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Stewart Copeland discusses the making of The Leopard's Son soundtrack on the Discovery Channel, as posted by Holly Murdock to The Police mailing list.The Making of The Leopard's Son STEWART: I have a great interest in Africa, and I've been waiting for this kind of film to come along. There's a lot of beauty in the landscape and the animals. There's a larger role for the music. NARRATOR: Stewart Copeland, former drummer and founder of the rock group The Police was chosen to compose the music score. STEWART: Well I started out as a classical musician but the classical music wasn't going to get me anywhere socially, but that rock and roll works every time! I got into my first group at the age of 12 and never looked back. I enjoyed all those years, but as soon as I'd been through the whole cycle of rock and roll, the actual music that's tinkling away at the back of my head there, the composer part of the brain, has those symphonic sounds and those textures you can only get with, you know, with 100 string players. NARRATOR: Copeland spent 3 months writing the score and another month recording the music. A crew of over 100 people, including musicians, copyists and editors contributed to the 70 minute soundtrack. STEWART: Hugo [van Lawick] and I spoke in general terms before I started work on the film and I got an idea of what his kind of emotional state is in a way. And we went through the movie and he explained to me -- in fact I totally lost proffesionalism there and spent the whole run-through asking "Well, when leopards do that, do they..." I mean when you get talking to him it's riveting. This was absolutly, glaringly obvious. Drop everything. This is the film to work on, we'll schedule the rest of the year around *this*. I dream the music as I watch the film. And when you watch a film without any music if you're a composer it comes, every scene. The movement of the subject, whether it's an actor or a leopard, has a kind of tempo and that tempo gives you a tune, and that tune gives you a harmony. It's really an act of discovery. Composition is supposedly creative, but in fact the sensation you get is as if you're finding something that's already there. My favorite part of the process is the part where I've talked to the director and spotted it, which is where we have a list of different pieces of music and what their function is and you decide ok, what does each scene mean? What's the emotional impact? Are we afraid for the character here? Like for instance the scene where he, the leopard's son, makes his first kill. We see this Thompson's gazelle, beautiful creature, eating a flower of all things. Eating a flower! And the leopard's son comes out of a tree -- Rarr-Arrh! It's actually, ok how are we treating this scene here? His mother has left him alone now and he is going to die unless he gets lunch. Narrator: The Leopard's Son score contains over 50 music cues. Copeland often wrote a theme for certain characters in the film with variations to change the mood of a scene. STEWART: The lions, their theme is all bad. There's only one thing the lions do in this movie and it's bad. They kill leopards for one thing, and this is a leopard movie. The lions are the bad guys so every time you see the lions, we have ugly, hostile music for these -- these not nice creatures. They're not the king of the jungle in this movie. In this movie we see the lions on their hands and knees like some redneck, pulling baby hyenas out of a hole. Arrgh! We don't like lions in this movie.
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