Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

You can find the whole world of a film in one instrument, or you can find a world of sound in the orchestra.

I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

The art of making films is a collaborative art. As a composer, you're always working with the cinematographer because he's so much the heart of the world they've created on film.

Film music really is about point of view and you can shift it wherever you want really depending on how you look at it.

Sometimes you want to use the music in a clarity way to explain something in the film.

When you're working on a film, it's intense and it's very all-consuming. There's not something in particular.

Theater and film are essentially the same - just different kinds of storytelling.

I've been writing music since I was 9. I took harmony and counterpoint classes when I was studying the clarinet. So, I've been writing for an awfully long time. It just became part of everyday life.

I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office.

When you start on a new film, no matter how many you've done before that, I think I've done close to 80 films, but it's always kind of a fun adventure.

I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

As America celebrates Memorial Day, we pay tribute to those who have given their lives in our nation's wars.

You're going to end up with a government in Egypt that is concerned about the precious Palestinians, the same way we ought to be concerned about both precious Palestinians and precious Jews.

It is not a question how much a man knows, but what use he can make of what he knows.

When the grandmothers of today hear the word 'Chippendales,' they don't necessarily think of chairs.

You have the same DNA as the greats of the past who started revivals.

Philosophers there are who try to make themselves believe that this life is happy; but they believe it only while they are saying it, and never yet produced conviction in a single mind.

Some filmmakers, you know, have their style and then they kind of go looking for the movie. I'm not like that. I don't have one style that I want to take from movie to movie.

You are about to enter the realms of human beings. Be prepared for cruelty and kindness, for friendship and hatred. People are made of all possibilities and conditions.

Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? - Lady Macbeth