| Rolfe
Kent Q & A
For
composer Rolfe Kent, the job is to find out what
sticks. "We have this phrase in film when
you try music where you say, 'Oh, it doesn't stick
to it,'” he explains, “which means,
the music's nice, but it doesn't really seem to
belong in any way to what's going on screen."
And although About Schmidt was Kent's
third feature with writer/director Alexander Payne,
after Citizen Ruth and Election,
his familiarity with Payne and Payne’s sensibilities
didn't make Kent's job easier. He still had to
find out what stuck.
On figuring out what Schmidt wasn’t:
I'd read the script. I'd watched the film, and
I heard the temp music they'd put in the beginning,
and then we just went from there. I was sort of
hampered by my own supposition that About Schmidt
was going to be of a similar style to the previous
films we'd worked on. And so I wasted a certain
amount of time trying to make it fit the same
old mold. And it went [along] gradually [until]
I realized that, in fact, no, it wasn' t
that film at all.
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