Interview: Mark Adler, 'Merchants of Doubt' composer

Mark Adler has been working steadily as a film composer and music editor for the better part of four decades. Adler's experience includes television, indie documentaries, and big-budget Hollywood movies as well as collaborations larger-than-life directors such as Francis Ford Coppola.

Most recently he re-teamed with Robert Kenner, with whom he has been collaborating with for 25 years, for the documentary Merchants of Doubt. Kenner's 2008 film Food, Inc. struck a chord with audiences and Merchants looks to do the same, investigating "pundits-for-hire who present themselves as scientific authorities as they speak about topics like toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals and climate change."

I spoke with Adler, whose experience uniquely qualifies him to speak about the evolution of film scoring.

What's the difference for you scoring fiction versus documentary, and where does Merchants of Doubt fit in there? The score at times sounds like a Fellini film with the arrangements of Nino Rota, and then at other times it's reminiscent of more modern composers like Thomas Newman or Danny Elfman. Then, of course, you blend them together.

Thanks for picking up on that. As far as the Fellini and Nino Rota influence goes, my parents actually used to take my brother and me to see Fellini movies when we were like 12 and 13 years old. Which, now that I think back on it, was probably an unusual thing for parents to do with their kids, but you know, I had a couple great parents. So that influence got under my skin really early in life — associations with those kinds of characters and those slightly ironic, slightly absurdist situations, were burned into me at a cellular level. So when I encounter picture problems that encourage that kind of tone, it's relatively easy for me to go there.

Have you found the way Fellini blended fiction with non-fiction has helped you too?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. The non-fiction and fiction thing is so strange, because I think the kind of musical cinematic conventions we associate with fiction and non-fiction have been blurred quite a bit over the years. On the one hand, many of the same kinds of tools fiction filmmakers use you find documentary filmmakers using and that provides the potential for a much more proactive music track. Not that they always are — sometimes they are more textural and looped based. Certainly the opportunity is there to do something that's more traditionally cinematic.

On the other hand, fiction films often use more minimalist tracks. So, there's been a blurring and I think that's a good thing. I don't know that those categories should ever be rigid where you say "this is the kind of music one writes for a documentary and this is the kind for a fiction film." It should be much more in response to what the particular film seems to require, whether it is documentary or fiction.

My process is to work locally to the scene, try to get inside the scene and figure out what sort of tone might work best, and then you go to another scene and discover it should be more dark or ominous, and then at a certain point you want to present the idea of a unified score because I think that has value. So you try to find places where you can meld the two, where it's appropriate, because otherwise you run the risk of a very pastiche kind of sound and if you can find ways of merging two or three different tones to a couple of places it brings a unified tone when you stand back and look at the whole thing. I think that brings value to the film if you can do it.

Do you generally start thinking in terms of themes, or instrumentation and sounds?

My approach varies from project to project. Sometimes I will think melodically first and other times I might go searching for a sound or color that seems to convey what the film is about and develop melodic material out of that color. I actually like being able to mix it up like that. I like being able to pick up a pencil and a piece of music paper and scribble out some notes. I also like being able to go to the computer and search for sounds.

Do you ever use sounds you find, or do you use a sound to motivate the use of an instrument or arrangement to replicate the sound?

I'll very often stay with that sound. In a couple instances I think I used a cavaquinho sample, which is a Latin American guitar-like stringed instrument, but I didn't want to use the sample in the final so we ended up using a mandola live — which has a similar sound, but not exactly the same. It was close enough that what was more important was getting something of a live quality instead of using a sample.

To get that live room feel?

Yeah, and obviously the player brings something special with the way they play the instrument that you cannot really do with a sample.

And then in other cases a particular sample or an electronic sound might be just exactly right. I've actually been in situations where I have replaced them with a live recording of something and I'll say, "You know, the live recording sounds wonderful, but it's not doing exactly, emotionally, what the sample did." So I am not a purist in that standpoint. What's really important for me is what works for the picture and what works for the music.

Why is the sound the way it is for Merchants of Doubt? What spoke to you about the way you developed that score?

For one thing it was a really unusual score just in the sense that I began writing it as they began shooting the picture. I was brought on very early. Generally composers are brought in towards the end.

Unless you have a relationship with the director, usually.

Yeah — though it's funny, I was at the ASCAP awards and Elliott Goldenthal was honored and he came out and said, "I like to be brought on as very late in the process as possible" and I totally get that because then you can sit back and respond to the picture and let the picture speak to you in terms of how it's been edited. You start solving problems for a picture that's pretty much set.

I've had good experiences coming on rather late. On the other hand, what was really gratifying on this project was being able to help develop the tone of the film through the music by coming on and providing pieces for the editor to work with while she was still cutting. I've never had that experience before because I've never come on that early.

So, what I was responding to since there was little to no picture at the beginning was conversations with the director, which is quite interesting. He'd throw out little descriptive phrases and then I would write based on what he asked me to do in terms of those descriptive phrases and I would send it in and he'd say, "Yeah, that's kind of interesting, but what if you did this or this is a little too dark, I think I need it a little lighter here." So, very collaborative.

As you were giving them material to edit with did you have to go back and redo a lot once it was locked or was there quite a bit of material that was used as it was originally done?

Maybe 50/50. Sometimes everything sat almost exactly right — everything needed a little bit of attention, it never was exactly the way I delivered it; there was certainly a back and forth process throughout the editing and scoring period. I would give them a piece of music, they would cut it in, I would look at it, tweak a bit and send it back.

In one instance toward the end of the film they had cut in a piece and I'm watching the scene and thinking, "I had a piece of music at the beginning of the film that we really only hear once, and to bring it back here would not only work well with the scene I am looking at, but also give it that sense of architectural unity" and that ended up working really well.

Did this bring you back to some of your roots in screenwriting and filmmaking?

Well, yeah. I think this particular film lent itself to this way of working because, Robert Kenner will admit, that he didn't have a structure worked out going in. It was very much a process of exploration for him. So, the structure evolved as it was being edited. He is doing one now that I'll be scoring and we were having a conversation the other day about it and he said "I know what the structure of this one is, I know how we are going to do it."

They're all different and I think what's most important is flexibility. The more comfortable one is with one's working methods the better off you are because every situation will be unique.

How complicated was it for you to blend the couple worlds you created — one being the Felliniesque idea and the other being more modern? It seems like you achieved it with particular instruments that spoke to each region and found ways to put them together. Was that difficult?

Because this grew organically and the score evolved as the picture evolved, it wasn't possible to plan anything. At the same time that the score and film developed I was constantly aware of the developing tone of the score and how much unity for variety there was. At a certain point I started more or less consciously looking at the different types of musical tones, and moving forward tried to develop pieces as appropriate that would integrate them. Sometimes that was done instrumentally, but also after a few months I sat down with pencil and paper and wrote the themes down, even stuff that was improvised into my computer, so I could look at them. I was trying to make myself absorb what had been done other than just with my fingers and my ears. That was a way of re-evaluating where things were and in doing that I identified some chord progressions that I liked and I would isolate those progressions and use them in other cues, even where the tone might be a bit different.

That process of writing everything down, and taking the moment to look at it and think about it, has an interesting effect. It's not like you're now working from a non-intuitive, intellectual standpoint. It's more like taking the time to be a little more contemplative about it, maybe more rational, which allows you to be more intuitive again because that rational examination gives you a kind of foundation. It almost operates on an unconscious level, which I generally think is the best way to approach something. Try to be as thoughtful maybe at the beginning or at some point in the middle — so you are really thinking about harmonic relationships — and then forget about it and just write.

Garrett Tiedemann is a writer, filmmaker and composer who owns the multimedia lab CyNar Pictures and its record label American Residue Records.

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