Greetings! ScoreKeeper here taking a break from my nightly swim in prehistoric piranha invested waters in order to bring you a chatty little interview I had with Michael Wandmacher, composer of PIRANHA 3D (2010). After I first saw PIRANHA 3D earlier this summer I knew I wanted to track Michael down and talk with him about it. There's a lot to love about this movie and its music. As a prolific connoisseur of exploitation cinema, I was rather pleased, albeit a little surprised, on how successful this film pulls off the exploitation vibe. It doesn't take itself too seriously but there's enough realistic gore and mayhem to keep your feet in the water.
This is my second interview with Michael and I hope I get the chance to speak again in the future. Now it's time for me to go back into the water. Hey, wait a minute...I'm missing my arm. Oh wait, there it is under the dock. No worries. I'll just go in and get it. Enjoy!



SK: Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to speak with me. I know that you're deep into scoring your next film so I'm very appreciative of your time. I wanted to talk with you about PIRANHA 3D (2010). This was one of the more enjoyable films I saw this summer. It's very successful in pulling off that modern day exploitation vibe that seems to be so elusive in cinema. How did you first get involved with this project? MW: There was a demo that I was asked to do when they were looking for composers. I came up with the motif that you actually hear in the film. There’s two little motifs...there’s one that’s kind of this clicky little col legno string sound (a technique where the string player bounces the wood of their bow on the strings) that’s supposed to represent fish teeth or something that sounded like it. When Alex Aja heard it, he thought it sounded like piranha teeth and the little descending four note motif on the strings. Those two things I combined into a piece of music that was a couple minutes long and it just kind of went through the ropes. They started putting it in the temp and for some reason it was really working, so that’s what led to the meeting which led to doing the movie.

SK: So you simply auditioned for it? MW: Yeah, it was really off the cusp and it was really quick. I got an email and I went and did some research online. I literally went to Wikipedia and just read about Piranha for a couple of hours and thought “How can I represent this musically?” Those were the ideas that I came up with and integrated that onto a piece of music and that’s what came out. Evidently it worked, so I was happy to see that it came to fruition.

SK: One thing that strikes me about this score is that it’s very chaotic and chaos at a musical level can be insanely difficult to control. You can't just throw shit up there because you end up with sonic mud. I was very impressed how controlled and clear the chaos was. Was this a challenge? Did it simply correct itself in mixing or were you controlling the chaos on a compositional level? MW: I wrote the music. I knew that I was going to use a big string section. A lot of the brass is samples but the strings are all live. I knew I was going to divide it up into real small groups of players all doing different things. It was a matter of writing through each line one at a time so taht each part of the string section was going to be playing. Then I literally rolled through the sequence back and forth listening to the mock up I was doing making sure that when everything was clashing it was clashing in a way that I liked. When it resolves itself it resolves in a way that I liked. I experimented with tempos and part of it all was just a leap of faith. When you look at the score it looks like one big train wreck with some of the attack cues. When you hear it played out and everybody is playing those really sharp marcatos with very short, sharp accents it all feels chaotic in a good way. It was more or less just a lot of experimentation and seeing what happened. Like Alex described...it’s Bernard Herrmann meets Megadeath and that’s what he wanted.

SK: (Laughs) That’s a great description of it. Since you are so careful listening to your mockups were your decisions fully realized when it was translated to live musicians? Were there any surprises for you as far as trying to control the clashes? MW: Actually it ended up sounding better. There was more clarity to it. The more dissonant it became the more it actually worked better with people playing it. It always does. The players were really getting into it. I don’t think they had seen a score like that. Where we recorded, they were used to playing very lush flowing highly melodic type scores and they hadn’t seen anything like this. When they started playing it, they were really getting into it and it was actually a lot of fun watching their faces. After the first few takes people would just bust out laughing because they were having a great time. It was fun.

SK: They got their aerobic workout in for the week, huh? MW: Yeah, the bass players especially were really into it. It was the equivalent to playing rock 'n roll on stand up bass. They were having a good time.

SK: How large of a string session did you employ? MW: It was either 60 or 61 people just to get all of the parts played out. In some cases we were doing third and forth violins, just because there were points where I wanted it to be really dissonant or there would be a technique that I wanted to be executed on top of another one and there was no way one person could do it, so there had to be two or three people playing the same thing at the same time.

SK: So you have a live string section and you said you used some sampled brass. What other electronic elements did you incorporate in the score? MW: There were a lot. I played a lot of guitar in the score. There were some rock elements in there. There’s drums. I used electric cello in a lot of cases. Double guitar parts were played. Things in lower registers that had a guitar feel to them. And all of the other stuff was just programmed synthesizers and things like that. I always work with that in every score. I try to incorporate that. I enjoy doing that. I’ve been doing that for a long time. Percussion sounds are things that I build templates and then monkey with it to get it sounding the way that I want.

SK: Tell me about the initial approach. Was this exclusively your approach to the score? Did Alex have a strong vision for what he wanted you to do? How did you guys work that out together? MW: He definitely had an idea of what he wanted to do, there is no question, and he wanted a lot more organic nature to the score than you might expect from him. He knew that the fish were going to be entirely CGI, so he wanted them to be juxtaposed by musical elements that were real. That’s what brought in the orchestral sound layered in with the electronics. He likes hybrid scores. He’s very savvy about music, but his ideas for the attack scenes and the motifs in the movie and how he wanted the fish to be represented was very clear. The attack scenes were fun because he just directed me. He’d put a piece of temp music that was sort of like what he wanted. He’d say, “Take this general idea and make it pure chaos. It’s not like JAWS (1975) in the sense that there’s one creature coming after you and there’s a sense of impending doom, it’s more like a swarm of bees and it’s completely random and there’s no way out no matter which way you run and it had to feel like you were being suffocated by this slowly building wall of chaos, for lack of a better word, and integrating all the other rock elements and electronic elements." Those were things that he wanted and we just kind of forged it over time to figure out what kind of sounds blended best with the orchestra.

SK: I'm assuming that the work print you were scoring from was missing most of the CGI fish elements. Was there ever a concern while you were scoring to this work print that didn’t have the fish in there that you were doing too much? MW: No, I was never afraid of that on this movie for two reasons. Number one because the spirit of the film is very much set in old school exploitation horror comedy schlock movies. It is that. That’s what it was trying to be and succeeded to a great degree on that level and number two because it’s 3D. One thing I’ve learned about 3D after doing a few of these films is that we are feeding the high intensity score, especially from a genre film, a horror film, or an action thriller or something like that you can never really make the music too big, because it’s an immersive experience. We found on MY BLOODY VALENTINE (2009) at first when we were mixing that the mix we thought was working actually taken into the theater for a playback in 3D and realized that everything was way too low and that the music could be put much more in a surround and the whole thing could play out on a higher level, so with both of those things working in my favor, I thought, “There’s really no way I can go over the top on this movie.” We would keep putting more stuff in. (Laughs) It did happen.

SK: Yeah. I saw the film once and I’ve heard the music now several times and I’m just thinking off the top of my head here, was there ever an element to the music where you were at least acknowledging some of the comedic moments? MW: Not necessarily. There is a tongue-in-cheek aspect to the score in that one of the piranha motifs, the little clicky teeth one that I like to call it, they was a literal-ness to that and we used it on certain shots for the fish to accent the humor, but I always find that in movies that are trying to be funny that aren’t straight up comedies, they are based on jokes… In this case a movie that’s so over the top that you laugh at it and that’s a good thing, it works better to just play the music straight. There’s something about it that makes it more ridiculous and if you don’t point too much of a finger at the joke, it actually works better.

SK: I enjoyed the film quite a bit just for that very reason you touched on. It’s in the vein of exploitation cinema which I think is a dying genre. We don’t really get those fun exploitive movies anymore or at least not to that extent. MW: That was intended from the beginning to just be in your face at every turn and towards the end of the film there would be things story wise and I’m not going to give away anything for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but it gets pretty serious and lives are at stake and time is running out and if something doesn’t happen people are going to die. I played the music in a serious mode like that, the fact that people are trying to escape from giant prehistoric monster piranha adds that one element of B-movie goodness to the whole thing and makes it work as a whole. That music though was written to be pure tension, pure ticking clock, this is all going to come to a head pretty soon, what’s going to happen, kind of approach.

SK: What went through your mind the first time you saw a rough print of the film? MW: That the movie is fun and it was probable that the marina attack was going to be a huge challenge. Those were the two things that I took away from the first screening of the movie. And to make sure that the fish always had a presence on screen along with the music, so that it was always clear when they were around or when something was going to happen and that those are the stars of the film. There was pretty good detail, even when I couldn’t see a fish on screen, there was always enough camera movement and enough explanation of whatever I was looking at that I could come up with something that would work and then as effects were added I would be able to fine tune those ideas to hit really specific points or cuts or something like that. That marina sequence, for lack of a better word, it’s a monster. It’s like 14 minutes long, it’s five cues back to back and the whole thing is just balls to the wall the whole way.

SK: One of the highlight moments of the score for me, because there’s so much chaos all throughout the picture, there’s a nice moment at the end where you composed an elegiac piece of music. Can you tell me a little bit about that? There’s no other moment in the film that’s quite like that, is there? MW: Not really. That was Alex driving that. You know through all of the ridiculousness that had just proceeded it, he still wanted somehow emotionally in the music to touch on the fact that all of these people were dead and that lives were lost and people who had friends there were dead and it was just a really sad tragic theme. People still laughed at it, but they didn’t laugh at it in a way that was bad. It just felt right at that point in the movie. It was acknowledging the horror of what had just happened and you felt like that huge gear shift in the music was a really big way to do that.

SK: Yeah, it is a nice twist. During the marina attack I found myself rooting for the piranha, you know? So at the end when you do see all these dead people, it grounds you. It’s really an important moment in that film that I think cleanses the palette and prepares you for the remainder of the film. MW: Yeah you definitely need a relief, especially after that, because it was so dense with screaming and shooting and boat motors and underwater and overwater and megaphones and jet skies and…

SK: And some of the best gore effects I’ve seen in years! MW: That was one thing that I know KNB was really proud of, because it’s exceptionally difficult to pull off gore effects like that in broad daylight and they did a really good job. It’s a huge challenge when you’ve just got the summer sun beating down and there’s nothing to hide behind, no shadows, no dark corners, or anything to hide the imperfections in the makeup. They were out there and it was for everybody to see and if you saw the actual pictures of people who had been gored like that and looked at the pictures of what they had done on that beach, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. That’s what it would look like. It was really something else.

SK: There were quite a few shots where you don’t see an effect...you see a muscle hanging from somebody’s bone. (Laughs) It’s pretty awesome! MD: They are really proud of it and they should be. I wish that somebody like the Academy would recognize something like that for the technical achievement that it really is, but I doubt that will ever happen, because it’s that kind of a movie…

SK: Yeah…I’ll second that...So now you are working on a film called DRIVE ANGRY (2011)? What's it about? MD: Patrick Lussier is directing it. I worked with him on MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D. It's written by Todd Parmer who also wrote MY BLOODY VALENTINE. It stars Nicolas Cage, Amber Hurt, Bill Fickler, Billy Burke, David Morris, and I’m trying to think of who I’m forgetting…Charlotte Ross and a few other people. It's basically a road revenge movie with some twists to it. There's definitely an edge to it. Nicolas Cage plays a man who comes back to his old stomping grounds to save his granddaughter from being used in a sacrificial way. Most of the movie is him trashing his way through a lot of cars and explosions and chases and lots of other “in your face” and aggressive type set pieces in order to get to a grand climax at the end where the two face off. It’s very much in the spirit of late sixties early seventies movies like HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (1973) and VANISHING POINT (1971). It’s in that realm where the hero is actually an anti-hero. He’s not necessarily a good guy, but you are rooting for him anyway. It’s tone-wise one of the most hard to categorize films I’ve ever watched, because it goes a lot of different places and the score is all over the place. It’s really challenging to write the music, because there’s so much different stuff that needs to be addressed in the story.

SK: How far along are you? MW: I’m almost done. I’ve got a couple of cues left to go and we start mixing in about two weeks. There’s about 90 minutes of score. What’s been fun about this movie is I’ve gotten to play a lot of different instruments myself. I got to play guitar a lot, which is something I haven’t been able to do in a long time and I was able to play the guitar, the banjo, some dulcimer, and a whole bunch of different instruments, harmonicas…Things that I just haven’t played in a long time and was able to bring them out and utilize them as part of the score, because it does take place in the south and needed a little bit of that twinge in the score, not overbearing, but it lends a hand to it. It was just fun. It’s more laborious than what I normally do, because I have to make up the parts and play them as I go. It actually more like doing a record than a film score.

SK: When does the film come out? MW: February of 2011.

SK: Any talk yet of a soundtrack release? MW: You never know. Every studio has a different take to putting out soundtracks. Some people jump on it. Some people you don’t know…We will see. I think over all I’m looking at it as the outcome would be positive, but I don’t know it’s just so much music that they would have to make it a good listen. I would have to cut out half of the score.

SK: You said you were almost done with this so what do you have to finish out your year? MW: Right now I’ve got two short projects that I have to work on, both short films that I can’t talk too much about right now and I’m in the process of waiting to see what happens on two other movies, just waiting for decisions. I’ve had a really long run of work and I’m hoping that…and I always want to keep working, but I’m hoping that I can get a short break here. I need to do some retooling at the studio and I know there are some things coming next year that I have to get ready for, but I haven’t stopped working I don’t think for like a year and a half or almost two years straight.

SK: Sounds good. That’s a good problem to have. (Laughs) MW: I call it a high quality problem, you are absolutely right. I wouldn’t change it for anything.

SK: Well Michael, it's a pleasure to speak with you again. I wish you the best for a successful end to your year and I'll be looking forward to DRIVE ANGRY early next year. MW: Thanks, great talking with you too.



On behalf of Ain't It Cool News I'd like to extend a monstrous thank you to Michael Wandmacher for speaking with me. I'd also like to thank Mike McCutchen for his transcription help. Michael's music for PIRANHA 3D is currently available for order at Amazon.com and other major retailers.

ScoreKeeper!!!