Basic accompanists aren’t the only scorers who grab Martinez. He likes the gushes of Elmer Bernstein (To Kill a Mockingbird), but also Bernard Hermann (Citizen Kane): “He’s one of the pioneers of minimalism in film. He had an amazing ability to take a simple three-note motif and spin off endless variations that not only held your interest, but created great emotion as well.” More recently, Martinez has laid an approving ear on Hans Zimmer (Matchstick Men), Thomas Newman (American Beauty), Carter Burwell (Being John Malkovich) and Harry Gregson-Williams (Chicken Run).
More than movements or melodies, Martinez composes original sounds. That doesn’t seem so tough. But look around his Calabasas home. Here, a roomful of big steel drums. There, a row of percussion tubes taller than he is. Martinez records most of his tracks in his own home studio; you have to build a thing like that and learn to operate it.
And he spends a lot of time poking around junkyards for percussion “instruments.” “I discovered that generally the really cool stuff is large. I stick the mike right up against it and hit it lightly, trying to de-emphasize the onset of the sound and emphasize the tone, the ring-off,” he says, applying a large, soft mallet to a hanging hunk that looks like a car hood, the top of which he’s adorned with a row of metal antennas. A deep, watery sustain floods the room. He takes sounds such as this, processes them in different ways, samples them and stores them in his computer library.
The star of his living room, though, is an exotic instrument called the Crystal, which looks like something out of a Paul Klee drawing. Its tones come from a row of thin glass rods, which resonate against a sort of metal shield. Martinez first saw one as a child in 1965, at an art exhibition.
“It blew me away,” says Martinez. “It made me not only want to be a musician, but to be a weird musician.” He thought it would be a fantastic addition to the Solaris soundtrack, though it ended up being used more in Wonderland. He spent a lot of taxi fares in France tracking down its creators, François and Bernard Vachet.
“One of the brothers I guess you’d call a metal sculptor, and the other one is more preoccupied with acoustics. So they always built stuff that looked cool, and some of their instruments were actually a little more successful in the art world than they were in the music world. They’re kind of hard to get. You can’t order them from Guitar Center.”
He had one flown in from France, and divined many of its secrets in just six weeks of lessons from the Crystal’s only virtuoso, Michel Deneuve. Martinez dips his fingers in water and strokes the rods, whose tones rise into an enveloping, gorgeously thrilling blend. The smile is in his eyes now. He likes this job.
Soundtracking is “something I kind of learned just by doing it,” he says. “I always felt like I just fumbled my way through it. But I finally feel like I’m beginning to get good at it. The film thing is kind of spooky, though, because as soon as your job is done, you’re unemployed.” Between movies, he has packed his head with formal knowledge, studying piano and orchestration. “I also spend quite a bit of time trying to keep current on music technology. Which means reading lots of manuals.”
Last Halloween, back at the Fox sound stage, synchronization digits blur across the bottoms of several video screens filled with George Clooney’s space-helmeted face. Nobody here knows yet that the theatrical run of Soderbergh’s Solaris, an entirely new take on the Stanislaw Lem novel previously filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky, will be short, swamped in the holiday marketplace. The production credits of James Cameron and Jon Landau won’t save it. Not even a couple of lovemaking scenes in which Clooney showcases his sculpted glutes will get it more than a passing glance.
It will turn out that Solaris — now out on video — just isn’t a holiday movie. It’s an austere, personal film whose deep emotion is, you know, a commercial problem. It asks questions most of us don’t want to answer.
Conductor Bruce Fowler, who has orchestrated Martinez’s score, lightly ushers the crowd of sawing and sonorizing instrumentalists through airy musical passages that waft over the bwonks and pings Martinez has recorded at home. Somebody suggests bringing the flutes up an octave, and the change is adopted. The music incorporates the feel of György Ligeti’s Atmospheres, which was conscripted for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Martinez has studied the way Ligeti wrote parts for each of 28 violins so they’d enter and exit at different times, producing an impression of infinite continuity.
Soderbergh is nowhere around. He trusts Cliff with this stuff.
On the screen, the pixels of Clooney’s face dissolve into the sparkled void, where a spacecraft floats, functional and beautiful. The music is perfect. Martinez hunches over his laptop. He’s breathing. It’s art.
