It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
Agreed, very much different than Arnold's arrangement.
I sure hope he does. Though not used in QOS, it was used in both SF and SP and it's nice to see instances of continuity like that.
Any Barryesque or Arnold sound will be welcomed after the turged Newman piffle. The only great pieces from the Newman era were done by his assistants.
Such as?
Bond's arrival at the casino in Skyfall riding the boat with the main theme playing in the BG.
Wait, this isn’t the controversial opinion thread. Oops.
It’s not controversial in my house! :)
I’d be amazed if that isn’t the Arnold arrangement, or variant of. It even repeats the Newman thing from Skyfall of having the guitar play the vamp (which I do like).
Well most wrong statements are controversial.
;)
Correct! ;;)
I know sometimes the soundtracks appear on streaming in advance, but in this case I think it's a same day release across the board.
Interesting. How do we know that?
That cue was done by Newman but at Wilson's insistence so that the title song felt less random at the top end of the film (if I'm remembering correctly). I don't know whether Newman would have incorporated it anyway.
Indeed! From this interview, Newman is asked about the Adele song:
From these comments, it seems like he let J.A.C. Redford handle all of Adele's Skyfall. I don't have the liner notes of the soundtrack near me, but I think it confirms what he says here. I do have the Spectre liner notes, which note 'Orchestration of "Writing's on the Wall" by Simon Hale', so I always assumed Newman didn't do the Skyfall interpolation either.
To bring it back to Zimmer and NTTD, I wouldn't be surprised if Zimmer (having a bunch of projects to do) did the same as Newman: he met Billie and Finneas, worked out the theme with them, but left the orchestrations to Steve Mazzaro, who, in Zimmer's own words, worked more on the soundtrack than himself.
I love Newman's two Bond scores more than many seem to, and I'm glad we got them (especially Skyfall). But sometimes I do wonder how much his heart was really in all of it, and how comfortable he really was throughout the process.
Newman asked Mendes for the gig, so I think that says it.
I guess it makes sense though: if you have a whole movie soundtrack to write and time is tight (which I'm sure it always is) if you have two themes handed to you which are already written (i.e. the Bond theme and Skyfall/Spectre) you're going to give those to your assistant to do, because they require no writing: there's no point in the main composer doing those bits.
I don't see any reason to think that, he's a professional film composer.
I didn't actually read it that way initially - I always thought those comments were exclusively about the song and not the cue on the score. I didn't realise Newman didn't handle the orchestration of WOTW in SP. I always thought that was his thing.
This is no doubt due to EON allowing the artists to have their creative freedom, as opposed to following the composer’s lead. IIRC, in the Bond and Friends podcast someone mentioned that one of the stipulations Barry made over whether he would score TND was that he was guaranteed control over the song, and EON wasn’t willing to guarantee him that, which is likely why he ultimately turned it down.
So it’s always nice to hear that there was a collaboration between the composer and artists, as that at least assures a better weaving of the song in the soundtrack. I hope Zimmer has made good use of it in the way it used to be done back in the Cubby years.
Similar case with DAD. Arnold did intend the main theme of his score to feature in the title song as well: "I Will Return." I don't have the source or the exact wording on me right now, but I recall him being asked at one point about why he didn't put Madonna's electro-pop into his score, and he gave a good-natured but sarcastic reply along the lines of, "Seriously?" They did replace Arnold's party music (which really was the better choice of the two) with a remix of Madonna's "Die Another Day."
And Arnold amazingly did weave "Another Way to Die" into the score for QOS. As with his interpolations of the Bond theme, it's subtle but it's there. Could it have been more obvious or more in-your-face? Sure, but that wasn't really the nature of that particular score.
At the same time I believe it's actually the melody from his own very similar "No Good About Goodbye".
Oh, certainly. Among the best and I wouldn't try and suggest otherwise. And as I said, I love both those scores! I've defended them quite often, it feels like. Especially Skyfall. It's a top Bond score to me, which isn't a popular opinion, I know.
There are just certain things that make me wonder. Like, if you were composing a Bond film, wouldn't you be looking forward to integrating the title song into the score? (vs. having to be reminded?)
And I still think lifting certain Skyfall cues verbatim for use in SPECTRE is one of the most questionable musical decisions in franchise history, even though I like them. (I recognize this was rumored to be a Mendes order after hearing the temp score, not a Newman choice). A momentary reprise here or there could have been terrific, but going with entire action cues at times just screamed of either laziness or unoriginality, even if it was totally unintended.
(Funny/ironic how that doesn't bother me on other franchise films, though -- Zimmer did it all the time for Batman, Powell all the time for Bourne. But each time they reprised a cue in a subsequent film they also found subtle ways to evolve them. The Skyfall to SPECTRE jump didn't try to do that -- maybe that's it).
Barry was able to incorporate his “Thunderball” theme even after “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” got rejected late into the process. Of course, Barry was an actual maestro, so it only highlights what a downgrade Arnold was as a Bond composer. Listening to that subpar “Surrender” track it’s pretty apparent.
That sounds like a lazy excuse. There’s plenty of melodies to be found in the Madonna song to weave in his score. If his answer was “lol, seriously?” then he’s not as much of a dedicated Bond fan as people claim.
That’s not good enough. And I’ve yet to see any concrete verification that he gave any nods in QOS. That’s just fandom giving him more credit than he ever really deserved. Oh, he used a guitar riff on some boat chase that didn’t even sound like Jack White but we’ll pretend it sound similar? That’s really flimsy.
I do think it’s interesting that EON made sure Newman’s score would feature a token appearance of the title sequences, but never made the same request for Arnold to do the same in TND, DAD, and QOS. Or the same with Kamen and Serra.
Not a rumor. This was verified by a Lee Smith interview where he and Mendes got very attached to the temp scores and wanted to retain them in the final cut, only being slightly remixed to sound different enough from how it was mixed in SF.