© 2009 Theodore Shapiro Composer Theodore Shapiro

EXCLUSIVE MUSIC INTERVIEW::

E-Notes: COMPOSER THEODORE SHAPIRO TRAVELS BACK TO 'YEAR ONE'

One of the kings of hip Hollywood comedy scores in the new summer film

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER, Soundtrack Editor
Published 6/18/2009

If there’s a running theme to YEAR ONE, it’s the humor that happens when the old school meets the hip factor. On screen, it’s the perils that befall Jack Black and Michael Cera’s cavemen as they bumble into more advanced civilizations, quickly finding that having huge temples and plumbing doesn’t necessarily mean being the sharpest end of the stick. But behind the camera, the comedic past meets the present with far more carefree results, as Harold Ramis, the maker of such comedy classics as CADDYSHACK, GROUNDHOG DAY and ANALYZE THIS discovers the new, hip sound of hilarity in the music of Theodore Shapiro.

While it looked like he could have kept scoring the straight and narrow with such early work as ON THE ROPES and HEIST, Shapiro’s talent for crossing symphonic music with hipper rhythms has graced such uptempo chick flick comedies as 13 GOING ON 30 and THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, as well as raunchy guy fiestas like OLD SCHOOL and MR. WOODCOCK. As his resume grew in that arena, Shapiro gave a hilariously frantic pace to FUN WITH DICK AND JANE, funked up STARSKY AND HUTCH, heard the regressed future of IDIOCRACY, created pompous sports anthems for DODGEBALL and BLADES OF GLORY, and found that war could be rocking fun in the fake Vietnam of TROPIC THUNDER.

More than ever, Theodore Shapiro’s humorously fresh, but thankfully uncondescending approach has made him the “go to” composer when Hollywood’s out to capture the youth comedy audience. And that gamble’s never been bigger as YEAR ONE (soundtrack on Lakeshore Records) rolls every cavemen flick, sword and sandal adventure and biblical epic into a dialogue-driven comedy that resonates with intelligently droll humor. And it’s up to Shapiro to bring all of pre-history’s musical cultures into an energetic score that’s as much “world music” as it is the sound of Olde Hollywood. Here strings swing into beat box rhythms and Egyptian winds roar into action right out of a Mexican gundown in the Wild West. It’s the kind of straight-laced, yet eccentrically hilarious sound that’s continued to distinguish Theodore Shaprio’s comedy stylings, one that turns the music you’d hear if you were bumbling about YEAR ONE into a contemporarily fresh jam session that any cave dweller, or Babylonian soldier could groove to with a smile.

iF: Some of your early scores were for WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER, STATE AND MAIN and OLD SCHOOL, comedies where your sound ranged from traditional strings to rock and jazz. In that way, do you think getting drawn into comedy scoring gave you even more stylistic range than doing traditional dramas?

THEODORE SHAPIRO: Yeah, I think so.  Obviously some comedies allow for, or even call for an eclectic approach to the music.  Having done films like that certainly gave me a lot of experience writing, recording, and producing different styles of music, and there's no substitute for experience.

iF: This is your first score for writer-director Harold Ramis, who's made no small amount of classic comedies himself with stylistically different scores. How would you describe his musical sensibilities, and what was it about your music that brought you to YEAR ONE?

SHAPIRO: It's a little bit awe-inspiring to look at the list of films that Harold has written and/or directed.  The list includes many seminal films of my childhood.  Harold is a very knowledgeable and interested person.  He likes learning about instruments he's never heard of.  He wants to know what that strange-sounding string instrument is, and where it comes from, etc.  In the main title cue, I used a sample of Indonesian Kecak Dance music.  The idea to use it was Harold's. He’d been to Indonesia and seen a performance.  So as you can see, this is really the best kind of collaborator-- someone who, without limiting the composer's freedom, is deeply interested and engaged in the process of making music.  As far as my involvement in the project, they were looking for a composer who could blend a traditional orchestral approach with a modern sensibility, and luckily I'd done some other scores that fit that description.

iF: Did you do any historical and ethnic musical research for YEAR ONE?

SHAPIRO: Early on I did a session with a wonderful Middle-Eastern multi-instrumentalist named A.J. Racy.  He showed me a tremendous number of Middle-Eastern winds, stringed instruments, and percussion instruments.  And a lot of material from that session was used in the score.  That said, I realized at a certain point in the process that any kind of authenticity about musical styles was actually a distraction from the film.  The characters go on a road trip through a VERY loose version of the Old Testament, but the movie is not in any way about the Old Testament.  It's a road trip movie, and the more the music underlined that the clearer it would be to the audience what they should be focused on.

iF: How did you want your music to "progress" with Zed and Oh as they find more evolved civilizations on their road trip?

SHAPIRO: Harold's idea is that the characters trace the arc of human civilization.  The characters start out as hunter-gatherers in a tribal village.  So the music in that section of film draws from African drumming, but with other sounds that are primitive in nature: didgeridoos, chanting, thumb pianos, etc.  When they leave the village, they move through an agrarian culture, where they meet Cain and Abel; they go to a bazaar in an Arab seaport; they meet the Hebrews; and finally they go to the city of Sodom, which is figured as an ancient Las Vegas.  Once they leave the village, the music becomes a sort of stylistic collage-- it uses drum loops, ethnic and electric guitars, ethnic winds, percussion, and orchestra.  So obviously, I was not trying for authenticity.  But the music does mirror the shape of the journey: in the agrarian culture there are more rustic sounds; more Middle-Eastern sounds from the point where they reach the bazaar; and the score becomes its most electric in the city of Sodom.

iF: Talk about all of the different musical cultures that your score encompasses. What were some of the more exotic instruments that you used?

SHAPIRO: At one point we were doing a recording session with the ethnic wind player Pedro Eustache, and he said, "I'm playing in a Middle-Eastern scale, to a reggaeton beat, on a Chinese flute!"  I think that says what you need to know about the blend of musical styles in the score.  The score has elements of African drumming, a lot of Middle-Eastern instruments and harmonic language, a little bit of Bollywood influence, and of course, lots of contemporary sounds and styles.  There is also an unusual use of the orchestra.  The string section for much of the score is smaller than a traditionally sized orchestra.  In the size of the group, the style of playing they do, and the way in which we recorded it, it functions much more like a Bollywood string section than a Hollywood string section.  Some exotic instruments used: zourna, mizwiz and mizmar, kawala, bhangra dhols, dizi, and something Pedro made out of two pens.

iF: A lot of the humor in YEAR ONE is dry and dialogue driven, as opposed to the more slapstick antics of a film like HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PART ONE. How did that low key style of comedy affect your score?

SHAPIRO: It just increased the imperative to never strain to underline a joke.  The score's primary function became the underlining of the vibe of the movie and especially the charming relationship between Jack Black and Michael Cera's characters.  It was never to sell the comedy.

iF: With its sometimes-epic orchestral sound and use of "primitive" percussion, would you say YEAR ONE's music is also a take-off of any number of cavemen and biblical soundtracks?

SHAPIRO: It's not a take-off of anything, per se; though I'm sure people may be able to point to other scores that use a similar palette.  I am a great fan of Jerry Goldsmith's PLANET OF THE APES, and we can't help but to have the music we adore live somewhere within what we write.  But there are no sly references here that someone is supposed to catch.

iF: There are some great, musically anachronistic touches like hip-hop rhythms and Mexican western music that invade the symphonic period of YEAR ONE. In a score that mostly plays things straight, would you describe these passages as the score's "jokes?"

SHAPIRO: No, I wouldn't describe the anachronisms as jokes at all.  I would say that what I was trying to do was write the music that touched on the essence of the film.  To me, that essence was not about the historical year one, but about two guys on the road trying to figure their lives out.  The whole film is completely contemporary, with a very loose feel and dialogue that feels improvised at times.  So the idea of the musical collage was to reflect the film and relate the characters to the world we live in.

iF: As one of Hollywood's busiest comedy composers, do you think you have a "hip" sound that keeps you particularly busy in the genre?

SHAPIRO: The word "hip" scares me, and I certainly never try to be cool with my musical choices.  Like a lot of other composers, I've tried to find a way to blend sounds from the pop world with traditional orchestral material and make it sound like one unified thing.  Hopefully I've succeeded at that.  But of course, being busy is in large part a function of having people want to work with you again, and I've been fortunate to forge great working relationships.

iF: How do you think YEAR ONE stands out in your comedic resume, and what kind of film comedy do you think you have left to tackle?

SHAPIRO: I really like this score.  As with TROPIC THUNDER, this is a very maximalist musical approach that enabled me to combine very disparate styles and come up with something strange.  I particularly enjoyed thinking about writing for the orchestra in a new way with the atypical string treatment.  As for what kind of comedy is left for me to do, I want to do an animated film, many of which are essentially comedies in essence.  I have two kids, ages four and two, and I would very much like to be able to have them watch a movie I've scored.  They're not ready for OLD SCHOOL.

Hear Theodore Shapiro go back to the beginning HERE.

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