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

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.

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.

Silence is the biggest weapon sometime..

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

That's important to me, to recommend books.

A lot of people live in a property that will one day be part of their pension, and that is true for me too. I have an investment I can sell with ease.

The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.

If laughter is the best medicine, I promise to continue to make you laugh as my wife and I work together with the National Kidney Foundation to save lives.

It is to this silence [contemplative prayer] that we all are called.

I'm a woman for all seasons. I mix 'n' match, do designer and high street - keep all my good pieces. I design all my evening and cocktail dresses most of the time as I dislike what is out there.

People make great films. I just don't have the eyes to watch them.