Director James Cameron is speaking out about his friend and colleague James Horner, who died in a plane crash yesterday.
As we reported yesterday, Horner (pictured above right) was piloting his plane when it crashed north of Santa Barbara, California on Monday morning. We learned later in the night that it was Horner on board.
Today, Cameron (above left) reflected on Horner’s life in a piece on The Hollywood Reporter and shared some touching thoughts about the composer and his most well-known pieces of work. Horner is responsible for the soundtracks of Cameron’s Titanic, Avatar, and Aliens, but his work extends beyond those three. He was also responsible for the scores behind films like Apollo 13, Jumanji, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Speaking about their collaboration on Titanic, the director said, “When I was doing Titanic, he had just done Apollo 13 and Braveheart. I thought, ‘I don’t care what happened, I want to work with James.’ We had this very cautious meeting where we were falling all over ourselves to be polite,” Cameron said. “We laughed about it so much in subsequent years. But we developed a very transparent means of communication which made for a great working relationship. He totally committed himself to the movie. He blocked out his schedule and sat down and watched maybe 30 hours of raw dailies to absorb the feeling of the film.”
He continued, “I asked if he could write some melodies. I believe that a great score really consists of something you can whistle. If that melody gets embedded in your mind, it takes the score to a different level. I drove over to his house and he sat at the piano and said, ‘I see this as the main theme for the ship.’ He played it once through and I was crying. Then he played Rose’s theme and I was crying again. They were so bittersweet and emotionally resonant. He hadn’t orchestrated a thing and I knew it was going to be one of cinema’s great scores. No matter how the movie turned out, and no one knew at that point — it could have been a dog — I knew it would be a great score. He thought he had done only five percent of the work but I knew he had cracked the heart and soul.”
As he retold this story to THR, Cameron realized his “one regret” after Titanic was not attending more of Horner’s scoring sessions for the film. “But the orchestra loved him,” he said. “He always worked with a lot of the same players. Unlike most composers, he also conducted. He was classically trained. It was his room and they were sure to make something great. If I thought maybe there was something that wasn’t supporting the picture, he could turn on a dime and make it work.”
Cameron went on to say that his last encounter with Horner was in April when he attended a performance of the Titanic score at Royal Albert Hall. “I went to London just for the concert, and we had a kind of reunion. It was emotional and I’m glad that was my last personal memory of James. They had to subtitle the film because when the orchestra was playing, you couldn’t hear the words. I thought, ‘This is how James would have imagined it.'”
Horner was 61 years old.
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