Michael Nyman Quotations

I was rather disappointed, because the one thing I wanted to gain from that opportunity was to add something to his music, and have him add something to mine.

It was a very curious situation when there were two soundtracks for the film being composed simultaneously - my score, and the songs.

The film scores, the operas, the string quartets, and the instrumentals. I feel free basically to slap down any ideas that interest me.

I'm not a great inventor from scratch. What I do is to use, steal, acquire, reproduce or re-cycle music from other musicians.

I feel absolutely no threat or fear in Mexico City.

There's always a question of duration, there's a question of who the orchestra is. No one is free to write what you want - you collaborate on a film score, and one of the good things is that someone else's work is motivating you.

I'm like a decathlete who does all of the events he's used to, but is being forced by certain circumstances to focus on three events, and being forced to focus on events that he wasn't that interested in, and also weren't his strongest events.

I'm not saying that there weren't other inherent problems with the score that couldn't have been overcome with a bit of remixing, but why did they ask me to do it, and why did Griffin ask me to do it this way, for a film that had nothing to do with American vernacular?

What happened with Practical Magic was that I wrote the best score I think I've ever written for a film that engaged me not at all.