Movie music for the blockbuster season
By Ada Guerin
April 10, 2008
John Powell
"Hancock"
Sony
July 2
"'Hancock' is about love and death, and who really are the 'superheros.' The music plays the role of an invisible actor hinting at what is really happening despite what the actors you can see are saying. As the composer, I should be informing the audience of the subtext -- and occasionally, adding some grease under the wheels.
Hancock (Will Smith) is not your typical superhero. He is down on his luck. He is an alcoholic superhero who needs a publicist to fix his image. To complicate matters, he falls for the publicist's wife.
(Director Peter Berg) said he wanted the sound of a huge orchestra playing the blues, so I employed lots of guitars, some 'moaning' (a term for a type of wordless blues singing) and an orchestra of people who have all recently been divorced.
The score's defining sound is a Fender Bassman head and a 1977 Scully 8-track tape machine. Recording with a Scully 8-track is a fairly complicated and time-consuming way to record. Because we are dealing with tape, it is more challenging and there is pressure to get it right in one take. Using the Scully gives the score a unique sound; it gives it a raw, dirty sound similar to the way (blues) records were originally recorded.
The biggest musical challenge was to support the story with music that is as good as the film is -- and this film is really, really good."
I always thought this would be do well at the box office because of Smith and Theron but looking at the combination of action and comedy it has the potential to be a huge summer hit if the word of mouth is good.
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