Quotes from Thomas Newman

I didn't listen to any of my dad's scores.

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.

I know what my taste is, and I do like my touch on the piano.

The thing I don't want to do as a film composer is reiterate. I prefer to subtextualize or to underline rather than to say, 'This is what you should be feeling.'

In animation, action is changing so quickly that there's really not a lot of suspended moments.

There are moments when I invoke my dad and think about him on the podium, but in a very positive way. I don't feel at all intimidated by him. I feel like I've found my own voice.

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.

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.

The thing about the creative process is it's so chaotic.

Movie music allows me to work with players as creatively as I can.

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?

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.

The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.

The idea of creating film scores was terrifying for many years, into my 30s. It struck me as a career of doing 30-page term papers the night before they're due.

You want to say as little as you can and get the most punch out of it, always with the knowledge that people are not in the theater to listen to your music so much as to respond to the movie. You're a part of that experience.

I flew to England to see the rough cut of 'Revolutionary Road.' I was quite moved. As a married man, it's kind of disturbing to see a couple try so hard to work things out and fail so miserably.

There was no saying I could ever step in and do what John does, because it'd be really hard to be John Williams.

The golden age of Hollywood was the conceit of the movie and the style of the movie.

When you see an early edited version, you're not sure what it is. The movie is getting on its wobbly legs.

We're all shocked by new ideas, and we're less shocked when we hear them again. And less shocked when we hear them a third time.

It's always nice to remember that there was a time when I loved something that I didn't know much about; it just reached my ears and moved me.

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.

Part of me wants to stay hidden; it's no coincidence that I write movie music. It lets me stay in the shadows, in a way, but still lets me be expressive.

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.