Cliff Martinez got his start drumming with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the ’80s. After several years performing with the band, he resigned from the touring lifestyle and began a career writing music for television. Martinez landed his first gig composing for “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” and eventually shifted his focus towards film scoring. Today, he is one of the most sought-after composers and is known for his dreamy and atmospheric soundscapes. His many credits include popular films such as Traffic, Contagion, Drive and The Lincoln Lawyer.
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GRAMMY.com caught up with Martinez who walked us through his process of scoring his latest big-screen endeavor, Only God Forgives, on which he re-teamed with Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn. He also shared his advice for up-and-coming composers and touched on his gear and co-writing process.
Can you walk us through the process of scoring Only God Forgives?
Well monogamy has its advantages. This is Nicolas and my second picture so there’s a certain degree of creative telepathy that goes on. Now I know what he likes and doesn’t like and have a very general notion of his approach of putting music to picture.
Nicolas is pretty unique in that he really depends on music. He likes music a lot. I had never written any nine-minute music sequences in a film until I did Drive. It’s a challenge I welcome.
This film is even more of a silent film than Drive and there were some really big challenges. There is a scene where a one-arm man is talking about who this cop is that took his arm and Nicolas sent that to me and I said, “Alright. Now you’ve gone too far. Now I see the guy’s lips moving and there is still no dialogue. What’s up with that?” He said, “Well, I just didn’t like the way it sounded. He kept calling him the angel of wengeance.” He said the foreign actor kept pronouncing it “the angel of wengeance” and it had a comic overtone that was inappropriate.
So I had to musically tell the story of the angel of vengeance without any words. You have to appreciate those things — seeing the film without the music. I like to think that music is very important in his films, more so than in other films.
When Nicolas says he’s going to direct a movie and wants you to score it, do you start generating ideas for the score before you see the picture?
In Drive, I was brought in at the five-week mark, which is when writing a film score is pretty down to the wire. So that was a different process. For this one, he knew he wanted to work with me so he brought me in at the script stage. It was very different in that we actually were able to spitball some ideas before he even shot anything.
I think Steven [Soderbergh] is the only other guy that brings me in that early — at the script stage before things have shot. Usually, everybody waits till the last second and says, “Who are we going to get to do the music? It’s going to be released in five weeks...” Until you actually see the picture and start to throw some stuff up against it, you really can’t write anything.
So we had some ideas. I had this idea that I really wanted to bring the setting of Thailand to the world with music. I went to Thailand and locked myself in a hotel room for five weeks and had my laptop set up and wrote it there. It was so intense that I had room service three times a day and never left the room. I did buy a couple of Thai folk instruments — a pin, which is like an electrified three-string lute. I didn’t really play it in the idiom of the Thai folk tradition but it didn’t stop me from trying so I did weave a little of the Thai influence in there.
How much did your ideas change once you saw the film come together?
I always have this plan and then once you get in the middle of it, all these specific ideas that you had get tossed out and you go with something else.
Nicolas had a very different approach. It was a bit of a controversial practice with temp scoring so really the director gets a lot of credit for designing the overall approach because their first edit of the film contains some music from a CD of some other composer to get the ball rolling and it dictates where they want the music placed: where it starts, where it stops and a general kind of direction or approach.
In this case, Nicolas used my favorite film score of all time, [Bernard Herrmann’s 1951 score for The Day The Earth Stood Still], so I kind of dropped the Thai thing. I heard that and thought, “If I could put those two together, that would be interesting,” so I was always trying to do that. I really tried the sci-fi ’50s thing but that didn’t work. There was a lot of trial and error.
In Drive, we went for first impulse, which usually works and it did. This time we had a lot of time to experiment and there is probably over two hours of music in a 50-minute score so there’s a lot of leftovers — a lot of aborted experiments.
When scoring a film, do you ever co-write or do you work on it exclusively?
I have a couple of guys that live in Topanga Canyon [Calif.], although we hardly ever see each other and I hardly ever see Nicolas — he’s in Copenhagen [Denmark]. I guess that’s the nature of collaboration in the digital world.
I have a couple of guys that work with me that are credited on the score. To me, the scope of doing a film score is you have to have a team of people to work with because you don’t just write the score. Writing 50 minutes of music is enough of a task but it ends up being like you have to write that 50 minutes three or four times so for me it’s just overwhelming for one human to do it.
What is that collaborative process like? Do you put down your basic ideas and then send them portions to take and work with a little bit?
I try to come up with a general [instrumentals]. I try to send out things I call themes, although I have a hard time using the word theme and keeping a straight face because a lot of my stuff is more of a recognizable sound than something you could whistle or sing.
In this film, I had my love theme, my death by sword theme... I try to establish these things and then hand it out to the minions and say, “OK, let’s make it work in this scene or another.” I’m very much attached to the idea of theme and variation, which is a purist classical approach. I try to do it that way. It gets scrambled along the way but I try and keep that purity. That makes it easy to hand off to somebody and say, “Here’s the love scene. Let’s try applying it to the film. Let’s try to make it work here.”
What was the biggest challenge you encountered when scoring the film?
The film had very little dialogue. Originally Nicolas sent me the script and it was with normal talking. Then he shot it and it was like, “What happened to all the talking? There is no talking now.” He said, “Well we decided to thin it out.” Fine by me. It gives me more to do. The viewers look to the music more. They’ll pay closer attention — what is he saying or thinking? It naturally puts more emphasis on the music, which I like.
Music is often thought of as an afterthought — what ketchup is to a cheap steak is what music often is. You do these transitions just to smooth out the cuts but Nicolas gives you a nice juicy part for the music.
What equipment do you use? How much is samples and how much is live instrumentation?
I have a pretty simple set up: a couple of hard drives, Kontakt instruments, Symphobia, Omnisphere was used. Zebra was the fight scene. It’s got this great real time control and Nicolas wanted something that was along those lines. I was stealing from Philip Glass but all that stuff is out of the box.
The love theme, the melodic line, was recorded with a real orchestra in Bronislava. All the other weird stuff was Symphobia and L.A. scoring strings so they are all sample libraries. They are all fake. Nicolas liked the orchestral idea so everything else is kind of fake.
If you were starting over as a composer today, would you focus more on scoring films or licensing music for television?
If I had my choice, I would say go with the feature films because to me licensed music is music detached from the picture. You create the music then you try to sell it and to me —because of where I come from — that’s less artistically satisfying than writing music to picture.
The first time I did “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” that was the first thing I ever did. I saw the previous season and when I got my first show in the second season, I thought they gave me the worst episode of the show ever. Then I started to write the music and the whole thing came together. I thought I was dragging a rocket ship. I thought I had just fixed it, but I realized throughout the course of that project, how powerful and how satisfying putting music to picture is.
So if you’re licensing stuff, you’re not doing it to picture and you’re missing all the fun. Whichever is more lucrative, I couldn’t say, but I would say whatever opportunities present yourself, I would go with it.
How did you transition from drumming for the Red Hot Chili Peppers to being a full-time composer?
I was with them from ’83 to ’86, back in my childhood. I made the jump because I thought I was playing a very small role here as an accompanist to three other people. Not that it was bad while I did it, but when I switched over to writing music, it was a whole new world of creativity and creative options opened up. I think there’s nothing more satisfying than writing music and if you are successful at it, it will be far more lucrative than session stuff. I think the money is in creating [music] not performing it, although bands like the Chili Peppers make billions by touring, but they’ve burned a few calories to get to that point.
I was just not cut out for that lifestyle. I’m a fragile little traveler — body functions and a number of things just don’t work as well when I’m going city to city. That’s another thing; I just did the touring thing. I was always in bands but never one with a record deal till the Chili Peppers and I finally got a whiff of the rock and roll lifestyle and I realized, “I’m not going to do this for the next 20 to 30 years. Travel is kind of cool — playing live is kind of nice but this is rough. This is like being married to four people!”
What type of musical training have you had?
It’s pretty sparse. I grew up as a rock and roll drummer and I wasn’t able to parlay any of those skills into film composing except that I can make music by hitting things with a stick so I would play pitch percussion but my training is pretty limited.
After I got into the business, [during] my periods of unemployment, which I actually had lots of them in 2009 and 2010, I would take music lessons. I would take piano lessons and a few guys around town teach composition.
But really I have big gigantic holes in my musical training in the formal sense. My cop-out for years was, “Well, if you want to be a different fish, you have to get out of the school.” I wanted to sound original and I didn’t want to learn the way Bach did “Counterpoint,” but that’s just being lazy. I do try to read about things but I’m basically a self-taught music Neanderthal.
Well, you’re influencing a lot of composers. There are going to be a lot of guys ripping you off.
Well, I’m ripping off a lot of people [laughs]. My philosophy is you steal one thing from one person, you’re a plagiarist. You steal two things and put it together, you’re a pioneer. Most of my stuff is Philip Glass meets Bernard Herrmann meets Thai pop music. You put those together and you can steal pretty blatantly, but if you combine them or come up with something wildly original…
Any last bits of advice for people looking to pursue a career in composing?
I’d like to think the key to success is to be yourself. To find a way to express your musical personality, to discover what your musical identity is and then express it proudly and develop what is you, what it is about that distinguishes you from everybody else. I feel that ultimately I would like to think that’s what makes you competitive and sought after.
