Imagine “Star Wars” with no John Williams. “The Lord of the Rings” without Howard Shore”s swells of epic music. It”s actually not so easy even if you try.
Both of those composers are featured in “Score: A Film Music Documentary,” currently in the works. You can see Williams and Shore in the HitFix exclusive clip from the doc at the top of this post, which spotlights movie music recorded in Studio 1 of Abbey Road Studios – the same room where the Beatles recorded their orchestral music. The clip also features Joe Kraemer talking about the recording space while he works on this year”s “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.”
The documentary will explore the power of film music as an art form and will delve into the creative and technical process of scoring a movie.
As director and executive producer Matt Schrader describes it, “‘Score” is about how composers experiment and write a symphony that is designed to evoke feelings in us.”
Schrader told HitFix that multiple times he and his film crew got to witness a composer “talking with his people on his team about why a certain note should go a certain way because it makes us feel something different. They worry about every single note that”s in the score because they understand that it affects us.”
DVD featurettes about the music composed for films like “The Dark Knight” and “Finding Nemo” inspired Schrader, an Emmy Award-winning producer, to make a feature-length documentary about film scores.
Over 50 people – from composers to directors to film critics – have been interviewed for “Score.” (Schrader said that though some may not make the final cut of the film, he hopes to make extra featurettes using that footage.) Among the participants in the project are Hans Zimmer, James Cameron, Danny Elfman, “Battlestar Galactica” composer Bear McCreary and “The Social Network” duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
You can watch the latest trailer for “Score” above. Now, this trailer”s got a little mystery waiting to be solved. What is the last track in the trailer, the music that starts at 1:46? It certainly sounds like some epic, moving piece of movie music – but it”s nothing that the film score geeks waiting for this documentary have been able to identify since it appeared in the first trailer for the documentary earlier this year.
Schrader is keeping mum on where exactly that music”s from.
“We purposely haven”t told people because we don”t want them to know yet,” he said. “A lot of people have thought it”s Hans Zimmer. Some people thought it”s John Debney, who”s on the screen at that time. But I think we”re gonna keep that [secret] for now because that will end up showing up in the film.”
The director did tell HitFix that the mystery track was composed for a film (it”s not from a trailer music library), and it”s from a film that has been released. Perhaps it”s some piece of unused, alternate music? Who composed it? And for what film? We”ll have to wait to find out.
“Score” raised funds in a successful Kickstarter campaign in March. Today an Indiegogo campaign launched to raise the final funds for the film, which is aiming for an April 2016 release.