Hollywood Road

Back in Los Angeles, Murphy only took a two-day rest. Hans Zimmer, who served as the soundtrack for this time, called and informed the ministry that the distribution of music had been sampled.

An excellent film needs the same excellent soundtrack to set off the atmosphere. If the two can be perfectly combined, it will inevitably bring an effect that one plus one is far greater than two. Many films in the past and now have proven this point countless times. , So Murphy immediately gave up his vacation and told Hans-Zimmer to meet in the professional studio of Fox Tower.

Both parties are veterans in the industry, and there is no needless nonsense when they meet. After a simple greeting, Murphy directly said to Hans-Zimmer, "Let’s start now."

"Yeah." Hans Zimmer nodded and told his assistant, "Alex, play it."

The soundtrack sent is mainly divided into three aspects, involving the most important roles among the three "Dark City": Magician, Jay Rachel and Chris Dann.

Murphy and the producers of Gal Gadot and Carla Faith pricked their ears and listened carefully to the first version of the soundtrack played by Hans Zimmer's assistant.

The first is the magician's main soundtrack. Just like Hans Zimmer told Murphy, he used a lot of suppressed electronic sounds to highlight the restlessness and extreme evil caused by the magician.

Although he is completely a layman in music, and does not understand very professional knowledge such as composition and creation, Murphy has been in Hollywood for more than ten years and has made so many films, and he still has a certain understanding of film soundtracks.

Full of depression is the distinctive feature of this magician's theme soundtrack. It uses a seemingly uncoordinated monotone transposition, combined with the special sound effects produced by the electronic synthesizer, to directly give people a strong auditory stimulation.

Hans-Zimmer obviously used a lot of cool tones to create the dark atmosphere of the soundtrack, many inconsistent chords and almost crazy weird melodies, plus unusually rich electronic elements, and even analog stopwatch countdowns and similar explosions. The sound effects are integrated into it-the mixing of various tones not only makes the electronic sound effects describing the magician not auditorily thin, but also makes the feelings more full and real.

After playing the magician’s main soundtrack, followed by the background soundtrack by Chris Dann, this soundtrack inherits the tone of "City of Chaos", but is richer and more gorgeous. The violin keeps moving on a sixteenth note. The jumping bow playing, strong and powerful, combined with the sense of urgency created by the percussion instrument, also showed a sense of instability and anxiety, just like Chris Dan's thoughts that he might fall into the abyss at any time.

Coupled with the long notes displayed by the string music, it is completely a release of passion, and it is full of dynamics with the accelerated theme of Chris Dann with a strong sense of rhythm.

This soundtrack combines the effects of electronic music and orchestral music, which is quite commercial and full of modernity.

Murphy has collaborated with Hans-Zimmer many times. It is clear that this practice often appears in many of Hans-Zimmer's works. The soundtrack uses a large number of electronic sounds and quickly transfers between orchestral music. This transfer is quite rapid and difficult to detect. Let the music finish smoothly.

The last one played is the background music of the heroine Jay Rachel. This soundtrack uses a lot of beautiful piano solo and a lot of thematic variations. It is obviously divided into two parts, like Jay Rachel ups and downs. The same in life.

However, even in the first half full of light, the piano melody of the soundtrack uses a string of cool notes, the melody is quite divergent, and it seems to tell a poignant story.

The room was quiet again. Duke turned to look at Gal Gadot and Carla Faith, and asked, "How do you feel?"

"I think it's good." Gal Gadot now has considerable professional skills, nodded, and whispered, "Hans Zimmer has always been of high standards."

Carla Faith also showed approval, "Very brilliant!"

Hans Zimmer was at a distance from them, and when he looked at Murphy, he knew very well that Murphy was the one who really had the right to decide.

Murphy asked the assistant named Alex to play three pieces of the soundtrack again. After thinking about it for a while, he said, "Hans, I am very satisfied with the soundtrack. You can finish it as soon as possible, and no later than the end of February next year."

"No problem." Hans Zimmer stood up immediately, "I will finish it on time."

"Well, let's stop here today."

Murphy stood up, shook hands with Hans Zimmer who came by, and said, "I'm waiting for your good news."

Sending away Hans Zimmer, Murphy was not going to leave. In the editing studio next to him, Jody Griffith was watching all the shots with several assistant editors, and he went over to take a look. .

Discussed with Jody Griffith about editing. Murphy left the Fox Building. In the following days, he would come to the editing room on time to deal with some preparations before the official editing. For real-time shooting with more than 80 special effects, there are fewer shots processed by CGI. While allowing the colorist to grade the shots, he also puts editing on his work schedule.

In November, Murphy and Jody Griffith began to make rough cuts on the film in order to turn the total length of more than 1,850 minutes into a coherent action crime movie.

Although some special effects scenes that need to be synthesized using CGI have not been added, those shots that only need to adjust the background and light have been basically completed. After the rough cut picture style fully meets Murphy's requirements, how to maintain the overall style on the basis of Editing the entire story more compactly is what he and Jody Griffith need to do the most.

The theme of the film is dark and heavy. If the slow pace like "The Wire of Fire" is dragged on, Murphy believes that "The Dark City" will definitely hit the streets to make Twentieth Century Fox vomit blood.

"My request is very simple. Use concise and sharp editing to form a strong narrative tension and bring out the dark and heavy theme of the film!"

The dark style of commercial production has finally become a genre of mainstream North American films under Murphy’s efforts, starting from "Man of Steel". It is definitely a new thing at present. In the past ten years, it should be They will not be outdated, but there are not too many stories that can carry the dark wind, and based on the existing content framework and style restrictions, all commercial movies are turned into dark wind, and the dark wind is completely eliminated from large-scale commercial films. , Are unrealistic.

However, to a certain extent, the visual effect of Diablo is easy to make people tired.

In fact, it is the process of watching movies that makes people more fatigued. It is precisely because of the dark outlook on life, the pros and the villains come and go, and back and forth, and human nature is surging and whirling in it, and it is easy to make people feel "tired". .

Such movies are not like Disney and Marvel’s commercial movies with light comedy features, which make people feel like “eating popcorn”, but dark movies like Murphy also have their own advantages. , It will not be as monotonous as popcorn, forget the taste after eating, but can continue to evoke nerves.

Of course, from another perspective, Diablo is not a universal style, nor is it an element that every director can play. The former "Dark Knight" is certainly the pinnacle of the Diablo style, but In "The Dark Knight Rises", the dark style has been reduced to the point where nothing is better than nothing.

Of course, there are commercial considerations, but this style itself restricts movies, stories, and characters, which is also a huge factor.

Some people believe that Diablo is a high-level and high-level movie style, and cannot be compared with commercial movies in the general sense—especially those comic superhero movies where bluffing superheroes team up to fight.

In fact, even in Murphy's own eyes, whether it is a dark style or not, this matter has nothing to do with compelling, but only related to the personal choice of the studio and the director.

For example, some of Marvel’s superheroes are not difficult to adapt to the dark, but Marvel did not do so in the past, because this movie style is very different from the style of Marvel comics and the entire series.

More importantly, not everyone will like dark-style movies. Movies are just a form of entertainment for most audiences. Therefore, under normal circumstances, shooting seemingly sophisticated and uniquely stylized movies is often fundamental. The mainstream movie viewers, especially the underage viewers who occupy a considerable share of the market, cannot be satisfied.

Nowadays, in the increasingly important overseas film market, the audience's perception of commercial films is "high-tech special effects blockbusters."

Therefore, when "The Dark Knight" was released, audiences were more willing to regard it as an independent movie rather than a superhero movie.

The head of Marvel Pictures, Kevin Fitch, once said that-the movie "The Dark Knight" does show the difference between a comic and a movie and the potential of the movie. But I don't think that the audience will blindly love this dark, rough film. Therefore, we did not make "Thor" and "Captain America" ​​into such dark films as "The Dark Knight."

These words, even in Murphy's eyes, may not be unreasonable.

Movies are always diversified. Disney and Marvel are sticking to their own styles, and Murphy is sticking to their own styles. Unless the inherent style doesn’t work, they won’t make changes easily.

Compared with Murphy heading into the post-production of "Dark City", Gal Gadot has to control the overall situation of Stanton Studio, as the daily work leader of this leather bag company, and several projects currently invested by the company , Such as "House of Cards" and "Game of Thrones", etc., should be paid attention to in time.

And after Murphy gave an outline of "Fifty Shades of Gray", she was still considering how to operate the project.