Writer and performer Tim Minchin talks about creating songs for the stage musical adaptation of Roald Dahl's "Matilda" (pictured); director Patricia Riggen worked with composer James Horner on "The 33," a film about the trapped Chilean miners; songs by the '70s gay, glam rock act, Smokey, have been re-issued.
One of James Horner's final collaborators pays tribute to the composer
When film composer James Horner died this week in a plane accident, he left behind a career marked by epic scores on films like "Titanic," "A Beautiful Mind," and "Field of Dreams." But he also made smaller scale films, and one of the last he completed was "The 33," a drama about the Chilean miners who were trapped underground for 69 days in 2010.
Patricia Riggen is the director of "The 33," and she joined us on The Frame to talk about her relationship with James Horner and their unusual method of collaboration.
Interview Highlights
How did you hear about James Horner's death?
I woke up in the morning and I got an email from one of the writers of "The 33," letting me know and apologizing. Then I got email after email. It's just unbelievable. It's very hard to digest that he's not around. I did talk about the flying with him, I have to tell you.
I told him I didn't like him flying — I've always thought it was really dangerous to fly private planes, and that's not what he did for a living. But it was his absolute hobby and he said it was one of the things he loved most. So when I heard the news and they weren't sure it was him, I just knew it was.
It sounds like you became very close with him during the making of this film.
James was a very loving man. He told me that he had become very picky about the movies he makes, and he didn't score many movies any more. He just wanted to make movies that he really cared about, and he wanted to make "The 33" because it moved him profoundly, he told me.
I discovered that was true because we would sit together in the recording room every day, and I would see him cry when we reached certain moments in the movie. It was something that really touched him.
How was the collaboration with him different from working with other composers?
All musicians are artists and they're all very eccentric and live in their own worlds, but James was particularly a special guy. He's very shy and quiet, almost feminine — he spoke very softly. He was just a huge talent.
What's very different about working with him is that I was sitting by him when he was composing the score, the entire time. So it's not that he went away and came back — he was really doing it with me. He was creating the music and we had the musicians in the room and he was making it right there. He described it as painting, a picture, using the colors in the moment.
That is definitely not the usual process between director and composer. How did that come about?
That totally was his idea. I was a little nervous, because I wasn't going to be able to hear anything before we actually got to the stage to record, but we were using such special instruments that that was the way to go.
He flew in the most brilliant flautist in the world — the guy's from Britain and he brought a humongous amount of Indian flutes — long ones, tiny ones. Remember the famous Ennio Morricone score for "The Mission?" That's the same guy who played those flutes back then, and it's the same guy who played the flutes in "Braveheart," which James composed.
We had all these great musicians in the room and we were recording at the same time, so when he finished composing we basically had the score recorded.
Composer Tim Minchin on adapting Roald Dahl's 'Matilda' for the stage
"Matilda the Musical" debuted to rave reviews when it opened in London in 2011, winning seven Olivier Awards, England's most prestigious theater awards. And the fanfare didn't cease when the musical moved across the pond to Broadway, as it racked up four Tony Awards in 2013.
But growing up in Perth, Australia, composer Tim Minchin did not have Broadway aspirations. The musician, comedian and actor played in cover bands and strung together comedy and musical theatre gigs for several years before he was asked to write music and lyrics for the stage adaptation of Roald Dahl’s "Matilda."
With the success of “Matilda,” Minchin has no problem getting work these days. He’s working on a stage adaptation of Danny Rubin’s script for "Groundhog Day," and he’s also scoring an animated feature for DreamWorks — fittingly set in the Australian Outback.
When Minchin sat down with The Frame's John Horn, he talked about his long-held interest in Roald Dahl's story, the challenges of turning the classic book into a musical, and the importance of musical satire in his approach to "Matilda the Musical."
Interview Highlights:
A long, long time before you co-wrote "Matilda" for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2010, you tried to do it on your own. What happened?
Yeah, well...it's a lovely coincidence. Back in 2000, when I was writing music for theater in Perth, while I was playing in bands and trying to act, I was writing music for a children's theater company. And some point during that time, I got it into my head that "Matilda" should be a musical.
So I wrote to the Dahl estate and said, "How do I get the rights?" And they wrote back very quickly with a very charming response, saying, "We're interested in adaptations. Send us a sample of your score and we'll consider it."
And I realized they thought I was proposing to write the musical, when really I was asking if I could put it on in the local hall, because I writing 10 songs in four weeks and put them on for eight shows — my head was on a different scale.
It remains the only time I've written to a literary estate about rights for anything, so it's significant. But then eight years later when they called me in and said, "Have you heard of 'Matilda?'" my jaw dropped. "Yeah, I think so, yeah."
You collaborated on "Matilda" with Dennis Kelly, who wrote the book. What were the biggest challenges in adapting Roald Dahl's story for the stage?
The challenges of "Matilda" are the challenges of all musicals, which is trying to make it not suck and trying to retain a sense of truth, because musicals have that slight problem where you're breaking into song all the time and it can make people feel removed from the intent.
Particularly with Roald Dahl and "Matilda," the big challenges were that his tone is very unique — he somehow treads this line between dark and light, where he manages to talk about quite dark subjects but with such a light touch. "Matilda" is really a story about a mistreated child, and it's quite dark.
The other big challenge is that it's a children's story, an episodic novel with little chapters that are designed to be read to your kid on a nightly basis. Before I'd even gotten there, Dennis had written this adaption, which solved so many of those problems in the most ingenious way: he created a whole subplot where Matilda tells a story, and she's trying to create adult figures that are not as awful as her parents and trying to find a way out by telling this story. Of course, there's a big twist at the end, which reveals the story is actually something else altogether.
Do you think there's a natural path from what you did as a standup comedian to what you wrote musically for "Matilda"?
Without a doubt, partly because my comedy is really just cabaret, writ large and gone wrong, because I come from a background of writing music for theater. My comedy is not musical parody — it's not Weird Al Yankovic, bless him — but my songs are fully formed songs, though the intent of the lyrics is to satirize and criticize.
Dahl had a really strong line in social criticism, so this story was ripe for me because the whole musical starts with a 10-minute song called "Miracle," which is just a complete piss-take of parents thinking their kids are special. It acts as a counterpoint to the fact that there then becomes this kid who is clearly special.
You're incredibly busy these days. Do you miss something about being a struggling artist who didn't know where his next gig or paycheck was coming from?
I don't miss the insecurity of it, but I miss and will never get again — and young people should appreciate it — that making art with no further aim than making it good is the only way to make art, and certainly the only way to do the apprenticeship of making art. I think it's a great joy of coming from West Australia where there was no ladder in sight, no link between writing theater in West Australia and having a Broadway musical — it was totally not on my mind.
When I was writing something in Perth, I was writing because in three weeks we wanted to put it on and we wanted people to love it. There was no sense that an agent would come and whisk me away. It was just the work for the work's sake, and I was earning literally no money off of it.
I was washing dishes to sustain my habit of making stuff, and the joy of that in contrast to the political complexity of trying to make a $100 million film at a studio where there's a lot of fear and financial impotence and stuff ... the contrast is massive. I like the challenge I've got now, but man, making stuff because you like making stuff is something you shouldn't wish away.
"Matilda the Musical" is at the Ahmanson Theatre through July 12.
Smokey: A cult-favorite glam-rock act from the '70s gets a revival
Smokey, made up of musician John "Smokey" Condon and producer EJ Emmons, dabbled in everything from synth-punk to disco back in the '70s. Although musical innovators of their time, the duo could never get a record deal, frequently being described as "too gay."
Although they wanted to take part in the music scene in Hollywood at the time, Smokey and Emmons were misfits, with no intention of joining the mainstream.
"Well the music scene in Hollywood at that time was glitter, some glam. We had some disco," Emmons recalls. "It was kinda coming out of the psychedelic era — Led Zeppelin was really big. The scene was just totally wide open. We felt we could do anything that we wanted to. But I think that was more our bent — that we didn't see any particular reason in fitting in and we didn't fit"
"We were pretty outrageous for what was happening," Condon adds. "Everybody was mellow in California. We were just outrageous for the time. We sang about and recorded songs that we knew life about. You know — leather bars, drag queens, dancing."
Smokey, originally from Baltimore, had previously been living on the streets in New York. In his late teens, he moved to Los Angeles and he got a job as a bartender in Hollywood. Emmons and Smokey were introduced through Vince Treanor, road manager of The Doors. After that, the music followed.
After putting out singles such as "Leather" and "Miss Ray," the band gained popularity by playing at Rodney Bingenheimer's famous club, English Disco, on the Sunset Strip.
"It was the place to be at that point," Condon says. "The Starwood [club] was around. The Whiskey was around. But Rodney's was the club to be at. You could walk in any night and see members of the biggest bands in the world there."
"It was very much like a neighborhood bar on steroids that had just gone mad," Emmons says. "There wasn't anything else like it."
Smokey regularly packed the house.
"It was pretty chaotic," Condon says. "People were nuts. People were standing on tables and screaming. Guys were clawing at me, ripping my clothes. We got written up in the [Los Angeles] Times. All of the press was there. The hype that had surrounded 'Leather' and 'Miss Ray' drew huge crowds."
However, what seemed like a glimmer of hope for the band gave way to few results. Emmons and Condon tried a number of times to get a record deal via various connections, but were rejected for being "too gay" or too unorthodox.
"One Saturday morning I got up and I thought, You know, we really ought to try to get a deal somewhere," says Emmons. "We went to Mercury Records to see Mr. Denny Rosencrantz, who a couple of months later signed The Runaways. They were our fan club at Rodney's. He was very kind and very sweet and he said, 'This is really a great record, but you realize Mercury Records cannot sign something like this.' That was basically the response across the board."
"It was disheartening," Condon says. "Because we would have these shows where people would go nuts over us and yet we couldn't get a record deal. It was mentally and physically exhausting on both of us to keep going."
Condon and Emmons also felt as though the sounds and methods they were creating and introducing to the rest of the L.A. music scene were being attributed to other artists. Condon, tired of the attention he received in his local neighborhood, moved to the Valley where he tried to get his life together. Emmons continued to work as a sound engineer in Los Angeles while still maintaining hopes for the group.
"While I missed what me and Smokey were doing I was busy," Emmons says. "I was like, He'll be back, or, you know, maybe he won't. I don't know. I think Smokey just felt like he had had enough for a while."
After a long intermission, the band remerged because journalist Guy Blackman and J.D. Doyle of Chapter Music wanted to create a compilation of gay bands from the 1970s.
"[Blackman] just happened to mention in passing," Emmons says, "'You don't happen to have any other tunes do you?' And I said, 'Well I just happen to have in my cellar a whole album.' He said, Oh really?' I expected that tape box and the tapes to rot into dust. [They] didn't."
The reception from 2015 audiences is maybe looking better than it would have in the 1970s.
"You know, I think with the feedback that we're getting it seems like it's right on target for today for some reason," Condon says. "I would expect that we're going to hear some of these songs in places that I never would have expected."
"How Far Will You Go?: The S&M Recordings, 1973-1981" has just been released on Chapter Music.