MIKE PATTON Discusses Film Score Debut; Video Available
April 24, 2008Erin Broadley of SuicideGirls.com recently sat down with Mike Patton (FAITH NO MORE, MR. BUNGLE, PEEPING TOM, FANTOMAS, MONDO CANE) in San Francisco to get all the details on his film score debut, "A Perfect Place".
Watch the seven-minute clip below.
When asked how he met he film's director, Derrick Scocchera, Patton said, "I was a big laserdisc guy and he had a store in my neighborhood and I used to go shop there a lot. So being a regular customer, I got to know the people who worked there and I got to meet him. It was really a great store. It was so great, [laughs] of course it went out of business. I spent a lot of money in there. We got to be friends and from that point on, he was working for Zoetrope for Coppola for a while and we'd call each other from time to time to talk about film and talk about music. I'd invite him to my shows and he'd send me stuff that he was doing. He started an independent company [Fantoma Films] where he was putting out great DVD box sets from really historic directors Mario Bava, Fassbinder he put out lots of great stuff that, even if I didn't know him, I'd just go to the store and buy it. He put together great packages and I was a fan of what he was doing and he said, 'You know what? I also write scripts,' and sent me a few scripts and it's hard for me to tell what a movie is going to be like from reading it on paper, but there was a kinship there and when he said, 'I'm going to make a short film and I want you to score it,' who was I to argue?
On the topic of whether he crafted the compositions for the movie scene by scene, Mike replied, "A lot of the film was basically done, or close to being done, before I started. Being friends with the director, he showed me a couple of scenes. Also, he would just describe a scene to me and say, 'I need a theme for when the old lady puts on a seventy-eight and I want it to sound like Enrico Caruso.' One of the best directions he gave me was from the outset he said, 'I want one major theme, and I want you to come up with a zillion variations including the source music, including a seventy-eight record, or when the guys are in a car, flipping the radio dial, I want you to write a piece like that.' In a sense, I was doing the score and the source music, in one. It was fun."
Check out the entire interview in text format at SuicideGirls.com.
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