You recently went to the Sundance Institute - what can you tell me about that program?

quote-leftRobert Redford started the Sundance Institute about 20 years ago to help foster the careers of up and coming directors and screenwriters. Recently they added a Composer's Lab to their curriculum. Like the filmmaker program, it was a fellowship - they only chose six people out of many applicants, so it was quite an honor to participate. We traveled to the Sundance resort in Utah, and studied for two weeks with a lot of great film composers. Carter Burwell came out, as did Shirley Walker, Mychael Danna, and George S. Clinton. We also got to meet that year's directing fellows - we were paired up with them, and scored the experimental short films that they shot for their program. It was all very much in a demo format - we were provided with a simple synth setup and had to crank it out in a week! It was a very inspiring program.

You never watch your films with an audience. Don't you miss hearing them scream?

quote-leftNo. I can hear them when I'm making the picture.

Do you feel that the American film remains the most vital cinema?

quote-leftWorldwide, yes. Because when we make films for the United States, we are automatically making them for all the world--because America is full of foreigners. It's a melting pot. Which brings us to another point. I don't know what they mean when they talk about "Hollywood" pictures. I say, "Where are they conceived?" Look at this room--you can't see out the windows. We might just as well be in a hotel room in London, or anywhere you like. So here is where we get it down on paper. Now where do we go? We go on location, perhaps; and then where do we work? We're inside on a stage, the big doors are closed, and we're down in a coal mine: we don't know what the weather is like outside. Again we don't know where we are--only within our film, within the thing we're making. That's why it's such nonsense to talk about locale. "Hollywood." That doesn't mean anything to me. If you say, "Why do you like working in Hollywood?" I would say, because I can get home at six o'clock for dinner.

Q: What is Four Rooms about?

quote-leftIt's four friends telling four stories in one movie, but it's different from other anthology films because it has a connecting character who develops throughout the film. That's Ted the Bellboy, played by Tim Roth. It's New Year's Eve: he goes into these four rooms, and each room is directed by a different person: me, Alexander Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, or Quentin Tarantino. And terrible things happen to him. Actually he makes out best in my room because he gets laid by Ione Skye!

By working on "Get Carter" you had an opportunity to take a recognizable and respected theme and re-approach it. How was it to take someone else's work and mold it to be your own?

I enjoyed it because I liked Budd's original score which I think is an interesting work of music in and of itself. He wrote the score nearly 30 years ago and recorded the entire bit for a meager 400 pounds. This includes songs, vocalists and an eclectic cast of musicians. I have a great deal of respect for any artist who doesn’t allow money to govern the extent of how far they will go to achieve the ultimate end results. I thought the opportunity to arrange Roy Budd’s theme for the year 2000 was great fun. Additionally, the visual style of the film lent itself to many interesting sonic possibilites, so I was able to incorporate a lot of unique elements into the piece as well as changing the melody instrument. Budd originally played it on a harpsichord. I used a marxophone to give it a different sound. The director and I talked about acquiring the rights to rearrange and re-orchestrate the original Budd theme early on in the project. I had yet to have the opportunity to do a project like that, so I seized it!

You served your apprenticeship originally with Roger Corman working on horror movies. Was that a good apprenticeship?

quote-leftOh yeah. Aside from the fact that it was the only apprenticeship possible, the only way to gain that experience. Nowadays there are many people like Roger making so-called exploitation films. But in those days there was nothing other than Roger, and I was lucky to become his personal assistant, and he assigned me many many different jobs, from editing and writing to being a sound recordist, cameraman - you name it, I did it for him. And although the pay was, of course, very very poor, what you gained in experience and confidence more than made up for it.

What would a normal "Simpsons" work schedule be like for you?

quote-leftWhen we're on a week-to-week schedule, what I will normally do is spot an episode on Friday afternoon. The music editor will prepare my timing notes on Saturday and Sunday and then I'll start writing, usually Monday morning if it's a "normal" episode of "30 cues or less." If it's more than that, I'll sometimes start on Sunday to get a jump on things and then I'll put in probably four long days—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—of maybe nine in the morning until 11:30 or midnight every day. And then we spot the next week's episode Friday afternoon again and I'll record the cues that I've composed during the past week on Friday night starting at seven. We usually have anywhere from a three to a three-and-a-half hour recording session to do those 30 cues. Every week is different on "The Simpsons" as you know. It really is dependent on whether it's straight underscore type of recording that I have to do or if I have to record vocals—if I have to do orchestral sweeteners of songs that I've written in the past. So, it's never a dull moment.

Corey Eubanks will disclose the startling truth about what really took place during the filming of some of the biggest television shows and feature films Hollywood has ever produced, including “The Dukes of Hazzard” – “The Fall-Guy” – “The A-Team” “TRANSFORMERS” - “THE FAST AND FURIOUS” and “TERMINATOR GENISYS”.

What do you think about this phone, first of all?

It's kind of interesting, isn't it? I mean, it's not as revealing as one might have thought. And people are just getting used to the incredible mobility that a remote phone gives you, moving around, doing stuff while you're talking on the phone, so I wonder whether this is going against the momentum of that freedom.

Where do you get the money for your films?

This is the second-most-asked question I encounter. (The most-asked question is, "What's Joe Strummer doing nowadays?") As a young lad, scrabbling in the red sandhills of my home planet, Mars, I found a huge trove of Mexican tesobonos and American dollars in a cave. Apparently they had been stashed there by corrupt American and Russian astrounauts, some time in the late 21st century.

I am not a theoretician of the cinema. If you ask me what directing is, the first answer that comes into my head is: I don't know. The second: All my opinions on the subject are in my films. Among other things, I am an opponent of any separation of the various phases of the work. Such separation has an exclusively practical value. It is valuable for all those who participate in the work - except for the director, if he happens to be both author and director at once. To speak of directing as one of the phases in this work is to engage in a theoretical discussion which seems to me opposed to that unity of the whole to which every artist is committed during his work.