A Reluctant Musical Genius
Whether it’s making up songs on the spot Friday nights at Hollywood nightclub Largo or laboring for months on movie soundtracks, Jon Brion is ultimately just a hard-working ideas man.
Thursday, December 30, 2004
By Todd Gilchrist
There are few composers working today who have left as indelible a mark on modern cinema as Jon Brion. Along with anchoring Friday nights at the Los Angeles club Largo for longer than anyone can remember, the 34-year-old Connecticut native has also been responsible for some of the movies’ oddest and most unique odysseys, including Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I Heart Huckabees. Not that you would be able to immediately tell by listening to these respective scores; Brion’s oeuvre is defined by a distinctive lack of conceptual continuity beyond its consistent excellence. And as the composer recently told FilmStew, that’s just the way he likes it. “I have nothing,” Brion says of his approach to composing. “I have my gut, and I have my relationship with the given director, and that’s it.” Brion, also a producer of such venerated performers as Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright and Aimee Man, began his film career in 1996 thanks to a chance encounter with then-unproven director Paul Thomas Anderson. The result: a jazz-influenced score for Hard Eight.
While Brion acknowledges that he’s enjoyed innumerous opportunities working with some of the best people in show business, this particular strand of his music career came almost in spite of his own efforts. “I guess it’s pretty important to note that I’ve spent my entire career trying to avoid doing movies,” he explains, with now five significant credits attached to his composing resume. “That’s my first advice to anybody getting into the motion picture business: avoid doing them at all costs.” “And then, when ones that are sort of so good that you can’t refuse them come up, do those,” he continues. “I mean, that’s pretty much all I’ve done. I’ve never actively sought movie work.” However, Brion’s general resistance to working in the motion picture business has been consistently couched over the years by the chance to work with folks who are impossible to say no to. “When I get a phone call or somebody I know goes, ‘I’ve got a movie you might be interested in,’ I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do any movies. I want to make records. Leave me alone!’” he says with a chuckle. “[They reply,] ‘Oh, it’s these guys Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman,’ and I’m just like Goddammit! It’s like Al Pacino- they keep pulling me back.”
“I’m fortunate enough that whatever it is I’ve done for some other movie, someone sees it and calls up and wants to do something,” he says modestly. “If I know something they’ve done and actually had an emotional response to it - for instance, with Michel Gondry, when he called I hadn’t seen the first movie that he had done with Charlie, but I was a fanatical fan of his video work, and actually had collections of his videos on VHS tapes from years before.” “An old girlfriend was in a video of his and that’s how he came to my attention almost ten years ago,” he remembers. “She said, ‘Oh my God. You’ve got to see this guy’s reel!’ It used to be this thing we had around the house and just watch for the pure joy of it, so he wasn’t yet sort of a known name.” Brion’s partnership with Kaufman gave birth to the singular audiovisual experience Eternal Sunshine, which branded romance in melancholy and established both the filmmaker and composer’s names to folks who before might only have known each of them in passing. Like most composers, Brion typically joins a production once most of the shooting is already completed. But he has also enjoyed some very unique and fruitful collaborations during and even prior to the beginning of production. “Most people remember they have to hire a composer once they have started editing the film,” Brion maintains. “It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, we should have some music on this,’ which I think is a pity, because if you really want it to be integrated with the film, you make your decisions earlier one.”
“A lot of the great stuff with Spielberg and John Williams [whom the director recently characterized at the Kennedy Center Awards as the most fortunate element of his movie career], I think there was a little more contact early in the process,” Brion observes. “I mean, with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you had to; they had to know what their little melodic figure was going to be that’s used in communications, and because of it there’s a real beauty to how the music works in that film.” This is in fact the way Brion worked with Paul Thomas Anderson on Punch-Drunk Love. At the same time, he confesses that even the most elaborate collaborations sometimes generate ideas that seem anathema to his own creative process. “ What always happens is you have the themes for the character and then the director goes, ‘Yeah, I don’t like that piece of music for that moment; can we take this piece and put it over there?’” he explains. “Suddenly it’s like, ‘Well, that’s the theme for the opposite character.’ It just becomes, ‘There’s no poetic interaction here,’ and I give up on it.” Despite these occasional obstacles, Brion has always flourished by working with filmmakers who fly in the face of convention to create something new. “The people I’m attracted to are trying to break up cinematic clichés in general, so why should we be beholden to the leitmotif idea in general?” he suggests. While Brion’s reputation as a musical mad-hatter opens him up to some tough demands from collaborators, he loves the idea of delivering music that others might look at as not always appropriate for the on-screen moments being accompanied. It’s the kind of philosophy that endears him to fellow iconoclasts such as Anderson. “Paul’s working process for every movie changes,” Brion reveals. “He does not have a hard and fast way that he does this. Even though he has a crew of people he trusts and generally works with, he is changing the very concept of how he approaches making movies every time, and there’s a lot of that in how I’ve made records.” Nevertheless, Brion admits that each and every project he’s worked on has proved significantly taxing, no matter how familiar he was with the director or his other collaborators. “Every one is a challenge,” he confesses. “Many of the musical decisions that get made in the movies aren’t even ones I necessarily agreed with. I tried to make it work as well as I could, and then it was mixed the way they wanted it mixed.”
“I consider the things I don’t like acceptable losses,” adds Brion. “But because I allow myself to be collaborative with directors, I’ve finally realized that because I can offer up options on the spot, they pretty much do with me what they do with actors and editors.”
Even though this doesn’t necessarily always create better options, it can provide some mightily useful creative context. “Fifty takes in, it’s like, ‘You know, that second take you did was pretty great,’” he says with a laugh. “It’s always exhausting.” “I haven’t done a movie where I wasn’t absolutely just a quivering mass of flesh that couldn’t remember its own name at the end,” he continues. “If I was a quivering mass of flesh on the ground for a picture that’s just an average picture, I’d kill myself. That would be terrible. It would be an awful life.” Having helped shape the sound of many progressive alternative musicians during the 1990’s, Brion can now look back on undeniably the signature year of his evolving sideline career as a movie soundtrack auteur. Although he does not yet know exactly how he will follow I Heart Huckabees and Eternal Sunshine, he looks forward to the relative simplicity of the cinema art form.
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