, where he will receive a career achievement tribute on Sept. 30, kicked off – as such things often do – with an offhand comment.
“I had no formal instruction, no mentor and I didn’t know anybody who was scoring film,” he continues. “I learned everything by myself seated with a video tape, stopping and starting with my pause button and my sequencer.” “Atom is a conceptual filmmaker, and he taught me to be a conceptual composer,” Danna says. “Our concept for [“Exotica”] was to take this music from other cultures and bring it into this world of exoticism and projection. I literally took my entire fee and got on a plane with a digital tape recorder. I travelled around Asia for a couple of months to record all the strangest and most interesting things I could.
In “The Ice Storm,” for example, Danna used Balinese gamelan music to contrast a tale of suburban malaise. “The film is about these broken ties of a family and a society, set against music played by a group of people in a village, who all have a strong bond with each other,” he explains. “The music is of a completely opposite social construct to story, and sometimes that contrast is super effective.
No matter the case, whether working in tandem or all on his own, the composer doesn’t change his overall process. “I come up with the concept first,” says Danna. “I think: What is this film about? And then, if I can sum up this film in two sentences, what’s the most elegant musical way of helping people understand that, of conveying that theme without hitting them on the nose?”
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