InContention.com--a website dedicated to covering all things Oscar--is running a piece on the makers of Doubt. Select comments from Howard Shore:*****
“Doubt” is unquestionably a small, intimate film where excessively showy work from the crafts artists had significant potential to prove distracting. Shore says he felt it was important to reflect that fragility in the score. “Much of the music was church music that I needed to blend in with the score,” he says. “I needed to capture that intimacy so I wrote the score for just 17 musicians.”
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From a musical point of view, Shore agrees that the first thing to do is “capture the time and place, which in this case was 1964 and The Bronx.” His use of folk instruments was an attempt to bring the audience back in time, he says. And while many composers are hired at the last minute, Shore prefers to be involved in the process as early as possible. On “The Lord of the Rings,” for instance (an effort of which he says “everything I know about filmmaking and drama is in those 10 hours”), he was involved very early on. “Being part of the production leads to the best results in the filmmaking,” he says.
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Read the well-written piece in its entirety here.
