Lorne Balfe previously worked on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, providing additional music for Julian Nott back in 2005 — now, nearly 20 years later, he's in charge of scoring the whole thing for Vengeance Most Fowl. In this chat with FILMHOUNDS, Lorne shares his experience of working on something that's been part of his life since he was a teenager.
Whenever you read about your career, the story always seems to start with your connection to Hans Zimmer.
It does — is that where we're starting today as well?
Well, I'm more interested in something you briefly mentioned in another interview — that you didn't have any formal training in music?
That's right, I didn't. I tried. I went to five different music conservatoires and never finished. I never got the rudiments or the proper training, and now, as an adult, I see that being dyslexic made it quite difficult for me. In those days, there wasn't really much there in terms of help, and I didn't really understand music theory because there was always this deep analysis about why Mozart did this or that. There was always a reason for it academically, apparently, and I was always thinking, well, maybe he just did it because it felt right.
So I didn't have that solid training that a lot of composers have had. I learnt to orchestrate, really, by practice and trial and error. To be honest I'm still trying to figure out now how, when you listen to John Williams, how does he do it. I still don't get it. So I'm still chipping away, and maybe that's why I enjoy working on animation — that's where you get to experiment and work it out as you go.
Do you think working it out as you go has helped you as a composer? Or do you wish you had more formal training?
That's a difficult question to answer. I think it's a bit like with directors — those who haven't gone to film school are equally, if not more, interesting than those who have. There's a unique voice there that doesn't get removed or refined by academia. There is no right or wrong, but it's just different when you have to work it out yourself rather than picking it up in a school. I think, sometimes, if you haven't formally been trained, you do figure out your own voice as a by-product of working out how to do things.
That do-it-yourself attitude is something I always associate with Wallace & Gromit — I know it's a bit more sophisticated now, but I always think of this image of Nick Park sitting in his shed and making models on his own, and how on the old shorts you could see thumbprints on the models and that kind of thing. Was there an element of that, or anything else from the old shorts, you wanted to capture in the score?
Yes. The world of Wallace & Gromit has got a bit of a film noir approach to it. There's lots of genres in it, there's nods to old Hitchcock films, that sort of thing. So that's an approach where you're actively trying to embrace the past, and it doesn't work if you're trying to be perfect and contemporary. It just doesn't belong to that world. There's just this honest purity in this love for the past visually in what you're looking at, so musically you have to follow that. There's still experimentation, but it's in the past and it's honouring the past.
Because Julian Nott's theme tune is so iconic, was that restrictive for you?
No, not at all. I work on movies because I love them, I love going to the cinema and being a member of the audience, so that's how I approach it. So when I work on something like this, or when I worked on Terminator or Mission: Impossible, I'm always very conscious of when and how you want to hear that theme. These are all themes that have been part of my life since I was a teenager, so in some way, I've kind of been writing these scores my whole life. That's how I look at it. It can only be a positive if I've already got a connection and the audience has already got a connection with a piece of music. It's such a bonus.
The list of films you've worked on is so diverse, but is there anything you feel like you haven't had a chance to work on yet that you'd like to?
Way too many. But I got into films based on three people — Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson movies, and anything that was scored by Hans Zimmer. Those are the films I watched and I always said those are the people I want to work with, and I've been very very fortunate that I've been able to. Those are the people that make the films I rush to go and see, and I've done it. Since I started working, there have been other people who have entered the list, and I've had the chance to work with them too, so the list isn't very long now. Who are your favourite directors?
People like Sam Raimi, Spike Lee, Brian De Palma. In terms of newer names, I've been really impressed with Léa Mysius. I tend to like filmmakers who just started doing it because they had something to say and they somehow managed to do it however they could, so I tend to really enjoy low-budget horror films from that perspective too.
I love horror films, I watch horror films a lot. I've only just done my first because it's something I really struggled with. It's a genre where there are so many tricks that the audience is so used to, and it's just hard to reinvent the wheel. It's very difficult genre to get into. But some people find it very easy, or very comfortable to stay in one platform or one genre. To me, I think that's boring.
Wallace & Gromit is streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK
