STORYBEAT WITH STEVE CUDEN

STEVE CUDEN INTERVIEWS AWARD-WINNING TELEVISION AND FILM COMPOSER, BEAR MCCREARY

Announcer:

This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So, join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden:

Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the steel city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. StoryBeat episodes are widely available at storybeat.net, on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and on numerous other podcast apps and platforms. Please take a moment to subscribe to StoryBeat wherever you listen to podcasts. My guest today, Emmy and BAFTA award winning composer Bear McCreary began his career as one of the final proteges of film music legend Elmer Bernstein, with whom he worked for nearly a decade. Bear has since become one of the most sought-after talents in today’s music industry. Bear burst onto the scene, scoring the influential and revered series Battlestar Galactica, for which his music was lauded by variety as innovative and by NPR as, “Like no other.”

Bear went on to win a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding original main title theme for Da Vinci’s Demons, a musical palindrome that sounds the same forwards and backwards. He also received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his work on Black Sails, Outlander and Human Target. And he’s twice been awarded ASCAP composer of the year by his peers. Bear’s recent projects include feature films like Godzilla: King of the Monsters, 10 Cloverfield Lane, the 2019 re-imagining of the classic 1988 slasher film Child’s Play, Happy Death Day, The Professor and the Madman starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn, and the Netflix films Rim of the World, and Eli. Bear also composed the score for the Netflix Blue Dream Studio’s smash animated hit Animal Crackers, which was co-written and co-directed by one of my favorite StoryBeat guests and my good friend, Scott Christian Sava. For TV, Bear’s work can be heard on Apple’s new drama series, SEE, AMC’s global phenomenon, The Walking Dead, and Disney’s long running series, Marvel’s Agents of Shield, among others.

Bear also composed the score for Sony PlayStation’s award-winning game, God of War. Forbes recently declared of Bear McCreary, “As a composer, his genre track record is one of the most impressive in modern day Hollywood.” So please stick around at the end of the show for a real treat. Bear has graciously lent us the exquisite theme he wrote for the feature film Europa Report, which we’ll play at end of the show. This is truly a great thrill for me to welcome one of the very best composers ever for the screen, Bear McCreary, to StoryBeat today. Bear, welcome to the show.

Bear McCreary:

Thank you so much. That was quite an introduction.

Steve Cuden:

Well, it sounds like you’ve done a few things.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah. I almost feel like I need to apologize for the lengthy bio that was necessary.

Steve Cuden:

Oh no, it’s really good. It’s good to set it up so we know who you are and what you’ve done, especially for those who may not have heard your work, which will be actually I think fairly few. All right, so let’s go back to the beginning. Let’s talk about a bit of your history. Where and when did your first love of music start? How did you even think that, music, this is something that I might like to do?

Bear McCreary:

I think it started with my upbringing. When I was four or five, I really started to fall in love with music, and that critical age, five or six, is where I started taking piano lessons and I started really clocking what was happening in movies. I would have been six when Back to the Future came out. And that time I had a little Fisher Price tape deck, a cassette recorder meant for kids. And I saw the movie. I was so blown away by the film, but ultimately the music. I was so enamored of this orchestral music, these melodies, that I begged my mom to take me again. So she took me again the next day. I took my Fisher Price recorder and I held it up so I could record the music so I could hear it later. And I got really mad at my mom when she would laugh during the dialogue. I’d literally like, “Be quiet, mom.” Because I didn’t know you could buy a thing called a soundtrack.

You can imagine in the next year or so when I was walking by the cassette aisle at whatever store or mall we were in and I saw a cassette tape with the Star Wars logo on it. And that was the beginning of the end for me. That was it. My fate was sealed. I started voraciously collecting soundtracks and I would go to movies just to hear the score. And certainly by the time I was eight or nine, my heroes were composers. Where other kids are collecting baseball cards or talking about actors, I would say, “You guys, I found this new Danny Elfman score this weekend. You’ve got to come over and see this movie.” So, I was heavily immersed in that. And at the same time I was taking piano lessons and that’s where those two things came together.

My piano teacher saw the writing on the wall here and quit forcing me to learn Mozart and Beethoven, which I would eventually go on and learn, and let me … I was transcribing Star Wars and Beetlejuice and Back to the Future and Mission Impossible. And I was trying to figure out how these themes go. And my piano teacher just started encouraging me to make those transcriptions. So you can see this perfect storm of events, right? I’m falling in love with stories and movies. I’m clocking what the music is doing and I’m getting obsessed over it. I’m also sitting at the piano going, “How do you do that? What are the notes?” And all that stuff. It was like the perfect storm. It all came together. And I basically knew what I wanted to do by the time I was eight.

Steve Cuden:

Well, if you’re listening to nothing more than Lalo Schifrin, John Williams and Danny Elfman, I’d say you’re doing pretty good.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah, exactly. That was definitely my steady diet.

Steve Cuden:

So did you meet Elmer Bernstein before you went to USC or after you started at USC?

Bear McCreary:

I met him before.

Steve Cuden:

Before.

Bear McCreary:

I met him when I was in high school. So I was a junior in Bellingham High School in Bellingham, Washington, which is the last moderately sized city on the coast before you get to the Canadian border. So, I was the Rotary Student of the Month. The Rotary Club would let you put this little thing on your resume. And that involved this ceremony, where I got to ditch high school for an afternoon and go to the Rotary Club. And they got up in front of all the old guys and said, “Oh, this is Bear McCreary. He’s applying for these different schools.” They mentioned I was looking at USC and they said, “He loves film music.” And this thing was so boring, man. I mean, even then I was like, “I wish I was back in history class.”

And this guy comes up to me, introduces himself. His name is Joe Coons. And he runs the Boating Association. He goes, “I’ve got a friend in the business who you might be interested in meeting.” And admittedly, by this point I was already a little cocky. Like people had said, “I know the guy who does the local weather report. Maybe you could write a theme for it.” And by this point I was already like, “No, I’m not interested in cable access music.” You know what I mean? And I was just like, “Okay, whatever.” And he goes, “Have you heard of Elmer Bernstein?” My jaw hits the floor.

Steve Cuden:

Sure.

Bear McCreary:

I mean, Ghostbusters, Animal House, The 10 Commandments, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape. Yeah, I had heard of Elmer Bernstein. So I make a cassette tape of what I’ve been doing. At this point, again, I’m a junior in high school. So I had had a couple of pieces played by my jazz band in high school, and then a lot of stuff that I had mocked up on my consumer grade keyboard sequencer. And I think I had Windows 95 maybe. I had just gotten into sequencing. So I was, doing a lot of mock-up orchestral music. And I sent this cassette tape to Joe who sent it to Elmer. And I would, of course later find out that Elmer would receive cassette tapes by the dozens every month and wouldn’t listen to him. I mean, he doesn’t have time, but because he knew Joe, he did.

Steve Cuden:

It’s all about who you know, not so much what you know, huh?

Bear McCreary:

Well, absolutely. And I think also, Joe, I owe a lot to Joe and Elmer and the universe in that way. I don’t know what it was Elmer heard. He certainly could have been like, “Sure, I’ll listen to this thing.” But he listened to it and then the next time he came up to his boat, which I think I skipped a part of the story. That’s how Joe knew him. Elmer kept a sailboat in Bellingham, Washington.

Steve Cuden:

Nice.

Bear McCreary:

And would sail up to Alaska every summer. So he knew Joe. And in fact, I think what, four years later, four or five years later, one of the summers when Elmer sailed up to Alaska, I house sat his house in Santa Barbara and orchestrated a movie for him and took care of his dogs and just that was my first real job.

Steve Cuden:

That’s a pretty good first job, if you’re going to get them.

Bear McCreary:

Let me tell you, man. So when I house sat for Elmer … I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll tell that story in a minute. It’s a good one though. So anyway, I met with Elmer and I don’t know what he saw in me. I think he heard my passion for film music. Obviously, I was not trained. I mean, the first question he asked me, he goes, “Okay, this is really impressive stuff. Have you formally studied composition?” No. “Have you studied counterpoint?” No. “Orchestration, music theory, music history, jazz voicings?” And I was like, “I take piano lessons and I write music and I play in the jazz band. That’s it.” And what Elmer instilled in me was essentially this sense that, okay, well, look, if you want to do what I do, you’ve got to be this tall to get on the ride. You have to know these things. Oh, conducting was another one. And of course I wanted to know these things.

All of my heroes. Scratch that. Most of my heroes knew all of these things. Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, Ennio Morricone. The notable exception at the time of my heroes was Danny Elfman, who was not formally trained and did not know how to conduct or orchestrate.

Steve Cuden:

It was rock and roll. He was great rock and roll.

Bear McCreary:

And in fact, Elmer was wrong. He was giving me outdated advice. What he was saying is if you want to be a film composer, you have to know these things. And at that time, Hans Zimmer was nominated for his first Academy Award just a year earlier. That would have been the year he was at the ceremony coming from a rock and roll background. Danny Elfman coming from a rock and roll background, Mark Mothersbaugh coming from a rock and roll background, Terence Blanchard coming from a jazz background. The boundaries for where your background was were starting to dissipate, and they would ultimately just explode. I mean, in my generation, not only do you not need to know those things, I am a bit of an anomaly historically because I met Elmer and he inspired me and said, “You’ve got to know these things,” so I went and got a degree in classical composition. I studied all that stuff.

Steve Cuden:

From USC, right?

Bear McCreary:

From USC. And Elmer wrote me a letter to get in.

Steve Cuden:

I too am a Trojan alum.

Bear McCreary:

There you go.

Steve Cuden:

So, I know from where you were.

Bear McCreary:

Indeed. And it was a rigorous background, but the thing that makes me a little bit of an anomaly is that I also, like I said, was fully versed in computer music. That’s how I made music. I grew up with computers. I grew up with electronics. I played in rock bands because of my exact age. If I were any younger, I would have fully been pencil paper classical guy. No, I’m sorry, if I were any older, I would have been pencil paper guy. If I were any younger, I would have fully been electronica rock and roll guy. But I was just in this-

Steve Cuden:

Sure, of course. But you can do both.

Bear McCreary:

Exactly. The porridge was just right. You know what I mean? So I have a foot in both worlds and that really served me because I learned a lot from Elmer. I ended up studying with him for almost 10 years. And yet I know objectively, I can say, there are many things that I learned as an inspiration, but even at the time, I was like, “I’ll never do a movie that way. No one makes movies that way anymore.” The way you communicate with directors in terms of personality, that hasn’t changed, and I learned so much from Elmer. But on the technology side, I was learning things from younger composers. I worked for a composer named Richard Gibbs. I also just taught myself. I grew up around computers. Even some of my classes at SC, they were like, “Here’s how you align the tape heads on a 24-track tape recorder.” And I was like, “What?” I literally knew I am never going to do this. I have no interest in learning this. I record stuff on my computer, and it sounds great.

Bear McCreary:

And of course nowadays, I’m holding up my phone. The amount of processing in this thing, like I could practically score a film and have it sound good on my phone. I’m exaggerating a little, but you know what I mean.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah. Well, music in movies and TV, or anywhere, on stage, it doesn’t matter where it is, music is still an emotional creature and no matter what tool you’re using to create it, you’re still trying to elicit an emotion out of a listener, correct?

Bear McCreary:

100%, and that is where I think I’m … I learned so much from Elmer about the art and about the craft and about life. I mean, he changed my life in so many ways. And I then feel so fortunate because I was able to channel that knowledge into what was the technological environment that I was emerging into. I was doing student films at USC. I was playing in rock bands. So, I really developed these two very different ways of approaching music on a technical level, but I was able to apply what I learned from Elmer to all of it. And I think it made me a better artist.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, no doubt. I mean, the deeper that you get into the weeds on that kind of stuff, eventually it sinks in somehow and turns you into whatever you’re known for. Well, I want to talk about that. You’re best known clearly for sci-fi and horror, that genre, but you also recently did Animal Crackers, which I absolutely adore. I think that’s a phenomenal movie. Scott had shown it to me years ago when he was struggling to try to get it released or distributed and was having all kinds of problems and finally it shows up on Netflix. Thank goodness. But I’m wondering, it’s quite a stretch to go from The Walking Dead and Agents of Shield to Animal Crackers, because one is dramatic or very dramatic, and the other is playful. What inspires you to stretch that far? What gives you that … It’s not rock and roll. What stretches you that way?

Bear McCreary:

It’s an interesting question. And I often mock Scott Sava. I’m like, “Why did you hire The Walking Dead guy, man?” Talk about, I’m so lucky you made this rookie filmmaker mistake. I’m grateful too. That kind of genre stretching is the way my brain is wired. I mean, it’s not a question of how can I do it? It is almost like a survival mechanism. How can I not do it? So to go back to when I was a kid, the cassette tape that I sent to Elmer Bernstein had a big orchestral kind of John Williams fanfare. There was a fictitious film score for a fictitious film that I had imagined, actually wrote, and I had cues from it in this big swashbuckling style. But then there was also like horror cues, romantic cues, a Western thing.

Every time I saw a new movie, a kind of movie as a kid, I would go home and go, “Oh my God, I’ve got to write this.” When Tombstone came out, it blew my mind on Westerns, and I was like, “I’ve got to write a Western theme.” So, that’s always been the way my brain is wired. So when I came onto the scene in a professional environment doing Battlestar Galactica and then later The Walking Dead, to be honest with you, I struggled with doing so much sci-fi and horror. And there was a lot of science fiction that I started turning down just because I feel like I had done it.

Steve Cuden:

Were you burnt out on it?

Bear McCreary:

Not at all. It just wasn’t inspiring.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, I see.

Bear McCreary:

I would look at a science fiction show and go like, “Yes, I can totally do that for you. I can do that in my sleep for you.” That’s not what I want … I don’t want to get out of bed and do that again. I’ve done Battlestar Galactica.

Steve Cuden:

You yearned to stretch your wings.

Bear McCreary:

Absolutely. So I actually made a conscious effort maybe now five or six years ago. It was shortly before I met Scott. I was like, “I’m going to commit myself to branching off into other genres.” So I started doing spec demos and sending them to filmmakers and show runners, and the weirder the genre for me, for what people thought, the more I wanted it. And there were years of rejections, rejection after rejection after rejection, which was a funny thing because at the same time, my career is still ostensibly blowing up. I mean, I’m doing 10 Cloverfield Lane for JJ Abrams.

Steve Cuden:

Which I saw Saturday night, by the way. I just saw it this weekend.

Bear McCreary:

Oh, yikes.

Steve Cuden:

I was very surprised by it.

Bear McCreary:

I bet.

Steve Cuden:

Certainly the storytelling is very unusual, and the way it twists at the end is really unusual.

Bear McCreary:

I’ve got to say, I almost … I mean, what 10 Cloverfield Lane must look like to a new viewer in 2020 as opposed to when it came out, has got to be real interesting.

Steve Cuden:

It is.

Bear McCreary:

I highly recommend anyone in lockdown to watch 10 Cloverfield Lane. Yeah. But there were a couple of movies that I ended up really branching out. I did a British costume drama called The Professor and the Madman that took place in the late 19th century and started Mel Gibson and Sean Penn and Natalie Dormer. I mean, to me, I was like, “Oh my God, this is like Masterpiece Theater.” I got to totally immerse myself in the British composers of the time, Yvonne Williams. And that was insanely out of character for me. I got to do a JD Salinger biopic for director Danny Strong called Rebel in the Rye. And again, I definitely demoed for that one. And then Animal Crackers came up, and the reason this came up is that I met a writer named David Wise through our mutual friend, Len Wein, and ended up meeting all these comic book writers and artists and animators that actually were sort of tangential to the TV writers that I was really close with.

Steve Cuden:

Absolutely.

Bear McCreary:

So, I ended up just like socially hanging out with all these people. And I vividly remember meeting David Wise. David was such a big personality. I mean, just such a delightful person. It’s rare that I meet somebody and within a matter of minutes, it’s like, “I like you. We’re going to be friends forever.”

Steve Cuden:

Well for the record, I knew David and Len, both who have passed away. Len who created Wolverine most famously, David who adapted The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who has been on the show. David’s been a guest on the show, along with Scott’s been a guest on the show. Unfortunately, I never got Len to be on the show prior to his untimely passing. But these were all guys that I hung out with for a long time then, and Marv Wolfman and others. So, yeah. I’m sorry, I interrupted.

Bear McCreary:

Well maybe, you know what, well no, Steve, maybe you can explain to me. Because I’ll tell you my perspective was that David was a music aficionado.

Steve Cuden:

Yes, very much so.

Bear McCreary:

And we were sitting at a table together and essentially trying to get a feel on who the other person was, like our Spidey senses were tingling. I was like, “Something’s up with this guy.” And I could tell. He was talking about Jerry Goldsmith scores. And I started talking about a little more obscure one. And then he went even more obscure. And I was like, “Oh, is this guy a composer. What’s going on?” And so we started, you know. After about five or 10 minutes … and then even at one point, he was like, “So, you’ve done some stuff I’ve heard of probably. Right?” And I was like, “Maybe.” Anyway, it finally comes out. I was like, “Wait a minute. Oh my God, you created The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show? You wrote the Clock King episode of Batman, the animated series?” And then he finally was like, “Wait, you scored Battlestar Galactica?” So, it was funny. Yeah, we really bonded over that, but maybe you can tell me, Steve.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah.

Bear McCreary:

He, I think, recognizing me, he was like, “This guy loves scores. He’s obsessive. He’s been obsessed since he was a kid. He’s into Jerry Goldsmith. This is the guy that Scott Sava needs to work with.” And it didn’t matter to David one iota that I had no animation experience. In fact, I said to him, “I’ve always loved animation. And no one will hire me in animation. I’m The Walking Dead Guy.” What was it about David that, from your perspective, that made him connect me with Scott?

Steve Cuden:

So it’s actually quite simple, truthfully. Two things. Scott, as you now know, doesn’t know a whole lot of things about the whole industry. Scott is very well focused on what he loves. And David on the other hand was widely knowledgeable in everything in the business. I mean, his depth of knowledge was extraordinary. And I think what David heard in you, because he knew your work, he knew that you would bring life to that particular genre and that it would have some drama and pathos to it, which wouldn’t just be treacly stuff. It would actually have depth to it. That’s what he heard. That’s what I hear in you. You’re a fairly deep composer. It’s not lightweight stuff. It really impacts people when you listen to it. That’s what David heard in you. Does that make sense?

Bear McCreary:

It does. I appreciate that. And I will say, your comment about David understanding how the business works, I’ve actually found that many people in the business don’t actually understand how it works.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, not at all.

Bear McCreary:

You know what I mean? And in… business don’t actually understand how it works.

And in fact, to a lot of people … And music is the most alien thing to anyone who’s not a musician, especially a filmmaker. A filmmaker generally understands every aspect of the movie better than music. Meaning if they really had to, they could write the movie. If they really had to, they could color the movie. They could shoot the movie; they could light the movie. But in no world, could they write the music for the movie.

Steve Cuden:

Well, that’s right.

Bear McCreary:

What this creates is this insecurity that it’s like, “Okay, I don’t really understand music. I am doing a horror movie. I want to get The Walking Dead guy, because I like that music and it works in that context.”

Steve Cuden:

Sure. Of course.

Bear McCreary:

But conversely, if I’m doing an animated family adventure comedy, most people would say , “I want to get the person who’s known for that.” They would go to, what’s Randy Newman doing right now? You know what I mean?

Steve Cuden:

Sure.

Bear McCreary:

And they would be wise to do that. This person has done that before. What I appreciated about David is that he understood at least music, and if not the whole industry enough, to understand that here’s a guy that will be able to do that because he loves music so much. And in talking about Jerry Goldsmith, one of the things we bonded over was Jerry could do anything.

Steve Cuden:

Anything.

Bear McCreary:

You know what I mean? And to me-

Steve Cuden:

Well, so could Elmer Bernstein do anything.

Bear McCreary:

Absolutely.

Steve Cuden:

I mean, you go from The Magnificent Seven over to Ghostbusters and Animal House. I mean, those are big stretches.

Bear McCreary:

Absolutely. And it was-

Steve Cuden:

And The Great Escape. I mean, to all the genres.

Bear McCreary:

Totally. And in fact, Elmer perhaps is the most typecast composer in history, certainly of his era. He had to personally make an effort to break out of genres on two occasions. He was the Western guy for a long time. Then after Animal House, he became the comedy guy. And in the late eighties, he was like, “No more comedies. I’m going to do dramas.” And he did My Left Foot with Daniel Day-Lewis-

Steve Cuden:

Sure.

Bear McCreary:

… was the first drama he had done in almost a decade. And I thought about that and I talked to David about it. I was like, “David, my mentor had the same problem.” So I just want to do what he did, which is at a certain point say, “No, no, no. I’m not going to do this anymore. Or at least for a while, I’m going to stretch out and do these other things.” And I think that resonated with David and-

Steve Cuden:

I’m positive it resonated with him. And the fact that he connected you to Scott was for him, not, not difficult to do. I’m confident of that. So when you start out in the business, you have to get your first gig in order to get your next gig. So once you get pigeonholed as you got pigeonholed, you’ve got to get your first gig again on something else in order to get your next gig.

Bear McCreary:

Steve, it’s so intuitive that you said that because the philosophical thing that I did in my brain, I really did this 10 years ago. Yeah, I was in my early thirties and I realized that my career was kicking ass. I was doing TV shows and I was doing a lot of great genre stuff that I loved. But I was like, “Do I want to be doing science-fiction television? Do I want my tombstone to say, ‘The guy who did Battlestar Galactica?'” And I was like, “Easy. No, I do not.” And I really switched. And I said, “Okay. I switched to what you just said. I go, “In my brain, throw away all my accomplishments.”

Steve Cuden:

Oh, yeah.

Bear McCreary:

“Throw away all the stuff that I’ve done.” Because I was realizing, I was walking into a room with this subconscious thing, this subconscious attitude, feeling like, “I’ve done Battlestar Galactica, dude. Of course I can do your comedy. Of course I could.” Even though I wasn’t verbally saying these things, I was coming across like this arrogant little bastard. And I realized, “Okay, switch over to pretend you don’t have any credits at all. What would I do?” And I was like, “Huh. Okay. So, Danny Strong has a drama about J.D. Salinger. Pretend I have no credits. What would I do?” It’s like, “I would write him a theme and send it to him.”

And that’s what I did. And then he was like, “Yeah, this is good. Here’s a couple of scenes. I don’t know.” And I was like, “If I had no credits, of course I’m going to score your scenes. Of course I’m going to fly to New York. I’m going to make up a story about how I’m in New York, to fly there to meet with you.” Do you know what I mean? Because I’m realizing these are the things that need to happen. And that benefited me. I mean, it really did. When you say your first gig leads to your second, leads to your third, I think what you’re … You’re so smart in pointing out that a second gig in another genre or another medium is a first gig.

Steve Cuden:

That’s right.

Bear McCreary:

It is completely starting over.

Steve Cuden:

That’s right.

Bear McCreary:

And that’s really helped me. In the last 10 years, when I say my career was going well when I was in my early thirties, it actually was not going the way I wanted to. And now I’m feeling much better about where it is. I mean, I applied that philosophy and I changed my attitude really fundamentally. So when I walk into a room, I’m not bringing any of my accomplishments. They’re at the door. When I walk into a room, it’s like, “I’m all about your thing. What do you got? What’s your dream project? I want to help you make that.”

Steve Cuden:

That’s very, very wise advice. Because the truth of the matter is, most people who get into the motion picture and TV industry in one thing or another, they get pigeonholed into it. And no matter what they do, they can’t get out of it. It’s very difficult, because you’re the person that does these things. And so what you did is you’ve intentionally gone in and said, “Hey, I’m always starting over again in a sense. And that’s really wise, I think. Most writers, they’re known for writing one kind of thing.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah.

Steve Cuden:

They can’t get away from it. And occasionally you see somebody break. So it’s really cool that the fortuitous moment when you met David and he turns you on to Scott, and Scott says, “Yes,” because you’re the guy that David said should do it.

Bear McCreary:

Well, let’s extrapolate on that, because we are glossing over a lot.

Steve Cuden:

Sure.

Bear McCreary:

David introduced me to Scott. Scott did not say yes, Scott, as he should, and the supervisor, music super, Andy Ross, they were looking at a lot of composers. I was allowed to throw my hat in the ring, that’s what David did. So my hat was in the ring. I wrote a demo for Animal Crackers. They sent me a scene of an animatic, and I understand they did this with a bunch of other composers too, I don’t know how many.

Steve Cuden:

Makes sense.

Bear McCreary:

Totally common, totally common. So they sent me the Zucchini chase on the highway.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah, great chase.

Bear McCreary:

A four-minute action scene. My mind is blown. Like, “God, this is the audition?” The second hardest sequence in the entire movie, I would later find out. Only the third act is more intense than the Zucchini chase. So again, I was like, “What would I do if I was starting out?” Well, I would do a really good job on this thing. So I scored the scene, this was December, 2015. We’re talking five years ago. And I scored the scene, and I recorded the cue with the symphonic orchestra at the 20th Century Fox Scoring Stage here in Los Angeles.

Steve Cuden:

Was that all?

Bear McCreary:

A hundred-piece orchestra. I also had kazoos that I sang into and accordion, I did all that funny … I mean, if you’ve heard the score, that is the demo, that didn’t change. That was this theme for Zucchini. I also filmed this recording session and sent Scott essentially a music video that showed the orchestra, showed me conducting, it cut away to me playing accordion. In fact, I later released on my YouTube channel, a music video of the final score. It was similar to that. I mean, except my hair would have been only down to my ears.

But that’s what I did to get Scott’s attention, to get the job. You know what I mean? That is what I think sealed the deal. As David was basically like, “Hey, I think this guy is crazy passionate about film music and would be a good fit. You should hear him out.” Then I submitted that video and Scott called me and was like, “Whoa, you’re the guy.”

Steve Cuden:

Yeah, I do know.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah, yeah.

Steve Cuden:

And you are the guy.

Bear McCreary:

Well, thank you. But I definitely felt the need to show him that and look, to talk about the journey that I’ve gone to try to branch out of sci-fi and horror, the thing that I just described is also what I did to get Rebel in the Rye for Danny Strong. I’ve also done that many other times and not gotten the job. I mean, so do not think that it’s like, “Wow, you went all the way out and made this big video and recorded an orchestra. And of course I hired you.” No, no, no, the batting average is really low. So these are

Steve Cuden:

So I want to stop you on that for half a second, because this is what is misunderstood by people who are not in the industry.

Bear McCreary:

Yes.

Steve Cuden:

So Steven Spielberg, who’s arguably the most successful director-producer who’s ever been in the business. People, all they know about are the projects he turns out, which are a huge number. But what people don’t know about, are the dozens and dozens and dozens of projects that don’t go through.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah.

Steve Cuden:

That doesn’t get any press. So you’re saying the right thing that, yeah, you have had a great deal of success and you’ve done a lot of work, but there’s a bunch that you didn’t get to do.

Bear McCreary:

Absolutely. And people think, they look at my credits and go, “Wow, he must be so in demand and he has his pick of the litter. He can do whatever he wants.” It’s like, “What makes you think that? These are the projects that I got to do?”

Steve Cuden:

Sure.

Bear McCreary:

Do you know what I mean?

Steve Cuden:

Absolutely.

Bear McCreary:

And yes, those are cool projects and I’m very grateful. But in order to get those, I was at BAT a dozen other times.

Steve Cuden:

Right. So I want to get us off onto a little bit about how you do what you do.

Bear McCreary:

Sure.

Steve Cuden:

This has been very, very interesting and I love hearing all this. But this is as important to me as the history and how you get there, but all right. So in the case of Animal Crackers, you were sent an animatic, which is sketches that are put together to look like something is actually moving. But I assume you’ve been hired off of scripts, not finished products, or is it always a finished product?

Bear McCreary:

A composer will get hired at any point in the process.

Steve Cuden:

Right. Okay, so-

Bear McCreary:

It’s all about what the director, what kind of experience and relationship the director wants.

Steve Cuden:

And they might have some vision and they may not know how to articulate it. And they turn to you and say, “Can you give me an idea of what this will sound like?” Do they do that?

Bear McCreary:

In broad strokes. I mean, everyone has a vision for what they want their film to be. And it’s almost like you’re speaking a different language.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah, sure.

Bear McCreary:

They’re able to say, “My vision is this.” And you have to help them get there by creating this magical component that they can’t really talk about in words.

Steve Cuden:

All right. So let’s assume for a moment, for instance in Animal Crackers, you’re sent an animatic, or perhaps somebody sends you a scene or maybe a finished movie to score. What is your first step? What do you do? Do you immediately start to gather feelings in your head? What’s the first step?

Bear McCreary:

Elmer Bernstein used to tell me that he would watch a movie a dozen times, and that by the end he knew exactly what to do. He said, “The movie just tells you what it needs.” And while I rarely watch something a dozen times, I’m usually off to the races long before that number, I still follow the same philosophy. It tells you what it needs. And in fact, this is where the personality of your composer really comes through.

Ultimately, if someone hires me or hires or Ludwig Göransson or hires Hans Zimmer or anybody, once we start scoring a movie, we’re all professionals. We all know how to get to the stage. We all know how to take notes, we all … The process is so similar. The thing that’s totally unique, like your thumb print, that idea. That idea that comes into your brain and you go, “Aah.” For me it’s like, I saw Zucchini and I heard Gilbert Gottfried’s voice. And I was like, “That’s accordions and kazoo.” You know what I mean? From there the process just barfs out of you, but that first thing.

Like I think about, I keep going back to Jerry Goldsmith, but I mean Jerry Goldsmith watched Gremlins and thought, “You know? What I need is a fire engine siren from the twenties to be in the room with the orchestra going (Bear makes a fire engine sound). And so he did. No one else on earth would have thought that. You know what I’m saying? No one else would have had that idea. That was his musical thumbprint DNA. So where that comes from, I don’t know, man. That’s almost divine, I cannot begin to tell you.

Steve Cuden:

Well, that’s what makes the artist, the artist.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Cuden:

It’s that human connection that makes something different than what you thought it would be, or that it could be if a computer spat it out. I don’t think computers are going to replace composers and writers and certain parts of the arts for quite some time to come, maybe eventually, but not for now. So yeah, you have to take it to that next step. That’s your job is to bring something to it that nobody was expecting.

Bear McCreary:

Absolutely. And your question that you’re circling that I want to really pinpoint is, what does a director give you in order for you to give them what they want?

Steve Cuden:

Great question.

Bear McCreary:

And part of your job is understanding when they aren’t giving you that. And Animal Crackers is a great example, because Scott was green in terms of being a film director.

Steve Cuden:

Right.

Bear McCreary:

And I was green in terms of understanding animation. I understood the filmmaking process. So yes, we scored on animatic and then he had an animatic of the movie and a script, none of which were enough for me. I was like, “I need more.” Scott was really eager to start. So maybe six months after I was hired, I started writing themes. And Scott and I went into this process where we started writing themes. And even as we were going, I could tell we were going nowhere, even Scott will tell you this. Because the movie wasn’t done. Once you’ve shown me the movie, it will tell me what it wants. Scott telling me what melodies he likes telling me what the plot is about, this doesn’t matter, it’s not the way to do it. So I ended up writing, not only some themes, I mean dozens.

Steve Cuden:

Wow.

Bear McCreary:

We went back and forth and finally, at a certain point, I was happy to do it. I was having fun; it was a fun exercise for me. But I was realizing none of this is going to end up in the movie. I’m just teaching Scott how to talk about music. Because he’s giving me interesting notes and I’m getting inside his brain and all of this is going to pay off later.

Finally, he had thrown out a bunch of themes and he rubber stamped this one, “That’s it. I love this theme.” And I was like, “Cool, man.” Even though in my heart I was like, “That’s not the theme for Animal Crackers. It’s not even going to end up in the movie.” And guess what, it didn’t. Scott laughs about it now, because it was just, the movie wasn’t there. Five months later, I get my first cut of the film that is mostly animated. The performances are there. The artists, the lighting they’ve all contributed to the storytelling. Light bulb goes on for me. I know exactly what the movie is. It’s telling me what it wants. From there, after working on the film for more than a year doing conceptual stuff, I scored it in four weeks.

Steve Cuden:

Wow.

Bear McCreary:

Top to bottom. And I was right in that Scott noticed, toward the end he was like, “Oh, we never used that theme, did we?” And I was like, “Oh yeah, beyond that, all the themes that you threw out are in here.” And he was like, “Oh, but they work really well.” And I go, “Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they do. But you have to see it with your images.” Do you know what I mean?

Steve Cuden:

Sure.

Bear McCreary:

“We’re not just making music that you like; we’re not making an album. We’re making your score. So once you give me your movie, I can give you the score for it.” That’s-

Steve Cuden:

Well, I like to tell my students, “You don’t go to the theater and pay your money at the box office and then they hand you a script.”

Bear McCreary:

Yeah. It’s great.

Steve Cuden:

No, no. The movie itself, and in your case as a composer, the movie is the underlying foundation upon which you build your house, the house of music. And without that–

Bear McCreary:

Yeah. And it all needs to come together.

Steve Cuden:

Right, exactly.

Bear McCreary:

The script has to make concessions when actors come in and have other ideas. And of course, any theme that I think in advance, “Oh, this is going to be it.” Once it all comes together, I have to adapt my ideas. Producers come in with other perspectives that can be very useful.

Steve Cuden:

Sure.

Bear McCreary:

Everybody meets in the middle. And that’s why I like the idea that the director doesn’t tell me what to do, the movie tells me what to do.

Steve Cuden:

Just like-

Bear McCreary:

That is my guiding light, and sometimes I … And I learned this from Elmer. I go, “What do you do when a director, you just don’t see eye to eye?” And he goes, “Look, at the end of the day, the thing to say to a filmmaker is, ‘This is going to hurt the movie.’ You don’t talk about your ideas or his, it’s like, everybody’s ideas are valid. But you talk about it the movie is an entity that’s on the operating table and we’re all trying to save its life. We’re all-“

Steve Cuden:

It’s a living, breathing thing.

Bear McCreary:

Absolutely. And that also in a way, it makes us all a little more humble about it. Other little tricks, I always say our score, always. You can work for me for years, you’ll never hear me use the words, “My score.” It’s not, it’s ours.

Steve Cuden:

And by the way, once it’s out in the world, it stops being all of yours and becomes the audience’s, they then own it.

Bear McCreary:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Steve Cuden:

Just like a novelist writes a book and then it becomes the readers’ book, it no longer is the author’s book. And so the perception-

Bear McCreary:

Yeah, you have to let it go. Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Cuden:

All right. So on what do you compose? Is it a piano or do you have some other instrument you compose on?

Bear McCreary:

I’m a piano player, I’m a keyboard player. So yeah, I write at the piano. I write at my workstation, where I have a keyboard plugged into my computer with access to a template that I’ve made over the years of thousands of sounds that are grouped in folders that I go to. So if I think, “I want to hear some strings,” I am half a second away from being able to play my keyboard and hear string sounds. And that allows me to do sketches with very rough colors and-

Steve Cuden:

Do you watch the movie at the same time that you’re composing? Do you have it on the screen?

Bear McCreary:

In the case of a film, I usually watch it a few times over and then I don’t watch it. I try to capture the feeling of it. And it’s almost like, once it’s in my brain, I’d need to go into a purely musical realm to do my early sketching. It’s distracting if I have all that. And then once I’ve got an idea, then I will pick a scene and go, “Okay, now I’ve got this shape, this color, a melody, an idea. Let’s apply it to picture and see if it works.”

Steve Cuden:

All right. So you started out early on as an arranger and an orchestrator, right?

Bear McCreary:

Not really. I did that for Elmer Bernstein.

Steve Cuden:

Okay. Well, so you have that experience?

Bear McCreary:

So yeah, I definitely had that experience. And in fact, I never told you the Santa Barbara house-sitting story, which I’m going to sidetrack real quick.

Steve Cuden:

Sure, go for it.

Bear McCreary:

So my first job, I was in college, I was a junior now in college. And I said to Elmer that I’d been going home for the summers back to Bellingham, Washington, and working at Kmart and stuff, man, it was soul crushing. And I was like, “Elmer, I can’t go back to Bellingham. I have to stay in Los Angeles. Do you know anybody looking for an assistant? I’ll do anything, anything in the music industry.” And he goes, “Hey, you could work for me.” And I was like, “Oh my God, I wasn’t even angling for that.” It didn’t even occur to me.

So one summer I worked with him in his office in Santa Monica, organizing his entire collection of everything. I mean, everything that’s at the USC Collection now in the library was organized by me.

Steve Cuden:

Wow.

Bear McCreary:

And I would sit there all summer and I would work by collecting stuff, and I’d have to put them in bins. Like, “All right, this is the 1951, 1952.” All the way up through the nineties, and organize it also by project. So I’d find a score and it’s like, “I think this is To Kill a Mockingbird.” And then I would put it in the To Kill a Mockingbird pile. But the funny thing was, anything I didn’t know, which was a lot, I just set aside. And then at the end of every day, Elmer would come in and sit down and go, “Okay, let me help you organize this. Oh, this. This is a letter from Otto Preminger. See here, this goes in the 1955 pile.” And I’m like, “What.”

So I start setting aside stuff that I want to know about. So I see Ghostbusters and it has a code name, it’s not marked Ghostbusters, but I’m looking at the score. And I go, “I know this queue. This is the opening queue of Ghostbusters. I recognize it.” I’m about to put it in the Ghostbusters pile when I go, “I want to know why he used that weird theremin thing in all those scores in the eighties.” He used it in Heavy Metal and Black Cauldron. So I’m going to pretend I don’t know what this is. And then Elmer would come in and I go, “Gee, Elmer, what’s this?” And he’s like, “Oh, that’s Ghostbusters.” And I go, “By the way, what is that?”

And we’d talk for an hour about the ondes Martenot and how his orchestrator slipped it into Heavy Metal in 1981. And he was so blown away by the sound of this early electronic music, that he used it in everything. So much so that it drove filmmakers nuts. By the end of the eighties, there were filmmakers being like, “I don’t want that Theremin thing.” He loved it. Second summer I worked with him-

Steve Cuden:

I love it too, by the way.

Bear McCreary:

Oh, it’s amazing. And I used it in a score called Dark Void as an homage to him, and it was the same player he used to use. And the second summer I worked with him, he went on a sailboat up to Alaska, like usual. And I house-sat his, house took care of the dogs, did all that stuff. But he also gave me a film to completely reorchestrate.

Steve Cuden:

Wow.

Bear McCreary:

And this was a 1960s Mayan adventure pick called Kings of the Sun, starring Yul Brynner. The scores had been completely destroyed by Universal, like the paper scores were gone. The tapes were gone. It didn’t exist. It had never been on TV. And at that time, it had never been released in home video. It had just not been seen in 25 years.

Steve Cuden:

Wow.

Bear McCreary:

Elmer wanted to rerecord it. And the only thing that existed was his original pencil sketches that he wrote. So, he dumps this huge folder, a binder, on me and he goes, “I’m going to go for the summer. You re-orchestrate the entire movie.”

Steve Cuden:

Whoa.

Bear McCreary:

“I’m going to go on vacation. Oh, and make sure the dogs get their medicine. And when I come back, I’ll sit down and I’ll show you what you messed up.” So, talk about a crash course in orchestral writing. I am looking at the pencil sketch that Elmer Bernstein put to paper to imagine this music. I’m looking at the notes he made for himself. And I go, “Oh, I think what he’s saying is this.” And I expand it out.

So, at the end of the summer, Elmer came back and got out a red pencil and goes through the score, and shows me all the mistakes I made. And it was the ultimate crash course in arranging and orchestrating for film.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, for sure. That would be the ultimate crash course.

Bear McCreary:

And in fact, at the last recording session of his life at the end of 2003, he recorded that. And Kings of the Sun, my orchestration of Kings of the Sun is out in the world as part of this thing called the Film Music Collection, which is pretty cool.

Steve Cuden:

How lovely is that?

Bear McCreary:

Yeah.

Steve Cuden:

That’s pretty cool. Okay. So, I want to talk about orchestration and arranging, because I think it’s a very interesting part of what you go through as a composer. Do you usually hire someone to do that for you? Or do you do most of that yourself?

Bear McCreary:

I mean, I have an orchestration team that I work with because I simply don’t have the time to do that polish pass. With that said, I used to do it on my own, and my compositions are extremely detailed. So, if you were to say, am I the orchestrator? No. But am I making 95% of the orchestral decisions? The answer is a resounding yes.

So, my sessions are extremely detailed because I have that background. I know what works. I understand all the way down to the very granular details of how string bowings might affect the phrasing that I want. And most importantly, when I’m up on the stand conducting, my philosophy is, every question that a person asks, that a player asks is wasting money. I mean, you’re spending like hundreds of dollars a minute in some of these stages. When you’ve got a hundred-piece orchestra at a world-class scoring stage, if a clarinetist raises their hand and says, “Excuse me, sir, is that a B flat or a B natural?” It’s like, wow. I just spent 50 bucks answering that question. No. I want it flawless on the page. I want the bowing to make sense. I want everything I can think of done in advance. So, when I get up there and I conduct, the first pass is already as close to my vision as the paper will allow. And from there, we get into interpretive decisions that happen in a recording session.

Steve Cuden:

A lot of orchestration and arranging has to do with tonality or style or the way something feels emotionally because it’s a kind of instrument that you’re using. You’re controlling that, yes?

Bear McCreary:

Absolutely. It’s linked to composition in a profound way. Because what it is, I think of it like framing and context. Let’s say you have an idea, a melody. Well, if that melody is going to work, you have to understand the frame to put it in. How do you deliver it to the audience? A closest analogy is, I think, painting. If you are a Renaissance painter and you paint this beautiful figure, but you have no idea how the human eye follows a picture, where it goes, you’re just like, “Well, no, I’m just going to put the picture there. I’ll let somebody else decide where the windows go and where the other figures go.” Well, you’re not really a painter. You’re missing an important skillset. When you look at a painting, it’s the path of the eye is designed. The frame of the subject of the painting is carefully designed. Those things are inextricably linked.

And to go further on that analogy, I sometimes think about the Renaissance painters as my job. Sometimes, the Verrocchio, or DaVinci when he later had his studio, they would have pupils that worked for them, that ended up specializing, like, “All right, you do hands. You’re the one that can draw feet.” Or “you can draw hair.” Like, “All right, I’m going to get this started. Here we go. Oh, my God, I got to go. The Medici family wants something else. You finish this. I got everything but the hair. You do it.” That’s what a film composer is. You know what I mean? I could spend all year and do every single thing myself. I’ve studied it. I am arguably, I’ve put in my 10,000 hours on all this. Right?

Steve Cuden:

Sure. Absolutely.

Bear McCreary:

But I have my studio. So, I understand how it works. I set it up. I pass it off to my orchestrators. “I need you guys to fill in these colors. I’ve got all the pieces here. Hit me up if you have any questions. You know what I want. And you guys are also trained artists.” That’s how you make art on a deadline.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah. There’s a corollary. It’s a bit different, but there’s a corollary. So, if you go back and look at the Marx brothers, the way that their movies were written, they had guys that were structure guys. They had guys that were joke guys. There were guys that were able to do the little bit of the drama or the emotion. There were plot guys. So, they had different people that were specialists in what they could do. That’s what you’re talking about.

Bear McCreary:

Absolutely. It’s 100% that. And that’s very fun for me. It’s a very collaborative, fun experience. And I rely on the team that I’ve built over the last 20 years. I rely on the musicians too, who also can bring this incredible personality. And I mean, while I say, I’ve put in my 10,000 hours, and I’m pretty good at what I do, I always like to surround myself with orchestrators that are better than me, the instrumentalists that are better than me. I just want to have a team that is incredible.

Steve Cuden:

Do you lead them in terms of what instruments they should be orchestrating?

Bear McCreary:

Yes.

Steve Cuden:

Or do you let them come to you?

Bear McCreary:

That’s the analogy I was struggling to make with the painter. If I go, “Here’s my melody, but I don’t know what instrument is playing it,” that’s like having a picture of a lady in a Renaissance painting going, “Just put it in the frame somewhere. I don’t know where.” You’re not actually doing the job. Do you know what I’m saying? So, yes, I absolutely can’t even write a melody without knowing what’s going to perform it. I can’t think in a vacuum. If I hear a melody, I automatically go, “Oh, that’s going to be the French horns” or, “Oh, that’s a piccolo.” I don’t even know how to imagine without knowing what’s going to play that instrument. It’s almost like-

Steve Cuden:

You’re actually dictating out, as you have, whatever you’re handing over to the arranger or orchestrator. “Yeah, I want this, this, this, and this.” Yeah?

Bear McCreary:

Oh, 100% those decisions. The decisions that I don’t dictate out are, maybe I want, during this phrase that I’ve really hammered out, and I’m telling you what the strings are doing, what the brass are doing, what the percussion is doing, and I programmed all of the synths. The flutes, I want them to do like a little… Like a little, just some, give me some Harry Potter stuff in the flutes. I will tell them to do that, but I won’t map out all of the little notes, but so, there’s leeway for them to express themselves. But really in the grand context, it is the decorations.

Steve Cuden:

Another good analogy would be animation, where in traditional hand-drawn animation, you would send to some kind of a secondary artist. You would send them key frames and they would draw in the cells in between.

Bear McCreary:

That’s a great analogy. Let’s run with that for a minute. When you look at, what, the key frames the animator did, then you look at the final. And it’s like, undeniably, the final has a level of emotion and artistry that’s expanded upon. But when you look at the key frames, I would say the story and the emotion are there. The person who animated those told everyone else what to do. The people that filled in the key frames used that emotion that they saw, filled it in. The people that colored it used the emotion they saw in those. You know what I mean?

Steve Cuden:

I do.

Bear McCreary:

That early sketch had to, in some capacity, contain everything. And think about it from the director’s standpoint. The director had to look at that. The studio had to look at that and go, “We are going to rubber-stamp this and spend millions of dollars developing it, so your sketch has to be good enough for us to feel confident.” Similarly, I play a sketch for a director, and it’s like, you’re about to pay for an orchestra to play all this, and I’m going to spend all my time polishing in the details. The sketch has to be sufficient that you understand everything that is going to happen emotionally.

Steve Cuden:

Isn’t that why the piano is so excellent to compose on, because it has all those colors in it?

Bear McCreary:

The piano is the only single instrument that can play all the pitches that an orchestra can play. That is true. And writing on the guitar or anything else, you are at a disadvantage. For sure.

Steve Cuden:

Right. So, I would say, most composers tend to be pianists or keyboardists.

Bear McCreary:

I would tend to agree with that. I mean, certainly you don’t have to be. I mean, I studied piano when I was a kid. I was really good at it. But you don’t have to be good at it. You know what I mean? You can be terrible at it. You can still walk over to it and go and hit the lowest A and imagine what that would sound like in a contrabassoon.

Steve Cuden:

So, you do play other instruments. I know you play the accordion because I’ve seen you do it. And I know obviously, you play kazoo, although pretty much anybody can play kazoo.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah, I play a lot of weird instruments. I play hurdy-gurdy. You look up on my YouTube channel, look up the Black Sails main title. I was nominated for an Emmy for that. And it’s like, it’s hurdy-gurdy heavy metal. That’s what it is.

Steve Cuden:

So, I was going to say, you’re known for some very odd instrumentation. The one that I really… Obviously, you had pots and pans, I saw, in a video clip, where people were banging on pots and pans.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah.

Steve Cuden:

But also, you have this instrument that I did not know about until I started to research your work, which is called the blaster beam. I did not know about that instrument. Tell me a little bit about that, and how it’s become part and parcel of some of what you’ve done.

Bear McCreary:

I used the blaster beam a lot on 10 Cloverfield Lane. And that was a sound that has been in my brain for my entire life. One of my favorite scores, and I hesitate to even… People are always like, “What are your top five scores you couldn’t live without?” And I’m always like, “Don’t make me do this.”

Steve Cuden:

Yeah, no kidding.

Bear McCreary:

But between us and your listeners, if I had to, one of them is Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Jerry Goldsmith.

Steve Cuden:

Okay.

Bear McCreary:

In that score-

Steve Cuden:

Pretty good.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah, it ain’t bad. Some good tunes in that. The blaster beam is featured in that. It’s the theme for V-jer. When we’re out in space, and you hear this low-frequency sound that so perfectly captured the vastness of this being, the vastness of outer space, the mystery, the wonder, the menace, I mean, it is one of the perfect marriages of soundtrack and imagery and narrative concept that has happened in the medium.

It’s amazing. Well, what is that? It’s a blaster beam. I’ve already raved about how Jerry Goldsmith brought the fire engine siren into the room with the orchestra for Gremlins.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah.

Bear McCreary:

He did the same thing with Star Trek. He wouldn’t split it out on another track. It’s like, “I’m bringing in with the orchestra. I’m just going to have this insane thing. So, director, you better like it. You can’t get rid of it.” The blaster beam-

Steve Cuden:

Explain it. It’s a fairly long instrument, yeah?

Bear McCreary:

It can be, I think, 18 feet long. It’s long. It is a metal slab that has strings run across it. Think piano strings. It has electric pickups. It is an electric instrument in that it is almost like a gigantic electric guitar or electric bass. The pickups then run into an amplifier. But because it is so long, it is capable of frequencies. If you imagine a Steinway piano, a nine-foot piano, and the lowest strings that are really thick, I mean, they’re like industrial cabling. They’re not even… To call them strings is an understatement.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah.

Bear McCreary:

All right. That’s like the higher notes on the blaster beam. It goes way lower than any other acoustic instrument. It is capable of creating frequencies that only a synthesizer could create. And you play it by either playing it with a bow or hitting it with a mallet. It creates all these incredible overtones. I mean, it’s… You can slide across it. It’s almost like a gigantic pedal steel guitar. That might be the closest analogy. So, anyway, I’ve always, always, always wanted to use this, but it’s cumbersome. There’s only a few of them in the world. It’s 18 feet long. And I had to track down the guy who played it on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

And on 10 Cloverfield Lane, I recorded it because I wanted to use it to capture the underground feeling. I kept thinking… My philosophy was, “Okay, we’re underground. We’re in a bunker.” So, I’m not going to spoil the movie. But most of it takes place in a doomsday preppers bunker underground. So, I kept thinking like, “What can I do to do subterranean frequencies?” Something really low. And I kept being like, “Ah, I can program some cool synths.” Then I was like, “Synths don’t feel right. J.J. doesn’t like synths. See, J.J. likes orchestral scores. And I have this rare opportunity to explore these alien subterranean colors, but not using synthesizers. Then I was like, “Oh, my God, the blaster beam.” And that was how it started.

So, it was an homage to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I mean, obviously, like my… It’s a color in 10 Cloverfield Lane. It’s not featured as prominently as it is in Star Trek. And in Star Trek, it’s this, I mean, for Goldsmith, it was this master stroke. It was truly brilliant. For me, it was just a fun thing that inspired me, and it was an homage to my hero. And in fact, Craig Huxley, who built that instrument and played it on Star Trek, he… James Horner used it on Star Trek II a little bit also in the Genesis Countdown cue. But he basically was like, “I haven’t played this thing on a film score since the early ’80s.”

Steve Cuden:

Oh, wow.

Bear McCreary:

No one else used it until I asked him to use it on 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Steve Cuden:

Wow.

Bear McCreary:

So, I felt really cool about that. That was incredible.

Steve Cuden:

Well, there’s certainly a color to that sound that’s like nothing else.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah. Absolutely. So, I think for soundtrack fans, I’d love for them to pick up on the homage to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And for anyone else, I just hope it captures this surreal alien soundscape.

Steve Cuden:

Well, space is certainly a part of the story. And I won’t give anything further away if people haven’t seen it yet, but you should check it out. It’s fun to watch. I mean, it’s a fun movie to watch. John Goodman is extraordinary in it. And not-

Bear McCreary:

He’s incredible.

Steve Cuden:

Not your normal John Goodman character, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead is very good in it, so.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah.

Steve Cuden:

I enjoyed it. I thought it got a little strange at the end, but that’s neither here nor there, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. I want to talk just for a moment about conducting before we wind this thing down. You conduct virtually every score that you do? That you write?

Bear McCreary:

Yes. Increasingly, due to the pandemic, I have been doing a lot of remote recording in Europe, which means I am listening over the internet while someone else conducts. But historically speaking, I conduct all my scores. And I mean, going back to my first student film scores, I would get six violins in a room and I’d put up mics and like… I waved my arms around and then realized like, “Oh, if I do this, then they’d give me what I want.” And it became inextricably linked to the way that I write my music. It is how I’m able to tell a filmmaker with confidence, “You’re going to get what you need,” because I know when I’m up on the stand, I can use my body, and my body language to shape the narrative.

Steve Cuden:

Of course.

Bear McCreary:

It’s incredible. It’s also just so fun. It’s really one of the best things I’ve ever got to do in my life. And I don’t know when I’ll get to do it again. Very sadly, it’ll be a while, but.

Steve Cuden:

Conducting – which – I’m not a musician. I’ve worked on musicals, but I don’t play. I can’t read music. I just do it by ear. But when I watch people conduct, I think that must be like the most powerful thing to do.

Bear McCreary:

It is. And beyond that, as a way to experience music, what’s funny is, I’ve often confessed to people that I don’t like going to classical concerts. Because I’m in the worst seat in the house. In the house.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah.

Bear McCreary:

The conductor, that is where the music is touching your body. I mean, it’s like you’re right there. That is where, to hear music at that place is such a high, that to go to a concert and sit in Disney Hall… People talk about the acoustics. They go, “It’s amazing.” But it’s like, “No, it ain’t. It’s not. I’m sorry. It’s just not doing it for me.” I would rather go to a rock concert where the volume, like, I feel it there, but to have… Because basically, if you’re conducting an orchestra, it’s like the feeling of being at a rock concert, but it’s acoustic, and it’s real. And it’s actually people using their bodies, using their breath, using their arms, to move the air. That air hits you and shakes you. It’s so profound.

Steve Cuden:

It’s all facing you. It’s all coming right at you.

Bear McCreary:

It’s incredible. Then, and to add to that, the response that you get by raising your arms or lowering your arms or making eye contact with someone to bring out what you want from them, oh, it’s the greatest thing in life. And one of the things I was most proud of as a father, when I became a father six years ago, and I always brought Sonatine, my daughter, up on the stand with me. When she was an infant, I would just sit her on the stand, and then she would stand on the stand, and then later, kind of sit next to me. And she had that experience many times early on, just as a baby. She was on the stand during 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, really?

Bear McCreary:

Some of the incredibly like grizzly, horror cues, tension, dissonance, blasting horns, and scratching strings. And she just sat there looking, with her little headphones on, just looking around. I just thought like, “God, this is a thing I discovered when I was six.” I went, “Oh, my God, what is this film music?” And I… Not to say, she’s going to be a film composer. She can do whatever she wants. But the idea that, at that age, she can feel this thing that I daydreamed about. I’m so happy for her.

Steve Cuden:

Well, clearly, it spoiled you because you can’t go enjoy a normal concert in a concert hall, because this is something that you’ve experienced so many times. And now, everything else pales by comparison.

Bear McCreary:

Well, I will say that, maybe you can speak to this too, because I am a fan and a voracious consumer of media and stories. It’s my religion, music and story. I worship it. And yet, when you reach a certain professional level, you can’t help but have a little bit of the way you interface with other media change, forever. It’s so rare. I mean, how many times can you watch a movie or a show and get 100% dissolved into it?

Steve Cuden:

Yeah.

Bear McCreary:

Ever? Can you ever do that anymore?

Steve Cuden:

Actually, the truth is, I can, which is amazing because I’ve seen so many tens of thousands of hours of footage. But that’s when I know that something’s really, really working.

Bear McCreary:

Yes.

Steve Cuden:

I’ve often said to people, “You don’t really learn very much from the stuff that works. You learn most of what you learn from things that don’t work. And I’m not going to do that, and I’m going to do that differently” and so on. Because the stuff that works, you get lost in it. And when you get lost in it, you either have to then watch it over and over and over again in order to understand it. Because once you’re lost in it, you can’t get there. But the truth is, that doesn’t happen very frequently for me anymore.

Bear McCreary:

It’s so rare for me. I mean, so rare.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, I believe it.

Bear McCreary:

And I even find myself, once in a while, at the end of a really great episode of television or the end of a really great movie, it’s like I snap out of a trance and I…

Steve Cuden:

Exactly.

Bear McCreary:

Oh, my God.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah.

Bear McCreary:

I wasn’t thinking about the structure, the cues, the mix. Because I’ve spotted… I mean, when I say I’ve done my 10,000 hours, I’m not exaggerating. I have sat with filmmakers for thousands of hours looking at their footage, fixing it with them. They go, “Ah.” They go, “Yeah. On the day, the actor couldn’t do this thing. I wanted to get coverage from the other side.” And I go, “Don’t worry, man. Here’s what we’re going to do. Maybe we’ll put in some emotional thing here. I’ll use the strings here. What else, what else can we fix? Let’s fix it. Let’s fix it. Let’s fix it.”

And when I watch a film and I see, it’s like, I see what the director wanted. I hear an ADR line, and immediately I go, “Ah, there’s a story beat that didn’t work.” There’s an off-camera line about, “Well, we got to go plant the bombs or else the time’s going to run out,” destroys the movie for me. Because immediately, I go, I’m spotting it now. And I go, “Oh, is that it? We have a story issue, right? Hey, maybe with the score, I can… Oh, no, no, stop. Stop. I’m supposed to be watching this movie, not fixing it.”

Steve Cuden:

Yeah. For you, it’s the equivalent of seeing the mic dip into frame. It takes you out of the moment is what it does.

Bear McCreary:

Totally. And I’m so conditioned. It’s like, it just triggers it. And I immediately-

Steve Cuden:

Well, you’ve got way more than 10,000 hours. How many… What year did you start composing? Where you were legitimately being paid to compose?

Bear McCreary:

2003. So, been almost 20 years.

Steve Cuden:

So, you’re probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70,000 hours.

Bear McCreary:

I have done… I haven’t added it up, but I mean, Battlestar was like 80 episodes. Walking Dead is… I mean, I’ve probably done a thousand episodes of TV. If I really think about it, that my… Well, and again, think about every one of those was a three to five-hour spotting session and a week of work.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah. It’s a lot.

Bear McCreary:

So.

Steve Cuden:

It’s a lot.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah.

Steve Cuden:

I’m going to ask you a question that I ask lots of guests, and I’m always interested by the answer, and you may or may not be able to get there because it’s a really curiously difficult question. And that is, what for you, makes good music good?

Bear McCreary:

What makes good music good is it connects to you on an emotional level.

Steve Cuden:

There we go.

Bear McCreary:

Fundamentally, that’s all that matters. Good music is something that you can hear once, and you remember a week later. No, let me go even further. There are movies that I saw only once as a child, and I can still, if I think about it, remember the music. And I haven’t listened to it. I mean, good music imprints on your soul in a way that is profound. And all other components of, is it technically proficient? Is the recording good? None of that matters. So, I think that that emotional connection is what matters most. And I imagine that that answer could probably be broadened out to good art of any kind.

Steve Cuden:

It could. And it’s a very, very good answer. And I don’t always get a good answer on that, because it’s one of the things that people usually don’t think about, because it is an emotional thing. You know it, it’s a little bit like, I can’t remember, was it Potter Stewart or whoever the Justice was, who said, “I know pornography when I see it.” It’s the same thing, you know good music, you know good art, you know a good play, a good screenplay. You know it when you see it. You can’t always identify, that’s, I’m going back half a step to say, that’s why it’s really hard when something works very well. It’s hard to identify what exactly is that works.

Bear McCreary:

Yes.

Steve Cuden:

But when it doesn’t work, you can pick, you can see the scenes and pick things apart, just like you were talking about.

Bear McCreary:

Another thing I want to add to that, because I’ve been involved in all manner of things. And one of the things I learned, when I was growing up and to this day, I love cult movies. I love bad, low budget movies. I mean, I just love, and I love them. I love the passion on display.

Steve Cuden:

I’ve got a good one for you.

Bear McCreary:

All right. You want to tell me now or tell me later?

Steve Cuden:

I’ll tell you later.

Bear McCreary:

All right. But here’s my point. One of the things I’ve learned is that no one sets out to make a bad movie.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, no.

Bear McCreary:

And in fact, when you look at cult films, the ones that are the worst, are often ones where an experienced filmmaker is doing an homage, trying to make it bad on purpose. That is a disaster.

Steve Cuden:

Right.

Bear McCreary:

Everyone sets out to make something amazing. And that, to me, there’s so much to learn. When you say, when things don’t work, it’s like, you can rule out immediately that somebody wasn’t trying. And there’s so many cliches about, “Well, the studio didn’t get this,” or “The producers.” But the thing that take a breath and remember is, what do you think, the studio’s trying to make a bad movie? No.

Steve Cuden:

No.

Bear McCreary:

Do you think the producers are trying to ruin the movie? No. And when you’re in the trenches, you’re trying not to panic, everybody has a competing vision. I mean, I wasn’t in the room when the ending of Blade Runner was changed and they go, “We need a happy ending and a narration to explain it.” But I promise you, the people that made that decision had the best interest of the movie in their mind. They weren’t going, “Let’s ruin a cult classic. Ha, ha, ha.” And I mean, I hope people have that empathy with me. And it’s like, I don’t always succeed. My scores aren’t always great. My scores aren’t always groundbreaking and memorable. Sometimes it’s like, I’m just doing what I think serves the movie. And when you get in the trenches and you realize when you’re a working person, there’s so many factors, and the number of times that things come together and click, it’s so rare.

Steve Cuden:

Correct me if I’m wrong, please. Most of the time, you don’t want people to know that your music is there. It’s like editing.

Bear McCreary:

Oh, 100% of the time.

Steve Cuden:

It should be a part of the wallpaper.

Bear McCreary:

I know. I don’t want to be a distraction. I want you to be immersed in the drama. Ideally, you’re immersed in the drama and the next morning while you’re pouring your coffee, you catch yourself whistling something and you go-

Steve Cuden:

Exactly.

Bear McCreary:

“What is that? Oh, that’s that theme?” That’s my goal. You know what I mean? I want to get in your head, but not to the point that the music is calling attention to itself.

Steve Cuden:

So, we’ve been talking for well more than an hour now, and we’re going to wind this thing down. You’ve obviously been doing this a long time and you’ve had lots of experiences. Can you share with us an experience that you’ve had, where something weird, quirky, oddball, offbeat, or maybe just playing funny happened to you?

Bear McCreary:

Oh, there’ve been so many. I mean, my-

Steve Cuden:

Well, give us two.

Bear McCreary:

All right. Well, one example would be, when I was growing up, my favorite band was Oingo Boingo – Danny Elfman.

Steve Cuden:

Sure.

Bear McCreary:

And even at the time, there were adults in my life that were like, “What’s this stuff?” They didn’t get it. And I was such a super fan that I ended up not only meeting everybody in the band, but ended up working closely with most of them, and in fact, becoming very close with them. I mean, to the point that sometimes I look back on my life and I’m like, “Oh, the guitarist from Oingo Boingo was a groomsman at my wedding, and is like a father figure to my me and my brother almost, and played on Battlestar Galactica.” I would get these guys together to play on all these things.

And that’s just one of those times you look at your weird life path, and it’s like, and why do I know the Oingo Boingo? It’s like, only because the guy whose film music I loved as a child was in that band. You know what I mean? So, it is weird sometimes looking at how you can have these weird, seemingly random experiences, but they can all be connected. Got another weird experience. There’ve been so many. Right now, I’m sitting at a piano that is from the set of Battlestar Galactica.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, wow.

Bear McCreary:

It’s against the wall back there. There was an episode toward the end where it involved a piano player, who showed up on the Battlestar Galactica and had a relationship with Kara Thrace. And I got to write all these songs, and I actually was on set shooting that episode with them, coaching the actors, and playing the piano off camera to inspire performances. It was amazing. I mean, life changing experience for me getting to work with the production on that level. And then through a series of random things, it ended up on the auction block when they auctioned off all the props, and it ended up with one of the executive producers, whose kids played it for five or six years, and he gifted it to me.

And it’s on my, it’s actually, when I write at the piano, it’s the piano from Battlestar Galactica. And that’s just another funny, weird little thing. I have this clunker upright piano that I had to rebuild, because it was from a prop house in Vancouver. I mean, it’s not like a good instrument. But I rebuilt, I had the inner parts rebuilt, ultimately spending way more than the piano is worth. Because I wanted, I was like, “That. I want that to be my writing piano.” So, that’s another funny little thing I get to do.

Steve Cuden:

So, you write on an upright then?

Bear McCreary:

Yes.

Steve Cuden:

Wow.

Bear McCreary:

Because it’s the one from Battlestar Galactica.

Steve Cuden:

Oh, that’s really cool. That’s really cool. Because one imagines in one’s wild imagination, that film composers are sitting in a huge room with a great big, great grand piano, but no, this is, that’s really cool.

Bear McCreary:

My studio isn’t that big. There’s a grand piano in the house, but there’s people running around. It’s just in the house. But in my studio, where I need to be a little more conscious of space, I wanted an upright, and the one from Battlestar came up and I, obviously, couldn’t resist. But also, I really do, like I said, I do a lot of my sketching in a computer environment.

Steve Cuden:

Sure.

Bear McCreary:

So, I do not spend a lot of time at the acoustic piano.

Steve Cuden:

Got it. All right. Last question for you, Bear. What’s the best piece of advice that you can lend to those who may be just starting out, although you’ve already given us a huge amount of advice, but somebody who’s just starting out, or maybe they’re in a little bit and they’re trying to get to that next level?

Bear McCreary:

The best advice I can give is advice that I am very fortunate no one needed to give me. So, it is one of the secrets of my success, if not the secret to my success, completely by accident, completely because it’s how my brain is wired, and I didn’t have to do it on purpose. That’s having passion for what you do, and enthusiasm for what you do.

Steve Cuden:

Well, you’ve got that in spades. That’s obvious.

Bear McCreary:

Indeed, indeed. And I have since I was five. So, in a way, what I had to do was learn how to scale down my passion so that I didn’t look like a cocky bastard, because I’m so passionate about it. But there are other people that don’t have my personality, or I also see other composers that come to me and they’re like, “What do you do when a filmmaker doesn’t want to give you the budget? There’s no money. What do you do?” And I’m like, “I’m sorry, what’s on your IMDB?” “Well, nothing, but what are you?” And I’m like, “Why are you not doing this movie? Who cares? Who cares about the budget? You’re getting worked up over nothing.”

Steve Cuden:

Yeah. Do it.

Bear McCreary:

You know what I mean? And not only getting worked up by even thinking that, by even asking that, by even putting it in the universe. What you’re saying is like, you’re saying, “This filmmaker’s trying to screw me over. I need the money,” and “Well, other filmmakers blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And it’s like, you have an opportunity. Someone’s coming to you with footage to score and you can write music for it. If you’re passionate for it, and it’s all you want to do, and you would do it for free.

Meaning, that’s what you do in your spare time anyway. Then who cares? I can honestly say, there are many times in my career that it’s like, “Oh, the money on this is a joke.” I don’t care. I’m going to do it. I’m going to even lose money, but I’ll make, I just trust the universe. I’ll make it up elsewhere.

Steve Cuden:

Wow.

Bear McCreary:

There’ll be some other job where I make it up. On Animal Crackers, like I said, I assembled a 90-piece orchestra to record the demo. That wasn’t free, dude.

Steve Cuden:

That’s impressive.

Bear McCreary:

And I could have easily not gotten hired, but I just felt like, “Hey, I get to go in front of an orchestra. I get to write some fun music.” I’m going to spend some money, but overall, I get to do this, and the general trajectory of my life is positive.

What’s interesting is that I did films for free in school. I just scored movies all the time for filmmakers. If they didn’t have a movie for me, I just write some music on my own. I was crazy about it. And there was a certain point in the middle of third or fourth episode of Battlestar Galactica, when I realized my life had changed so quickly. And then I realized, “Whoa, Whoa, wait a minute. I’m getting paid to do this now. This is amazing.” But my life didn’t change in one fundamental way. I was working with the same people, the same musicians, doing the same thing that I was doing for free six months earlier. So, I find that that passion, when it’s real, it’s so palpable and it lifts people up. Filmmakers are nervous. They want someone to come in and go, “Oh, my God, your movie’s awesome. And it’s going to be great. Let’s do it.”

Not somebody that comes in and goes, “Well, I could score your movie, but what’s your budget again?” It’s a mindset thing. And I am amazed when I meet younger composers, how few people actually seem to radiate that passion for it. You know what I mean?

Steve Cuden:

I do.

Bear McCreary:

And if you’re approaching it like a business, it’s like, “Dude, there’s a lot of other ways to make money. Go to Wall Street, man.” If you’re worried about, “Well, how do I, what do you do? How do you do the business side of it?” It’s like, this should be 100% about making art, making friends, meeting filmmakers. The finances are going to be okay, but this is a risky business, for sure. The reward has to be getting to do this with your life. And if you’re prepared to say, “I’ll live under a bridge, if I got to.” If you put it out there like that, I just, I’m confident you’ll succeed. I really am.

Steve Cuden:

That’s just extraordinarily wise advice. Screenwriters, in general, have to write lots of spec stuff in order to sell something. They don’t get hired out of the gate.

Bear McCreary:

Yeah.

Steve Cuden:

You have to do a lot of work.

Bear McCreary:

I know.

Steve Cuden:

And that’s what you’re talking about.

Bear McCreary:

And even, I think when I’ve learned, I’ve become friends with some really, really well-established screenwriters. And I realized, “Wait, how many scripts have you written that aren’t made?” That blew my mind a lot.

Steve Cuden:

A lot.

Bear McCreary:

I mean, and honestly, you writers, man. For me, when I do a demo for a job and I don’t get it, it’s like, “Oh, man, that sucks. I wrote a five-minute cue and I didn’t get the job.” I didn’t write an entire feature score and not get the job.

Steve Cuden:

Exactly.

Bear McCreary:

For me, the number of times that I have to write a piece of music that goes nowhere, compared to you guys, it’s nothing.

Steve Cuden:

Yeah.

Bear McCreary:

99% of the music I’ve written for a film, someone can hear on Planet Earth somewhere. But for writers, it’s the opposite. It’s like, we get to experience 1% of what you write. So, that kind of emotional fortitude you have to have.

Steve Cuden:

Oh. And it gets even a little weirder for writers, because when you finish with your score and it’s done, rarely is anybody going to come along and say, “You know what, I’m just going to chop this part of it out, and I’m going to revise that.” But when you’re a writer, everybody’s got their hands in the pot.

Bear McCreary:

I know. And that actually does happen. And when it does, it’s so rare and so outrageous that it becomes famous stories that pass around the film music world. I mean, like one of the most famous ones is Alien. Jerry Goldsmith was furious at Ridley Scott because he chopped up the score, put a bunch of stuff into other places, use the temp score in places. And Jerry Goldsmith was like, “Ah, I’m so angry.” And then the accolades started coming in, and then he was like, “Oh, never mind.”

Steve Cuden:

“Okay.”

Bear McCreary:

Yeah, anyway, I can go on and on. I’m going to stop.

Steve Cuden:

And maybe one of these days we’ll have you back for a second round, because a whole lot of stuff we didn’t cover today. This has been just so much fun. And what a great career you’ve been having and are continuing to have. And I know I’m, for sure, looking forward to hearing much more of what you have to do, and I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show today. It’s been just spectacular.

Bear McCreary:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Steve. This has been great.

Steve Cuden:

Fantastic stuff. And now as promised, we have a real treat. Sit back, please enjoy now, Bear’s gorgeous and haunting theme from the film Europa Report.

THE THEME FROM “EUROPA REPORT” PLAYS…

Steve Cuden:

And so, we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you like this podcast, please take a moment to give us a rating or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to. Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden, and may all your stories be unforgettable.