James Horner Music Quotations

When I do a film score, I am basically nothing more than a fancy pencil for hire. I don't own any of the music when I am - it belongs to the film company - and likewise, when I am done, even if I come up with something astounding that I may want to revisit... in the world of film composition, you can't do that.

My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.

I think people hire me for the slightly weird angle that I bring. Part of the trick is keeping it sort of simple; you have to give the impression of not that much music playing when there's really a lot.

The sound world that I created for 'Avatar' had to be very different, really, than anything I ever created before. There is also three hours of music.

The music's job is to get the audience so involved that they forget how the movie turns out.