 Hey, welcome to Creature Features, everyone. I am Daniel Schweiger. I'm the soundcrack editor of filmmusicmag.com. And this is our Anatomy to the Score series. And I'm very happy today to announce that, well, I think it's always going to be Outlander for me. But some score is The Odd Life of Timothy Green, an Emmy nomination for Into the West, the Pacific hitman, and Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man, Tell No Tales. Mr. Jeff Cinelli. Hello. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here. Well, I mean, this is certainly the biggest, a long time coming to man the ship of the series that you've been a part of since the very beginning. Tell us how you came to work with Hans Zimmer's team. And we've got a clip lined up from the first Pirates, but you're familiar with it. You know, I was Hans's intern in 1994, actually. That's when it started. So he was doing The Lion King. And that was, like, I was 19, I guess, the first job I ever had in the industry, or a job. I wasn't getting paid. And jobs are the things that get paid for it. It was volunteer work. But I was in a studio. It was the first time I'd ever been in a studio, actually. And then just, so that was 94. Pirates was nine years later. I'd never went home. I worked for some composers there, John Powell. And then somewhere around, I guess, 1999, I think, when Hans was doing Hannibal, he had heard that I had been doing a lot of good arranging work for John, and he offered me a room. And I said, yes. And then I became his arranger. This is the very short version of the story. But I was his arranger on Hannibal, or one of them. And then when Pirates came around, I mean, a lot of people probably know the story. But the first Pirates movie was a very short schedule, because they were dubbing the movie when they decided to change composers. So they called Hans, said, can you score the movie? And he said, yes, but I can't take credit, because he was under contract to another film. So he wrote all the themes overnight and called me in on a Saturday. And I remember about eight of us in a room watching the rough cut of Curse of the Black Girl. And we didn't quite know what to make of it. We knew we liked it. And we were like, are they going to watch it? We had no idea. And it was literally 24 days, I think. After that, we were done, finished recording the score. So it was like that. We watched the movie and started working right away. And Hans had written maybe a six minute demo, which is basically all the themes. Like he's a pirate is on there and the Black Girl theme. And yeah, we just went straight to it. And anyway, on the first one, I think by the time we were done, somewhere on 27 or 28 minutes of the score came out of my room. So I kind of made me because it was such chaos. I don't know, I ended up coming out of that with a substantial involvement with the thing. I was the star on the team. And obviously, the way the credits shook outwards looked a little different from that. But that's what happened in the locker room. And then when we went around into Pirates 2 and 3, of course, Hans said, why don't you come back in? And that's when I started really doing more actual writing. So in the second movie, the Cannibal Island music was all mine, not the walls, but when you go into Cannibal Island. And then I also wrote the Pia D'Alma theme. Not at all knowing what that was going to mean for Pirates 3, because then you guys know the story, but she's calypso in that movie. And the theme takes on a bigger role. So naturally, my music expanded inside the Pirates world, I guess. So going back to Black Pearl, it's a California kid. What did the Pirates of the Caribbean ride mean to you? Well, OK. So I grew up very close to Anaheim in Westminster. Closer to Anaheim than Hollywood. So I would go to Disneyland, and I'd ride the ride, and I'd go like, I mean, it kind of blows you away. It even still does. Every room has a story and a punchline. There's all these little jokes in every room. And it's evocative. It's exciting to be there. You feel you're going through a story. And I'll be honest with you, I had no idea they were going to be able to pull it off as a movie. I thought, what everybody else thought, really? And then I saw the teaser with that skeleton foot comes down. It was part of the underwater march. And then I went, I can't wait to see that movie. And then I got a call two weeks later, and it was like, guess what, you're also working on it. So that was, I think the earlier movies did a lot more sort of nodding to the ride. You know what I mean? Like there's the dog jokes and stuff like that. Then I think we're really cool. But then they started to take on an identity of their own. You know, what's interesting is that Pirates is very much a rock and roll film. And when we were conditioned for pirate music to sound like Max Steiner or something like that. It's great. What Kornbould might apologize for is that, but this is kind of like the punk version of Kornbould essentially going into the first film. Yeah, look, there was even sort of an edict right at the beginning, which was like, we're not doing those like woodwind rides, you know what I mean? That you kind of associate with squash buckling stuff. It's very ornamental in the traditional music. But instead, you know, taking a cue from, really kind of came from Gore's direction. But even Johnny Depp is going, OK, I'm looking at Keith Richards as the inspiration for Jack Sparrow. So, and Gore would say things like, think of it as Cinderella at a Metallica concert. These were the notes he gave to the music team. That's for the moonlight serenade when they're you'd hear a nightly up. And so we were always going, OK, pirates are the original rock stars, right? So we could treat the orchestra like a rock band. And I think that's what made the music have its own identity. Mr. Reverend. Now, you've essentially selected for us your greatest pirates hit. So let's begin with the clip from Curse of the Black Girl. Thank you. I mean, you write from the first film and it starts off with such memorable, distinctive themes. Yeah, that actually was the very first thing I ever wrote for any pirates ever. That opening when Barbosa throws the apple. And we always called it, we called the sequence broadside. Eventually the ships end up, you know. And in fact, that's how I ended up getting my nickname. On the albums, we all have pirate nicknames. So that's, I became Jeff Broadside forever from that cue. But it was, and it's actually an arrangement of that he's a pirate theme. It was disguised enough that Hans actually kind of went, where'd that come from? And I, you know, it's your thing, you know. And he got all excited about it. And that was a pretty big early hit actually. It must have been played in the first meeting sort of two days after we started the job, I guess. And I think it was received really well. So that became one of the kind of iconic versions of that theme, I think. It plays in Pirates 5 too, because I couldn't resist. You know, and that's the thing about, you know, Hans uses a team of people, but yet it all comes out in a very cohesive manner. I mean, what's the trick as a composer to writing in someone else's voice and again, getting that cohesion going on? Well, I think the cohesion isn't, is the responsibility of the composer to wrangle that. You know, what my role is on this additional music composer is really to just write what I think the scene is, or you know what I mean? Like just respond to it, honestly. And I think probably what makes it cohesive is like that piece was sort of undeniably right for the sequence. And it started to kind of inform other sequences in the movie, whether I wrote them or not. And so the cohesion comes as a result of, obviously Hans having written a demo that we could all understand and use. But then as the score starts taking shape, cues like this or there was one that Blake did, which was for part of the Barbosa's Curse, and it starts to end up in more than one scene in the movie or something like it. And then the cohesion just comes out of that but by its kind of development. Did that make sense? Didn't it? Now the second and the third films, again I think Gwerfer Binsky is, if nothing else, not ambitious in terms of his scope. And again, you almost kind of got this Lord of the Rings Lord of the Rings-esque epic that happens with the second and the third films. What was the challenge knowing again that you're gonna go on to do essentially two films together? Right, well actually I wasn't aware of what the plot of Pirates 3 would be when we did Pirates 2. If I was, it would have been more intimidating I think to write the Tia Dolma things. I didn't realize what it was gonna have to go and do. But that was by design, because Gwer was going this is a standalone movie even though he knew what he was setting up. So I think we certainly knew on the second one that we had a bigger scope and we knew we were gonna make a third one. But I'm not sure that there was really a, Hans probably knew more about the score for Pirates 3 or what it would have to be. So when he started writing some of the longer themes, like Jack Sparrow gets a much more developed theme in Pirates 2, I think he knew full well what he was gonna have to do with it in Pirates 3. But for me, my work on that one was more self-contained. Like it was the Cannibal Island is just in a bubble, right, it doesn't recur. And I didn't know that Tia Dolma would really recur either. Well, we have a two-part clips, one from Cannibal Island and one from Ia Dolma. It's such a Gwer Verbinski thing to have like a woman turn into a million crabs and dump into the sea. And I had asked if I could call the album, the cut on the album that had that music attack of a 50-foot woman, but that was shot down. So I just thought, I mean, come on. I'm supposed to attack on the crabs. Yeah, exactly, right. I think it's called Calypso. Now, you know what's interesting is that you can tell from the first clip, is rock and roll, as these scores are, and kind of like in your face, Eric Wolfgang, Corn Gold, is that they actually, they also seem authentic in the use of period instruments, is that at the same time, it's an anachronistic pirate score, but it seems that maybe people would have been listening to this kind of music back in the day. Maybe or at least the instrumentation. And I've thought about that too with Pirates 5 and I thought, boy, we've underutilized the banjo. Believe it or not, it actually is an instrument that made its way through the Caribbean. So there's a little bit more of it, but sometimes you run into issues of scale where you still need the huge orchestra and the choir to do it. But there are, yeah, I think it's deliberate though. There's harpsichord in the earlier ones and we use it sometimes for the kind of very civilized people, I guess you'd say. The ones who are the bad guys inevitably, right? So the pirates get, well actually no, I guess Barbosa has a harpsichord on his ship in Pirates 5. But yeah, there was at least some attempt at bringing in some of the period instruments to fight the synthesizers. And as you can tell by this wonderful epic music we had in the Calypso sequence, is that this is much more of a fantasy. It goes from horror to fantasy with the third film, the second third film. Yeah, I think so too. I think, well, the first one has the sort of overtly horror elements with the, you know, the skeletons and stuff. But these ones that it's, that to me feels more like a Harry Hauser moment. You know what I mean? And I think that's a good thing. I think that's, those are the movies I grew up on. Probably is why I was able to relate to these movies and succeed within that context, I guess. You're a big fan of the Sinbad movies. Yeah, I mean I just, Clash of the Titans was the one when I was a kid. I mean I grew up, Beastmaster was a huge movie. And then the more mainstream movies like Indiana Jones, Adventure was what I did, you know, because I lived in the suburbs so I didn't get to live it. I had to watch it on TV. I also grew up right at the time when cable TV was starting to happen. So you would get like the, you know, the movies that I was too young to have seen in the theater, they'd be on on Saturday afternoon and then I'd go to the theater to see Indiana Jones which would have been current. So I got a good education. Just jumping in, it's like essentially a dream. And you can really hear the enthusiasm, like this is your dream come true. Totally, yeah, Pirates is like, yes, totally. So now we get to On Stranger Tides, the fourth film. And again, we have a bit of a Spanish inflection. Yeah, the Spaniards show up. And are you doing the opening? Yeah, I actually have a clip that shows these are not the nice mermaids from Peter Pan. Oh, he's the mermaids, right? Okay, good, yeah, go for it. Let's take it, check it out. I just love that, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And that whole sequence goes on, I think it's probably two or three times longer than that and the earlier cuts longer still. So there's a lot of like frantic mermaid music floating around out there. And again, you know, the fourth film occupies kind of an interesting, you know, space between the previous films, again, where you've got Blackbeer and again, the fantasy element. Yeah, and I think the attempt was to do a standalone piece instead of, because two and three were so bound to each other. And also to make it more Jack-centric, kind of. You know, Jack has, in some ways, the bigger role in Floor as opposed to being the kind of comic relief that the other characters bounced off of. And, but, you know, I thought with Blackbeard, there was a good opportunity for music, but Hans wrote all that theme, but I wrote the music for the Spanish army and I wrote that mermaid sequence and, you know, that felt like new ground to me. And I also remember we brought in Rodrigo and Gabriela to play on the score, which was another kind of the rock and roll version of adding the Spanish guitar in a way, actually. Now for Dead Men, Tell No Tales, you get the captain's wheel. At one point, what's it, do you think become apparent that you were gonna be the heir apparent to take over the series? Probably right after Lone Ranger, which so, and I knew I was scoring Dead Men probably a year and a half before they shot it. So it was, you know, it was decided quite a while ago. And I think it was just a matter of, you know, at some point in the last two or three movies, I mean, my enthusiasm for it's obvious, right? So, you know what I mean? So Jerry and Disney, who watched me then go through Lone Ranger, and that's a whole other story we don't have to tell right now, but I did a lot of work on that. And so it became like, you know, this is his thing now. Let's give it to him. It was very organic, though. I mean, it was almost, there was, I hate to put it this way, but it was just sort of seemed like obvious that I would be doing it at some point, you know? I don't even remember anyone calling me and saying you're doing it. It was just like, the directors are coming over, let's sit down. You know what I mean? Well, there wasn't like a party or something. It was just like, hey, you know, it just, it was almost a no brainer, I kind of. Now, I mean, you could say, I have to admit that the new film was probably my favorite of the series, and probably my favorite score of the series. And again, you have such an amazing wealth of themes from all of the past films from, I mean, you almost like checkerboard, like, okay, we're gonna use this scene from this here and this theme and this, and then here's gonna be my stuff. Yes, actually, yeah, but not so much, there's no spreadsheet, because I don't think that way. But that is absolutely what we're thinking about. Okay, so before I started writing, before they shot the film actually, so the directors, Joachim and Espen, and Hans and I all sat down. And it was really like, this is the passing of the torch meeting, right? And it was really a matter of, obviously the directors have to like me, you know? So they're coming over to make sure that they're totally okay with this whole arrangement. And in that meeting, which was really probably 20 minutes long, the takeaway was, Hans said, guys, these are your themes now, do whatever you want, right? Because he trusts me, he knows I'm not gonna, he knows I can handle that. And the other thing that we talked about was, there's a lot of new ground. So there's Salazar, big bad guy, there's Karina, who has this huge story arc. If you guys have seen the film, she kind of is the story, I think. Barbosa has a new role, it's related to that. And then there's like an overarching mythology of the sea music that needed to be written. Cause that's like Henry Turner and the myths of the sea. Poseidon's Trident is all the new stuff. So then it was a matter of going, well, where are we gonna use the old themes? Where are we gonna use the new ones? And that just evolved. It took the four or five months, I was writing the score to really lock that in. Some of it's obvious, when you first see Jack, you kind of wanna hear Jack's music, that's easy. But in other spots, it was a matter of going, where are we tapping into something that's sort of like the legacy of pirates? And when are we tapping into something that's new with a new ground? Does that make sense? Yeah, totally, yeah. I think Salazar is coming. There it goes. You know, in a way, the movie reminded me a lot in a really good way of gardening to the galaxy too, in that it also deals with family and sacrifice. And the film, actually, I got something out of this that I never expected to get, which was emotionally caught up, which I've never been before in the series. And right through the first scene, I got a lump in my throat with a wonderful scene of the son of Overland, the first character trying to save just this really powerful moving scene of the waters coming and statsing, you cannot save me. And again, and there's also, I won't spoil it, but again, it's a terrific emotional payoff as well at the end of the film. Yeah, right, yeah, that's, well, that was, that was the new territory, because I think in Pirates 3 and World's End, there was like an amazing emotional thing, but it was about romantic love. It was Will and Elizabeth, and they get married, and there's sort of the mother of all love themes. I happen to think, I can say that because I didn't write it. I think it's an astounding piece of music that Hans wrote for that. But then when we started talking about this, we went, okay, this is new emotional territory. It's not that it's more or less emotional. It's that it's about familial love. It's about loss, saving your father. You know, all of these things that come into play, and I think it's a kind of a more modern and interesting type of love that we're starting to see in their movies. Like, I mean, even Frozen, it's about sisters. It's not, you know what I mean? It's not about prince and princess so much. It sort of pivots from that, and I think that's what we're doing here too. So that emotional territory was new ground. That was exciting for me to do, and then Salazar I think is sort of darker than any of our bad guys, so we were sort of pushing the edges out. Those, you know, darker and more emotional. Yeah, I mean, that's another thing I loved about it. This almost seems like a Lovecraft film crossed with the pirates, okay? I mean, I mean, what a great catchy theme for it. I just can't get enough of that theme. Tell me about the ghost, his particular reflection and the square for that character. I mean, with Salazar? Yeah, so, okay, so, initially we were going, well, how much should we play into the fact that he's Spanish? And we did quite a bit of exploring that. But it turned out instead of, you know, the Spanish guitar, which, you know, well, we gave it a go. But instead what ended up needing to be there was, it's not so much about his heritage. It's about his threat to Jack. That's what I wanted the story to be. In fact, even outside of America, in some countries the movie's called Jack versus Salazar or something like that. And there's other words where it's called Salazar's Revenge or something, which is funny because I don't know that he gets revenge, but he's trying to. But the idea for me though is, okay, so we have Jack and he's that cello that we just heard it. This sort of puny solo cello that's like drunk and a little sort of jaunty and sometimes even silly. So how can I make Salazar, you know, the threatening version of that, right? Because in addition to looking at Spanish guitars, I started trying to find what's an instrument that can stand up to the cello and I fought that battle and banged my head against a wall for long enough to realize it wasn't the right idea. The idea was instead to, if Jack's one cello, Salazar is an army of cellos, right? So some of them are electric, some of them are acoustic, some of them are recorded in such a way that they do not sound pretty. They're not orchestral celli. So he's outnumbered now and it's electrified and everything about it is it's Jack's sound reflected back at him with sort of malice and piss and vinegar or something, you know what I mean? It's the dark version of that instrument. So that's where it started and then it became like, it just has to be big and threatening and layered in such a sort of a way that's like rage-filled because that's what Salazar is. Now you brought a little something special for us. What a great bit, it's like Darth Vader. Yeah, good, I hope so. What a great bad guy. Thank you, I hope so. Yeah, that was, that's the idea, more, yeah, more. Darth Vader's actually a good template. It's the orchestral version of it, but it's like so precise and, you know, you know he's coming, right? So anyway, that was the idea to just have like a really some element of it that's instantly identifiable. So when he's coming down the steps, those four notes in a row become like jaws to, you know, when I, if I need to invoke Salazar when he's not there or when you know he's coming, it's instant now. I mean, and another thing I really loved about the Square was the whole kind of the fantastical quest element of the film, especially when you reveal how they find the Poseidon's trite and just the mystical cosmic choral quality of the score at that point. Yeah, well, and that all relates to Karina's music, which to me was needed to be a little bit scientific, but also aquatic and she's an astronomer and there's like a tie-in with the stars and all of that. So there's, you know, an element of getting, getting into the heavens kind of with the music. It doesn't, you know, so I was using bells and the choir to kind of do that and play her role, which is totally counter to the Salazar music, of course. How would you say this score stands out from the rest of the pirate scores and is that part of the whole that continues the, what would you say in the first film? Well, hopefully it's doing what I was trying to do, which is, you know, push into more emotional territory, but I feel like that's almost more a question for the audience and for me, like how are people responding to it and what they will take away from it? I think we're not gonna know how it stands out for another half of a year or something like that, but I hopefully, I honored, you know, the legacy of pirates in addition to, you know, getting us to some, hopefully, some really new and deep emotional stuff. Well, more than you see normally in a mainstream film, like The Warp, so I think, so. Well, on that note, actually, I wanted to turn it over to the audience to see if any of you have questions for a job. Go for it. Thank you for being here. Of course. I want to say I really enjoyed the score. Thank you. I was really happy to see great new material, but also the piece that we love. Of course, yeah. And actually, I want to ask for the scene that's already been touched on, but I just kind of had to point it out because it was so great. It was the father sign moment, hearing that love theme again. Surely, okay. The opening was just such a great move, and I wanted to ask sort of what the process was like. You know, that is a scene of familial love. Do you think would this theme work? Should we try it? I just wanted to know. Well, actually, that one, I knew I wanted to have Will Turner's theme in there because it was Will, the thing that, I think I knew right away, but what was interesting about how it evolved is once, that was one of the earlier cues that was done, once it was done, it became apparent that Will, in that scene, he hands him the amulet, he sort of hands him the music at the same time. So one of the really tricky things with Pirates 5 is we do have sort of 40 great themes from the old movies, right? So there's a real danger of, not 40, but you know, of having too many themes. So initially I was like, I for sure need a brand new theme for Henry, Will's son. But it turned out instead, the more efficient and elegant way to do it was, Will actually gives him his theme. So Henry, like in his heroic moments, is actually played with the Turner theme instead of having two themes. So that scene itself actually was what made it me able to kind of go, oh, I can whittle it down, I can have 11 themes instead of 12, and there really is a danger of kind of bloating and having a schizophrenic score if there isn't continuity. So that scene was the one that made it go like, boom, you're a Turner now. And so that was a surprise to me, actually, but then it was sort of obvious once we finished the sequence. It got me very emotional earlier. Good, yeah, good. Me as well. Question, isn't it? I'm curious about the studio, in this case, Disney involvement. Like, is there an executive who comes over and comes to you, gives you a list of what you can do, what you can't do, or encourages you to do things? Or do you have complete creative control? No, it was more that I had creative control. And especially because before we started, there was, you know, it was blessed by Hans. It was like, you can do whatever you want. So that was, if he hadn't said that, there might have been much harder to do. But Disney was involved in that they would come to some of the score reviews, and they might weigh in with some notes, but really the main people that worked on the score with me would have been Espen and Joachim or the directors, and Jerry Brookheimer, who produced it. But none of them were limiting in any way. It really was like, use this theme if you want. And so a great deal of that was on my shoulders. In fact, quite a lot of what would happen is, when they were assembling the film, they would use music from the first four movies. So into the temp score. But not necessarily with some sort of thought about what the themes mean. It was instead like, what's the emotional content? What's the size? And I was really nervous about that. Because as soon as you have Davey Jones' tune over Jack's sword fighting or something, to me it bugs me, right? And so the concern for me was, what if they fall in love with it? But the good news is they didn't. So when I could sit down with them and go, I like the weight of that, or the heft of the music there, but that's not the right tune. And they'd go, okay, what's the right tune? Instead of no, just shove it in there, right? So that's good news, because they were all open to, I guess respecting the film and looking up at the film and going, like let's make this the best Pirate's Five that we can make it, so. Does that make sense to you? Yeah. Can you tell us about where your internship was like? Sure. Especially the lion king, that's an incredible story. I know, yeah. Well, the thing about it was, okay, so I was a student. I was going to Berkeley in Boston, right? Someone here has a Berkeley shirt, there he is. And I went to Berkeley, and when I was there, we didn't have the internet yet, because I'm old. They did have a book called The Recording Industry Source Book, and it would list like all the studios in LA, and if it said film music, they got a letter from me and said, we'll work for free, I'm gonna be in LA this summer. And I thought maybe I'll get 30 phone calls, and I didn't get 30 phone calls, I got one, right? But luckily it was Hans's place, and remember though, Hans, I knew who he was, of course. He'd done Rain Man, but he hadn't done The Lion King yet. So, and The Lion King to me is what turned Hans from like a great film composer to like an A-list guy. I mean, I think that was the turning point in his career. So, yeah, I got that internship. Actually, I didn't even get it. They said, why don't you come and interview? And I'm like, oh, yeah, I better not screw this up. And I talked my way into it, and then what I was really, what I was doing, honestly, I was washing dishes, I was picking up food, I was bringing coffee in, and I'd go into Hans's studio and like set coffee cup down and walk really slow. Cause if you go slow enough, he might hit play, you know what I mean? And go back to work, and I hear something, or if there's a meeting going on and I'm bringing in the tea, you know, that was my education. Cause what does what does Jeffrey Katzenberg say to Hans Zimmer when he plays a piece of music? I had no idea, you know, I didn't grow up in Hollywood. I don't know, I didn't know a single professional musician or filmmaker when I was a child. I'd never been in a studio until I got that internship. So the culture of studios was totally alien to me. So just even, I mean, like I would read biographies and to me it sounded like the composers were throwing chairs at the orchestra and storming out of meetings, right? But that's not really how it goes. You know, it's not so contentious. It's people working together on a film and you hear them talk and you go, oh, this is really different from what I expected. If somebody throws out one of Hans's cues, he doesn't put his foot down and go, damn it, you're wrong. He goes, let me think about what you just said. You know what I mean? And all of a sudden his gears turn and it's totally fascinating to me. It still is actually the way, you know, filmmakers relate to one another. So that was when I started to get, and I mean like the tiniest little glimpse of it because I'd hear, you know, 11 words. I wasn't in the three hour meeting. He'd throw me out eventually. But then, anyway, I was still in school so I'd go back and forth. I'd come back in the summers for two more years before I could even take a job. And I became reliable or dependable there. And then I made friends with the engineering staff and that was really important because what would happen was Alan Meyerson he mixed all the Pirates movies. But at the time, he would let me come into the room while he was mixing and then when he'd go home, you know, I've only just started being able to confess this in interviews. When he'd go home, I could go into the back and I could get, you know, a multi-track of say, oops, of say, oh thank you. Rain Man or the Lion King because it was a few years later and I'd bring the tape into the studio and I'd hit play and I'd sit in there and I'd solo through the tracks and I'd go, ah, that's what the strings are doing. That's what the woodwinds are doing. That's just that one drum is doing. You know, and I started to learn orchestration that way. How it's sort of split out. Of course, if anyone knew that, they would have crucified me. You know, you took the multi-track for Lion King and you play, yeah, but this is what I did. And sometimes I try to mix it because I thought that's a good skill to have for a composer and it is. But more importantly, it was like, now I'm dissecting this stuff, you know. And it was great. So by the time I was able to start taking jobs and I worked for John Powell as an assistant first for three years, I was already sort of supplementing my actual composing education, not just loading machines and turning computers on. So, yeah, wow. But that was, you know, from internship to the first time I wrote a note for Hans would have been five years at least and a good three or four before I wrote anything for John, too. So, it's a long road. It all starts with the coffee. It does. And cleaning toilets, unfortunately. I know about that. Oh. I do. Question anyone? Was it being a band of those sort? Is it one of you, to break it down here or something else that could bring a new version of it? Oh, I see. All right, well, let's see. Yeah, okay, so I was 15 when I became a musician. So quite a bit older than most people. I was the first day of my sophomore year of high school. So I went to college as a three-year-old musician. But in those three years, I had a band. We were terrible. But I knew that I didn't want to do that. I liked being in a band, but I'm not gonna go into her. And the other problem with it really was if you're in a band and things go well, you play Sunday, Bloody Sunday twice a week for 40 years. You know what I mean? Even that's if they go well, right? And I thought like, I don't know. I wanna change hats. I don't wanna get locked into this thing. So even before I went off to college, I was thinking I wanna be in film music because not fully knowing what that even meant. I knew I wanted to do film music, but I didn't know what a composer acted like. Or you know what I mean? Like I didn't know any of them. Or what the workflow was like. I just knew that I could take a film music course at the college I was going to. So I was gonna do that. And I liked the idea that the composer works for three months or longer or shorter or whatever on a movie, then they put it away and then they go to the next one. So you're getting to change hats all the time. So I mean like from pirates to Disturbia to Odd Life or Timothy Green to the Pacific, they're totally different scores. And I love that. Anyway, so I knew even when I went to college that's what I wanted to do. And then I also, because I'm from Southern California, I knew I'd be here in the summers. So I'd come out, I'd stay with my parents all the way in Westminster and I'd drive 60 miles to work for free bringing coffee into this thing. You know. That's how the dues used to get paid. I mean, I think they still get paid that way somehow. Oh yeah. Any questions? Sam? On a huge film like that I've been told in the tales, do you, is there a temp score or is that something you're involved in? No. Yes and no. Yes, there's a temp score. I'm not involved in it because the music editors, what'll happen is that there'll be a music editor and the picture editors as soon as the movie starts getting shot. So they start assembling it. And in this case, they tempt it like totally with pirates or almost totally. And so actually part of the drill for me was how do I get as much of that stuff out as I can? You know what I mean? Like I didn't want it to be cut and pasted in. There are a few exceptions though. The couple of times when you first see Jack, I wrote a few different versions of it before I find them like, no, hang on a second. Why am I fighting that? I wanna hear Jack there too. I'm a fan of these movies. So okay, here it goes. And there's a handful of spots in the movie where it's like that or it goes into and out of the old themes. I shouldn't say handful, it's quite, I don't know, maybe a quarter of it or something, it's in some way the old thing. I'd like to say Mea Culpa. I actually worked for a company that were the music editors, honestly. Yeah, I worked, I think it was modern music at the time before it became for most of the music. And you have a long time on this, like two years it seemed. And I remember the one sequence I helped out a little bit was a sequence that was cut from the film where it actually shows young Jack Sparrow's internship under Salazar. Where you see the Madon that he gets from. Well, but actually that's still, that's still, that would have probably been like a prelude to the flashback sequence or something. Yeah, it was in the flashback, yeah. Okay, so there's still the flashback, but you don't see the, I do know there was much longer versions of that. But the one that's in there now, it's Salazar talking about when he was young and his confrontation with Jack. And that actually was an important, it kind of relates to what you're saying, because they attempt it with all sorts of pirate stuff. But I saw it as a place to like, not just shove the tunes in, but instead do an arrangement that's sort of fresh for the scene kind of. So that whole sequence is when Jack Sparrow becomes Jack Sparrow as far as I'm concerned. Like he's 12 years old and he, I don't know if he saw the movie, but he does something that makes him into Jack. So I know what the Jack Sparrow theme is, but I went and did a version of it that's much more, almost like a pomp and circumstance or something. Like he graduates into being Jack. It's a very big, proud rendition of the tune. It's a new version of the Jack Sparrow theme, which hopefully resonates and it's like, you know, it's his origin story. There's a couple other moments in that where we're doing the sort of tinier version of it when he's up on the crow's nest. And that relates more directly to the earlier stuff. But the rest of that flashback, I was really trying to go like, okay, here's a new version of that tune. Here's the, almost like, we're retroactively applying this theme at making it into a classic theme from when Jack was 30 years younger or something. You know what's interesting about that whole wonderful sequence? It's before Jack has gotten scurvy or hit the bottle. Because he's like, he's pretty normal. He's like a heroic character. He's not in his shtick. Right, that's right. Right, he's not. He has any, he's still wily and sort of over courageous, but it's not, he doesn't, I don't think he has the mark on his face. He doesn't have, you know, and in fact, the people later line up and sort of give him their tribute and some of those things they give him are things that end up in his beard. You know? They can see that, but. More questions, anyone? Yes. Yes. I actually don't, because there's always stuff in between them. So, you know, so like, the closest two that were together were two and three. They were a year apart, but even then, I think that was the, I don't remember what would have been in between, but might have been Disturbia. It was Disturbia, because two came out while I was doing Disturbia, and then I did Hitman Outlander, I think, and maybe Ghost Town all before Pirates III. Is that possible? Anyway, I don't know what, I'm asking you like you just. Oh, I don't know. So, I had enough, you know, I typically do three or four movies a year. Sometimes, I had one year where I did seven. So, they're. Are they full scores? Well, no, no, in additional music, or now I'm not doing as many additional music, so it's probably more like three to four full scores per year. So they rotate around. I'm like, when this was done, I did a human trafficking thriller, you know, like instant, like right after this was done. So that's a totally different sound. But I don't get burned out on Pirates, because this stuff, I mean, I grew up on these adventure movies, I just adore them. So, you know, I'm a fan of it too, which helps and hurts. It makes me a little bit overprotected, I think, of the music. But, you know, I think that helps in the long run, you know. So, I had more questions. I'll go for it. And not that I know of, yeah. But I hope so. I mean, look, the box office has been good, especially internationally. So, I told them you can sign me up for the next eight, if you're gonna keep making them, because I just love them. So, yeah, I don't know. I hope so, though. Yeah, well, so going through multi-tracks was where I first started getting into that. But then when I was working for John Powell, he was starting a movie called Face Off, which was his first big Hollywood movie. And he only had one room, so I would sit in the back of that room while he wrote it. So that was a huge, huge education, because, you know, he would sit there and struggle, and he writes the way I do. It's not easy for either of us. I mean, like, I know some composers who sit down and like, they sort of sneeze on the piano when it sounds like music. Whereas, like, for me, it's like, first I pull all my teeth out, then I pull the gums out, and then, you know, it takes a lot to get music out of me, because I torture myself. So, and John does too, and I would see him go through that, and I sort of, first off, it made me feel good, because it meant there's at least one other person that has to do it this way, because there's sort of an image that is true for some people, but sometimes it's like a maintained image that it's like, it's so easy to do this. I don't find any of it easy. I find it exhausting and difficult, but I also find it worthwhile, so I keep doing it. But anyway, I feel like I went off your question a little bit. But I guess that sitting in the room while John wrote an entire score, beginning to end, was like, hugely educational, and I was in that room for a couple years. So he did maybe four or five movies like that. And then, that was probably more important than what I did in school, I had to say. But I did do, I mean, I'm educated in the sense that I went to college, but I also think the way that Berkeley teaches music is a little bit more contemporary than other colleges. So I got a sense that it was okay to break some rules. I got a sense that you're not limited stylistically to certain types of music or something. So, and plus that's how I listened too. I listened to a lot of different music, and I feel like when I was first coming up, it didn't seem like that was necessarily okay. Now it's different, I think, because I think that the kind of the playing, the composers who are working now are showing and succeeding with scores that are very diverse, I think. We have our own kind of battles, but when I was young, most of the movies that I watched had a very purely orchestral score, which, and I happen to love writing that kind of music too, but I would never claim that that's what this is. We have an orchestra, but those celli, they're rock guitars, and I just tell them that, you know, and that's part of the attitude. So I guess, yeah, I mean, those were the, I didn't ever do like an actual orchestration job, you know, like I never had that as a job, like a professional orchestrator, but I did learn composition like that from John, and then eventually I'd start writing music and on his machine at his rig, and then, like he might give me a scene or something, and then I'd score it, and then he'd come in and throw it all out and build it back up, but that was the big thing, because then I could go, here's my version one. This is what I played to John that got thrown out. Here's the movie that's, the version that's in the movie, and what's the difference, you know, and that was like really important for kind of bridging the gap between what, what I initially thought was right and what actually ended up in the movie. So, you know, that all kind of combined to give me my education, thank you. Well, I guess, we'll wrap it up by my question. Again, the movie's doing pretty well, actually. Where do you think the pirate's music has to go? Where would you like to see that music go if you could create your own sequel or see, because again, they kind of go to a different part of the ocean or the legend in the mythos with everyone. Where do you want that? What kind of music do you want to write for the series? Well, you know, I think in some ways this movie is the more classic of them, at least in terms of the score, and probably of the story as well. I mean, like, I feel like if anything, we may have gotten slightly more orchestral, you know? I mean, there was always the orchestra, but I think, you know, I'm not, I think probably the next important evolution for the series would be to take another big risk, because I think in the first three movies with Gore, there was always some element of something totally unexpected. Like in three, you've got a close-up of Johnny's nose for 20 seconds across a desert, and then, you know, remember the thing in Davy Jones' locker where the rocks turn into crabs and the ship is sailing on sand, you know, like imagery that's really out there. In the second movie, I think the Kraken did it to some extent, and in the first one, it was risky just by being a pirate movie, like, you know, nobody was watching him. So I think there was a certain amount of like really ballsy moves that Gore made in those three movies, and I think we started to go back towards that with this one, but I think there's still an element of there needs to be a little more crazy. I look forward to it. Let's give it up for Jeff Sinalog. Thanks for coming.