Special Report: Music Editor Ben Schor

Hold your ears, folks. It's showtime. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Turn it off. Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I am talking with Ben Shore. He is a music editor who was recently working on Alien Earth, as well as the new Cape Fear series.

Had a lot of fun talking with Ben. I hope you have a great time listening to this. Enjoy. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got into the business, though? Well, I started out as a singer-songwriter growing up in Seattle and came down to Los Angeles and at music school at USC Thornton school of music, expecting that I was going to live a life as a singer songwriter and a musician and came to realize pretty quickly over the course of those four years that the music business is taking, taking a new look at itself.

This was around the time that Napster came around and file sharing was a big deal. And I think that a lot of people were reevaluating what it meant to be in the business and the business model was shifting. And it was at that point, being in music school, having access to everything that USC had to offer, I started taking a real strong interest in film and I think really igniting my love of film music and had a chance to score some student features along the way while I was there. And coming out of college, starting to look towards what I was going to do with my career, I had a longtime family friend of mine who was essentially looking to make a move out of the music editorial business and raise a family and had an opportunity for me to come in her stead.

And that's how I got my start. I came in under her wing and her name is Sienna Pascarella. She is actually now my wife. And I learned everything I could through that experience coming into the business. And I've been doing this now gosh, 23 years, which is really exciting.

What were those early jobs like? I was a fortunate guy in coming into the business where there was still room for assistance. Since then, budgets have shrunk and teams have gotten smaller, but I came in as an apprentice and assistant. So those first jobs were really very instrumental in learning what it meant to be a part of the film team, the film music team, and really getting an idea what the process was like. But my first movie was a movie called Gigli, which is just absolutely hilarious to me because obviously it's become very infamous, but it was an absolute joy to work on, even though it was an interesting situation to be in.

The film had been constructed as one thing, and the tabloids had gotten a hold of the fact that Ben and Jen had a relationship, and all of a sudden, the movie was tailored to an entirely different story. So it was unique because it was... an interesting way to look at the way that footage can be used and how it can be framed. And I had the wonderful fortune of working with a composer named John Powell on a score that I'm extremely proud of working on. So it was really, it was a joy. It was a real joy to start that way.

I'm going to ask you some really just very dumb questions because I have never actually spoken to a music editor. before, so I'm just so curious, what is that relationship like with the composer, and where does their job end and your job begin? The music editor, if we're lucky enough to come in at the beginning of the project, essentially ushers the sound of the film's music from start to finish. We often come in post-production when editors are just starting to do their own cuts with directors, and we will take a look at the film And the first thing that we usually do is we will construct what's called a temporary score. And that will oftentimes be comprised of music from other composers. Sometimes it'll be from the composer that's been selected for the project, if they already know who they're going to hire.

And then obviously sometimes it will be more diegetic and more song-oriented things, depending on the project. So we will literally come in, have a session with the director and the editor talking about where they want to have music, what the feeling they want to have in the music should be. Sometimes they'll have some musical ideas of what that sounds like. Sometimes we'll just talk in terms of emotion. And after we've gone through and discussed that, we'll oftentimes go off and do a lot of listening, do a lot of experimentation and build out of This pre-existing music, this template of the score that will stick with the film or the television project and become a talking point between the director and editor and also the composer or the music department.

Because oftentimes... Composers have a very strong understanding of musical language, but they might not necessarily know what the direction of the film is supposed to be. And the director might, again, know exactly what they want to feel, but not know how to say it musically. So we work as a liaison between those two parties, essentially, making sure everybody is saying what they need to say, that the music is communicating the ideas properly. And then the composer will go off with that template, write the score, and all the while picture is still being tweaked and edited and shortened.

So a lot of times composers will write music and it'll need to be edited shorter or sometimes it'll need to be extended depending. And that's another spot where we come in is to make sure that the intent of the music is honored. And the last part of our process is recording the score with an orchestra or with a band, mixing the score in its own context, and then bringing that material to a dub stage where the We, along with dialogue editors and sound effects editors and mixers, who are called re-recording mixers, will all have discussions and bring our materials to the show and start to mix them to see what should be louder, what should be taking the scene. Sometimes you'll pull dialogue out of a scene because music is communicating it without the need for dialogue.

We have a lot of different experimental fun with what we can do with audio and that will comprise the final soundtrack. So we'll be on a project if we're lucky from the beginning of post-production to the end. It's a really interesting creative relationship. What if you're not lucky? There are lots of times where we can be brought in and it's a very short schedule.

Sometimes we'll be brought in and they have a couple of weeks to have the composer write their score. And it's a lot of sort of furious editing and making sure that the spots that have been written for a film are can address lots of different other places in the movie. And we might take that material and literally cut it into different spots and make changes to it so that it can be unique to where it is in the film. And then we'll basically do what's called tracking a film that way. But also what will happen is we can come into the process and maybe other people have been working on what the temporary score is.

So there's already discussions that have been had. There's already decisions that have been made. And those sorts of things can be either helpful or hurtful depending on how attached somebody is to the work that's already been done. Oftentimes you'll have filmmakers who might really like a piece of music that they've used, but it's an old piece of music and it's not unique to the film. And they have a hard time separating what it's doing from what their composer might bring, which might be a completely different thing.

Yeah, I've heard of directors falling in love with the temp track before, where it's like, I want this. I like this song. I want this sound. It does happen, and it can be a big challenge, especially when it's very specific, because you have to thread that fine line between doing what the director wants, which obviously is our number one priority, and then trying to make the film unique and having that vision. And that's where our relationship with the composer is really helpful, because because you can really hone in on what specifically is going on in a piece of music.

Like maybe you've got the melody being played in the strings and the winds, or maybe you have this rhythmic feature that's something in the band or in a rhythm section, or maybe there's some synth colors that somebody has been programming that are a part of this original piece of music. And you can really hone in and say, this is what's bringing this emotion. Let's try and take this idea, adapt it, and make it more our language, but use the same musical colors to achieve that goal. In creating these temp tracks, I'm sure you must have some sort of encyclopedic knowledge of music so that you can say, all right, this seems like the best way to go forward with this. This song is going to match, or this musical piece is going to match this emotion better than anything else.

Definitely, yes. We build up that kind of knowledge over the course of our careers and have a huge database and access to all sorts of new music as it's coming out. As we're working on projects, we amass our own collection of these different things and Like anybody who's creative, you start to think about it as a problem-solving technique. What did I use to solve this in another project? I'm going to go back and reference that.

Or maybe that piece of music is perfect for something new that we're working on. So yeah, it's super important to have that kind of knowledge. But I'm also not the kind of person who thinks I know it all in any capacity. I'm always trying to learn, always trying to listen to new things. And being exposed to new music, there's just so much out there, as I'm sure anybody who's a fan knows.

Yeah, and it's not like you can pop down to the record store too much anymore and listen to the new tracks. Yeah, I miss those days, that's for sure. I'm sure you have composers that you work with really well, and I'm curious who some of those folks are. Absolutely. I've been really fortunate, again, over my career to work with a lot of people who I really respect and who I think are extremely talented.

The ones that come to mind as important to me over the course of the career have been I got to work with Dave Grusin a number of years back on a project. And for me, growing up with the Goonies, that was like the be-all, end-all. So that was really exciting to have a chance to work with him. But I've also worked with a composer named Christopher Young, who's known for his horror film scores. In addition to some other dramatic work, he's scored Spider-Man 3.

He did The Hurricane, The Shipping News. More recently, he did the film Sinister. He just had a film out this last summer called Passenger. He's enormously talented. Another composer I love working with is Rob Simonson, who's had some great success in the last couple of years, specifically with Deadpool and Wolverine.

Yeah, and then I've been really very excited to spend the last eight years or so working with Jeff Russo, who's doing great, creative, exciting work in terms of limited series and television projects. Those have just been a real dream for me. Yeah, when did you first start working with him? Jeff and I got hooked up on a project that was a Peter Berg movie called Mile 22. Again, we get our jobs from all sorts of places, but I had a great relationship with the music studio head at STX, and he was asking me to do the film, and I came in, and this was another case of things being a little bit in disarray.

Jeff had written a whole ton of music for the film, and Pete was, I think, struggling to find what he thought the sound of the movie was. I came in and I kind of tried to help hone in on what those elements were in the score that had already been composed and really helped focus Jeff and finished off some things that were still hanging open and allowed some direction to come in for Jeff there as well in finishing things. And that relationship really was born in that project. He and I started to see we have a similar aesthetic mind when it comes to what music can do In terms of how it relates to picture and what the emotion is behind different scenes. So that really started things.

And since then we've done, I don't even know how many projects, probably upwards of 20 or 30. It's been great. And all sorts of things from Fargo to Ripley to The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was this great series on Showtime that unfortunately not too many people saw. I encourage anybody watching. who has not seen the show, to seek it out. It's just a great piece of work.

But then also things like Alien Earth that we've had this last year. And it's been tremendously exciting getting to work with different sounds and, in some terms, also projects that have pre-established musical notions. We did this as well with this Apple TV series, Cape Fear, which has been airing recently, taking a well-known concept of what the sound of a film or a TV show is, and then learning how to adapt it, taking in what was successful about it musically, and then also making it your own for the new era. You talked about things shift. You've got the edit.

You've got the score. Okay, I need to make this a little bit shorter. I need to make this a little bit longer. So obviously, if you need to shorten it, you just fade it out really quickly, right? That's like the trick.

Yeah. I wish, yeah, that would be ideal, of course. There's all sorts of internal concepts that we think about, where to start and stop a melody, where to start a rhythm track. We might be very close in terms of where the start and stops are, but not close enough to just let it play as it is, and we might have to do some compression and find ways to manipulate the audio so that we can still maintain the things that it's doing against picture, but also... let it react to the way that things are now. Obviously, you don't want to bring the orchestra back and, okay, now we need four more bars kind of thing.

How would you lengthen out something that is already completed, something that's already in the can? Depends on the project and the way that the music was written. In terms of how I work with Jeff a lot, and this applies to Alien as well as to Cape Fear, We do a lot of work independently of picture where Jeff will compose thematic suites. And sometimes this will be well before there's even been frames of the show shot. So he'll write these suites, oftentimes in concert with his showrunner, and come up with the sound of the film and come up with the thematic material.

And then he and I work in concert to decide what's going where and interweave those different things together. So In those situations, because we're designing it from the ground up when it comes to actually working on the picture specifically, I think it's more of a concept that we take in mind as we're going. But we don't ever have the opportunity to recall the orchestra on things that have already finished. The good thing about a television show is we record in blocks. So we might do three episodes at a time.

And yes, indeed, if something is really crucial and we've missed it, or we've decided to maybe take an idea that we came up with in episode five and back time it to episode one, because it's so successful, we might take those times and fly it into those episodes. But those are rare moments. And when it comes to film projects, you do not have another opportunity with the orchestra. He and I work very forensically in the way that we record, and that gives us the most flexibility to be able to react to those sorts of changes. So Ben, I don't know why you're lying to me, because we all know that when it comes to scoring a picture, there's an orchestra that's in a booth, and then there's the picture going on screen, and they just play the music live to whatever's happening on screen.

I love those opportunities when they happen. But man, are they rare. Yeah. Things move so fast these days that, like I said, we'll be working to four or five different older versions of the picture. Again, just because that's the way that the music has been created.

Oftentimes you can incorporate the notes into something that's older. And like we've talked about before, there's more opportunity to adapt it. If something is written in a longer form, obviously it's easier to deal with when there's a change. to make it shorter rather than to expand it. So that's another case of why we're lucky to do things the way that we do. But yeah, man, there's nothing better than sitting in that room with the orchestra, watching them play down a sequence that Jeff's written and seeing it come to life.

It's just, it's the best part of the job. What are the tools in your toolbox? What do you use the most? Well, I edit on Pro Tools a lot. For me, that's just the audio workstation that I use.

And that's also what a lot of people in the film business work on as sort of their standard workstation. And that's how we deliver things to a dub stage. Everybody's working in the same format. But a lot of times, what are the tricks? The tricks can be audio plugins, which will allow me to add reverb tails on the end of music to make it sound like it was naturally supposed to end the way that it does, even though I've completely... created and then that of what was necessary for the show.

But also I think the biggest part of my toolkit is my brain and the way that it works and just keeping those ideas in mind while we're working so that, like I say, we're not running into a situation where we don't have what we need. I know half of your job title is editor and I'm curious, how do you work with the film editor or the project editor on a day-to-day basis? Again, I think it depends on the project. For Alien Earth, we're very fortunate to work with Regis Kimball and his team in Noah Hawley's camp. And Regis is extremely collaborative with music.

And we will really literally all go at the soundtrack from different perspectives. And Regis is sitting with Noah while they're cutting together episodes. Oftentimes, they'll experiment a little bit with these suites that Jeff has written, and we will come in and make adjustments or sometimes make something completely new. And they're very open to adjusting the picture to accommodate sometimes what the musical idea or the emotional idea is. Then sometimes you'll run into editors who are like, nope, that's the way I cut the sequence.

That's the way it's got to play. You guys have to figure it out based on how that is. And that can be its own challenge. But I think working with editors is like working with directors. Everybody has a creative mind.

And I think our job more than anything is to try and satisfy as many people as possible, making sure that our composer is happy with the way that the music is playing, that it plays in a musical fashion, but it also serves the picture that the director feels like the emotion is being captured, that the editor is, proud to say that these two or three ideas he had or she had during the process are now incorporated into the score. Everybody's in play. Everybody. There's just so many moving pieces. Visuals, the sound, the sound effects, the score, the dialogue.

There's got to be so many. You talked about that kind of mix-down process. That's got to be huge to just, like you said, bring all that balance and make sure that everybody's satisfied when they walk away. Yeah, it's a dance, that's for sure. And I think the more you work within the business, the more you begin to understand, I think, where to leave room for different elements of the soundtrack, making sure that we're not overpowering score scenes where people are whispering.

And that sounds like a minor thing, but oftentimes composers can not be as interested in the dialogue and might be ripping through a sequence where somebody is talking very quietly, and you really have to make sure that you understand every bit of dialogue that they're saying. And the same comes to big action sequences. What I like doing with Jeff is that we score the emotion of the scene rather than scoring the specific action. So a lot of times that leaves its own room for the sound department to really create what the soundscape is. In terms of Alien, Lee Gilmore and Brad North, who are our sound supervisors, did a tremendous job.

They have a fantastic team at Pacific Standard Sound. And those guys... are really good at finding a balance of what can music do? How can I support? How can I get what I need? Because there's a lot of things that we created in the score that may also have sort of this sound effect concept in mind.

So everybody has to make room for each other. And that also means adjusting those sounds when maybe something sounds too musical and it's in the wrong key of the score or something like that. So we're always making those changes. And like I said, the sound department is a huge proponent of why it works. We do a lot of playing around, but we're also on very short schedules because television shows mix very fast.

When it comes to something like Alien Earth, it's going to be interesting because you're dealing with a property that has such a long history and has so many talented musicians behind. It over the years. Starting with Goldsmith, moving into Horner, so many all-stars, I would say. And then how much do you pay attention to them versus how much do you branch out on your own? I think about that violin shriek that Horner would use whenever the aliens would show up, that kind of like jump scare noise.

That's classic. Do you pay homage to that or do you just move in another direction? Well, again, that's another case of having those discussions early on really helps. And Jeff and Noah talked about that a lot when they were talking about what the sound of the score should be. But yeah, there were definitely musical gestures that we thought about, things like what you're talking about with James Horner, or one of these specific effects that was unique and specific to the location we even recorded the score, which is Abbey Road, where you had a very specific sound where you'd have this delayed effect, which you'd hear either brass or you'd hear woodwinds, and it would be this figure that would repeat.

And that was another unique sound that's specific to Alien. And I know we wanted to find spots for those things. But yeah, it's also an interesting challenge to make sure that the melodic sound of the show feels familiar, but then also is new. That's where all that extra work up front comes in with Jeff. He's constantly going back and forth about what should I incorporate, what should be new.

And for Alien, the things that step out from the rest of the score to accomplish that are a few different colors within the orchestra and some without the orchestra. One is a type of instrument called a contrabass flute. which you're used to seeing a flute being held by somebody in their two hands. This is a massive instrument. It's as tall as the musician who's playing it sits on a stand. You ought to take a look at it in your off time.

It's quite a remarkable thing, but it also has a very unique, low, rich tone. And that plays in several places throughout the score. And then there were two other colors that, like I said, were not part of the orchestra. Jeff had a instrument created for the score called called a bass desmophone, which is this sort of triangular metal box on top of which there are some strings that you can also bow. So there's all these interesting things about tapping the metal and finding ways to incorporate the two sounds simultaneously.

And that's a lot of what made up things, I think, in what the track is on the soundtrack called Xenomorph. It's really, again, I think, a unique sound that you don't find it anywhere else. So it's got this otherworldly feeling. And then another thing that he incorporated in the score is this, again, really unique looking instrument called the Aztec death whistle, which is the size of my hand. But it's literally, you're looking at it like this.

I don't know what it's made out of, but it looks like an actual skull. And you blow through the top of the head of the skull. And it's got this really interesting shrieking sound talking about the horner. finding new ways to incorporate what that sound is, but maybe adapt it a little bit. That's one of the nice things about Alien that I enjoy, both the movie and the television show, is just the quiet to loud. Because so much of it, and especially in a television show where you have more time, you are allowed to have those quiet moments and build that tension up so much.

It's really exciting to do that kind of stuff. I absolutely adore it. Some of the stuff that I'm most proud of in the show are these long sequences that are starting from very little. And you spend five to six to eight minutes just building the tension one piece at a time. Sometimes it'll be the ascension of the way that the musical melody is going.

Sometimes it'll be the additions of instruments. It's really exciting to play with that, for sure. Were you a winner of an Emmy for Ripley, was it? Yes, I had the good fortune of working with Steve Zalian on that show. Congratulations.

Thank you. That was another really unique project. Steve works... I think, different than anybody else in that he essentially works on the whole project like it's an eight-hour film. And when he feels comfortable with the structure of the whole thing, he'll literally send us the whole show and say, okay, this is the show.

You guys go ahead and get started. And I remember talking to Jeff about what the sound of the show was and thinking it was very Italian and it had a romanticism to it. And he worked on the first couple of episodes and we turned music in to Steve and he said, you know what? That's beautiful. It's just not the show.

We're making a thriller about a serial killer, and we really want to lean into that level of tension. Why don't we try something different? Why don't you start scoring the last two episodes, see where that takes you musically, and then we'll readdress, which is exactly what happened. We worked on seven and eight and found the sound very quickly of what brought that tension and began to apply it earlier on in the show. How is it watching a movie with you at home or at the theater?

Are you constantly, oh, that could have been better, or ooh, I really like what they did there? I'm sure a lot of that's going on inside my head. I try not to voice it too much. But yeah, no, I'm a huge fan regardless. For things to not be working for me, it usually means that something's sticking out.

I love movies. I love television. I love music. So I'm just really excited about taking part in the story. And I think that's the most successful stuff is always when you can feel like you're being brought along and it's doing something unique to grab you.

Are there any trends that are going on right now that you would, if you had the ability, you would just end them? I think the trends that I would say I'd like to end would be things about, you very impatient about what happens on screen and might be thinking, oh, the audience doesn't have the patience to sit with this for so long. They're going to pick up their phone, they're going to do something else, and we lose them. So there's a real need to, I think, edit things very fast to the point that sometimes you take away a lot of the emotional opportunities and a lot of the musical opportunities by cutting things so short that we don't have an opportunity for you to hear a theme that might have been written for a scene.

And I think that that's the trend that I really would like to highlight more than take away is that I love when creatives allow for music to do its job and to really bring that emotional resonance. And that can only happen by having the chance to hear it more than once. You have to be able to pay it off because you've heard it before. And that's the kind of stuff that I love. I mean, a perfect example is the way, you know, in the Odyssey, they pay off some of the visual cues and towards the end of the film.

I won't spoil it for anybody who hasn't seen it, but there are definitely some visual references that Ludwig takes and references musically, and those are the kinds of things that really grab you. Are there any composers that you really wish that you could have or could work with? It's kind of crazy to say this, but I feel so fortunate to work with the people that I do that I almost am happy where I'm at, because I think a lot of times... The graph can be a little greener. It's nice to see things from the outside and really experience what the creativity is.

To be on the inside of it sometimes can change what the magic is. But who wouldn't love to work with John Williams? And who wouldn't have loved the opportunity to work with Jerry Goldsmith or Bernard Herrmann back in the days? These are titans of film music. And the things that they've done and established are touchstones for the rest of us.

If anything, I think it's really just being an opportunity to be a fly on the wall is more exciting for me than necessarily working on the project sometimes. Speaking of Bernard Herrmann, I haven't seen the new Cape Fear yet, but I'm curious how much in debt to Herrmann is the score for that? Jeff set out from the onset of that project to find a way again to, I think, thread the line between what was old and what was new. And we were fortunate enough in Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese to have two amazing, strong creatives who felt very passionately about the fact that the Bernard Herrmann music is the quintessential way to celebrate what Cape Fear is. So they wanted to embrace that material, which really gave us an opportunity to be orchestral, to be unapologetically orchestral, and to let music, I think, take a role in the way that it is not usually allowed to do so.

Because it's very much a character in the show. And we're jumping back and forth between Herman's music, even some of the stuff that Elmer Bernstein wrote for the 91 remake as well. And then Jeff's themes. And it'll all happen in the span of the same cue oftentimes. But it's a real treat.

And I'm so proud of Jeff's work and also my work on that show. I think that it's, especially the last few episodes, it really pays off well. So when you have an opportunity to watch it, I'm excited for you if you're a fan of that music, for sure. What are we working on now? Jeff and I are gearing up for a couple of things, one of which is Alien Season 2, which is very exciting.

I've heard the first pieces of music that have been written. They just started shooting, I don't know, about a month ago. Things are coming together with that. We're going to be working on a second season of a Netflix show with John Wells called Untamed, which is very exciting. And I have had the good fortune of coming back together to work with a composer friend of mine, Chris Young. on a Guillermo del Toro-produced film called The Boy in the Iron Box, which is set to debut sometime next year.

Ben, thank you so much for your time. This was great talking with you. I had a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you. Bye.