Film composer, James Horner talks Avatar soundtrack

It’s a pretty chunky interview, one that was published on the L.A. Times site in two instalments and as such is packed with fantastic insights into the role of a film composer as well as more movie specific details on Avatar. Horner even makes a sly dig at Cameron’s fellow blockbuster director, Michael Bay. But we’ve managed to pick out a few teasers that we think make a nice starter before the main course at the link below.

The L.A. Times: This film takes place on another world, a distant, troubled moon covered with lush jungles and dotted with floating mountains. That must have made for an interesting set of decisions when you began work on the score.

JH: This film is so radically different from any other movie and, really, from any other movie ever made, both on a technical level — how it was made — and just the look of it. The usual sort of rules and the ways I would approach the project don’t apply. What was asked of me was to create a score that was grounded for a conventional audience — being that it would play in Oklahoma — yet at the same time was very adventurous in terms of the sounds I would use and the approaches I took cinematically.

There’s also the epic sweep to the film; you’ve had experience with that, certainly, with Titanic and films such as Braveheart, Apocalypto and Troy, but in each of those you had an earth-bound historical backdrop to use as a reference.

JH: Yes, correct. The sound world that I created for “Avatar” had to be very different, really, than anything I ever created before. There is also three hours of music. I had to find a sound world that covered so much territory; it had to cover both the human side of the story and the indigenous side of the story and the tremendous, epic battles that take place as well as the love story that is at the core of the film.

How do you create a “sound world,” as you put it?

JH: I had to create a sound world that was really quite different than anything I had used before. It wasn’t simply a matter of using instruments from New Zealand or Iceland or Lapland; I had to create new instruments, too, a whole library of instruments and sounds. I also found indigenous instruments and digitized them and changed them slightly. I used a lot of voice and digitized that to create a sound world for myself, a palette of colors so that I was able to create worlds that satisfied [James Cameron] and his need for this new world to sound appropriate as a place that you had never been to. It had to be different and alien yet at same time to have a very warm quality and an organic quality. The score needed to be very grounded, too, as I said. The score is very thematic even though the colors are very exotic.

That’s interesting about the created or altered instruments. Could you be more specific?

JH: There were a lot of vocal sounds I took from various places. These were odd vocal sounds that I would manipulate digitally and there were interesting flutes, for instance, from South America and Finland that I wanted to be more abstract. I also have instruments invented from scratch. They were programmed. There were a lot of instruments that sound like flutes of different sorts, but they were combined with gamelan-sounding instruments. The gamelan is Balinese. The word itself means “orchestra.” The individual gamelan instruments are these bell-like sounds. A lot of the percussion for “Avatar” is gamelan-based or sounds gamelan-based. So this has this sort of quality of ringing bells, like Indonesian music. It’s a very pretty fusion of different worlds that gives the place itself a quality that is magical. Using it for percussion, rather than drums or other things, gives a sort of magical glow to everything. And as I said there were a lot of instruments that I invented and worked on with my programs. I was very particular.

For the full interview, hit the L.A. Times website here and to get the Avatar score which Horner’s been working so hard on, pre-order your copy from Amazon.com here or from Amazon.co.uk here. The Avatar score will be released in the US on 15th December and a day later, on the 16th internationally.

UPDATE: Get all the best Avatar merchandise, from cool graphic tees to replica props here.