(OLDER
QUESTIONS BELOW FROM BOOK)
(Q) Recruitment
(A) When I first saw Bad Taste it was only half finished and had
very little dialogue. It was rough as guts but right from the
first frame I just cracked up laughing. It reminded me of being
a six-year old going to the Saturday afternoon movies at the local
bughouse. Let’s be honest, you can pick holes in it but
it’s got charm. And that’s what I saw the first time
I saw the rough cut, and I stuck with it because of its charm.
(Q) The Concept
(A) In some films there
are lots of emotional and spiritual sides to the music. The Bad
Taste music was purely painting, getting it right into the stupidity
of it. One thing I did for inspiration was play a whole lot of
tapes up against the visuals. I tired heavy metal but it didn’t
work. I looked at some pretty horrible horror movies for research
and I listened to a lot of film music. Miami Vice was an inspiration
in the chase scenes and I watched some Bond movies too.
Tony and Pete would
often suggest things if I was stuck. For example, in the scene
where the boys put their jackets on in the bush and bite the bullet,
it was Tony’s idea to play the song acoustically, and that
idea was exactly right. In spite of all my research the score
in Bad Taste is thoroughly original. I had this idea that every
time Derek’s head opened up you’d hear choir music.
Then after I’d written it I saw the same thing in Raising
Arizona. The music is like that. You can have an idea, and three
weeks later someone like Malcome McLaren over in America is doing
the exact same thing.
On the negative side
I was constrained by the budget to quite an extent. I would have
liked to have flown in musicians from out of town and I would
have liked to have used more musicians playing and recording in
the studio.
(Q) The Process
(A) I wrote the whole
of the action in two scrapbooks. Then I started making decisions
about where the music was needed. At first, probably due to inexperience
and fear, I worked in a solitary way. When it came to the show
and tell with Peter and Tony I was utterly terrified. I’d
played on a tinny old synthesiser. I’d written a massive
amount, and Tony stopped me about five minutes in and said, “What
about if the few bars of that theme you’ve got at the front,
that mofit, is carried on for the first five minutes?” And
then it snapped that it wasn’t a ‘me’ and ‘them’
it was all three of us together.
I composed as the film
was being shot, but didn’t record it until I had the whole
film. When I know a scene needs music, I look at it and it tells
me what the tempo is. I tap in what the tempo feels like with
my metronome (a Roland Juno-106), then I play it down there are
in that time frame. I hired a guitarist, and I played two bars
of alto flute when Derek goes off the cliff and the birds fly
off. Two of the songs were written and played by some of the guys
actually acting in the movie. The rest of it was done electronically
with synths and samplers – samples of choirs, organs, orchestras,
brass, drum machine.
Samplers allow us to
use out imaginations. When I did Bad Taste I wasn’t into
computers, I was only into synths. I did hardly any sequencing.
It was all manual ecept for some drum machine work.
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