STAR TREK II ARCHIVES: STARLOG AND CINEFANTASTIQUE

"I didn't think there would be any place for it in the film. I said I'd think about it. I worked out a way to use the Star Trek fanfare, which I used about four or five times, and it works very well. I always had wanted to use that fanfare, actually. Unlike the first Star Trek film, I wanted right from the start, from where the curtain first opened, to grip the audience, to tell them that they were going to see Star Trek. And there are only two things that can do that, either the Enterprise, or the Star Trek fanfare. The fanfare draws you in immediately — you know you're going to get a good movie."

"There were certain ways that drama was treated musically on the TV show. In certain spots in the film I tried to play upon that. In the sequence where the Ceti eels are put in the helmets, Khan says 'That's better. Now tell me about Genesis …" There, you hear a very high, weird lyre. And the strings are doubled with several percussion and electronic instruments.

"That's a very weird permutation of the Star Trek love theme from the TV series," reveals Horner. "It's a strange internal joke on my part. Very few people recognize it, but it's the kind of thing I smile at when I hear it. Maybe I perverted it so much that no one can recognize it now."

"Star Trek had a large brass section—six French horns, otherwise it was a general, large symphonic orchestra. There was a theme I composed for Kirk, (that nautical, Horatio Hornblower-sounding theme), a separate theme for the Enterprise, and the two themes are intertwined—Kirk and the Enterprise as one. There's a very strange, etheral theme for Spock."

"Spock never had a theme before, and I wanted to give him a theme to tie the whole of 'Genesis' and 'Spock' by the end of the film, so that it would all mean something. The theme for Spock, incidentally, is actually heard at the 'leaving drydock' sequence," Horner explains.

"I never wanted to use it," states Horner. "I begged, begged, 'Please don't make me use 'Amazing Grace.' It was the only battle in the film I lost. They all seemed to feel that 'Amazing Grace' was the only thing to make them happy. It was 15 seconds—I just did it.""It had already been shot, and I had to match it," Horner explains.

"Then I had the additional problem: Would I continue the bagpipe music outside the ship or would I switch to orchestral music? My feeling was to do something very etheral."

“The bagpipes were the wrong move. They sound like bleating goats. What you heard in the film originally was just the bagpipe alone. Now [Paramount] had a problem in the previews with people laughing at the sound. The producers wanted the bagpipe sound changed."

"The only thing I could do about the curse of the bagpipes," Horner shrugs, "was put in a cue. It starts where there's a pause as Kirk is talking—'Of all the people I have met in my travels, he is the most human.' There, the music came in. I had this strange chord that hangs over the whole scene; it did quite a bit, but doesn't solve the problem completely, because you still get people laughing at the bagpipes. It was, perhaps, a slight miscalculation, but it's one of those things that you're not going to know if it works until you do it with an audience."

"And there is another sequence, too, that I liked very much, but Paramount was having problems with. After Kirk sees Spock on the ground, you think he's dead. Spock gets up and straightens out his coat. Well, occasionally that gets laughter, too. I don't know whether it's good laughs or bad ones. But they were worried about that. To me, it was very touching the way he straightens out. Spock's under the worst possible situation, but he's still his old self. I've been to screenings where nobody, nobody has said a word in either scene — total silence during the engine room and torpedo room scenes."

"I had four-and-a-half weeks to do the score. Star Trek had a pushed production schedule; they had to be in the theaters by June 4th, and they started dubbing April 9th. I had to have the music available by April 15th. They locked the picture four weeks prior to that, and they were still getting special effects shots while I was writing it. It was a very rushed schedule. As you know, Nick was editing while he was directing: editing nights, directing days. Hollywood doesn't usually do it that way, but the film turned out to be wonderful. Every sequence I scored was in the film. There was one bit I wanted taken out. It was after Kirk surprises the Reliant, hits it with photon torpedoes, and Scotty carries the dead guy up to the bridge. Everyone just closes their eyes on the bridge, then they cut to the Enterprise, 'blowing in the wind.' I scored a big bittersweet chord for that cut. I wanted it to play very ghostly, very, very quiet, after all that battle noise. And we finally cut the music at that point. It works terrifically. Now the Enterprise just turns in that silence. It's really kind of nice."

"I have very concentrated work days," comments Horner. "I work 12-14 hours a day. I've never had more than six weeks to complete a score. I don't know what I'd do with the extra time. That's the way I like to work—in concentrated doses. I'm sure if I had to do 100 minutes of music, I'd need more time.

"I do my own orchestrations," Horner explains. "I look at the film on videotape and write directly on my score paper. A piano does not help me sketch out the 'color,' but it is a tool to help me with the timing. A lot of people write piano scores, and hand it to someone else to orchestrate."

"One interesting scene cut was when Kirk boards the Enterprise for the first time," he reveals. "Kirk talked to Peter Preston, played by Ike Eisenmann, whose character reference as Scotty's nephew was cut. In the engine room, Preston says, 'Sir, if you don't see this as the best ship in the fleet, sir, you're blind.' He had all this dialogue going. It was all cut."

"For whatever reason, various people higher up in the production did not believe the father-son relationship with Kirk and wanted it trimmed. The best way to trim it was to make it seem that Kirk didn't know that his son knew that Kirk was his father, until the very end. There were a lot of scenes cut out, like when Kirk introduced his son to Spock before going to battle stations."

"I had up until that time looked down at film music," he says. "I looked at myself as a classical composer. I was asked to do an AFI film, The Drought. I said, what the hell. I fell in love with the film, like a strike of lightning. I suddenly knew what I wanted to do — write film music. I did another six or seven AFI films, learned about Roger Corman, bothered him until he gave me a job, stopped working on my PhD, resigned from UCLA, left academia, and began working on film music, which I am doing to this day."

"Orion, the co-producer of Battle, asked me to do The Hand; that's how I got out of Corman and into more legitimate films," remarks Horner. "My orchestra for The Hand was more string than brass, so I could give it an eerie effect, unlike Battle, which was 40 pieces, mostly brass. There was to be a soundtrack to The Hand—I won't say it was doomed before it began, but there were so many problems along the way, and it's so expensive to put out records because you have to pay a re-use fee to the musicians. Unless a film is big enough, or important enough to be able to spend $70,000 on re-use fees, a company won't do it at all."

"Deadly Blessing, for Polygram Pictures was interesting—perhaps we can leave it at that," says Horner. Then I was asked to do Wolfen. This was an interesting film because another composer had scored the film. The music was disliked by the producers: the score was an abstract score, which would not work on the picture. It was a very noisy, avant-garde, atonal score. Everybody had nothing to relate to. It didn't have any emotional quality."

"Wolfen was about three weeks from print delivery at this point. Orion asked me if I could do the score in 12 days! What you hear in the Wolfen was done in 12 days, about 58 minutes of music. I worked very closely with the sound effects people, particularly Andrew London, who's done sound effects for TRON. He is a master at doing those very stylized sound effects. A whole 'sound world' was created for Wolfen. It was originally a four-and-a-half hour 'epic,' one of those 'troubled' pictures that went way over the budget. It was taken away from the director and re-edited. Unfortunately, it never found its audience."

“Director Nick Meyer wanted to give the film the feel of an adventure on the high seas. It’s that kind of nautical, wind-blowing spirit I’m after.” –James Horner, composer

“There is a tendency to want to compare scores of big outer space movies,” said Horner, “like John Williams’ music for Star Wars and The Empires Strikes Back and Jerry Goldsmith’s for the first Star Trek film. There will be similarities, of course. For one thing, if you close your eyes and play Star Wars and my Star Trek score, the first notion that will come to your mind is that the same instruments are playing. Williams created a trend in music for space movies with Star Wars because that was the first big space movie to come along in quite a while. But that style of scoring is very old-fashioned. It works well, whether you’re on a train or a pirate galleon or in deep space. That kind of approach is very tactile. It’s easy to use it to manipulate emotions.”

“I could do something very avant garde and very atonal,” continued Horner, “such as Tangerine Dream’s scores for Sorcerer And Thief, and my own score for Wolfen. But I have to sort of toe a line. There are certain givens in a movie like Star Trek. The setting, the plot, the characters, all demand a certain approach. If I tried to do something more avante garde I would not only upset my producers, I would probably do harm to the film itself. I have to work pretty straight-forwardly with the scene elements, but I don’t sock it on the nose too much, or hype the action. An audience will resist that kind of manipulation.”

“Spock’s motif is a very haunting theme,” said Horner, “very different from anything else in the film, but done with conventional instruments. It emphasizes his humanness more than his alienness. By putting a theme over Spock, it warms him and he becomes three-dimensional rather than a collection of schticks.”

“It’s sort of a menacing undertone,” said Horner, “very quiet music that underplays his insanity in a subtle way that will have a disquieting effect on the audience. When he’s involved in battles, the music is wild and pagan. A lot is going on in this movie, and by means of music you can help the story along. You can represent how characters feel about each other in an instant by using a bristling theme or a friendship theme. We do that with Khan. You know he’s crazy the moment you see him, but you don’t know why you feel that way.”

“It’s not the swelling dawn-of-creation, Stravinsky-violins theme you might expect,” said Horner. “It’s kind of awe-inspiring. There are large sustained orchestral chords which slowly and almost imperceptibly change. The closest comparison I could give you would probably be certain passages in 2001. It’s got a nice texture, but we’re not in it for all that long.”

“I get worried sometimes, that I’m being locked into being a horror movie composer,” he said. “I was doing horror movie after horror movie because that’s all I was being asked to do. And whenever I’d try to get some other sort of work they’d say ‘Yeah, you just did Wolfen and that was terrific, but, you know this is a sensitive story. We’ll get Dave Grusin.’ ”