Greetings! ScoreKeeper here fresh off my chat with the Maestro of Mojo, the Shagadellic Symphonist, the Yeah-baby Rhapsody himself, George S. Clinton.
George S. Clinton (the S stands for “I was never in Funkadelic”) remains one of the more interesting and prolific chameleons of film music. With a vast array of scores for films and television including STILL SMOKIN’ (1983), MORTAL KOMBAT (1995), THE RED SHOE DIARIES (1992-96), the AUSTIN POWERS trilogy(1997-2002), WILD THINGS (1998), THE ASTRONAUT’S WIFE (1999), and THE SANTA CLAUSE 2 & 3 (2002, 2006), Clinton has further demonstrated his musical acrobatics with his epically sublime score for BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE (2007) for HBO.
Nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Score, BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE, chronicles the life of a young Native American child raised in “white” America. A perfect blend of Western and Native American cultures, this exceptionally smart score is as functional to the film as it is pleasurable to listen to.
George was fun to talk to and exhibited an extremely laid back persona which I think is reflected in our conversation. Yeah-baby! Yeah!
ScoreKeeper: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today. I’d like to talk to you about BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE (2007). Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get involved with this project?
George S. Clinton: The way I got involved doing the music for BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE was through my friend, the director, Yves Simoneau. He and I have done movies together for fifteen years...mostly for TV and a couple of features. The last thing we did together was the pilot for a show called THE 4400 (2004) which was on the USA network.
I’ve always done dramas or thrillers or things like BURY MY HEART with him and yet…most of my success has been through comedies like the AUSTIN POWERS movies, THE SANTA CLAUS movies or stuff like that. So it was a real opportunity for me to do drama with an epic quality to it. It was great! I was so happy to get involved with it.
SK: I’ve always thought of you as one of the most eclectic film composers working today. If you lined up your scores in a row you’d hardly be able to tell that they were all composed by the same composer. You do so many varying projects and approach them all musically in varying ways. Here you are once again taking an amazingly different turn with WOUNDED KNEE. Did you feel that this film was different for you? Or was was it par for the course, like falling into a groove and doing your thing?
GC: Actually both. I hadn’t done an epic drama like this really. I had done some TV movies early in my career but not of the same scope as WOUNDED KNEE. I collect Native American instruments and art and I’ve always had a fascination with the culture. I’m from Tennessee and my mother claims somewhere in our family there’s Cherokee blood, but as my wife, who’s Canadian reminds me, everybody she’s met from the South has Cherokee blood in them [laughs].
But to answer your question, I was just ready to do something like this. One of the things that had to be overcome is when Yves suggested me as the fellow to do the music, the first name that popped through HBO’s mind wasn’t the guy who did AUSTIN POWERS!
SK: [Laughs] Right. I can imagine.
GC: Luckily I had done another Western called DOLLAR FOR THE DEAD (1998) and from that, MORTAL KOMBAT, and even a Viking movie that I did, THE VIKING SAGAS (1995), I was able to pull together a CD to show them more of the serious and epic side of what I do.
SK: Did you have to do an audition piece specifically for the project?
GC: No, I didn’t have to do that. I was able to convince them with the pieces that already existed.
SK: Good. How much knowledge did you already have about Native American music going into this project? Did you have a research period? What did you do to prepare yourself for writing the score?
GC: Yeah, the internet is a great tool! It’s just wonderful. I wanted to find out more about the Lakota flute specifically so I googled “Lakota flute player” and this name kept coming up, John Two-Hawks.
So I read a little bit about him, went on his website and heard his music. Then I went on iTunes and discovered he actually has albums on there and I said “This is my guy!” He lives in Arkansas and I told HBO what I wanted to do. They thought it was a great idea.
After I recorded the orchestra we brought him out for a whole day. We just sat there on the big stage at Warner Brothers with him and his flutes and he performed to picture on top of the score that was there. He and I had had previous conversations and I had sent him my demos of the cues I had done to demonstrate what I had in mind.
As it turned out, he had relatives that were killed at that massacre so he said that this was such a great way for him to honor their memory...to be able to offer his flute to the picture.
SK: Did you have to study the Lakota flute itself like its range and what it can and can’t do or did you just work with him and trust his instincts?
GC: I have a pretty good knowledge of what the flutes can do because I own and play some. I demonstrated to him, to some extent, what I had in mind. But what he brought to it...well, you’ve heard the score. It gives me chills just to hear his music and to hear him play. It brought so much of that authentic spirit to the score simply because he contributed what he did to it.
SK: And what’s even more amazing is that the flute itself, from what I understand, is a ridiculously difficult instrument to play. It’s not like a normal flute where you just blow and you get the sound. It’s a tremendously difficult instrument to play.
GC: Yeah!
SK: It’s one of the more gorgeous musical sounds I’ve ever heard.
GC: He showed up with about twenty instruments and we spent a day in the studio at my house, prior to coming into recording, picking and choosing which one would be right for which piece of music. It was just phenomenal! My engineer, Steve Kempster, who is a connoisseur of sound, had all his best microphones set up and we kept trying different microphones with different flutes so it was a real opportunity for it to sound as good as it possibly could.
SK: Like a kid in a candy store...
GC: Yeah, exactly. [Laughs]. Let’s try this! Oh, let’s try that!
SK: Talk about its usage in the film. Did you have a philosophy as far as when and where and why to use the flute?
GC: Yes, I did. There are no classical woodwinds in the score anywhere. I didn’t want any other sound to be close or similar to the sound the flute was going to have because of what it represented in the music, which was the Indian spirit. The main character, Charles Eastman, who is an Indian and as a child is sent away and raised by whites then sent back to his reservation, has a theme that is half flute and half piano...the piano, representing the “civilized side” of his nature or the more Western side of his nature. So there’s this back and forth in his character about who he is and there’s a back and forth in the theme between the flute and the piano.
I didn’t have any trumpets in the orchestra because I didn’t want to fall prey to cliché types of calvary “Da da dum!” and I kept the strings fairly low except for when they really needed to soar up high. So I had this whole idea that the orchestra would be rich and dark with this flute floating on top of it. The brass are all French horns and trombones. That’s gonna give you that epic, big sound. And then I also included what I call ambient sounds, which are synthesized textures or sampled textures that you would not necessarily think of as being musical, but they bring a sort of other-worldly aspect to the score. I wanted this to have sort of a mythic aspect to it. Not to just be an epic, but to be sort of mythical in the way it sounded. That was fun to come up with.
SK: Every composer has a different entry point or doorway into the film. Was it the character of Charles Eastman?
GC: Hmm…I think the first cue that I wrote was the opening cue. I think that the way the director brings this into the story sucked me right in there too. It starts dark. You don’t know what it’s going to be under the narration. It winds up with these two boys by a creek and lightens up a bit but once they start running from the soldiers it’s just like a freight train. It just takes off until we’re at the aerial shot of the Battle of Little Big Horn.
SK: Well, since you brought that up...this isn’t a scoring question but maybe you can shed some light on this. Was that shot a live overhead?
GC: Isn’t that amazing?
SK: It’s stunning. I’ve never seen anything like it.
GC: It is an amazing combination of CGI and a helicopter shot. To tell you the truth, I don’t know where one starts and the other one stops.
SK: Yeah. I was watching it comprehending the logistics of the whole thing. There has to be a trick here. But it’s seamless.
GC: Yeah, I know. It’s just amazing. I’ve seen various stages of it so it was interesting to see. I think the actual topography was filmed by the helicopter and might have been empty. And then the CGI was the horses and the Indians and all that.
SK: Great! CGI is best when you don’t notice it. That’s a great example of it.
GC: Yeah. You’re right.
SK: Tell me, one of the things that struck me about the score is the use of the choir. Even though you’re using Lakota texts, it has a very Western almost European quality to its sound. How did the choir factor into your thinking of how the score should work?
GC: It’s a thirty-voice voice male chorus and the text I have them singing is the Lakota translation of two things. One is, “it’s easy to be brave at a distance.” This is what Anna Paquin’s character says at the beginning narration. The other is, “we will be known by the footprints we leave behind.” Those were my main texts. When the soldiers are coming at the beginning of the film, it’s almost Gregorian. I had the male voices singing in Lakota, but I wanted it to have almost a religious significance. The religious aspect of it is almost like a Western, or Latin type of thing. It’s just a juxtaposition of spirituality basically. It’s the Western spirituality superimposed on these Lakota lyrics.
SK: I like the choice of choir over a solo chant or other wailing voice of some type. That’s become relatively cliché in modern film music. You found a poignant way to incorporate the human voice while simultaneously sidestepping such clichés.
GC: Mmm-hmm. One of the great things about working with Yves as director is he is totally about the movie. He is of, what I call, the zone. In my case, it was that opening cue that led me into the zone of the movie. But the director has been in that zone for a lot longer [laughs] than the composer has been and so he is very judicious about what is and what isn’t appropriate to his vision of the film. That includes uses of instruments.
He likes to use melody very sparingly because he feels like melody has a very specific emotional connotation and the only times to use that are when you want to convey that particular emotion and resonate that particular thought. When we first starting working together I accused him of making me de-melodize my music [laughs]. He loved it if I would just take the melody out, you know? He’s really good about knowing when a theme is exactly right and when it’s unnecessary.
SK: So you wrote 120 minutes of music in about 4 weeks?
GC: That’s correct.
SK: How in the hell did you do that?
GC: [Laughs] I have no idea! One of the things I try to do when I write is not get in my own way by judging myself. I just sort of let it flow and don’t worry about it I don’t worry about it sounding like something else or not being this or, you know, whatever critiques we put on ourselves. If I don’t have a lot of time, then I don’t have time to second guess myself.
One of the things I think I’ve got going for me - and there are lot of composers who are a lot better at a lot of things than I am - but one of the things I’ve got going for me is I trust my instincts. And so when you do that, you can move pretty fast.
SK: You didn’t find yourself redoing anything? Was it first drafts of everything, so to speak?
GC: Pretty much, yeah. There were things that we rethought during the process, but mainly it was just getting up at four in the morning, going out there and working until I had to stagger back into my house [laughs]. Usually by eleven o’clock.
SK: So how were your instincts? Were there moments after you scored the film and watched it where you thought, “Only if I had more time I could’ve done this or that?”
GC: I’m sure there are. I haven’t seen it since the premiere. I haven’t watched the DVD yet.
I think I wished that I had written a longer piece for the very end. When we spotted it, we spotted it that my music would carry us up to him riding away on the horse and then the Robbie Robertson piece would start. In looking at it, I feel like I would have written something that would have gone over those credits and then his piece could have started at the end of (the epilogue)
It’s good to look back on something and think, well, I’d do it differently now, but I don’t spend too much time doing that. It would be like looking at a photo album and seeing myself back in the 70’s with that hairstyle and try to airbrush it out.
SK: That’s a good analogy. I like that. I talked about your eclecticism earlier. How does this film and your score to this film differ from your previous films?
GC: In terms of musical satisfaction...in terms of me as a creative musician, this has to rank up right on the top just because of the fact that it came from my heart. Not that the other stuff that I’ve written doesn’t come from my heart, but what I mean is, this is totally that. There aren’t any humorous pizzicato strings anywhere in this score [laughs] which was really for me.
At this moment in fact, I’m mixing HAROLD AND KUMAR 2 (2007).
SK: [Laughs]
GC: I’m really having a great time with that. One of the great things about doing what I do is that you really do get to do a lot of fun and different kinds of music. Usually, whatever I’m doing at the moment is my favorite thing that I’ve ever done [laughs], but in terms of just musical satisfaction, I would say that BURY MY HEART is number one and strangely enough, THE SANTA CLAUS movies are probably next in line because I just get to go wild orchestrally on those films.
SK: Is it really nice just to be nominated or do you have hired goons hunting down Jeff Beal as we speak?
GC: [Laughs] Well, It’s a fact that it’s an honor to be nominated, but that doesn’t in any way diminish the disappointment that I felt [laughs]. Yeah, it’s a lot better to win than not to win, but at least the movie won best movie and in the end, everybody’s shooting for that. That’s what the goal is, to make it the best that you can make it.
SK: It was tough competition this year. I’m a big fan of Jeff Beal’s work and his music for NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES was fantastic. I thought maybe I’d be able to use our conversation to congratulate you on an Emmy win, but I’ll congratulate you on a nomination nonetheless. It’s very well deserved.
GC: Well, thank you so much! Jeff’s a friend of mine and I gave him a big hug when he went down to get his award. I could have tripped him, but I didn’t [laughs], so that’s to my credit.
SK: I’ve got one more question. I always told myself that if I was ever going to get the opportunity to speak with you, I would ask you this.
In GOLDMEMBER (2002), during the opening title sequence when Austin acknowledges Quincy Jones as the guy who gives Austin his mojo, I was like, wait a minute! No! It’s George S. Clinton that is the mojo behind Austin Powers! Now I’ll credit Quincy Jones. I think his “Soul Bossa Nova” piece is perfect for Austin Powers and I love it! But when he’s up there on the scoring stage weren’t you just a little bit like...Hey! That should have been me? I know I totally expected to see you on the podium.
GC: Well, as a matter of fact, if the camera had kept panning to the right, you would have seen a piano player who was supposed to be featured during one of the “Soul Bossa Nova” shots, but they ran out of time [laughs]. But anyway, I got to hang with Quincy and he is an amazing guy and I don’t begrudge him any of the accolades that he receives, but there is a part of me that winces a little bit.
SK: [Laughs] Yeah. I don’t blame you. That opening piece is perfect but it’s the remaining 200+ minutes of music that you composed that helps make that trilogy classic. When I first saw that I almost leapt out of my seat. I wanted to tell the audience Quincy Jones just did the first piece of music! You did the rest [laughs]!
GC: I really appreciate that. I remember my sister (she still lives in Chattanooga) calling me and saying, “George, we went to see GOLDMEMBER and I thought you had just gotten a real dark tan or something.” When he turned around, she thought it was gonna be me [laughs].
SK: [Laughs] Yeah, well, I thought it was gonna be you too. But Quincy is a public figure and people know him and respect him and he is definitely deserving of every accolade he gets.
GC: The last time I talked to him he was coming back from a trip to China where he’s helping advise them on their music industry.
SK: That’s amazing. He’s Superman of the music industry.
GC: I know. It’s true, it’s true.
SK: Well, is there anything else that you want to add or comment upon?
GC: The DVD for WOUNDED KNEE just came out. There’s a lot of interesting features on there. They’re non-specific to the music because, as is usually the case with DVDS, they do all that stuff prior to the actual scoring. Unfortunately, you don’t get to see John Two-Hawks or any of that stuff, but that’s pretty typical for what happens with extra features on DVDs. It’s really wonderfully packaged and beautifully done and I’m extremely proud to have been a part of this.
SK: George thank you again for speaking with me. I congratulate you on your success and look forward to hearing more wonderful work from you.
GC: Thanks!
On behalf of Ain’t It Cool News I’d like to extend a word of gratitude one last time to George for taking time out of his busy schedule to chat. Indeed, he was right in the middle of mixing HAROLD AND KUMAR 2 (2008) and used his break time to speak with me.
I’d also like to thank Tom Kidd of Costa Communications for his help with this interview.
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