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.

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 had great inspiration from a Japanese composer named Toru Takemitsu. He wrote over 90 film scores and a lot of concert music, a lot of classical music, and he gave me a lot of inspiration, as well as composers from other countries.

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.

Film music really is about point of view and you can shift it wherever you want really depending on how you look at it.

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.

Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.