John Paesano - The Maze Runner (2014) OST

Soundtrack / Score

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Tracklist:

01. The Maze Runner (02:49)
02. What is This Place? (03:03)
03. My Name is Thomas (03:15)
04. Ben's Not Right (02:41)
05. Banishment (03:14)
06. Waiting in the Rain (01:50)
07. Into the Maze (02:36)
08. Griever! (02:40)
09. Going Back In (02:31)
10. Why are We Different? (02:01)
11. Chat with Chuck (02:18)
12. Section 7 (05:14)
13. Maze Rearrange (02:07)
14. Griever Attack (03:55)
15. Trapped (02:07)
16. WCKD is Good (01:56)
17. Thomas Remembers (03:35)
18. Goodbye (02:08)
19. Final Fight (02:43)
20. WCKD Lab (05:57)
21. Finale (04:17)

About:

Wes Ball has gone on the record many times declaring his strong passion for movie scores and soundtracks. When setting out to add audio for the film, he made it known that he wasn’t looking to promote a bunch of new trendy musicians by putting them on the Maze Runner soundtrack. Rather, he felt the film needed a vibrant orchestral score to enhance the action and drama. Thus was born his partnership with John Paesano.

Paesano has composed posed scores for Dragons: Riders of Berk, Crisis, and When The Game Stands Tall.


Released by:
Sony Classical
Release/catalogue number:
88875003522
Release date:
15 September 2014



Film Music Monday: John Paesano on The Maze Runner

By Jennifer Harmon, Director of Film & Television/New Media
(excerpt)

Composer John Paesano has been climbing the ladder in Hollywood for many years with his work on Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas, NBC's Crisis, and his Annie Award-winning work on the DreamWorks Dragons series. That climb led him to The Maze Runner, the film adaptation of the first book in James Dashner's young adult book series, which hit #1 at the box office in 50 countries this weekend. John sat down with us to discuss his collaboration with The Maze Runner director Wes Ball and his process for developing the score for this dystopian adventure.

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Where did you record The Maze Runner score?

Here at the Newman stage [at Fox Studios]. We did 80 players with choir for seven or eight days. There’s nothing better than recording in LA when we can do it. It’s becoming less and less [common], but Fox is awesome. They’re always trying to keep stuff in town and do it right. I mean, they had a huge box office last year and I think it’s on all levels whether it’s the filmmaking, all the way to the scoring. When you see The Maze Runner, you’ll be amazed at what they squeezed out for 30 million dollars. It’s amazing! This movie holds up against The Hunger Games, it holds up against Divergent, and those are 100 million dollar films. It’s a little scary because that’s what people are going to compare it to. But I’m not worried about it. Wes [Ball, director of The Maze Runner] was always like “ We are going to get compared to all of the other YA films" but I say bring it on! I feel like it really holds up against all of those. He did an amazing job with it!

How many minutes of music did you record?

90 minutes, and we had everybody in the room. Wes is a huge fan of Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams and John Barry and more of the older guard composers. When I initially sat down with him to talk about a plan to put together for Maze Runner, his initial idea was, “I want to do a big Jurassic Park score!” This movie is taking place out in the wilderness, there’s this place called The Glade, it’s all outdoors, big walls. You know, replace dinosaurs with walls.

There were walls in Jurassic Park!

Yeah, totally! It did have that feel, that vibe to it. And it’s funny because this happens a lot: “Hey, read the script and tell me what you think the score will be.” And you really don’t know what the score’s going to be until you can actually see frames of the movie and put music up against it. You can have the greatest ideas in the world, but man, the minute that footage comes in and you start throwing those ideas against it, you really, in a very quick fashion, find out what’s not going to work.

Even though he and I both loved the idea and we thought it was going to work absolutely perfectly for the film, that Jurassic Park original idea, when I started putting those ideas up against picture, even temped with it a little, it was just completely wrong.

What was wrong about using Jurassic Park as a reference? The tone?

Yeah, the tone was one thing. I think that [Maze Runner] is a much darker movie than Jurassic Park. There’s a lot more tension than there was in Jurassic Park. It wasn’t a horror story. The Maze Runner is more sci-fi, dark, dystopian. Wes has a great description of it – it’s Lord of the Flies meets Lost.

It’s very different than all the other young adult stuff out there. Wes would always say, too, “You have a target on your back when you make a young adult film now,” because everyone wants to compare you to The Hunger Games, Ender’s Game, The Vampire Diaries, Mortal Instruments...Twilight is obviously a big one. But it’s very different than a lot of those movies. It’s a lot scarier. There's a lot more tension than those movies.

And this is the first film of a series?

The Maze Runner is the first of three. The next one’s going to be The Scorch Trials. It’s a group of boys, it’s about teamwork and brotherhood and unity. There’s some inner turmoil that’s between different tribes of boys living in The Glade, so you can kind of see how it’s got that Lord of the Flies vibe to it. And the Lost aspect is this giant mystery that they’re trying to figure out. So after explaining that, you could see how Jurassic Park would be an odd pairing for it...I don’t know if it’s just the pacing of the film, the editing of the film, the tone of the film, it just didn’t vibe correctly with the style of score of Jurassic Park, a very big, thematic, melodic type score. Now that being said, there were definitely elements of Jurassic Park that worked extremely well in it. Whether it was the instrumentation, the way that John Williams does develop tension in some of the scenes with the more scary scenes with the dinosaurs and stuff, really, really worked well. This is not electronic music sweetened with orchestral score. It’s an orchestral score sweetened with some hybrid elements.

So I definitely did lean on using more orchestra verses hybrid elements in The Maze Runner score. Which, in a sense, makes it feel like it’s a throwback, even though it’s not pure, 100% orchestra only. It had to be its own thing. You couldn’t just rip off a score and put it in there, but I definitely had a lot of influence from different scores of that era. Aliens was another one.

Is that why you incorporated the hybrid elements?

I think it needed it, too. When the score starts off, it’s very organic in nature. I use a lot of orchestra, but I’m using a lot of skin drums, taikos. I went out to New Orleans, actually, when they were filming and I sampled a lot of stuff they had on set because it’s this group of boys and they’ve built this village and in the village there are oil drums and there’s all this material there. Okay, first of all, it was recorded in New Orleans, in the swamp. As miserable as it was, it was so beautiful, too. Because if you’re from that area, you know it’s so hot and muggy.

I’m from the South, so I have sympathy.

But at the same time, when the sun’s going down and you have all the cicadas and the wind blowing through the grass and the trees and there are all these fires going...They built this whole Ewok village-type setting. It was very primitive even though it was a futuristic movie. The set was very primitive because it was a group of boys with nothing. They had to build. Even though it was in the future, at some point, they didn’t have dormitories and homes, they had to make lean-tos. They were eating wildlife that lived around. They were basically being thrown back into the Stone Age and that’s how they had to live. So when I went out there to visit, I remember hearing all the different sounds and I was like, “Oh, it would be really cool to come back here with some of my guys and record a lot of this stuff around.”

So you went back to the set in Louisiana to record live?

I recorded the cicadas and we tapped on oil drums on set, and recorded the fire and did a bunch of field recording and we took it all back here, brought it into the samplers and sequencers and we manipulated it and made drones out of the cicadas and percussion out of the sticks that we used. And I incorporated a lot of that into the score, mostly in the first half of the film. So even though there are hybrid elements in the score, I tried to make them organic in nature. I tried to make them out of organic things instead of just synths, at least in the beginning half of the film.

Now, as the boys go through this mystery, and they started realizing that there’s a greater world outside of these walls, and a more technically advanced world, when stuff like that starts getting introduced, I start taking these hybrid elements and start bringing them more into synthetic sounds and more modern vibes. The score starts to transform a little bit into this new world that they’ve discovered. So it starts out very primitive, big taiko drums and sticks and clacking noises and big oil drums for percussion, and it transfers into a more modern score. By the time we get to the end, we’re fully in modern land.

Was it your plan from the start to have the score evolve in style?

It wasn’t exactly planned that way in the beginning but it was something that naturally just happened. I thought I’d record this stuff and use it throughout the whole entire score. And then, again, once we started putting it up against picture, it worked great in the beginning, but then when we got to the end, it was like, “Wait, we’re in a different world now.” And the great thing with Wes, he was such a collaborator that I really, honestly didn’t feel like I was writing out the score myself. He was along with me pretty much every single part of the way. They were over at Fox cutting and he would come here two times a week at 12 o’clock at night and we would hang out and listen to stuff and talk about it; we were night owls. And even though I wrote it, we really wrote this plan, kind of like a blue print for the score, together.

And this is Wes’s first feature?

Yeah, first feature. He did this short called Ruin that caught a lot of fire on social media. He did everything himself on it.

Because he’s a visual effects guy.

He’s a visual effects guy. But he’s a very story-driven guy, too. Like I said, we had the same influences growing up. We were huge Spielberg fans, huge James Cameron fans, big into Raiders, big into Jurassic Park, big into The Abyss. I think essentially, at the end of the day, [that's] how I even ended up getting the gig. The first time I talked to him, when we were talking about ideas, I remember it was just like, “Oh, we’re just the same person.” It made total sense that we should have been working on this thing together because we had similar ideas, even before we shot. Which was another unusual thing. I was brought onto the film even before it was shot.

How early were you brought on?

About a year before we dubbed. Which, again, is such an old-school thing. Because the process took so much longer back in the '70s and '80s, we didn’t have all this equipment to helps us record and get mock-ups done. Now, film scores are written in three months. And let’s be honest, who knows if John Williams had only three months to write Star Wars, would he have come up with the great themes that he came up with in that movie? I feel like guys had so much more time back then to live with the film, to sit with it. Sometimes it takes you three months to figure out what doesn’t work. It’s a lot of ideas to suss out.

Well, films that have these strong visual elements take time to develop and seem to afford that opportunity for you to sit with it.

I have so much respect for anybody who can even get through one of these scores, let alone write something as thematic and amazing as Star Wars or Jurassic Park! ::laughs:: Having that amount of time allowed me to go out to set, do all that field recording, allowed me to come and incorporate it in into the score. I would have never been able to do that if I had three months to do the score.

I had to work through an idea that we were going to try to do A Thin Red Line thing and realize that we could use a little bit of it. It was about, “This part of Jurassic Park works really well so let’s take that and put it in a bucket, and this idea from A Thin Red Line idea and put it in a bucket.” Of course you take all these influences and ideas and you have to make them into your own. You can’t just take A Thin Red Line and throw it under the score and mimic the score and expect it to work.

If anybody thinks they just start a film score and just come up with a completely original idea, it’s hard to believe, to be honest with you. We’re all influenced, whether it’s by classical composers, whether it’s by other film composers. I think John Powell said it the best: "Take the opportunity to write music VERY seriously. It’s taken a lot of other people a lot of work, talent and energy to allow you to sit there at a computer, ripping off the temp. But don’t take yourself too seriously. After all, you are just sitting there at a computer, ripping off the temp. It’s not exactly art now, is it? For fuck's sake, you’re a 'film' composer…" We have so many influences we pull from.

It sounds like John Williams is one of your big influences. Who else would you say is a big influence besides him?

I would say Jerry Goldsmith is a big one. But then even modern guys. I’m really influenced by Hans Zimmer and what he’s done with music and how he’s taken it to a completely other place. And Danny Elfman who’s really between both worlds. James Newton Howard, Gabriel Yared...I have so many people I’m just huge fans of. I don’t even consider myself a film composer. I consider myself more of a fan of this than anything. I’m just fortunate enough to do it now.

In The Maze Runner, I hear Tom Newman, I hear a little bit of John Williams in certain things, I hear a little bit of Jerry Goldsmith, I hear a little bit of Hans in some of the more subtle, ambient cues in this film. As it gets a little more modern, I think there's a cue called “Into the Maze,” it’s a very hybrid, aggressive, ostinato string thing, and there’s definitely some Zimmer influence in that. There are so many different guys that have crept into the score. You could even say there’s a little bit of Michael Kamen in certain parts. There’s another cue called “Ben’s Banishment” that has tons of that Jerry Goldsmith, monster movie type vibe to it. There are so many different influences.

I still have plenty more to learn. It’s such a deep subject. I think it’s one of the best parts of the film industry, the music portion of it. There’s nothing better than sitting on that scoring stage and watching a director finally see his music and his score being put to picture, and they finally see their film. It’s such a long journey for them, you know? They start off in pre-production, they go to production, even post. By the time they get to that scoring stage, it’s like this is it, this is the final piece that’s going to be put on this thing. You get to see their eyes light up in this year-long, two year-long journey that they’ve been on. Some guys, it’s very, very emotional for them, and I get it. It’s like they’re handing you over their baby, and they’re letting you put the final touches on it. (...)

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