Thomas Newman Quotes

Thomas Newman

Profession : Composer

Birth : October 20, 1955

My father used to say it was just there, the opportunity. It was all teed up for him. The talkies were starting, and here was Hollywood waiting for people to come from New York who had the training, who could do music with a sense of dramatic context.

Thomas Newman

Music is one of the last elements in the creative process. It can and hopefully should tie a bow around an artistic concept, how a story moves forward, the pace of that storytelling.

Thomas Newman

Post-production is kind of the death of hope. The money has been spent. The grand ideas are either there or they're not there. So music oftentimes has to compensate if there are issues, or it has to stay out of the way if the movie is working really well.

Thomas Newman

In the end, you don't want music to be noticed as much as digested and integrated into the storytelling. And make audiences sit forward in their seats and enjoy the movie.

Thomas Newman

I first came to Abbey Road Studios in 1994. I scored 'Little Women' there. What I remember most about it was how hard it was to come to London from Los Angeles and conduct when you're jetlagged.

Thomas Newman

There were moments in 'Malala,' I felt very moved by the storytelling, and 'pleased' would be the wrong word, but the music could be part of what moved me: that I was trying to contribute to something that was meaningful outside the realm of creative work but just more in terms of the world.

Thomas Newman

Robert Altman was a very jovial guy and obviously a famed improviser and perhaps less effective in post-production, which is like the crystallising process. So I found myself at sea often with him because we'd have conversations about what music is, and in the end, I don't know how interested he was?

Thomas Newman

You can always hear a director saying, 'Well I don't really know what this piece is saying, so therefore, I reject it.' There are any number of things you can anticipate going wrong, and sometimes they go right. But I think the things you like most are the things that get rejected first. That's just how things work.

Thomas Newman

With film music, endings are often more difficult than beginnings, because a beginning is an underline, a way of exciting a moment, and then you have to find a way to dissipate that.

Thomas Newman

I'm a huge fan of not overemphasising with music.

Thomas Newman

Sometimes the best experiences are when I know nothing about this movie: I've never met the director, and I come and see something and I'm blank, because then it's coming at you in a way it would never come at you if you'd read the script, with an expectation.

Thomas Newman

I guess there are certain conventions that come with film and with scoring film. So maybe one of those is menace in a lower register. It's trying to evoke some sense of chaos and adventure.

Thomas Newman

I think as storytelling has changed, you know, it's kind of turned into kind of hyper-reality movies.

Thomas Newman

My father's Alfred Newman - born in 1900, child prodigy at the piano, ended up in pit orchestras in the teens. I think he's one of the youngest conductors to conduct Broadway and worked with George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Cole Porter - went out with Irvin Berlin in 1930 to Hollywood and never left.

Thomas Newman

My uncle Lionel ended up being a bug guy at 20th Century Fox, which my father had been - and, of course, my cousin Randy - you know, one of the great American songwriters. It was a storied family and, in many ways, very tough to emerge from.

Thomas Newman