The art of making films is a collaborative art. As a composer, you're always working with the cinematographer because he's so much the heart of the world they've created on film.

I always go back to the original material. I want a good connection as the composer and writer of the score to the director and to the source material. It's really important.

I grew up in repertory theaters, so it was comedy one night, drama the next. I'm used to going from one to the other. And I worked for years in television as well. So, I like the interrelationship of it and having a good relationship with a group of artists creating something really where the sum is greater than all of our individual contributions, our parts.

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.

I have kind of an intuitive feeling as a composer as to what would be appropriate for those groups and how to feature certain paths in a certain way, whether there was dialogue in a scene, or whether there was no dialogue and music was telling the story at that point.

You don't always want to be using the music in a way to express ideas inherent that are on the screen. You might want to work more around the fringes of the story, and work more with the subtext, and add more depth to the story through the use of music.

The piano is really the featured instrument of a 10-piece chamber orchestra. The construction is the harmonic language.