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

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.

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.

There is cost for everything.

Sometimes when things seem to be going wrong, they are going right for reasons you are yet to understand.

A lot of people think Heaven is sitting around on a cloud playing a harp all day, doing nothing except being holy - and they don't find it very appealing! Thank God that is not what Heaven is like!

I think the negative reinforcement really helped me in my very beginnings.

You never know what's in a person's heart until they're tested, do you?

Historically, there has been a bull market in commodities every 20 or 30 years.

I like normal life, but I will go crazy if Im not working.

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.

Sometimes I'm kind of spacey. I'm like Ferdinand the bull, sniffing the daisy, not aware of time, of what's going on in the real world.

Somehow I had turned myself into the worst thing in the world: I was just another man who wanted to teach me something!