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

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

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 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.

I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

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.

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.