57 Quotes by Thomas Newman

There's nothing like desperation to sharpen your sense of focus.

If you fail, fail fast enough so you can regroup and do it better.

In the end, you don't want music to be noticed as much as digested and integrated into the storytelling. And make audiences sit forward in their seats and enjoy the movie.

It's always nice to remember that there was a time when I loved something that I didn't know much about; it just reached my ears and moved me.

With film music, endings are often more difficult than beginnings, because a beginning is an underline, a way of exciting a moment, and then you have to find a way to dissipate that.

You want to say as little as you can and get the most punch out of it, always with the knowledge that people are not in the theater to listen to your music so much as to respond to the movie. You're a part of that experience.

The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.

Post-production is kind of the death of hope. The money has been spent. The grand ideas are either there or they're not there. So music oftentimes has to compensate if there are issues, or it has to stay out of the way if the movie is working really well.

I think I compose as a listener: improvising and listening back excites me because I get to ideas that never would have occurred. Then I bring in the computers and samplers... and I begin to loop and process and change them.