The Music Behind the Films

Posted on March 20, 2006

Dina Eng of The Seattle Timeswrote an interesting article about the experience of scoring music for a feature film. Nathan Wang, one of Hollywood's most successful film composers, created the music for the Amanda Bynes-starring feature film She's the Man, a high school comedy based on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Wang talks about the process of composing and scoring music to reflect the film it accompanies.

"Music is subordinate to what's happening on the screen," Wang explains. "I used to rent Charlie Chaplin silent movies, and would play the piano when I was 11 or 12, accompanying Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. That's still my same process of composing." While he tends to keep a low profile, Wang is actually one of the most successful composers in Hollywood. Prolific and versatile, he's written music for Jackie Chan movies, Steven Spielberg documentaries, animated cartoons, opera, symphonies and more.
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Andy Fickman, director of the film[She's the Man], says Wang was his first and only choice for composer. "Any time I have needed a musical partner in the last eight years, it's been Nathan," says Fickman, who worked with Wang on "Reefer Madness" (the stage play and Showtime film) and the independent teen comedy "Who's Your Daddy." "He has a classical heart, but if I say, 'Let's take this into rock 'n' roll, or 1930s jazz,' he's got the ability to dive into that world easily. He's just a genius. I know I'm smarter than him, and a better dresser, but I admit that he's a genius."
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"I've always had this entrepreneurial side to me," says Wang, whose maternal grandfather owned the No. 1 Department Store in Shanghai, the first commercial building to have escalators in China. "I just have a joy of going from one project to another."
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"I've gotten great opportunities to work on both Asian and American projects," Wang says. "Music is such an emotional part of me. It's so easy to express myself when I'm playing the piano. I really enjoy writing orchestrally because you interact with great musicians. As real as computers can sound, they can't replace live music."

From Reefer Madness to Spielberg documentaries. Now that's what we call a versatile artist.