text: JH) I still like to experiment, but I have also become much more cautious. I still take huge risks with my music, not only in terms of the sound I go for but also in terms of how I use music in individual scenes. At the same time, I think of easier and non-traditional ways of developing something, allowing myself to be influenced by the emotional underpinning of a scene. More precisely, I would say that my compositional style is far more sober than most. I’m very difficult when it comes to spotting the music. I take a lot of risks because I get offered a lot of projects. You know, left of center, you never know where you’ll wind up. The people I work for are aware of this and expect it of me. They’re never completely sure of the music they will end up getting and that’s a good thing.
  JH) Cocoon! Of course, I had a great time working on other films : 48 Hours, or Brainstorm, which I think is fantastic. The score was a very peculiar marriage between film and music. It’s the reason Douglas Trumbull and I are still friends. But Cocoon stirred something inside me, a sort of passion and emotion that the film conveyed extremely well. It’s an absolutely wonderful film about old people who get a chance to be young again. The film touched me because it looked at these old people in very subtle ways. It was one of the first films that moved me to tears, even though it wasn’t sad at all. Quite the contrary : it was a captivating and magnificent piece of moviemaking. In the years since, Titanic has made me weep my eyes out, of course (chuckles).
  JH) Well, the music is beautiful but also very simple, reflecting and supporting the movie’s simplicity. For most scenes, I needed nothing beyond a guitar, a harp and a piano. That score is very dear to me.
  DtD) But in order to arrive at the level of perfection displayed by Cocoon, you had to go through a whole lot of steps and movies.
  JH) That’s true. I covered a lot of ground between Battle Beyond The Stars and Krull. But I guess it was a learning curve. You learn the ropes while you compose for your first films, familiarising yourself with techniques and making mistakes you wouldn’t make again later on… Later on, you notice that the quality of the movies you score is not all that important.
  JH) Theoretically, yes. In my case, it was different : even though Brainstorm, Krull and Gorky Park all bombed, I had forged a certain musical identity that made the studios sit up and take notice.
  JH) Only Mozart was a wunderkind, only Berlioz, Prokofiev and the likes are geniuses ! No, I simply expressed my own identity and my ideas on film music, which were the result of the lessons I had learned.
  JH) Of course. The Brainstorm score was almost a tribute to his teachings, his technique of dissonance, music at its most abstract. The clash of styles, the opposing melodic lines… I sort of took his theory and put it into practice. He also asked us to quote other pieces of music in a very specific way. For Michael’s Gift To Karen, I just had to quote Schubert if I was going to be musically consistent. Quoting, you know, is quite an art. You need to integrate a quote in such a way that it does not hurt your own music or the original composer’s. That’s a far cry from the practice of imitation that is so pervasive in film music. When Monet quoted the Renaissance painters, he used it so well in his own canvases that he achieves a wondrous kind of unity. Brainstorm was a bit like that. Glory too, of course, and there are other scores.
  JH) Here, in the United States, people tend to confuse quotes with pastiche or worse, plagiarism. People here don’t understand.
  JH) (laughs) Yes, I’m sure you’re right. The best example is The Planets by Gustav Holst. Every producer here knows every note of every planet; not a day goes by in Hollywood that such and such a composer isn’t asked to mimick Holst’s work. For Krull, for instance, I pastiched Holst rather than explicitly quoting him, as did John Williams for Star Wars. It was rather amusing and interesting.