ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 4: STEVEN ZAILLIAN

Posted by Timothy E. RAW

August 26, 2009

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082609 1902 ISCHIAGLOBA11 ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 4: STEVEN ZAILLIAN At the top of the A-list of Hollywood screenwriters, Steven Zaillian is best known for his screenplay of the Steven Spielberg-directed Holocaust drama Schindler’s List, based on the book by Thomas Keneally. His work on the film won numerous awards and citations including an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

He is also credited with providing the story for the big screen adaptation of Mission: Impossible, penning a re-write for The Silence of the Lambs sequel Hannibal, that boldly moved away from the source material and co-writing the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. More recently he adapted a New York magazine story by Mark Jacobson into the film American Gangster for director Ridley Scott, staring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.

He has also directed from his own screenplays, helming the films Searching for Bobby Fischer, A Civil Action and All the King’s Men, an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s classic 1946 political novel, starring Sean Penn, Kate Winslet, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Jude Law.

082609 1902 ISCHIAGLOBA21 ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 4: STEVEN ZAILLIAN
Zaillian fielding questions in the garden of The Regina Isabella Hotel.

TIMOTHY E. RAW: Are you anything of a soundtrack fan? Are scores something you might choose to listen to away from work?

STEVEN ZAILLIAN: Film scores, no. I don’t really listen to film scores for pleasure. It’s mostly rock n’ roll music. A film score for me exists in connection with the film. I mean I might listen to it if I want to remember the film in some romantic way, but for me, composing for a film – and I think most composers would say this as well – it’s very different than composing any other kind of music. It’s a collaboration, very much like a writer and a director working together. A composer and a director have to work closely together as well, and the music that they would compose is generally a complete piece of music by itself but it’s also working in conjunction with the scene in the film.

RAW: Is music something you go to in any way when you’re writing?

SZ: Not for me, not for me. I sometimes listen to music to, y’know, put me in a certain sort of mood, but I’m never really thinking about the entire score — at least in the things I’ve done to this point – I’m never really thinking about the style of the score. I like to discover that with the composer, sit down with him, watch the film and discuss what the approach would be. One thing that I and most directors do, is that they’ll use a temp score for their rough cut. Some composers I know, have trouble with this because sometimes the composer falls in love with the temp score and the temp score was written by somebody else. Sometimes a composer is actually asked to sort of work in the same vein as the temp score. Sometimes that happens with me and sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes the composer will come up with something that works much better.

RAW: When you’re writing are you ever considerate of the space in which the score needs to exist in the final film. Are you at all wary or conscious of that negative space?

SZ: I never write with the idea that the music is going to “save me”. I never write and think “Okay, well this isn’t such a good scene but I know that when the score is put in, it’ll be a better scene. I never use it as a crutch. I sometimes write a scene that I know will have music, some kind of a montage or a sequence of scenes that will eventually have music connecting it but I don’t specifically write with that piece of music in mind.

RAW: Of the films you’ve written but not directed, can you think of specific examples where the score has taken it completely off the page, in an unexpected direction from what you envisaged when you were writing?

SZ: I’d have to think back to each one individually. I know American Gangster is fresh in my memory ’cause I just did it last year… I think it was last year. I felt that (Marc Streitenfeld’s) music was very expressive and very surprising and worked perfectly in conjunction with what I had done and what Ridley Scott had done.

RAW: Do you really have any greater degree of control or input over the score as a writer/director? You worked with James Horner on both Searching for Bobby Fischer and All the King’s Men. Between those films you wrote Schindler’s List , so with the huge recognition from that and the fact that you have so much more experience now, does that give you added clout or leverage in the composer/director relationship?

SZ: I don’t think it’s that much different. Both of those were done by James Horner and in working with him a second time, we’d developed this kind of a shorthand that we could use to discuss what we both felt would work best, because we had the history of Searching for Bobby Fischer. I could make references to a certain kind of music that was in that film that might be something like we should try in All the King’s Men or use it as an example of what not to do in it. I think all composers, like all writers, want to approach a project as an individual thing. They certainly don’t want to copy themselves if they can avoid it. They don’t want to copy a temp score and they don’t want to copy themselves in terms of something that they’ve done. What was very interesting about James Horner with Searching for Bobby Fischer, was that I made a conscious decision doing the temp score for that film, that I only used his music. I used music he had written for other films and I did it so that he wouldn’t feel as if I was asking him to be influenced by another composer. I felt that his body of work at that time – he’d been scoring films for a long time already – was large enough that I could find the pieces of music that worked best as a musical example of what I was looking for, to convey that which would be harder to convey with words.

082609 1902 ISCHIAGLOBA3 ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 4: STEVEN ZAILLIAN
Chairing a press conference with director, Marc Forster.

RAW: With All the King’s Men having such a stellar, high profile cast that the studio no doubt spent a lot of money investing in, I’m wondering if you get studio notes or even interference when it comes to that part of the process when you’re scoring the film?

SZ: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the studio always give me notes about everything. When I’m writing a script, I’ll get a set of script notes, when I first screen a director’s rough cut of the film I’ll get notes and suggestions and yes, they do sometimes comment on the score. The comment is usually very specific like, “Can you try again with a certain scene?” I can’t remember a time when the studio would say that they were questioning the entire approach, that’s never happened.

RAW: One of my favorite scores is Mark Mancina’s Twister. What a lot of people don’t know is that you did a re-write on that film and I’m interested as to the specifics of your contribution.

SZ: Zero! …I was brought on to try to do what’s called a production re-write, a couple of weeks before it was due to start shooting and I worked very hard for three weeks, one week into filming and two weeks before, but the director, (Jan De Bont) as it turned out was quite happy with the script that he had so he basically shot that. I thought I was being hired by the director, but I was really being hired by the studio. I don’t think there’s a word of what I wrote that’s in that film.

RAW: Getting up to speed with what you’re working on now, you’ve just been brought on to Moneyball, (a project with Brad Pitt in the lead) is that correct? The word online is that Steven Soderbergh “walked out” because the studio weren’t happy with his draft. What’s the state of play with that film?

SZ: Right now, it’s uncertain. Ultimately, I think that there will be another director but I don’t think anyone knows at this point what’s going to happen.

RAW: When are you set to direct next and when that happens will you be looking to work with James Horner out of comfort or will the material dictate that?

SZ: I don’t even know what that film is yet. It may be that the film will need very little music, it may be that the film wants an indigenous music to the story, it may be songs, I don’t know. Since I don’t even know what the project is yet, I can’t begin to think about the music. But I love working with James and if it turns out that I feel it would have to be a big, lush orchestral score –which is what he does best I think, even though he does do kind of smaller things, that’s what I appreciate from him most – it’ll be dictated by the film.