Peter has been doing live Ghostbusters concerts, and he owns a DX7. In fact, I pretty much used exclusively the patches that were in the original.
You just hear it on every 1980s film score. Goldsmith used that on Gremlins and Elmer Bernstein used it on Ghostbusters. But there's a synth from the 80s called the Yamaha DX7. It's an electric musical instrument, one of the first of its kind. The ondes martenot is an early synthesiser if you can call it that. Is it fair to say that your score is a celebration of the orchestral and electronic techniques from the period? There were trace elements of Jerry Goldsmith's Gremlins in there, and I mean that as the highest compliment. This was my homage to the scores I loved listening to as I was growing up. We wanted to do something that sounded like the mid-eighties. Jason and I knew that this wasn't a case of taking the Ghostbusters theme and putting an EDM beat on it, or trying to snazz it up, trying to make it hip. It was a wonderfully educational time, working on this film and digging into Elmer's score. It was great to have somebody there who could weigh in and say, "We would have put a timpani hit there" or "We would have doubled this with this" or "We would have pulled out this instrument for this passage". We rang him up and wanted him to be a keeper of the flame, part of the brain trust. He orchestrated for his father on the original 1984 Ghostbusters score. I also have to mention Peter Bernstein, Elmer's son, who is a wonderful composer and a fantastic orchestrator. If there's something that's familiar from the original, we tended to reach for it, and sometimes we simply re-recorded Elmer's cues. But after I read the script, I knew that the film was going to go in a lot of new directions. When Jason and I met for the first time, he said that he wanted to use Elmer's themes, he wanted it to feel like the original and he wanted us to record the ondes martenot. It was a passing of the torch, and I knew it would be a musical passing of the torch as well. You can feel the awe that he had as a kid for the franchise and for his father, Ivan's, work. He grew up on the set and this was his life. I really appreciated how this was a very personal film for Jason. Jason likes making indie films, and this was a big-budget, action-adventure, sci-fi spectacle. That must be a career high point, right? The director with whom you've worked before on Tully and The Front Runner rings you up and invites you to work on the new Ghostbusters movie.
When he called me up and told me he was doing it, I was like, "Alright! Let's give it a whirl."
#Scoreland magazine subscripton movie
Working with Jason on the new movie was great. I was a fan of the franchise and the gear and the sounds.
I watched it more times than I could count when I was growing up. I remember the music was scary, the big, imposing brass chords. I remember thinking that it was creepy, but I was laughing as well. But Ghostbusters had a lot of adult stuff. I was watching Commando when I was little. It was the first film that creeped me out. Yeah, I was born in 1978 so the original Ghostbusters was definitely part of the canon of eighties films that I grew up with. Were you one of the original generation fans? The original Ghostbusters is a sacred cow and so many people cherish it. Rob revealed how he traced elements of Bernstein’s material and blended them seamlessly with his own, with the final product materialising as a deliriously enjoyable and nostalgic hybrid score. Given that music is so intrinsic to the Ghostbusters lore (Ray Parker Jr., of course, gets a shoutout here), we had a lot to discuss. With Reitman adopting the mantle of his father Ivan, who helmed the 19 Ghostbusters movies, it fell to Simonsen to channel the spirit of Bernstein’s menacing score from the first film. However, this was the challenge faced by the versatile Rob Simonsen when his regular collaborator Jason Reitman asked him to score Ghostbusters: Afterlife.Īlthough Simonsen and Reitman have established a partnership via the likes of Tully and The Front Runner, neither have veered into the realm of blockbuster filmmaking until now. It’s not every day that one gets a new Ghostbusters movie, and it’s not every day that a composer is asked to step into the almighty shoes of the legendary Elmer Bernstein.
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