John Ottman - The Music
of Pictures
The Hollywood machine ain’t what it used to be. Rising costs, and the risk-averse culture of corporate control they’ve created, are driving many of its most creative people to take their projects overseas. Runaway production is such a problem that the venerable showbiz unions are staging marches in the street, and Governor Schwarzenegger gives certificates of recognition to any producer willing to stay and shoot in L.A. All of which amounts to good news for Australia.
Superman Returns is the latest big American production to bring its talent and gigantic phone number budget to Fox Studios in Sydney. On the 17th of August 2005, about 150 members of the local filmmaking community gathered at a Popcorn Taxi event to share an entertaining evening with its composer and editor: John Ottman. There’s a term for guys like this: they’re “backroom boys”. But some aren’t happy to be stuck there. Let John Ottman into the spotlight, and you find he’s got plenty to say.
He told us everything that’s wrong with Hollywood filmmaking these days. But he did so with a smile, and didn’t go easy on himself. In response to being goosed about his body of work (which includes The Usual Suspects, The X-Men Series, and now Superman Returns) John replied: “There’s a lot of really bad films I’m not showing.” He’s quick to acknowledge he’s not the only composer or editor around, but John is noteworthy because he can do both. Thus he integrates the music and the editing in his films. If you remember the taxi heist from Usual Suspects (which begins with the jump-cut plane landing and ends with the burning of the cop car) you know how slick a tapestry this man can weave.
Film School
As a kid, all he used to listen to was classical & film music, and he progressed from making his own films to a place at the USC film school. There he earned a reputation as a good editor, even though he didn’t want it (referring to his time in the cutting room as “editing jail”). Nevertheless, he was willing to edit for anyone. “Don’t hold out for the motherlode,” he advises, “because it might never come.”
John ums and ahs a bit when asked about his time at USCinema. He first met Bryan Singer on a USC thesis film, where the soon-to-be-big-time director was a lowly production assistant. So in retrospect, it did work. But he resented it at the time: so full of politics and bureaucracy. (Bryan, for example, was in the Critical Studies programme, so they wouldn’t let him use the camera gear. John certainly doubts there’ll be a Bryan Singer wing at USC any time soon.) He could feel his creativity being stunted- professors acted like execs- but that was pretty ingenious, in retrospect, because the real world operates in the same way. (As a student in that course a few years later, I’ll back up what John is saying about bureaucracy. It was more about fulfilling the academic requirements of an arts degree than practical filmmaking. The most worthwhile thing about it, looking back, was the people I met. And shedding lots of childish illusions about L.A. It made Sydney, which I’d left, look more appealing by comparison.)
You’ll find a very cheeky anti-film school subtext in Urban Legends: Final Cut, the slasher flick which John directed, scored, and finally ended up editing himself. For a start, it’s set at film school. Early on, the professor announces: “Clive LeVay will be offering a new Super-8 course, which is required before you go on to anything else,” at which the students roll their eyes. (A thinly veiled dig at USC, where we were restricted to making projects on our own Super-8 gear. Only the postgrads got to use the lovely 16mm cameras, the Johnny Carson TV stage, the Steven Spielberg Sound Scoring stage etc. etc.) Not to mention the fact that the serial killer turns out to be- gasp-the professor, who has murdered the star student and his crew so he can steal their film and retitle it as his own. At the final unmasking, our heroine hisses: “Those who can do, those who can’t teach.”
Working with Bryan Singer
After film school, John branched off from editing into scoring, and he started getting paid to score corporate videos. When Bryan got Public Access (his first feature) up, and the composer dropped out at the last minute, John stepped up. But the deal was: “If you edit it, you can score it.” A blackmail thing. Which John accepted. As he says: “Most of the films I’ve done without Bryan Singer have bombed, so I keep going back to work with him, and they usually come out pretty well.”
Like Steven Spielberg, Bryan Singer uses the same composer and editor on each film (augmented in Bryan’s case by cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel). It worked on Usual Suspects, X-Men… if the system ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Singer does a lot of takes to try and encourage weird things to happen. Just says to the actor: “Do it again. Differently.” So John gets lots of takes to go through in the editing room. Still, the extra work is worth it. Bryan has big creative control and gives his friend J.O. free rein. They tend to agree. Conversely, when he’s not working with Bryan, John has less creative freedom. “When it becomes by committee and it’s 7 moron execs/producers interfering, the score will suffer.” John likes being as far as possible from the suits while editing too. And he stays away from the set because it’s so godawful boring.
Superman Returns
At 200 million dollars, Superman Returns has one of those phone number budgets that makes the jaw drop. But the big bucks come with corporate compromises, and for Ottman it’s a bittersweet project because he had to use John Williams’ theme at the head of the movie or they’d have lynched him. As of now, it’s temped with Solaris, which is nebulous and modern, helping it work because they don’t just want to make a backward-looking recreation. But it’s ridiculous to try to change or improve on that main theme- he won’t even try.
The Superman editing schedule is currently nice: 10am-7pm and he has his weekends: though it will become more when they return to L.A. He likes working with Aussies “because they’re nice, and smart too. In Canada they’re nice but kinda dumb.”
…To be continued in Part 2…
Reported by D.W. Williams, August 2005