Timehost: We're very pleased to be joined by one of the greatest film music composers in the history, John Barry.
You all know him for his film scores -- from James Bond -- he wrote ten of the scores -- count 'em ten! -- to "Out of Africa," "Dancing With
Wolves," and "Born Free."
He's just finished a new composition that is not a film score. It's called "The Beyondness of Things," available on CD.
And he's here with us right now...Welcome Mr. Barry.
Guest_John_Barry: Good evening. I'm looking forward to this very much. Thank you.
filippomiller asks: Do you remember the first time you heard about Ian Fleming's James Bond?
Guest_John_Barry: When I was asked to do the theme for "Dr. No," I had never read an Ian Fleming book in my life.
There was a cartoon strip of Bond in "The Daily Mail" and
I knew he was a spy, but I'd never
really followed it. So I guess you could say I was flying by the seat of my pants. I knew the essence of what it was about, but sometimes
that's an advantage because your imagination
kicks in and it's better than research.
Carl_JJ asks: What do you do to get inspiration for your songs ?
Guest_John_Barry: Oh, my God. Every movie has a life of its own.
And as far as the song is concerned, I do love writing an essential theme for a movie. I do think it's a very operatic approach, where I think the main theme should carry the main weight of the drama
through its orchestrations, and changes in tempo.
I try to work that as the essence.
It doesn't work for every movie, but it worked like a dream for "Goldfinger." So the inspiration is what the story is.
"Goldfinger" is a nonsense piece. We all know it's going to work out all right in the end. Other things, more complex things, like "Out of Africa," that's a whole different approach.
So every movie has its own life. And as a music dramatist, you dig into that area, and into your own life's experiences to try and relate that in musical terms.
Mahlers10th asks: Did you listen to Mahler's 10th a lot in preparation for "Somewhere in Time," and if so, did that symphony
influence you later when you did the score for "Chaplin"?
Guest_John_Barry: When I did "Somewhere in Time," they came to
me, the producer and director, and said Mahler would be marvelous for this as a concept. I hadn't seen the movie when they made this suggestion. I adore Mahler. He's one of the most extraordinary composers, a fantastic melodist.
But when I saw the movie, I said the line is too long.
Mahler writes these incredibly long lines, and the movie didn't work
that way. A movie is a much more compact idea.
I suggested, actually, Rachmaninoff, who's a romantic, but who has a brevity about the structure of his music
that I thought was more appropriate for this movie.
If there's anything in my music that comes out Mahleresque, like "Chaplin," it is my love for his sad simplicity.
Very , very sparse, very uninvolved, very no-ornamentation-at-all.
There's no massive orchestration, just very simple counter melodies.
It's the most profound, simple statement of a state of sadness
because he basically was a very tragic writer.
And when I saw the opening of "Chaplin," when he started
with his hat and the mustache, and when he started to strip away
the image - the world only knew Chaplin as that man -
and when he took it off in front of the mirror and at the end
you were confronted with this simple actor, I thought it corresponded with that same idea.
Guest_John_Barry: I knew a lot about Chaplin.
When my father came from Ireland, he worked at the same theater, so I knew a lot about Chaplin from a personal level.
If there ever was a tragic clown, it was Chaplin.
And so I asked Richard Attenborough, the director, "Can I just go away and write
what I'm going to write?"
And I think they thought that I was going to write something funny.
The way Richard shot the movie and Downey performed it, I found it absolutely tragic, knowing a lot of actors and being around them all my life. And seeing when they take that thing off and they're less with their own selves. In many ways, it's a rather tragic state of affairs and Chaplin epitomized that.
When I played my music for Richard and he started to cry,
I said, "I can write a happy music, but I think that would go against the movie," and he agreed.
It's so tragically sad but I think it said a lot immediately about what we were about to get into because he was a very tortured man.
chessiel asks: Do you think it is ironic that many of your movie works are for the same stars, i.e. Sean Connery, Michael
Caine, Kathleen Turner ?
Guest_John_Barry: No, with Sean I had 12 movies, that was the longest series probably in the history of the cinema, and
each of those movies had an hour of music in them.
So that's 12 hours of music. And people ask why I quit!
I did the vintage Bond thing and it came to the end of me.
And the other movie I did with Sean was "Robin and Marian," which
was a totally different sphere. But I'm not the casting director.
It's a coincidence, it's a random thing. It's not something I look to do or my agents look to do.
mojave1 asks: How long does the process take for any given film?
Guest_John_Barry: It changes.
You know, sometimes I'll get a call where they'll say, "We've just finished this movie. We need the music in six weeks' time."
That happened in "Robin and Marian."
In other situations, where I knew the director very well, I read the script ahead of time and spent time with the actors, but there are no rules, no rules whatsoever.
Sometimes the speed of the spontaneity is terrific. You
don't get much time to think and you just hit a spark and you can
hit some type of excitement in that six week period, if you like.
And sometimes, you're lucky to hit on any thing.
There are variants and you have to deal with all of them.
Or sometimes just walk away from them, saying you don't have enough time because I cannot perceive that I can adequately deal with the problems to do justice to them.
That happens quite a lot.
Timehost: Here's a kind of follow-up...I guess they want you to name names...
aaron_1999_1998 asks: Have you ever worked on a film you were not fond of?
Guest_John_Barry: No. I don't think anyone goes into a movie they're not fond of. They're a few tramps who do.
I'm talking about certain kinds of actors. I take pride in what I do, so
when I get involved in a movie, I most certainly go in with 100 percent enthusiasm. What has happened is when you're three or four weeks in, and you see the way it's shaping up, or not shaping up (like they say in LA, "We're not all on
the same page."), then I have removed myself from various, rather important movies. And that's not because I'm arrogant it's because
I think the director would be better served with another composer,
We don't see the characters in the same way.
When we discuss the characters, it's not a question of me being right and them being wrong. It's a question of we're not coinciding, we're not melting into the same pot.
And when you're not doing that, you're making lousy soup.
I get accused at times of being arrogant.
I left "The Prince of Tides" with Barbara Streisand, one of the most
talented people on the face of the earth.
We didn't agree about the movie and a lot of things have been written about this separation that are quite wrong.
It was actually quite respectful.
I just said, "I think you need another composer. I don't think I'm right." For me, composing is a very lonely piece of behavior, it's very intense. I can't take input every minute. I need to go away and run.
I can't say , "Let me go away and walk and I'll see you tomorrow and
we'll see how far I've gotten." There are composers who can work like that. I'm not that kind of composer, who likes everyday communication with the director.
Guest_John_Barry: I think it's better to spit it out right away, because if you don't, it only gets wronger, if there's a word like that ... more wrong. Alan J. Lerner, who was one of the finest
librettists of the century, called me and asked me to be
involved in "Lolita," and we worked together for two years
and we never got it right. The first act was great, but the second act was obsession and that's a very difficult thing to put on stage.
And I remember Alan telling me one day how much it bothered him when some main thing went wrong in a project and people say yes when they mean no and no when they mean yes.
It sounds like an extraordinary oversimplification, but when people
stop being honest with each other, about what the problems are, it can be quite irksome. I like to work with people who when they say yes mean yes, and when they say no, mean no.
Otherwise, it only gets worse. I've never known it to get better.
rossholliday asks: Welcome, John. This is my first chat as well. How much do the actors affect the score itself? Do different
"Bonds," for instance, inspire different scores?
Guest_John_Barry: Actors affect the score...very much so.
Just as the lighting affects it, just as the camera movement affects it,
just as the whole directorial style affects what the music is.
But Bond is a bad example because it's like a cartoon.
I'm not diminishing the movies, but I remember
when Sean left and we did "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," I started
to do different things with the music.
We were faced with George Lazanby and I felt the need to
go back to the epitome of Bondian music so that I would
try to recapture in the audience's ear the original Sean Connery image, if you like. I was trying to impose on Lazanby the suaveness, the humor, and I really overdid the score.
Many people think "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" was the best Bond score.
I have no opinion, but I do know I really overstepped the mark
in trying to give George what I had given Sean.
What I gave Sean became very natural to me.
When I was faced with George, God bless him, I really felt
I had to enforce those same qualities, lay it on with
three spoons if you like, so that
when people saw this new Bond face on the screen, the music
would take them in a memory lapse back to the old Bond movies.
And maybe that's why some people think "On On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is the best Bond score because I went over the top to try and help George Lazanby with his task.
Guest_John_Barry: On a movie like "Body Heat," when you're asking about actresses, it was Kathleen Turner's first major movie,
and she brought to that movie the whole score for me.
If ever an actress or an actor steered me in a direction, it was her.
She was magnificent, she was selfish, she was manipulative, she
was beautiful, she was sexy and that's where the score lay.
If it had been Debbie Reynolds, it wouldn't have come out like that.
That was the best role she ever had and ever did, and she
brought to it such a dimension, it really made the score.
And I can't think of anyone who really dominated in such a way.
She certainly dominated William Hurt . Despite the apparent strength he thought he had, underneath he was really dominated by that woman. And that's where that came into play.
I can't think of any one, even Faye Dunaway, who could have
played that part and brought to me so strongly what I wanted to do
in that score. It's a lovely surprise to have that kind of strength to work with.
Timehost: Here's a question about your new CD...
alexmaron asks: From Brazil again. What is "Beyondness of Things" all about? It's background music, it's relaxing, it's
classic? Or nothing like that?
Guest_John_Barry: It's none of those.
The questioner makes it sound as if it's ...well, I don't know.
For 25 years I hadn't done a non-soundtrack album.
Chris Roberts of PolyGram called me up three years ago and said "We'd love you to do a non-soundtrack album, just what you'd like."
I'd had this title, "The Beyondness of Things," written down in the back of a piece of paper in an old wallet.
Ernst Block has written on his grave "To go beyond is to think."
It was Scott Fitzgerald who said "When you write, you'd better write about something you know."
When I sat down with the first challenge, I thought "What the hell do I know?" I know my own life, so I scored my own life,
Not in a deep structural way. It was a very random way. Some thoughts from my childhood, some from coming to America , some from London, they were flashes of moments that grab you one way or the other. There was one track which was totally to do with a Friday night when I walked down the Strand and heard that JFK had been assassinated, and being of Irish Catholic origin, it was the most horrific thing. One couldn't imagine that this man had been shot down by some third rate person. But you know, you shouldn't explain music or poetry. It's a musical biography.
Just like if you have a slow afternoon, wherever you live, and you have a brandy and ginger ale, and you reflect on your life and
remember something your mother said when you were four, some
awful thing that happened when you were nine, and
if you just made notes of 12 simple, memorable things that happened on an emotional level, some of them
delightfully happy, some sad, some whimsical, that's how
I wrote "The Beyondness of Things."
In the sleeve notes I explain it's something that will live with
you for the rest of your life and it will always be there.
Guest_John_Barry: Some of the thoughts are funny.
There's one track called "Nocturnal New York."
It's not very profound, but I just love New York.
It's a certain magic about the magnificence of New York.
It's terribly beautiful and terribly complex,
and thank God I'm in it. It's the capital of the Western world.
The track's not very profound, but the John F. Kennedy one is.
The CD ends with "Dance with Reality"
because at the end of the day you have to end with reality,
I wanted to have a happy, joyous dance with reality.
If you want to maintain your sanity, that's what you have to do.
Guest_John_Barry: I might add that I had initial arguments about the title...what does it mean?
This thing has grown and grown and grown,
and I don't know why. It's not a blatantly commercial album,
but it's touched a vein and it's grown.
It's just been released in New York and it's reached the 16th in the crossover area. When I write, I'm writing because I want to write,
I'm enjoying it because I want to write it. I'm not being manipulative. I just hope that somebody out there is catching on to it. I hope that my idea of 12 tracks that resonate
will catch on with all people. They are not symphonic,
they are vignettes. Jung wrote of dreams, memories, and reflections -- and that's what they are.
But it seems, it's becoming apparent through the acceptance of the album that a lot of people are
relating to these dreams, memories and reflections.
Even if they are not the same as mine.
That's the most extraordinary thing about music because it's the most universal language. It's boundless, accessible, the most boundless language possible.
The_Singing_Producer asks: What music do you like to listen to other than yours?
Guest_John_Barry: Do you have three hours?
I listen to my own music only when I've recorded it.
I listen to it, to see what kind of changes I want to make.
When I've written it, I will work on it for the four, five six weeks,
and then I run away from it because I'm still listening to every flaw.
And then I can come back to it. What I listen to is very wide.
Mostly classical: Mozart, Beethoven is my god,
Mahler, Bruckner, Bartok, Stravinsky,
Gorecki, Debussy. I'm in love with everybody.
I don't have snob appeal. I don't draw lines.
All the Broadway composers to the Gershwins, Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern. They were the theatrical melodists.
The jazz of the 50's: Stan Kenton,
Jerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker,
the Modern Jazz Quartet. All that happened in the 50's on the West Coast was extraordinary. A totally different breed of jazz musician.
I loved Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong. In fact, I had the pleasure of recording the last song Louis Armstrong ever wrote,
"All the Time in the World."
It was the most unsuccessful song in the world until two years ago, until it was a hit in a British Guinness commercial.
I don't know what that proves.
I'd wind up in sessions with Shelly Mann, Stan Kenton's drummer,
Bud Shank, and Ray Brown. And here was a young guy from Yorkshire with these greats. In mid 1975, I was in studios with my gods. Do you know what it's like as a composer to work with this kind of people?
Timehost: Tying in with your remark that you're in love with everybody....
j71rz asks: What do you think of conductor John Williams and his work for the "Star Wars" movies??
Guest_John_Barry: I think John got hold of that project and did the most spectacular job imaginable. He created the size, the magnificence, the humor, as in the bar scene. He's doing the new one now. John is an extraordinary composer, the most charming man you ever met in your life, but subtle and talented as hell.
I don't know anyone else who could have brought that to the first "Star Wars" series, and I know that he is going to bring that to the new series. People forget that he has composed lots of other movies besides "Star Wars." His work has always been extraordinarily sympathetic, he's a composer of great understanding.
I don't think John Williams has ever, ever written a bad score.
Mr_Big_2_U asks: What did you want to be when you where a little kid?
Guest_John_Barry: A concert pianist. I had a very good technique,
but I was in the north of England in the mid-30's
and no one had the intelligence to tell me I should have a magnificent memory, too. I have the worst memory.
Where am I now? Who am I speaking to?
When I listen to Von Karajan, he committed to his brain about 30 or 40 of the greatest symphonies in the world.
God gave him that extraordinary ability. He comprehends from bar one. Instead of looking at the score he can just spiritually take off.
There are other composers in this century who are great,
but I think he will go down as the greatest.
Technically brilliant with a great memory.
And I can't remember what yesterday was.
Even when I stand up in Albert Hall.
I think it's a question of courage, strangely.
I can remember symphonies in my own living room, but when you put me in front of a large group of people, I forget.
I think it's because I'm shy.
But if I had been a classical pianist , I probably would have been a clap-out classical pianist. The mistakes that often happen in your life become the gifts. I'm now 66, and I'm going to Birmingham Symphony Hall, then the Royal Albert Hall in London,
and I'm writing stuff that I want to write.
I would rather be where I am now, than where my original ambitions would have thrown me.
I would have by now been playing in a bar on Fifth Avenue
taking five dollar tips.
Thank God I'm not a classical pianist.
Thank God I'm a movie music composer.
You wind up where you are.
Change is the most extraordinary thing.
Some people feel it will destroy them.
But it's the most important thing.
It could be the most magnificent thing that could happen in your life.
Embrace change with the passion that you felt for your first love.
Timehost: And if you can just tell us very briefly whether or not you're involved in any upcoming movies, we'll end on that....
Guest_John_Barry: I'm not working on any upcoming movies.
I'm doing the concerts in London.
There's an extraordinary gentlemen John O'Donahue who's written an extraordinary book called "Anam Cara."
It was based on the spiritual wisdom of the Celtic World.
He's just written a new book called "Eternal Echoes: Exploring the Yearning to Belong."
I'm doing my next album, at the end of August or September,
with four or five songs, with a symphony orchestra., and it's to do with the Celtic nation.
But I don't want to associate myself with all the Celtic fashions in vogue now. I want to focus on what that society must have been like.
They were the only society that never built cities or statues.
I hate to sound like a 60's flower child, but I think that O'Donahue is one of the most extraordinary truthful spiritual thinkers around.
My next album is what I really want to do.
It's called "Longing and Belonging"
and is about a Celtic way of life. Very profound,
very simple and beautiful. The last resonance of these people is in Ireland, but people don't understand that they were in Italy, and northern France, everywhere across Europe.
I don't want anybody to think John Barry is just doing a Celtic album...it's not the fiddle playing crap.
It's a celebration of a quality of life, of a behavioral approach that is very close to the American Indian.
Timehost: Great. Thank you very much for being with us this evening, Mr. Barry.
I'm afraid we'll have to stop here because the room is going to close.
But a big thanks to you for joining us this evening!
Guest_John_Barry: My pleasure.
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