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.

When you start on a new film, no matter how many you've done before that, I think I've done close to 80 films, but it's always kind of a fun adventure.

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.

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.

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.

I look at the film without any music or sound. I try to grasp the story from the screenplay. I try to write to the novel or book if there is one. I try to create music that's honest and true to my heart for the story.

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.