Features | Interviews
Mychael Danna
By Craig Eley | 25 July 2006
Canadian composer Mychael Danna has scored over 20 films, including Capote, The Ice Storm, The Sweet Hereafter, and, most recently, Little Miss Sunshine, in collaboration with DeVotchKa. The soundtrack came out this week on Lakeshore Records, and the movie is in theaters this summer. He recently sat down with CMG's Craig Eley to talk about the politics of folk music, the significance of soundtracks, working with DeVotchKa, and Canadian Radio.
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CMG’s Craig Eley (CMG): You work often has an international scope, and DeVotchKa’s sound is usually described as being Eastern European, but how, specifically, did this collaboration come about?
Mychael Danna (MD): It was basically the brainchild of the music supervisor, Sue Jacobs, who I worked with onMonsoon Wedding. I believe that we worked on other things, too, but I think that was the piece that made her, you know, aware that I was able to collaborate with songs and all kind of different instruments, and I have an ear for unusual arrangements, and unusual situations, and this was all of the above.
CMG: So you hadn’t heard DeVotchKa’s work before Sue Jacobs suggested this?
MD: That’s correct, I wasn’t aware of them, but the directors actually heard them on NPR. They heard one of their songs and thought that sound would be perfect for the movie. I think it was early on in the process before they were even shooting, or something. They heard it, and then found out more about them. When I heard it, as well, I completely agreed that it was a perfect sound, and feeling, and atmosphere for the film.
CMG: Did you and the band work together to decide which pieces would become the instrumental score to the film? Some of the themes from “You Love Me” and “How it Ends” recur throughout the score.
MD: Yeah, we sat down with the directors, and the directors' background is very much song-based. They’re very successful and very talented music video directors, worked with some of the biggest artists ever, and they obviously have a real feel for songs and images. They were less confident about their understanding of what a score is in a feature film, and that’s where I came in to help… I mean, that’s what a film score is, as opposed to just song and then something completely unrelated and then another song and then something else completely unrelated. I helped to just join the dots and have some kind of arc to the music that you are hearing in the film, have connections made that can strengthen our feelings of character development and familiarity with the characters, and just help tell the story in a linear way with the music. So we sat down and they had songs that they liked here and there, and then it became a matter of how to make connective tissue; to pick up on those themes and turn them into film score themes. It was a search for the best of both worlds: to have songs that were kind of fun to listen to, but also be able to tell the story with those themes.
CMG: I guess that leads me to a broader question. When you’re talking about score, and the way the sound and the visual interact within film, is it still important to think about how it works as an album? Does it make any sense to think about a soundtrack outside of the experience of cinema?
MD: Well, that’s an excellent question. What I try with all of my work is to make the music, first of all, serve the film psychically, and dramatically, and emotionally, but also to make music that stands alone, that picks up on the atmosphere of the film and transports you back to that, but also to stand on its own and be musically complete. It doesn’t need dialogue and image to make it complete. So yeah, that’s something that I tried to do, and it’s certainly something in a score like this where the band is a big part of the equation. It’s much easier, and a much more satisfying outcome. Certainly, an album of just DeVotchKa’s songs would be fantastic as well. Hopefully the kind of thematic bits that we have here are amusing to listen to away from the images of the film.
CMG: I also imagine that collaborations like this can be fun. I’m wondering, specifically, about Greg Kinnear playing the glockenspiel on “The Winner Is?”
MD: You know, the film is about a family, and they are very family-ish people, and everyone that worked with [directors] John and Val on this just kind of entered the family. So when we were recording we had all kinds of people drop in. We were just playing around and having fun, and we had this little glockenspiel part to do, and one thing lead to another and Greg ended up with the mallet in his hand playing the part. The sessions were great, you know, the guys in the band are open and fun, and they’ve a different perspective from the usual set of players that I work with, so it was really creative. A great, creative atmosphere.
CMG: I’ve read that some of the previous work you’ve done didn’t involve writing out music for traditional musicians. You would work with folk musicians, record it on location, and then take it back to the studio to manipulate later. I imagine there is a big difference between working with folk musicians and working with a rock band, and I wonder if that affected your process.
MD: That’s a good question. I think that the film you are talking about, and I’ve done this many times before, is 8mm, where I was in Morocco for a couple of weeks and I recorded a bunch of folk musicians, and got them to do their thing. I would shape them a bit, but really they just do what they do and you can’t really force them, you can’t drop a score in front of them. You just have to take that stuff, take it apart, and then put it back together again. In a way, a rock band is similar to that in that they have a thing they do, and you get the best result when you work with that as opposed to against it. You can’t force alien ideas onto it. In this case it’s a little different, because most of these guys read music. I was able to drop a tuba or trumpet part on a stand, and they were just playing it. The idea of it, since a lot of the ideas and themes came from their work anyway, allowed me to just work with their style and their flow. I think it that way it’s collaborative, and there is certainly no language barrier (laughs), which happens with a lot of the work I end up doing.
CMG: Let’s talk more about the folk musicians. You’ve been able to do a lot of travel with the kind of work and music you are interested in, and I’m wondering if there’s something inherently political about using sounds from all over the world and interacting with people from other places?
MD: Yeah, I think you’re right there, especially because when I started doing this it was pretty unusual. Now, some 10 years on, almost every film score uses all kinds of ethnic instruments. If I hear another duduk in a film score my head will explode, you know? It’s now getting ridiculous. But, on the other hand, the people who generally do that stuff, they don’t…For instance, in the duduk’s case, I’ve been to Yerevan, Armenia, and recorded it there. Does that change the end result? Yeah, I think it does. It’s just such a different experience than calling a guy from across town to come and do a session. It is political. I have strong feelings in that way, and I just love to make it an inclusive thing. And also, I think the respect you give people as musicians and as human beings is just something that is done on their home ground. You come to them: you go to Morocco, you go to Armenia, you work with people in their settings and give them the respect of their culture. I do a lot of research, I don’t just drop in. I try to understand the music technically and also where it comes from culturally. I learn what its purpose is in the culture, and what meaning it has to that culture. If you do that kind of work and give people that kind of respect you have a result that is beyond calling in the duduk player from Sherman Oaks, or whatever. It’s a different thing.
CMG: And is this kind of political thinking the same reason you tend to work on smaller, more artistic films and with directors who are known for that kind of work?
MD: Yeah, it’s a more fun sandbox to play in and I have more freedom that way. The less money there is in a film the freedom you seem to have, and that is the way to go. The ethnomusicological approach to film scoring that I’ve been doing for a long time is now part of the standard approach to film scoring. Even in bigger movies you hear it. People are better educated now, and it’s good to see, but 15 years ago you would have the “Arab character” and you would hear tabla or something, you know? Just complete errors. Now I think people are a lot more culturally aware, so in bigger films you can still play with these ideas, especially in the last few years. But with directors like Jon and Val I learn things. And that’s when it is the most fun, when I’m pushed to a place when I don’t know, and I have to expand and research. Little Miss Sunshine fit for me like that. It was the first time I ever worked with a folk-rock band like this, and it was a really interesting experience. They’re lovely people, the guys in DeVotchKa. I did actually go on location. Instead of Yerevan it was Denver (laughs). But I got to see them in their space, see how they work, and it was a sweet experience.
CMG: You mentioning the “Arab character” is interesting, because I’ve been watching a lot of Westerns and noticing the Native American drums and chanting that often accompanies them on-screen. Is that something that you think the casual viewer is keyed into? Are soundtracks representationally significant? Or is “film music,” like some people suggest, synonymous with “background music?”
MD: When score music repeats what’s on the screen, and is redundant that way, that’s when I think it is pointless, boring, and nobody gets anything out of that. It’s just reinforcing what we already see and it dumbs down the experience because all of your senses are telling you the same thing. It’s so much more fun when the music is enlightening the story but telling you something from a different angel or telling you something that you’re not seeing on the screen. That is when “background music” is at its most powerful. And you might not even know exactly why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. To throw out another example, this film The Sweet Hereafter is about a small town in Canada, a kind of village. For scoring we used an analogy of the Pied Piper, which is a story that’s read in the film. We used this village music from medieval Europe, so I got this medieval band to play all these great old instruments. So again, you’ll be hearing this music, and most people who aren’t music historians didn’t know what they were hearing. You wouldn’t know that this was medieval German music, a sac-button recorder and all that, but it’s really the sense of a small, insular community that doesn’t really know what’s outside its own borders. That’s what we were going for with that music. Hopefully that translates to someone who is not educated musically as well as someone who knows exactly what they are listening to. Hopefully it works musically, emotionally, and intellectually. With Ice Storm, for example, you’re watching this suburban landscape and you have Native American flute playing. Hopefully it will register way in their subconscious: what is there in common between this and a Native American community? Or what is it contrasting? This is what music can do. It can suggest contrasts and comparisons that you feel at a lower level.
CMG: I imagine that some of this development that you are talking about comes from the relationship you have with the director. I know with The Sweet Hereafter you worked with Atom Egoyen, and you’ve done a lot of work with him.
MD: I definitely resonate very well with directors that have that sense of working from several levels in a film, that kind of intellectual play. Films have to work on the surface: the emotional and narrative levels. But it is so much more rewarding when you can make it work on deeper levels. Atom, obviously, and Ang Lee, guys who are masters of that, and Bennet Miller, from Capote… these are guys that really know what they’re making. They’re in full control. People like that are the best to work with because music can really stir up those hidden layers. So, the intellectual analysis and process of these lower layers might be something that people aren’t always aware of, but it does resonate through all of the strata of a film. It makes it feel cohesive, like something that is in concert with itself.
CMG: Besides composition, there seems to be another way to go about this, which is to use all popular, recorded songs. How do you react to this as a composer and as someone who watches films?
MD: You know, every film is different, obviously, and needs to be approached with a completely open mind and a completely blank slate. There’s films that I think shouldn’t have any music in them, and I’m a composer [laughs], but there’s films that work best like that. There are films that work best with nothing but songs. If it’s true to itself and it tells what it needs to tell, and the director’s themes are illuminated in that way, then that’s the right answer. I guess that’s what I’m saying. We’re all in search of the right answer, the best, most elegant answer to the way music can service a film. How can music tell a story? How can it help the director illuminate his aims? That’s the bottom line. I don’t care how you do it. Nothing’s insulting, nothing’s wrong. I mean, when it’s the wrong answer I’ll probably be more insulted than anybody [laughs]. If they shouldn’t have used those songs and they did, then it was lazy, or bad judgment, or politically imposed on them, or whatever. And there are so many different forces. Film is a many-headed monster, and there are so many forces pulling it in different directions. All kinds of forces of art and commerce battling it out. When I see things that I think are wrong, I’m pretty sympathetic, because there are many ways that the apple cart can get upset.
CMG: In terms of the search for answers, do you have a few favorite composers?
MD: You know, I get asked that question a lot, and I really need to sit down and think that through. I have things that I like, but… I don’t know. I need to give some time to that one. I get asked what my favorite score is and I don’t even know. That’s embarrassing.
CMG: What about non-scores? Any pop records that you’re listening to?
MD: I listen to a lot of stuff, really wide-ranging. I listen to the radio a lot, especially college radio, where I can hear things that I’m not normally going to bump up against. I had an iPod, and I actually eBayed it. I found it limiting, in a sense. I already know what I like, and I don’t need to hear it over and over again. I’m a serial listener. I don’t really listen to things much more than once, which is a bit weird, I guess. I never really articulated that to myself before… I have some things that I listen to over and over again, but its old, historic stuff. As far as current music goes, I hop around, which is how DeVotchKa ended up on this film. The directors listen to NPR, and find them. That is something I miss from Canada. The radio up there is pretty exploratory, and it’s a lot harder to find that here in Los Angeles.
CMG: I meant to ask you where you were living, because this website is technically Canadian.
MD: Oh really? Yeah, I’m in Los Angeles. We’ve been here for a couple years, just to travel a little less as far as the production side of things. Of course, I’m still traveling to record, but I’m trying to be a bit more centered with the people I’m working with. We actually love it here, I didn’t expect to, but I think it’s a great place in so many ways. You can make whatever you want of it. But thing I really miss from Canada is the radio. I really discovered a lot of new things.
CMG: So, last question. With your first foray into working with a rock band, is it something that you could see yourself doing again? Will you be producing pop records any time soon?
MD: Um, maybe. I’m a serialist in that I don’t end up doing things more than once or twice. Like I said, I loved the experience. It’s fun to go on and do something else now. But yeah, I would be open to the idea again, and I’m sure most bands aren’t going to be as mellow and cool as these guys were. I’d work with them again anytime.
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CMG’s Craig Eley (CMG): You work often has an international scope, and DeVotchKa’s sound is usually described as being Eastern European, but how, specifically, did this collaboration come about?
Mychael Danna (MD): It was basically the brainchild of the music supervisor, Sue Jacobs, who I worked with on
CMG: So you hadn’t heard DeVotchKa’s work before Sue Jacobs suggested this?
MD: That’s correct, I wasn’t aware of them, but the directors actually heard them on NPR. They heard one of their songs and thought that sound would be perfect for the movie. I think it was early on in the process before they were even shooting, or something. They heard it, and then found out more about them. When I heard it, as well, I completely agreed that it was a perfect sound, and feeling, and atmosphere for the film.
CMG: Did you and the band work together to decide which pieces would become the instrumental score to the film? Some of the themes from “You Love Me” and “How it Ends” recur throughout the score.
MD: Yeah, we sat down with the directors, and the directors' background is very much song-based. They’re very successful and very talented music video directors, worked with some of the biggest artists ever, and they obviously have a real feel for songs and images. They were less confident about their understanding of what a score is in a feature film, and that’s where I came in to help… I mean, that’s what a film score is, as opposed to just song and then something completely unrelated and then another song and then something else completely unrelated. I helped to just join the dots and have some kind of arc to the music that you are hearing in the film, have connections made that can strengthen our feelings of character development and familiarity with the characters, and just help tell the story in a linear way with the music. So we sat down and they had songs that they liked here and there, and then it became a matter of how to make connective tissue; to pick up on those themes and turn them into film score themes. It was a search for the best of both worlds: to have songs that were kind of fun to listen to, but also be able to tell the story with those themes.
CMG: I guess that leads me to a broader question. When you’re talking about score, and the way the sound and the visual interact within film, is it still important to think about how it works as an album? Does it make any sense to think about a soundtrack outside of the experience of cinema?
MD: Well, that’s an excellent question. What I try with all of my work is to make the music, first of all, serve the film psychically, and dramatically, and emotionally, but also to make music that stands alone, that picks up on the atmosphere of the film and transports you back to that, but also to stand on its own and be musically complete. It doesn’t need dialogue and image to make it complete. So yeah, that’s something that I tried to do, and it’s certainly something in a score like this where the band is a big part of the equation. It’s much easier, and a much more satisfying outcome. Certainly, an album of just DeVotchKa’s songs would be fantastic as well. Hopefully the kind of thematic bits that we have here are amusing to listen to away from the images of the film.
CMG: I also imagine that collaborations like this can be fun. I’m wondering, specifically, about Greg Kinnear playing the glockenspiel on “The Winner Is?”
MD: You know, the film is about a family, and they are very family-ish people, and everyone that worked with [directors] John and Val on this just kind of entered the family. So when we were recording we had all kinds of people drop in. We were just playing around and having fun, and we had this little glockenspiel part to do, and one thing lead to another and Greg ended up with the mallet in his hand playing the part. The sessions were great, you know, the guys in the band are open and fun, and they’ve a different perspective from the usual set of players that I work with, so it was really creative. A great, creative atmosphere.
CMG: I’ve read that some of the previous work you’ve done didn’t involve writing out music for traditional musicians. You would work with folk musicians, record it on location, and then take it back to the studio to manipulate later. I imagine there is a big difference between working with folk musicians and working with a rock band, and I wonder if that affected your process.
MD: That’s a good question. I think that the film you are talking about, and I’ve done this many times before, is 8mm, where I was in Morocco for a couple of weeks and I recorded a bunch of folk musicians, and got them to do their thing. I would shape them a bit, but really they just do what they do and you can’t really force them, you can’t drop a score in front of them. You just have to take that stuff, take it apart, and then put it back together again. In a way, a rock band is similar to that in that they have a thing they do, and you get the best result when you work with that as opposed to against it. You can’t force alien ideas onto it. In this case it’s a little different, because most of these guys read music. I was able to drop a tuba or trumpet part on a stand, and they were just playing it. The idea of it, since a lot of the ideas and themes came from their work anyway, allowed me to just work with their style and their flow. I think it that way it’s collaborative, and there is certainly no language barrier (laughs), which happens with a lot of the work I end up doing.
CMG: Let’s talk more about the folk musicians. You’ve been able to do a lot of travel with the kind of work and music you are interested in, and I’m wondering if there’s something inherently political about using sounds from all over the world and interacting with people from other places?
MD: Yeah, I think you’re right there, especially because when I started doing this it was pretty unusual. Now, some 10 years on, almost every film score uses all kinds of ethnic instruments. If I hear another duduk in a film score my head will explode, you know? It’s now getting ridiculous. But, on the other hand, the people who generally do that stuff, they don’t…For instance, in the duduk’s case, I’ve been to Yerevan, Armenia, and recorded it there. Does that change the end result? Yeah, I think it does. It’s just such a different experience than calling a guy from across town to come and do a session. It is political. I have strong feelings in that way, and I just love to make it an inclusive thing. And also, I think the respect you give people as musicians and as human beings is just something that is done on their home ground. You come to them: you go to Morocco, you go to Armenia, you work with people in their settings and give them the respect of their culture. I do a lot of research, I don’t just drop in. I try to understand the music technically and also where it comes from culturally. I learn what its purpose is in the culture, and what meaning it has to that culture. If you do that kind of work and give people that kind of respect you have a result that is beyond calling in the duduk player from Sherman Oaks, or whatever. It’s a different thing.
CMG: And is this kind of political thinking the same reason you tend to work on smaller, more artistic films and with directors who are known for that kind of work?
MD: Yeah, it’s a more fun sandbox to play in and I have more freedom that way. The less money there is in a film the freedom you seem to have, and that is the way to go. The ethnomusicological approach to film scoring that I’ve been doing for a long time is now part of the standard approach to film scoring. Even in bigger movies you hear it. People are better educated now, and it’s good to see, but 15 years ago you would have the “Arab character” and you would hear tabla or something, you know? Just complete errors. Now I think people are a lot more culturally aware, so in bigger films you can still play with these ideas, especially in the last few years. But with directors like Jon and Val I learn things. And that’s when it is the most fun, when I’m pushed to a place when I don’t know, and I have to expand and research. Little Miss Sunshine fit for me like that. It was the first time I ever worked with a folk-rock band like this, and it was a really interesting experience. They’re lovely people, the guys in DeVotchKa. I did actually go on location. Instead of Yerevan it was Denver (laughs). But I got to see them in their space, see how they work, and it was a sweet experience.
CMG: You mentioning the “Arab character” is interesting, because I’ve been watching a lot of Westerns and noticing the Native American drums and chanting that often accompanies them on-screen. Is that something that you think the casual viewer is keyed into? Are soundtracks representationally significant? Or is “film music,” like some people suggest, synonymous with “background music?”
MD: When score music repeats what’s on the screen, and is redundant that way, that’s when I think it is pointless, boring, and nobody gets anything out of that. It’s just reinforcing what we already see and it dumbs down the experience because all of your senses are telling you the same thing. It’s so much more fun when the music is enlightening the story but telling you something from a different angel or telling you something that you’re not seeing on the screen. That is when “background music” is at its most powerful. And you might not even know exactly why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. To throw out another example, this film The Sweet Hereafter is about a small town in Canada, a kind of village. For scoring we used an analogy of the Pied Piper, which is a story that’s read in the film. We used this village music from medieval Europe, so I got this medieval band to play all these great old instruments. So again, you’ll be hearing this music, and most people who aren’t music historians didn’t know what they were hearing. You wouldn’t know that this was medieval German music, a sac-button recorder and all that, but it’s really the sense of a small, insular community that doesn’t really know what’s outside its own borders. That’s what we were going for with that music. Hopefully that translates to someone who is not educated musically as well as someone who knows exactly what they are listening to. Hopefully it works musically, emotionally, and intellectually. With Ice Storm, for example, you’re watching this suburban landscape and you have Native American flute playing. Hopefully it will register way in their subconscious: what is there in common between this and a Native American community? Or what is it contrasting? This is what music can do. It can suggest contrasts and comparisons that you feel at a lower level.
CMG: I imagine that some of this development that you are talking about comes from the relationship you have with the director. I know with The Sweet Hereafter you worked with Atom Egoyen, and you’ve done a lot of work with him.
MD: I definitely resonate very well with directors that have that sense of working from several levels in a film, that kind of intellectual play. Films have to work on the surface: the emotional and narrative levels. But it is so much more rewarding when you can make it work on deeper levels. Atom, obviously, and Ang Lee, guys who are masters of that, and Bennet Miller, from Capote… these are guys that really know what they’re making. They’re in full control. People like that are the best to work with because music can really stir up those hidden layers. So, the intellectual analysis and process of these lower layers might be something that people aren’t always aware of, but it does resonate through all of the strata of a film. It makes it feel cohesive, like something that is in concert with itself.
CMG: Besides composition, there seems to be another way to go about this, which is to use all popular, recorded songs. How do you react to this as a composer and as someone who watches films?
MD: You know, every film is different, obviously, and needs to be approached with a completely open mind and a completely blank slate. There’s films that I think shouldn’t have any music in them, and I’m a composer [laughs], but there’s films that work best like that. There are films that work best with nothing but songs. If it’s true to itself and it tells what it needs to tell, and the director’s themes are illuminated in that way, then that’s the right answer. I guess that’s what I’m saying. We’re all in search of the right answer, the best, most elegant answer to the way music can service a film. How can music tell a story? How can it help the director illuminate his aims? That’s the bottom line. I don’t care how you do it. Nothing’s insulting, nothing’s wrong. I mean, when it’s the wrong answer I’ll probably be more insulted than anybody [laughs]. If they shouldn’t have used those songs and they did, then it was lazy, or bad judgment, or politically imposed on them, or whatever. And there are so many different forces. Film is a many-headed monster, and there are so many forces pulling it in different directions. All kinds of forces of art and commerce battling it out. When I see things that I think are wrong, I’m pretty sympathetic, because there are many ways that the apple cart can get upset.
CMG: In terms of the search for answers, do you have a few favorite composers?
MD: You know, I get asked that question a lot, and I really need to sit down and think that through. I have things that I like, but… I don’t know. I need to give some time to that one. I get asked what my favorite score is and I don’t even know. That’s embarrassing.
CMG: What about non-scores? Any pop records that you’re listening to?
MD: I listen to a lot of stuff, really wide-ranging. I listen to the radio a lot, especially college radio, where I can hear things that I’m not normally going to bump up against. I had an iPod, and I actually eBayed it. I found it limiting, in a sense. I already know what I like, and I don’t need to hear it over and over again. I’m a serial listener. I don’t really listen to things much more than once, which is a bit weird, I guess. I never really articulated that to myself before… I have some things that I listen to over and over again, but its old, historic stuff. As far as current music goes, I hop around, which is how DeVotchKa ended up on this film. The directors listen to NPR, and find them. That is something I miss from Canada. The radio up there is pretty exploratory, and it’s a lot harder to find that here in Los Angeles.
CMG: I meant to ask you where you were living, because this website is technically Canadian.
MD: Oh really? Yeah, I’m in Los Angeles. We’ve been here for a couple years, just to travel a little less as far as the production side of things. Of course, I’m still traveling to record, but I’m trying to be a bit more centered with the people I’m working with. We actually love it here, I didn’t expect to, but I think it’s a great place in so many ways. You can make whatever you want of it. But thing I really miss from Canada is the radio. I really discovered a lot of new things.
CMG: So, last question. With your first foray into working with a rock band, is it something that you could see yourself doing again? Will you be producing pop records any time soon?
MD: Um, maybe. I’m a serialist in that I don’t end up doing things more than once or twice. Like I said, I loved the experience. It’s fun to go on and do something else now. But yeah, I would be open to the idea again, and I’m sure most bands aren’t going to be as mellow and cool as these guys were. I’d work with them again anytime.