s (Brokedown Palace, The Beach, Bridget Jones 2). My thirteenth discovery of this effort. If Twister and Speed 2 weren’t proof enough that Mancina had advanced beyond his MV days, this work certainly was.
MM: “[The theme] was written when I flew home from New York after I first saw some dailies of the movie. I came home and I wrote that piece of music. I thought to myself, ‘I don’t even know if this is even going to work. I’ll just start playing around with it'. I wrote most of the orchestral parts, I’d say 90% of it I wrote, but as far as putting pencil to paper and getting it all down for the orchestra, that’s what I bring an orchestrator in for. It would take me three months to do that myself.”
There’s a real warmth to the orchestral highlights, with a few large-scale string arrangements amidst horn countermelodies and some woodwind solos that could’ve tricked me into thinking parts of this came from a 90s Thomas Newman score. But the work draws just as much strength from its array of regional instrumentation - sometimes in your face, sometimes subtly - think James Newton Howard in this vein (Waterworld, or maybe Raya without the electronics or choir) as well as maybe parts of Fenton’s Anna and the King - or, in Zimmer terms, a less abrasive Beyond Rangoon. Mancina put a lot of thought into this.
MM: “I went out and got all sorts of instruments from Malaysia, Indonesian instruments, gamelan, finger cymbals, all sorts of little doo-dads. I just started recording ideas acoustically, put a microphone up and just ran tape recording feels, loops, ideas, sounds, and most of them stuck, some of them didn’t. String instruments didn’t seem to work on the score; I ended up using a Saz, an eight-string Turkish instrument, and a little charango guitar on the score. Everything else was pretty much mallet. Then I had a chamber orchestra.”
It’s a Mancina score from this era, so there’s obviously a guitar somewhere - but it’s an accent piece largely, and only in a few tracks. Some of the percussive suspense seems like a more muted version of Speed 2, and there are a few duller sections - but the dramatic highlights are still soothing enough to make this an easy recommendation.
MM: “It’s old news to just use samples or ethnic samples as a backdrop to a score. It’s boring, it’s awful, it’s flat.”
The Prince of Egypt (1998) - ***** (I had this at 4.5 before, but cannot find a legitimate reason to avoid giving it a top rating)
Zimmer; songs by Stephen Schwartz;
song arrangement, add'l music & conducting by HGW;
other song arrangement & conducting by Gavin Greenaway;
other songs arranged by HZ & John Powell;
other add'l music/orchestrations by Klaus Badelt; other add’l music & conducting by Rupert Gregson-Williams;
orchestrated by Fowler bros/Moriarty/McIntosh, Liz Finch, Marcy Vaj, Darryl Leonard, Erik Lundborg & Jack Smalley;
Middle Eastern wind ensemble produced by Jeff Rona;
Marc Streitenfeld as technical musical advisor;
thank you’s to Jay Rifkin & Mel Wesson
Dang - nearly every theme in this score SLAYS. Between this and Goldsmith’s Mummy the next year, the late 90s were a great time for massive Egyptian themes.
HZ: “I get this phone call from Jeffrey and he says, ‘We’re going to do a movie about the Bible.’ [I said,] ‘This is a joke, right?’ I started on the songs three and half years [before it was released]. Animators needed the songs [to] coordinate lip movements. For years, I worked on the project just one or two days per month--and even became involved in story shaping. We started doing very much the Disney model. Lots of jokes…awfully cute characters. We used to have funny songs. We shed all of those things.”
Obviously Zimmer knocked the burning bush sequence out of the park (the God theme remains one of the few moments of genuine awe and wonder to come from Zimmer’s hands during this period), though you have to wonder if the kind of maximalist minimalism at play in that scene would start to inform his tendencies in the Remote Control era and beyond.
HZ: “If I wrote a neutral piece of music, it would be a cop-out. If I wrote it as a religious piece, it would certainly have a stamp as being either Catholic or Jewish, and I didn’t want to do that either. It took me a long time to commit to this tiny little three-note theme.”
A bunch of folks helped with the score - which seems to have been driven in part by Zimmer’s admitted procrastination. “I was constantly worried about offending people. Guess which movies I wasn’t watching [over] the last three years? You need to find your own voice. So I allowed myself the shortest possible time to compose the score portion.” Underrated contribution: the wind ensemble led by Jeff Rona.
HGW: “I wrote a few cues when he got a bit crunched for time - an amazing Hieroglyphic nightmare sequence for one. I remember I played [Hans] a cue and he made 10,000 comments. But Jeffrey really liked it [once I fixed it].”
This would actually be when John joined the team - his first appearance since White Fang. Zimmer would later quip that they “both had an appetite for geeky gear, obscure British composers and bands, and world music.” Said Powell, “I did an opera, we put it on in Germany, and I found it difficult going back to jingles. Gavin and I put some money into going out to Los Angeles [in 1996]. I’m looking around for gigs and Hans introduces me to Jeffrey. The first time I met Harry he was helping on the score for The Prince Of Egypt. I didn’t do much of the score – I think I tried and fucked it up a bit. So Hans just kept me on the songs.”
Rupert shows up too - getting into the business almost the same way his brother did years earlier. “I wanted to be a musician since I was about seven, and a composer in my mid-teens - but as a rock star, so I learned the Hammond organ and got into bands that didn’t go anywhere. In my 20s I apprenticed for Richard Harvey, then Hans phoned me and said ‘come out to the beach’. Jeffrey Katzenberg brought Hans over because he wanted their first film to be as successful as The Lion King. Doing Prince of Egypt was the first time I realized how many people do the job.”
I’ve had a tendency to grumble about the score and songs not interacting that much - but, heck, they don’t really interact in The Lion King either and that sucker got ***** from me. Similar to Encanto, the song arrangements exist enough in the same sonic universe as the score that the lack of tighter integration doesn’t come off as overly bothersome. Speaking of the songs, within the exception of maybe Playing With The Big Boys, they’re all showstoppers; Schwartz knocked the assignment out of the park, and it’s astonishing that Katzenberg almost gave up on Deliver Us before Zimmer arranged it.
It would take over 20 years for Zimmer to oversee a score I enjoy almost as much as this one.
Antz (1998) - ****
HGW & John Powell; orchestrated by the Fowler bros/Moriarty/McIntosh, Liz Finch, Jack Smalley & Marcy Vaj;
“The Bar” with contributions from Powell’s assistant Geoff Zanelli; “The Antz Marching Band” by HGW’s assistant Steve Jablonsky;
“Back to the Colony” with contributions from Gavin Greenaway; orchestra conducted by Gavin Greenaway; choir conducted by RGW;
percussion loops by Ryeland Allison; 'I Can See Clearly Now' produced by Gavin Greenaway, Danny Jacob & Jay Rifkin
After getting a bit worn down by the maculine heaviness that dominated much of this era, I found getting to this score to be a breath of fresh air - the sheer goofiness, the moments of orchestral warmth, bouncy fun, and whatnot. I had to avoid the temptation to give it 6/5 stars just for that.
HGW: “John was at a very different stage when he showed up. He had already been a very successful jingles writer. He’d earned a bit of money. He had gear, he had things like a car and a wife. I didn’t have anything at all. He was already quite confident and competent.”
It’s a delight that holds up remarkably well from start to finish, even with my knowledge of later, better scores by both these guys. The lack of a higher rating is largely due to a second half that exposes some of the MIDI-ish feel to the orchestration / recording (and maybe also because the themes are generally effective but not quite earworms). It’d have contended for a top 10 spot in many other years, but 1998 was particularly stacked - something their then-boss certainly contributed to.
JP: “Hans couldn’t do it [and] suggested non-Media Ventures people. I think it was Craig Armstrong and Marius de Vries. But Jeffrey said, ‘what about John and Harry’?
We’re both very different people, different styles of thought, different egos. There’s 10, 12, 14 kids all trying to get attention from Daddy, which is Hans, so you end up trying to impress him or write better than the other guy. Hans would call me into Harry’s room and I’d hear something really good. I’d leave thinking, ‘Christ I really need to up my game’. But there aren’t many places you could walk around at 4am and find someone who understands the pain you’re going through.”
HGW: “When we started out on Antz, Jeffrey said, ‘Look, think of this more as Romancing the Stone - we’ve got to forget we’re looking at ants within 10 minutes of the opening.’”
Jablonsky’s off-key contribution could not be farther from the Michael Bay works he would be known for in the years to come. Said HGW that year, “[Steve’s] perfect. He keeps my vast MIDI studio running, and he is more than capable of writing a cue or two on any given project.”
Enemy of the State (1998) - Not heard
Rabin (with add’l music by Paul Linford & Tim Heintz) & HGW (with add’l music by Steve Jablonsky);
orchestrated by Bruce Fowler; orchestrated & conducted by Gordon Goodwin
I recall thinking the film was terrific when I first saw it (via a VHS rental from Blockbuster). Can’t recall a note of the score. Hans passed on doing this one for reasons unknown; one could assume he was just too busy with the two BIG works from this year, but I can’t help but wonder if lingering resentments from the reduced music budget on True Romance and/or his poor impression of The Fan played a part as well.
I could have put forth some effort to seek this out, but I think I reached a saturation point and didn’t feel like spending an hour with one of the less well-received works from this era. Note: I wrote that sentence before getting to Antz, which improved my mood considerably, but I'm not turning back now! 
TR: ”Because I was involved with Jack Frost, I couldn't do 73 minutes of music. I wrote a majority of the themes, and was in a co-partnership with Harry.”
HGW: “That's one way of putting it. TR wrote a Will Smith thing and I wrote the Hackman thing. There are a couple of other themes which we split out. We then set out to score half the film each. Some things have really surprised me (the absence of any of my music on the Armageddon CD, interviews implying this and that), but we get on really well whilst working.
I did get my start with The Rock, Armageddon, and Enemy of the State, but I quickly retraced my steps. If you know me, that kind of machismo thundering anthemic orchestral thing with a stack of drums behind it isn't what turns me on at all.”
The Thin Red Line (1998) - ****½
Zimmer; orchestrated by B Fowler/Moriarty;
‘Beam’ by John Powell; ‘Sit Back and Relax’ by Francesco Lupica whom Malick had heard playing the cosmic beam on Venice Beach;
hymn/chant arrangements by Klaus Badelt and probably more than that according to music editor Lee Scott;
add’l music by Jeff Rona who is instead noted for “visceral ambience” or piano/keyboard/synth playing;
conducted by Gavin Greenaway who also compiled the original album;
Marc Streitenfeld as technical musical advisor along with Justin Burnett;
featured musicians led by HZ & Ryeland Allison; thank you’s to HGW & Jay Rifkin
Zimmer remembers attending a dinner party full of painters and poets and writers - “you could hear Terry Malick and Werner Hertzog arguing about which cue of The Lion King they preferred. I was somewhat flattered.” It would presumably lead to Hans getting on his first prestige drama in a long time - maybe ever, since Rain Man and Driving Miss Daisy weren’t exactly big commodities before they entered production - and his first war film ever.
HZ: “He was producing Endurance, and it was fun hanging out with Terry. We slowly got to the potential that he might go and do this movie. [In the first year] I remember we only spoke about the script once. After that, we just spoke about painting, we spoke about baroque churches in Bavaria, we spoke about philosophy. We spoke a lot about color. I remember a lot of conversations about the band Garbage. We’re both great procrastinators, so the best way to procrastinate is to talk about other things, people who’ve actually finished writing pieces.”
Now Malick is well-known for pulling a variety of classical music into his films and taking a long time to edit. But back then Malick hadn’t directed a film in almost 20 years, and Zimmer may have had no idea how much Morricone music didn’t make the final cut of Days of Heaven. Confirmed parts of the temp for this film are Wojciech Kilar’s Exodus; Anatoli Lyadov’s The Enchanted Lake; Arvo Part’s Fratres and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten; and Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird. The drum group Kodo was considered at one point, though nothing was ever recorded. Zimmer was able to talk Malick out of using Wagner’s Das Rheingold - which just got sandbagged for Malick’s next movie - though more recently Zimmer has noted that he loved how the Ives and Part works functioned in the movie.
JP: “Hans worked so hard to get rid of all the temps.”
Yet again, this is another work I discovered via a VHS rental from Blockbuster - maybe in middle school. I adored the film from the get-go; for a while I was in the camp that thought it superior to Saving Private Ryan, though I haven’t seen either film in a long time. I have faint memories of the music being enormously effective during the Journey to the Line sequence.
This is not just the most orchestral-sounding score of this era from this group by far (Zimmer busted his ass to get the sound right), but also an unusually contemplative score for a war film. Zimmer had taken this kind of rueful view of large-scale tragedy before, namely in The House of the Spirits, though here his compositions are often less melancholy and more elegiac. You get the sense from his music that Zimmer hates war - though it’s not like he’s less than explicit about his humanism in his more recent comments about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “You cannot be neutral about war; you have to be against it. You have to be against slaughter, you have to be against racism, all that stuff - because at the end of the day it’s people who die, children who suffer. If we had only women (mothers) in government, it would be better.”
Much like Antz, part of my appreciation for this score comes from how NOT like the rest of this era it is. So many of the other works here elevate the drama and suspense and action to almost hilariously large proportions - and I’m not complaining, given my aforementioned ratings of many of those overstated scores. But it is probably only one of two scores from this era that could be credibly called understated, and it’s decidedly less boring than the earlier one (Smilla’s Sense of Snow).
HZ: “I wrote a whole score [for Malick to play on set]. I think it horrified them. You go ‘this is completely wrong’. I started again - a year had gone by and you get bored and want to try something new.”.
LS: “When I started the film, Hans had already written some themes which I began cutting as [a] temp score. At one point the director was concerned that the composer couldn't deliver the proper score and that it was up to me to track the film with this music. In one case, Malick preferred my inelegant edit to Hans' rescore (much to my chagrin). ‘Journey to the Line’ was the first piece of music Hans composed that clicked for the film.”
HZ: “I originally thought minor thirds and Terry said perfect fifths. I went away and wrote minor third, minor third - everything he didn’t want. But it was the first piece of music that really made the film start to work.”
The estimates on how much score was written have ranged from four hours to six hours over six hours - and as a result the score on the album is often drastically different from the score on film, or rather the score intended for the final cut as presented on Discs 1 & 2 of the massive La-La Land release.
The film version contains plenty of distinct material, including a few nice variations on Staros’ hymn-like theme (which Zimmer picked up from listening to NPR) and plenty of additional moments of the grim, churning idea for Nick Nolte’s character. But it is also a much more repetitive experience, and I felt exhausted after the first time I listened to it, though things were much better the second go-round. The production value on the expanded release is tremendous - especially the liner notes - but it may not be an essential purchase for everyone.
I do find it funny that Gavin Greenaway picked TWO different takes on the climactic cemetery scene for the original album (Stone In My Heart, maybe my favorite track from the score, and Silence) even though neither ended up in the finished film. Cemetery on the 2nd disc of the LLL release is the final version, though it’s entirely possible the scene was drastically different than the one Zimmer originally worked with.
HZ: “[As the film was cut down] we had bad arguments. Someone would make a decision and it would go in a different direction. He would quote some obscure passage from some obscure work and I would have to rush out and buy the CD to figure out what he was talking about. He started taking all the words out, and basically put all that on my shoulders. I think the satisfaction was in surviving it - the paranoia, the neurosis. The experience was really the hardest school I've ever had to go to. Terry said the way [we] fight is how only brothers fight. I’m not going to repeat what [Sean Penn] said about how tough it was, but I’m going, ‘oh…I’m not so weak after all, if Sean felt like this.’ The amount of notes I threw away!”
JR: “A lot of effort was put toward using very unusual, one-of-a-kind instruments that would create 'fear and chaos' to set a stark contrast to the austerity of Hans' score. However, at the last minute it was decided that these pieces lacked the energy and punch needed. So I replaced them using my own methods. Due to political issues, my credit had to be strange.”
While Zimmer was transparent about his occasional frustrations with the process (“it was a nightmare” per one interview), he also had plenty of positive tales about it. After one case where Malick lamented he wasn’t able to get light like in a Renaissance painting on film, Zimmer wrote a piece that seemed to solve the issue. 'We took out the music, and the light was gone. The music allowed you to see more than there was.” Zimmer would later look back on the final product with great pride. When asked about his favorites among his own scores in 2000, he listed The Thin Red Line as one of his top three. It’s an opinion that would be echoed by HGW, who in 1998 wrote, “The music for The Thin Red Line is outstanding.”
For those curious, Driving Miss Daisy and Gladiator were the other two works mentioned. Two years prior he had also cited A World Apart, “a couple of cues” from Crimson Tide, and Two Deaths as some of the few he was proud of (that’s the same interview where the infamous “there wasn’t any good music in [Days of Thunder]” quote comes from).
HZ: ”The best publicity that The Thin Red Line ever got was when Jerry Bruckheimer put it on the trailer to Pearl Harbor. Everyone wanted to know what that music was. Bruckheimer did more than Fox ever did for that movie.”
Also, a few years ago Francesco Lupica told an amazing story about his involvement. “I was pinching myself. I got an advance for an untitled Terence Malick movie. The beam’s gonna be in a film! But then I’d run into Terry every 4-5 years and he’d say ‘be patient!’ I was in the throes of putting together a nightclub [years later] and I forgot about it.
[Closer to the film’s release] I was broke - I had to move out of my building in two weeks - and I called Terry’s office and they said, ‘how did you know we were looking for you for 5 months? Terry thought maybe you were in jail, so we hired a private detective.’ He even listened to Craig Huxley and said, ‘No! I want Francesco!’ Hans, Terry, Doug Trumbull - they all came over. That was the beginning of being in seven of [his] films.”
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Next time: Holst-er your guns
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