I've been writing music since I was 9. I took harmony and counterpoint classes when I was studying the clarinet. So, I've been writing for an awfully long time. It just became part of everyday life.

To make good films, you have to have a good relationship and good collaboration as composer-director, composer-editor, composer-production designer-actor because you're working with the actors on screen.

Different directors have different techniques in the use of films. Cronenberg is very different in the way he works with film, and how he takes the audience into his films is different than how Peter Jackson would do that or Jon Stewart. So, if you go between those artists, you shift gears and you kind of fall into the working method of that film.

I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office.

Sometimes you want to use the music in a clarity way to explain something in the film.

Theater and film are essentially the same - just different kinds of storytelling.

Saturday Night Live was actually started with a show that Lorne Michaels and I did at a summer camp called Timberlane in Ontario when we were 14 and 15. We would do an improvisational show with music, comedy and acting.