Composer Howard Shore likes to sleep on it. “I try to get in touch with my inner feelings,” he said at the Zurich Film Festival , explaining his preferred method of working. “If you think about cinema, you go into a dark room and all this imagery starts appearing.
You are in a dream-like state and I like to use that idea when I write music for film. There is some napping involved, you try to be very relaxed and imagine what the piece could be. And then I set to work with my pencil, creating the actual score to what I am dreaming,” he said.
“I don’t study a film: I listen to it. I listen to the rhythm of the actors, the sounds. I kind of imagine the visualization, writing to this more abstract idea in my mind.
” A three-time Oscar winner, Shore received the Career Achievement Award at the Swiss festival, where he opened up about his collaborations with fellow Canadian David Cronenberg and thrilled fans with tidbits about Peter Jackson’s “ The Lord of the Rings .” “The first recordings were done in a town hall in Wellington, New Zealand. Later, we had to use government-created sound mixing rooms.
Mine had an unusual shape – it was like a coffin,” he recalled. “I worked with [screenwriter] Philippa Boyens, who’s an expert on Tolkien’s languages and she helped me, very carefully, to use them. It was a way of putting into music the ideas Tolkien had in his books.
Taking this poetry and song lyrics, and putting them back into the film. I think it gave.