Exclusive: Composer TYLER BATES discusses the horror of HALLOWEEN II, video games, and his new label

August 28, 5:49 PMSoundtracks ExaminerMark Morton

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Soundtracks Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

image courtesy of TylerBates.com

To say that Tyler Bates is a busy individual is a serious understatement. He’s composing scores for movies and video games, and he most recently started his own record label, for which he wants to oversee each product personally. The man has a true eye for detail, as exhibited by the intensity of the music he produces.

Although he’s been composing since the early 1990s, it was not until a whirlwind struck in the latter half of this decade that his name began to consistently crop up associated with cult and blockbuster movies. Ever since breaking out with the shocking success of Zack Snyder’s 2004 splatterfest Dawn of the Dead, Bates’ name has been attached to dozens of movies, frequently within the same year! In 2005, he did The Devil’s Rejects (his first in a string of films he would collaborate with Rob Zombie). In 2006, he brought life to Slither, See No Evil, and 300. In 2007, he helped re-imagine Halloween. Last year, he scored Doomsday, Day of the Dead, The Day the Earth Stood Still, episodes of the Showtime original series Californication, and the video game Rise of the Argonauts. He kicked off this year with Watchmen, has just unleashed Halloween II, is currently finishing the EA video game Army of Two, and according to IMDB, he’s still got a couple releases to emerge before the new year!

Read on as we explore the dark corners of a musically creative madman!

Do you get excited or apprehensive during the week of release of a movie for which you provided the music?

Both. (Laughs) Of course, you know, once the movie’s out there, you have to live with all your mistakes, the things you could have changed, etc. And you are excited for it, too, because you’re proud of the work you do, and you’re hoping you’re putting something out there that people will be receptive to.

I see you are competing this competing this weekend with Brian Tyler, who scored The Final Destination.

I didn’t even know he scored it, but hey, I wish him all the best. For me, personally, the competition is about doing the best work I can, given the circumstances, and just hope people like Rob’s movie.

So how do you go about choosing the movies you score? Your track record seems to be filled with these fringe movies that, on paper, shouldn’t become popular, but it seems every one of them develops a very strong following.

Well, it’s not that I have any pension for cult films. You know, cult films also pay like cult films (laughs). But the most important thing for me is the people I work with. If one of my directors is excited about doing a film, and it is budgeted like a cult film, I’m on board anyway. It’s more about the work, about enjoying doing this with people I really respect and admire. That seems to work out really well. I’ve done four with Zack Snyder (if you include The Black Freighter), James Gunn and I have worked together a number of times, and Rob Zombie and I have done five movies. I think I will just continue to work with people I admire.

And you’ve got two Zombie projects coming up, correct? Has the music for those been completed?

Oh yeah, El Superbeasto was completed a long time ago. And he’s got a new album coming out next month, and I did some strings for him on that; we have Halloween II today. I enjoy working with Rob – he’s great.

One of the things I really enjoy about your work is that you’re not a canned composer where all your work sounds identical. I mean, you can tell a Bates score when you hear one, but it doesn’t sound the same as another score in your filmography. And I don’t know if it is something you consciously do, but the music plays a different role in each film. In Watchmen, the music was part of the setting. In The Devil’s Rejects, it felt like another character. In 300, it took on the role of the emotions of everyone involved. With your work on Halloween II, the music seems to suck all of the oxygen out of the air and replaces the atmosphere with this really dense, palatable, metallic sensation.

(Laughs) Well each movie calls for something different. My musical tastes are very broad and are not really formed at all by film scores, although there are composers whose work I admire and get me fired up to do good work. But to be honest with you, I just look at the individual challenge. I don’t gauge a movie by something I’ve done before. Even this new Halloween movie, following the one Rob and I did couple years ago, the point really was to turn the page and approach this a little bit differently, while hopefully carrying forward some of the experience we had from doing the first one and dealing with the characters and taking John Carpenter’s pre-existing material into consideration.

On the first one, there were footprints you had to tread and, to a point, you had this built-in audience that was expecting to hear an homage to Carpenter’s work. But the new one has a very clean-slate feel to it, where it expands upon, like you said some of the character themes.

Actually, when I started the Halloween II score, I was thinking very minimalist. I wanted it to be really muddy and bassy with some gongs and random hitting of stuff that made it sound really tactile and identifiable with a room you just really didn’t want to be in as opposed to a traditional, thematic score. And it does become thematic at times, but not exactly in the traditional sense, and definitely not as much as the John Carpenter-era Halloween films. Even though that stuff can be limiting in terms of structure and that it was created for that first incarnation of Michael Myers (which is a totally different film style from what Rob is making), at the end of the day, when I’m dead, if I could have done one piece of music that is even remotely THAT identifiable, I’d be completely happy.

And like I said, this film is pretty much a clean slate in that it is not a sequel to Halloween II (1981), but it is in essence a brand new movie. So you are given a freer range of things you wanted to do and ideas you wanted to explore. That said, were there things in this Halloween II score ideas from the first film that you wanted to expand upon but couldn’t?

Yeah, I would say that it is a progression of ideas. In the first one, there was a sort of grappling with how much do we pay homage to the original Halloween and its characters and how much we employ the Carpenter themes. Really, that’s Rob’s battle. He will talk to me about what he feels is appropriate. But that said, any time I had to do a Carpenter theme, it was very difficult to drop it into the middle of what I was doing, so it pretty much negated a number of ideas I wanted to explore in the first movie.

So when Rob phoned me up and asked if I was up for it, he said, “I don’t think I want to work with the Halloween themes as integral aspects of the score. It would be kinda cool if it was somewhere in the film, but let’s do our own thing.” I thought that was an interesting opportunity or way to go back and make it our own complete destruction of a movie. (Laughs) So, yeah, sure there were different ideas and motifs that were explored, as if this were ‘Rob Zombie’s first Halloween movie’.

I thought it was a very bold move. Because historically, each of the previous Halloween sequels did a take on the Halloween theme that seemed to progressively water down, if you could even do so with an initially minimalist score. But with “Halloween Theme 2009”, it came across as very experimental – you did all sorts of crazy things with it, it has a feeling of growing insanity. It really sounded layered, and I swear I heard labored breathing as a background effect. How did this revision develop?

Well, I’ll tell you what, all those sounds are something I associate with Rob, ever since The Devil’s Rejects. I think my challenge has been to create an identifiable sound or motif that fits his filmmaking style. He’s a guy who makes things ‘Rob Zombie brand’. His music is instantly identifiable as him, and everything he does is of that ilk. It was a great challenge in the beginning, working with him, to make sure I could create a sound and a style that was uniquely Rob.

Nonetheless, over time, as I do this for different directors, they start liking things I’ve done for the others, and they want me to infuse some of it into their scores. But I think with Zack Snyder, there are things I’ve thought about doing specifically for him, and for the other directors, I try to do that as well. While I am really into synths and organic instrumentation, a lot of the sounds you hear, especially in Rob’s movies, are 95% created from scratch. It’s nuts.

Are they more live sounds, or are they synthetic?

Both. We’ll do field recordings, and we’ll record percussion, put together an ensemble; extrapolate certain samples from all that stuff and make our own samples, whether it’s modular synthesis or some other means of mutating the sound into something malleable and appropriate for a given project. I like things that feel human-performed, even in the context of what you would think of as more electronic. It all sounds like an orchestra to me. Rob Zombie’s music sounds just as much like an orchestra to me as Zack Snyder’s does. The instrumentation’s different, but that’s how I look at it. Every single bit of it has an identity to me.

So, when you are writing or preparing to write, how do you immerse yourself into the work? Do you watch the film a hundred times or what?

No, that happens later (laughs). Actually, I’ll watch the film once with the director, we’ll talk about it. Then I’ll keep my eyes off of it until a feeling starts to develop. Then I think of the texture and emotions, taking into consideration what actors are in the movie, because their actions will affect the musicality of how I play the character, the timbre of their voices, all of that I really consider when working with movies. Sometimes they send me a script and I write music while they’re in production. In some cases, when I work with Zack Snyder, he’s filmed a number of scenes using my music for the choreography. I really just try to develop a feeling for it before watching it too much. In the case of Halloween II, it was trying to make myself creeped-out enough to come up with something interesting and unsettling.

I’ve read somewhere that you incidentally are drawn to violent movies to work with, but I also noticed another thread among the projects you undertake. A lot of them seem to revolve around tragic characters.

I’ve had a lot of experience with them in my personal life. I think I have a pretty good understanding of people who are in a bad way, and I think I can offer compassion to them even though they may be a little unsavory. It doesn’t mean I endorse horrible behavior or anything like that, though.

So are you putting a lid on the Myers family, or are you going to answer the call if Dimension reaches out to you wanting to do a third one?

Well, that would be up to Rob. It’s really up to him. I wouldn’t do one without him, that’s for sure. It’s the only reason I did this one to begin with. I was always a fan of his anyway. I never imagined I would be scoring a Halloween movie, even after seeing the first one when I was a kid. I didn’t even think about scoring movies at the time. It’s kind of a trip. But I gotta say, at the end of the day, nothing beats the John Carpenter version of the theme. Reason being it was the FIRST movie, and in my opinion is the most revered, deservingly so. It is brilliant in its simplicity.

About the release of the score itself, this one is being released exclusively digitally as opposed to on CD. And from what I gather, the first film’s score wasn’t officially released at all. [Note: I later found out that someone made the Halloween score available here.]

The reason the first score didn’t come out at all was the same reason that this one came out digitally. Today is Friday the 28th, right? We actually finished the film last week. As late as you could possibly finish it, it was finished. So there was no way to prepare music for a soundtrack and artwork to coincide with the track list and all that, because that, too, is very time consuming.

Recently I had wanted to put my own label together, and then I was offered my own imprint on Koch/E1, and we decided that we should do it digitally and not release a physical CD of Halloween, based on how the retail market is at this time.

But we are planning to wait until the DVD release of the film and do a special-edition, and at least create something where there are “x” amount of copies numbered and signed by Rob and myself, and hopefully Tyler Mane if he’s into it. You know - something special for the people who really care about it.

So how did the concept of Abattoir Records come about?

It really came about because I’ve had a number of scores come out on small labels, and the packaging is pedestrian or minimal, and the promotion is usually not very good. It’s usually an underwhelming experience, especially for people who are interested in the score. I get a ton of letters from people asking for anything special or anything else from a given movie I’d worked.

Sure, they’re happy when a score comes out, but typically the packaging is pretty boring, and there’s nothing cool about it. I thought it would be great if we could put together some special packaging and whatnot, especially after my experience with Warner Records and Snyder’s stuff, you get pretty spoiled.

Yeah, I have the vinyl picture disc box set of Watchmen.

Yeah, that was just amazing. We’re not going to do anything that extravagant, but I’ve got some ideas to do something special, with a little bit more control or influence over the artwork – just because I have to do all the work for the soundtracks, I’d like to see it all through myself. It’s a lot of work for me to prepare a whole program of music.

So, will your video game stuff be included in this, as well? I’ve really been trying to track down a copy of the Rise of the Argonauts score, and I only just found out that it was a strictly limited release, only available as a bonus if you bought the game from Game Crazy stores.

Is that what happened?? There’s a label that has been trying to put it out, and I had only recently received some covers from a fan to sign and that was in there, and I had no idea it was released. If I had known someone was going to put it out, I would have edited a much better program and made sure the mixes were really good.

I don’t know where the titles for the tracks came from, so that, too, is a little unsettling. But with Army of Two, EA has a built-in deal that when you sign with them, it is already in the pipeline to release a soundtrack. I’m really excited about that one. I’m actually finishing that one now.

So how do you approach scoring video games? Do you treat them in the same regards as films?

Not really. It’s interesting because the technology for video games is constantly evolving. And because of that, you can’t have a unilateral approach to each one. You really have to find out what the technological parameters are for the developers, like how they plan on integrating the music into the game, the game play, and understanding the visual aspect of the game. That all has to be taken into account when writing the score.

With Army of Two the compositions are as long as they are vertical, if you can imagine. So you can add and subtract elements and it will still play as complete music. And the way they are formatting the music into the game, from what I can tell, is going to be the most responsive to game play that I’ve ever heard of. I’m really happy with how it came out.

So what can we expect in the next six months or so from Abattoir?

There are two projects we are planning to release, and one of them, I am very close to obtaining the rights to. If you can guess, it is something that I worked on and was never released officially. So I want to put it out there, because I’ve literally received thousands of requests over the years. We’re trying to work it out for the near future, and quite possibly a band recording – something I did with Azam Ali.

There are a couple other things, too, but down the line, who knows, for other composers who have a great score that isn’t getting released or if they’re not entirely stoked with the options they have, perhaps we’ll do some other scores, too.

The score for Halloween II is currently available for download at iTunes.