Composers are always going back to the past.

I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.

It's really the sound of the voices, the sound of the words, the sound of the sound that we're interested in.

I was part of the sort of avant guard tradition of John Cage and music concrete and pushing back the boundaries of avant garde classic pop rhythms. I think everyone brings something completely different to it.

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if youve got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.

My favorite work is The Full Monty because I got an Oscar for it. But it was really hard work at the time. Sometimes comedy is not a bundle of laughs to actually do.

Usually one or two things happen: Either you have an idea straightaway - the sort of sound that you want or the instrumentation or one particular sound that you want to feature - or you don't.