SOMEWHERE OUT THERE

James Horner wrote

SOMEWHERE OUT THERE -

Just yesterday, I wrote about appreciating those healing beacons in our lives ...

And now, he has died in the crash of the plane he was piloting.

One of the things I was looking forward to was James Horner's work on the sequel to AVATAR.

 I bet James Cameron never considered his lengthy gestation of that movie would cost him a trusted partner.

Just scan a few of his soundtracks:

GLORY. FIELD OF DREAMS. AN AMERICAN TAIL.

TITANIC. ALIENS. THE WRATH OF KHAN.

LEGENDS OF THE FALL. HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS. BRAVEHEART.

APOLLO 13. GORKY PARK. COCOON.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND. PELICAN BRIEF. AVATAR.

It's strange the loss I feel. 

His music has become a bedrock of much of the fiction I write as I write certain scenes.

In fact, one of my fantasies is that he would write the music for one of my novels turned into a movie.

{Dreamer, me.}

James Horner has keen words of wisdom for us as writers, too:

 “My job

— and it’s something I discuss with Jim [Cameron] all the time —

is to make sure at every turn of the film it’s something the audience can feel with their heart.”

Horner said.

“When we lose a character, when somebody wins, when somebody loses, when someone disappears —

at all times I’m keeping track, constantly, of what the heart is supposed to be feeling.

That is my primary role.”

He deeply appreciated John Williams:

 “It was very operatic,” he said of John Williams’s famous Star Wars score.

“You had a theme for bravery, you had Luke’s theme, you had the empire’s theme, you had Leah’s theme,

and then maybe more, and they were all intertwined.

They were really significant themes and you could tell what was going on. That type of writing is gone."

He said, 

“On several occasions on films I’ve worked on, I would write a theme to express an idea

and I’d be asked to take the theme out and just do it with chords or somehow imply it."

 “They did not want a theme in the film.

I don’t really know of another way to say something from the heart except by how I orchestrate it and with a theme.”

Horner said that he had “cut back” on writing music for major motion pictures because of the rise in predictable action movies.

But he said he would never quit writing for movies,

"To have a piece of music forever married to a piece of film, that’s a special sort of relationship.”

And that special relationship is how James Horner will live on in our hearts.