Accolade Film Awards
By Yayoi Lena Winfrey

Film music composer Alan Williams must be doing something right. To date, he’s won several Accolades! That makes Williams the top award-winning music composer in the Accolade Competition’s six year history.

For Williams, “Movies are a powerful medium, and music is certainly the most powerful universal language. Until people watch a film or scene that doesn’t have any music, they don’t realize how stale a scene is without it. Music is an emotional character that you don’t see on screen, but you feel it. You notice when it’s not there. Music is what makes you laugh, cry, and be scared.”

Williams started playing the piano when he was eight. He knew early on that he wanted to be a film composer, probably by his sophomore year in high school. The Colorado native attended Brigham Young University before completing graduate work in film scoring at the University of Southern California.

Q: What challenges have you experienced working with filmmakers?

A: Even when you work with a director on more than one occasion, you still have challenges on every project. Every film is different. There’s always a scene that needs extra attention or something that requires extra work on the music side, or maybe the director didn’t quite get the performance from the actors so looks to the composer to see if there’s something we can do. Every director is different. It varies from, ‘I have no idea what I want, I trust you, go ahead and write.’ The other is, ‘If I could write music, I would, but I can’t so I’m going to dictate to you what I want with every nuance. I won’t give you much liberty.’ True collaborations are the best experiences. I get to add my creative input and the director gets to add theirs.

Q: What’s your advice to filmmakers about working with composers?

A: Talk to me as if they were talking to an actor. My job is to translate and interpret drama and emotion in the music. I’d much rather have the director say, ‘We need the audience to feel angst or jubilation at this time or, ‘We really feel sorry for this character,’ instead of ‘It would be great if we had guitars playing right here.’ I don’t have a problem with a filmmaker playing a piece of music and saying, ‘This is the kind of sound or music I’m looking for.’ I’ll ask, ‘What is it that you like about it?’ That’s a better model of communication than when a director or editor will cut in a piece of existing “temporary music” while they’re editing. It helps with pacing, but what happens is they fall in love with that particular piece of music, and when the composer sits down with the filmmakers, they say, ‘We just want you to rewrite this piece of music.’ We haven’t had the chance to talk about drama or emotion, or see what it is you like about that music or what doesn’t work about it.

Q: What about newbie filmmakers?

A: I love working with first-time filmmakers. They tend to be a little more open to collaboration, sometimes more than experienced filmmakers, depending on what their background is and how much they freely communicate with a composer. But, they also don’t have experience in how important an original score is for their project. They’re not sure what things cost and they under-budget both money and time. Music is the last thing that’s added at the very end of the production, and chances are they have over-budgeted in every other area. It’s a million dollar score they want to produce, and they only have a few days. Those filmmakers that understand the importance of the music do all they can to preserve their monetary budget for it. They give the composer the script, send dailies and rough cuts, and have discussions. The more time you have to work with things, the better and more cohesive the project is.

Q: What distinguishes your scores?

A: There’s a trend in scoring of being atmospheric and groove-oriented, and I’ve always written scores as a thematic and melodic composer. Themes become the building blocks of the score that goes some place, as opposed to a lot of individual themes. It’s a unit that is tied together with themes rather than textures.

Q: How did you develop your style?

A: I think one’s style is always developing. For me, music is about melody, harmony and rhythm, and you have to have all of those in some fashion.

Q: How long does it take for you to write a score?

A: Ideally, it’s six weeks to do a motion picture. That isn’t always the luxury. With IMAX’ Amazon, I had two weeks. Music is the last thing that’s added to a movie. I write to the picture then, record it. They mix the tracks with dialog and dubs just before the movie is released--making little changes on the film all along. If they take out 30 seconds of a scene, it impacts what the music does and I have to rewrite that.

Q: What skills should a film composer have?

A: You have to have a pretty strong dramatic sense. Just because you can write really good music doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for a scene. You may have an 85-piece orchestra at your disposal, but that doesn’t mean a solo oboe isn’t all the scene calls for. You have to remain true to the film.

Q: Any favorite past assignments?

A: Amazon is one of the best highlights for me. It was a good film, even though I had only a small window of time to write the music. Plus the film got nominated for an Academy Award. That was my first big score on a big scoring stage at Sony Pictures. I look back on that experience, and have a nice sentimental spot for it.

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