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Multitasking Hero

Jun 1, 2006 11:00 AM, By Blair Jackson

John Ottman Serves as Editor and Composer for Superman Returns.

The relationship between a director and his or her editor is a special one — in a real sense, it is those two people who give shape, rhythm, and coherence to a film. In the case of Superman Returns director Bryan Singer, whose previous work includes the two hugely successful X-Men films, The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil, and Public Access, his editor, John Ottman, is also his score composer — a rare arrangement that has served both men well.

“I was an editor first,” Ottman says. “I went to [USC] film school with Bryan and edited projects for him and other filmmakers while I was there. When I graduated, it was around the time when MIDI technology was coming out, and so I got some equipment. And then just for kicks, I experimented with re-scoring some of my friends' student films.

“I was a freaky kid, and all I would do is listen to film scores and classical music. To this day, I couldn't tell you who the most popular groups on the radio are, but I can tell you what 10th cue on James Horrner's Apollo 13 soundtrack is. I'd go to the local symphony in San Jose and watch my favorite pieces be performed, and I'd learn how they were being done. So then in the '80s, when the technology came around to use computers to write, I started that as a hobby and occasionally doing little industrial films.

“Then, when Bryan got his first feature film [Public Access], I was editing it, and our composer dropped out at the eleventh hour, and I said, ‘Hey, I know this character as well as anybody, I constructed this movie — I could score this movie.’ And Bryan says, ‘But you do all that flowery fun music.’ I said, ‘No, no, I can do dark, too.’ The irony is after doing that movie, all I got hired for was dark, sinister scores for a few years. Then, when he made The Usual Suspects, he put it in the deal that I was doing both the editing and composing, which had not really been done before. I told him I didn't think I could do both, but he said, ‘Well, you're not going to edit it unless you compose, too,’ and that sort of blackmail has continued to this day.”

Ottman, who humorously describes himself as “Mr. Glass Half-empty,” emphasizes that there are negatives to the equation as well as positives. “The overlap is clearly not good for me physically, and for the time I have left to write the score,” he says. “On [Superman Returns] or any film, if we had a composer on board, he would have started at least a month or two before I started, because I was needed in the editing room — and I'm still needed there, even though I'm doing more music at this stage. Also, composers need to enter a sort of writing zone and shut the world out, and I can't do that when I'm editing the film because I'm always being dragged in for some ADR for the actors or a screening for the executives or some other reason. Is there a good side? Well, I get to have a big hand in making Bryan's movies with him, and I get to score movies, which I love. The other cost of doing both on Bryan's films is I potentially lose four or five movies by spending so much time doing one.”

Perhaps because of the success of X-Men, much of Ottman's outside scoring work has been for action films, including Halloween H2O, the camp classic Eight Legged Freaks, Gothika, and Fantastic Four. When he both edits and writes music for a project, he picks temp music long before he starts scoring.

“Unfortunately, I do a pretty good job at [picking a temp score], so I become my [own] worst enemy because if you create a really good temp score then you, and often the director, fall in love with it,” Ottman says. “I'd like to say I'm a total savant where as I'm editing, I'm thinking of [musical] themes, but if I have the editing hat on, it's really all I can do to keep up with what that requires. But I will have a sense, as editor, of where to build in purposely pregnant spaces where I know it will be a big musical moment. What it will be exactly, though, I don't know at that point. I think the best filmmakers and film editors, frankly, are closet composers anyway, whether they can actually write music or not. It's all about storytelling.”

Ottman edits on an Avid Meridian system with Unity storage, but says his basic creative approach to editing has changed little in recent years, even with this movie adding the Genesis camera system to the mix (see p. 26). “I still get footage in the Avid and edit the movie that way,” he says. “It did look really good, though.”

Ottman says he writes his scores on synthesizers. “I orchestrate everything down to the last flute trill, but everything is done in a synthesized rendering. My writing program is still [MOTU Digital Performer]; I don't want to learn anything new,” he says with a chuckle. “Then I use a few Gigastudios. I still use some of the old synthesizers — like I can't part with my old Roland D-70 keyboard. There are some vintage sounds in there that I used in Superman, and I've also got the old Roland JV-1080; you never know when you're going to need those old sounds, so I keep them around, mainly out of insecurity. And the thing about those is they don't crash. Once I do a [synth] mock-up that's approved, then my best friend and orchestrator/conductor — Damon Intrabartolo — takes the MIDI information and transcribes it; he still does it by hand.” Other key members of Ottman's team — he calls it his family — include music editor Amanda Goodpaster and scoring mixer Casey Stone.

In the case of Superman Returns, Ottman had an extra challenge to deal when it came to writing the score — working around nearly 15 minutes of John Williams' classic music for the original Superman films from the late '70s and early '80s. “It's one of his great scores,” Ottman says. “When I was young I used to drive my parents crazy playing my Superman records. And now here I am writing the score for the new Superman film; it's pretty awesome. But I definitely didn't set out to make a score that sounded like John Williams wrote it. I have my own themes running through it, and I think it has my personality; it has my stamp on it.” And with more than two hours of original music, Ottman was writing cues up until the bitter end.

“I have to be as objective as I can and pretend that the score was written by somebody else,” he says. “More often than not, the music isn't intended to be hot — it's designed to be woven into the effects, and I write with that in mind, so it's great to actually be there and weave the music in the way I intended. With films where I'm just the composer, I don't have the opportunity to do that, so that's one more bonus to doing both jobs.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.