Bear McCreary Interview

[00:00:01] Okay, David, this is where we're supposed to choose a side. Green or black? John, my soul is as black as night. Your turn. I am black for life. So, we're not fighting? I thought this is where HBO wanted us to, like, pick sides and fight and stuff.

[00:00:24] Don't worry, I'm sure we'll find plenty to disagree about on the pod. But we seem to agree on one thing. We both really like this show. The politics, the drama, the lore. It was made for The Lorehounds. And since we just finished recapping season one,

[00:00:38] we couldn't be more ready to defend our black queen in the Dance of the Dragons. And with the season pass option in Supercast, listeners can get early ad-free access to each weekly scene-by-scene deep dive, plus our custom show guide with all the characters and connections.

[00:00:53] See you in The Lorehounds podcast feed each week for our dragonfire hot, but probably positive, takes. The Lorehounds' House of the Dragon coverage is also safe for team green consumption. Side effects may include a deeper understanding of dragon lore, a hardened conflict with itself,

[00:01:06] and an inescapable urge to read the book Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin. Dragon seeds may experience burning. Welcome to The Lorehounds podcast. We are The Lorehounds, your guides to music composition in film and TV.

[00:01:38] I'm Jon, and today David and I are going to be interviewing Bear McCreary in this special edition of The Lorehounds podcast. We are going to be talking about his work on The Rings of Power, Foundation, and all the other projects he's been working on,

[00:01:53] as well as some of his future projects. So I hope you all enjoy this. You can always send in feedback to lorehounds at thelorehounds.com. You can go to thelorehounds.com to use the contact form or send a voicemail.

[00:02:07] You can head to our Discord server in the show notes if you want to get in on the conversation. And wherever you find us, I hope you enjoy this interview coming up. David with us today is a very special guest. We have Bear McCreary.

[00:02:20] Our listeners will recognize him from shows we've covered, The Rings of Power and Foundation. He's the composer, the scorer for these shows, and the man behind the music. So Bear, thank you so much for being with us today.

[00:02:33] Hey, thanks for inviting me. This is going to be fun. Yeah, we're super excited to talk to you. I know that we nerd out over all the production details, but especially in those two shows, your music has stuck out as something that really highlights

[00:02:49] the emotional beats and adds a lot of atmosphere to these shows. I know I'm a gamer, a video gamer, and a god of war. I sort of recognized your style before I looked in the credits, and it's just funny how you have that signature style. No way, really?

[00:03:06] That's been carrying over through my nerddom. Well, I appreciate you mentioning all of that. And let me just start by saying that there's definitely a freedom that I am allowed on The Rings of Power and Foundation when it comes to fantasy and science fiction, respectively,

[00:03:25] to just pull the stops out and tell a big, sweeping, thematically-driven, emotional orchestral story, which are the kind of stories I grew up on. They're the movies I watched, the shows I watched, and the scores I listened to. So I'm very fortunate to get to work with showrunners

[00:03:44] like David S. Goyer on Foundation and J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay on The Rings of Power. And we share this common language of orchestral music. We all talk about and reference the same scores over and over. And God of War, to a degree as well,

[00:04:02] also embraces that kind of epic, emotional storytelling that I don't want to say is my specialty. I can do an atmospheric synth score. I can. But it is probably what I prefer to do, is something that wears its heart on its sleeve

[00:04:23] and has melodies that, with any luck, get stuck in your head. So I'm very grateful for all those opportunities and appreciate you flagging them. Great. Yeah. I mean, you can tell that you love what you do, just the way you've talked about it in previous interviews.

[00:04:38] I know our favorite Tolkien scholar, Marilyn Arpukula, who's on a lot of our content, she mentioned she saw you speak virtually at Oxenmute. And she said, Bear can talk all day about this stuff, and it's great. That's very true.

[00:04:53] I was a little nervous at first speaking at Oxenmute, which is this somewhat academic collection of Tolkien scholars. But I realized very quickly that, said with love, they're just a bunch of nerds like me. That's right.

[00:05:06] So we actually can just nerd out about Rings of Power and Tolkien and fantasy storytelling and science fiction storytelling. And that's been really, really cool. I think there was quite a little bit of buzz around your appearance at Oxenmute as well.

[00:05:21] So you were, I believe you were well-received. Oh, great. I appreciate that because doing these things virtually, it's not like talking to you guys here where there's the three of us. When you're giving an interview that's being viewed by an audience, but you can't see or hear them,

[00:05:37] you don't know if anything's landing. You don't know if people are resonating with what you're saying. And so it was cool to hear afterward, people said they liked it. So that was great. Well, I'm glad it wasn't all for moot. Whomp, whomp, cue the trombone. Nice one.

[00:05:54] David, I know you had some questions lined up. You want to start off? Sure, yeah. So I just have to shout out Bellingham. I'm original Seattle-born native, grew up also in Portland. What? So spent a little time in Bellingham. Oh, another Pacific Northwestern lad. I love it. Absolutely.

[00:06:10] And now I make my home out here in Vermont, which has a P&W kind of vibe to it. Totally. The leaves are green and the sky is blue. And when the weather is warm, it is heaven on earth up there. Absolutely.

[00:06:24] As Perry Cuomo, I think, once said, the bluest skies you ever saw were in Seattle. So anyway. It's true. And truly there is something that happens because it's gray. It's gray nine months of the year. The three months that it's not, everyone's happy. Everyone goes to the beach.

[00:06:40] Everyone walks down the street with this grin on their face, which I did not appreciate until I moved to Los Angeles, where it's blue most of the time. But that means there is a sort of sameness. I don't want to say a lack of gratitude,

[00:06:54] but there is a sense that we're entitled to good weather and it's not something to celebrate. Yeah. Change gives us a definition, I guess, in our lives and in our world. So yeah, lead-off question. And this one kind of ties in with some other questions.

[00:07:09] We reached out to some of our patrons and some of our other lore hounds co-hosts. So I think this one will help kind of set some groundwork for going forward, but could you walk us through the basic outline, the basic process for working on a new show?

[00:07:27] What are some of the easy parts? What are some of the harder parts? But I think for a lot of folks, especially non-musicians, and especially folks who have nothing to do with film or TV production, it's kind of a gray mass of inconceivable,

[00:07:41] how do you even get started with this? There are studios, there are showrunners, there are actors, there are scriptwriters. It's a really complex world. So without being – every project is going to be unique, of course. But what's kind of a general process so that we can frame ourselves

[00:07:58] in this world that you work in? Well, I appreciate you framing the complexity of the question. It's not an easy – Every project. Every project is unique. That is the short answer, but you put it in the question, so you've disarmed me. Bravo. Thank you.

[00:08:13] Every show for me begins ultimately with sitting in this room that I'm in right now, staring at a screen, and looking at a blank sequencer canvas, and having to write music that will tell the story. Everything that leads up to that is different.

[00:08:35] Everything that comes after that is different. But that's the thing that happens when you hire me instead of somebody else. You're going to get my ideas, my instinct, my narrative voice, my taste, my life story is all part of – will become part of your show. Absolutely.

[00:08:55] So I think that for me, the way in is through themes, and the way to get themes is through character. This is true for film, for television, for video games. Ultimately, I need to write a theme that when you hear it,

[00:09:12] you understand something basic about the main character that it connects with or the story arc. So often on a practical level, I make a list of all the different themes. Do you get scripts ahead of time? Do you get – what, do you get a Bible?

[00:09:29] Do you get one of the show Bibles? Good question. How do I generate the list? Good question. I can often have access to – let me rephrase that. I have access to whatever exists. If I've been hired early, there might not be episodes to look at.

[00:09:46] I will read a script. Sometimes in the case of Foundation, I got hired before there was even a script. David Goyer was in my living room at my kid's birthday party talking about how he just got the rights to Foundation, and I'm flipping out. I'm so excited.

[00:10:01] I read those books when I'm a kid. My mind is already going. I wouldn't even begin writing for four years. Other times, I'm hired late, and there's an episode to read. So the best thing to do is to formulate an understanding of what the show is

[00:10:17] based on how it exists in the moment. It always involves conversations with showrunners. You want to know where it's going. If there's a pilot episode, that doesn't tell you where it's going to go at the end of the season,

[00:10:28] where might it go in season two, where might it go in season five. This is where, of all the shows I've done, the outlier that is the most complicated logistically is The Rings of Power because the first season alone, I made a list and it was 17 themes.

[00:10:45] A typical show, I will start off with four, sometimes even just one. 17 was outrageous, and I thought there's no way it would be that many. But it needed that many, and furthermore, I had to think about not only how they would map out across the season,

[00:11:04] but I could say with some confidence to myself, this story will probably go to its natural conclusion. Many episodes from now, they were throwing around numbers like 40 to 50 hours of content. In this case, we're getting to the last alliance of elves and men.

[00:11:21] If you saw The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson's iconic movie, the first seven minutes that Galadriel explains the backstory, that's what The Rings of Power is doing. It only made it more important that I map out all those themes carefully

[00:11:35] because I'm probably going to get to use them. I always do my homework to start a show. I always make sure that I have all the themes that I'm going to need because I've learned in the past when I don't have all that in advance,

[00:11:51] sometimes a show makes it impossible to even have that. Then I end up having to course correct as I go and change thematic ideas. And I like to know where I'm at right from the get-go. Awesome. Can I ask a follow-up on your Rings of Power character themes?

[00:12:07] I saw a Twitter exchange a while ago where you had confirmed that there was something reversible about the Hal Brann theme. Yes. Can you talk a little bit about that? I can. I can talk a lot about that. I figured this out, actually.

[00:12:25] I keep mentioning David S. Goyer. I've done a lot of great projects with him on a show called Da Vinci's Demons. Just to say we really appreciate David Goyer, his accessibility to us, the way that he presents how he runs his rooms,

[00:12:37] and the way he works on his projects. It seems like he's a really great person to work with. He's a fantastic person to work with, a talented writer, and really a brilliant TV writer. We met on a show called Da Vinci's Demons,

[00:12:53] and for the main title for that show, I wanted to feature the theme I wrote for Da Vinci. He's a fictionalized version of the historical character. The historical person in real life could write backwards. He wrote this way. People speculate because he wanted to hide his notes

[00:13:09] if people found his notebooks. It was called mirror writing. I said, I'll just make his theme a palindrome. Truly, if you turn the Da Vinci theme backwards, it's the same. Fans have done it. You can literally reverse the main title and you hear the theme.

[00:13:26] I had already exercised that muscle and figured out the challenges there. In The Rings of Power, we meet this character named Halbrand. I'm not going to spoil it. I would recommend you watch the show. I will say there's another character that he has a relationship with

[00:13:43] that is not clear in the beginning. I wanted to create two themes that were actually the same. It's just that if you played one backwards, it was the Halbrand theme. This is an example of exactly what I was talking about. Having the runway of knowing the whole season,

[00:14:02] knowing what was going to happen after the season, meant it justified what was a ridiculous amount of work mapping that out. For seven and a half episodes, it didn't pay off. I had to do it even though I assumed no one would hear it.

[00:14:20] Of course, the truth is by about episode six, some fans started to notice and were tagging me on Twitter asking if this connection between these two themes, which appeared to be a palindrome, was real. I just kept my mouth shut for a few more weeks

[00:14:36] just to let other fans figure it out. That, to me, is the level of fun added meaning that score can bring. I think the headline I want to underline, that is not my job. My job is to not make palindromes,

[00:14:53] to not make character themes that evolve over seasons. My job is to make sure that when you watch The Rings of Power, Foundation, Battlestar Galactica, or you play God of War, that in every single moment, you feel something.

[00:15:07] That you have an emotional response to what you are having experienced in the moment. Then zoom out. What's the best way to do that? The best way to do that is to create some tools that create nostalgia.

[00:15:22] The themes, while it is fun and I love to get into it, I do want to underline that a lot of people write scores that are perfectly functional, that don't do this at all. It's not a requirement. It's just the way I like to approach the challenge

[00:15:36] of making sure the audience understands at every given juncture in this media they're experiencing what they're supposed to be feeling. Then I'm behind the scenes, pulling the strings, making them feel that. That dovetails perfectly into one of the questions

[00:15:52] that I had written up before, is that truism in TV and movies, that visuals tell us what to think, but music tells us how to feel. That idea that our senses are feeding our brain with all of this stimulation and information about the world.

[00:16:10] Some of our senses we can block out, we could close our eyes, but smell and hearing, they go right in. Unless you remove yourself from the source of the sound, it's coming in and you're going to have an emotional response to it unless you're Mr. Spock.

[00:16:30] Even Mr. Spock played the lute, or whatever his Vulcan lyre thing was. I want somebody listening right now to tell us later what it is. What is the name of the instrument in Star Trek that Spock played? I like it. Side note, I'm curious. That's a great observation.

[00:16:54] It comes right in and we can't do anything. What is that? You already started to answer the question, which is your job is to tell me how to feel about this scene. Yes, my job is to inform and nudge you toward feeling something.

[00:17:12] I would never dictate quite so much to say I tell you how to feel because I think you are correct. If you took the music out, you would know how to feel. You would know contextually, but music in a way hypercharges your brain.

[00:17:29] The ability to feel it immediately, to feel it intrinsically. There is something about sound that gets right to our primordial lizard brain. I'm talking a million years ago, our ancestors were walking through the woods

[00:17:46] and they heard something in the reeds and they felt immediately they needed to climb a tree. That's what film scoring is. It is that immediate instinctual response to contextual information that may or may not be emotional or be immediately emotional.

[00:18:05] I think there is something very true about what you're saying. I am among the final protégés of a film composer named Elmer Bernstein, who I worked for for about 10 years at the end of his life.

[00:18:19] He was one of the greatest film composers of the 20th century. Look him up. I'm doing that right now. He scored The Ten Commandments, The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, Ghostbusters, Animal House. You're singing to my soul here. The Age of Innocence, Cape Fear for Martin Scorsese.

[00:18:40] He did the remake. He did a bunch of John Wayne westerns. To Kill a Mockingbird is probably my favorite main title theme of all time. I got to know him really well. The thing that's interesting about studying with Elmer Bernstein, he taught me a lot.

[00:18:59] More than anything else, Elmer Bernstein taught me that the only question you ever need to ask a filmmaker is what do you want the audience to feel? That's it. I use this every day when I'm talking with filmmakers because sometimes they don't know how to speak the language.

[00:19:17] They assume they have to come meet me where I reside. They'll say, I don't like clarinets. Or can we use trumpets? Or the temp music does this. I want the music to be more purple. When they get lost, I always listen to what they're saying

[00:19:36] and I go, okay, well let me ask you this. What do you want the audience to feel? They're never confused. Ever. I've never stumped a filmmaker because they know. Oh, well I want the audience to feel they're scared.

[00:19:48] I want the audience to feel like he's falling in love with her. I want the audience to laugh. They know this. That's their job. That's their only job. When you ask them this question, it takes all the pressure off. Man, don't talk to me about clarinets.

[00:20:02] Let me solve that problem. Just tell me what you want the audience to feel. I learned that from Elmer. It's the greatest piece of film scoring wisdom I think you can impart. Amazing. If I could hop off that question to bring it to the next stage of

[00:20:20] how do you deal with universes that already have an emotional history? You have the Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson movies with Howard Shore's score. You have the God of War games where you have this whole history of several games

[00:20:35] before this reboot of the series that you took part of. How much do you lend yourself to that and how much do you differentiate what you're doing? It's an interesting question and increasingly my generation has to deal with it. I am of the artistic generation

[00:20:51] that cannot let go of their toys. I'm 44 and I grew up on Star Wars and Child's Play and Godzilla and Terminator and Lord of the Rings and Battlestar Galactica. All of those things I have scored as a professional. All of them.

[00:21:14] And in each case I have to tackle with that exact question. What do you do with nostalgia? It can be weaponized. It can be leaned on like a crutch. It can be ignored. And there's the complicated rights question.

[00:21:35] Just because you have the rights to remake one of these stories does not mean you have the rights to use the music from that remake. So every situation is different. I will say I feel like the universe has allowed me to work that problem out

[00:21:53] the best way possible every time. For example, I did a show called Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles. I cite this example not because it's the one everybody knows the best but because it's not. I highly recommend you go find it.

[00:22:07] I don't know where it's streaming. It's hard to find. When you watch it, know that it was a network show from 2009 that was trying to be a serialized, gritty, adult remake. Not a remake, a continuation. Forgive me. A continuation of a beloved science fiction story.

[00:22:24] It was so far ahead of its time that it's almost hilarious. That every network now, every streaming network wants to have Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Lena Headey who would go on to star in Game of Thrones played Sarah Connor. This show was very, very good

[00:22:42] and for a network show, it's one of the best that's ever been made. The reason I bring it up is that the reason I bring it up is that I had access to Brad Fidel's music who scored James Cameron's first two movies.

[00:23:01] And to be clear, our show picked up after Terminator 2. It was the first narrative on screen to do that. And I had access to Brad Fidel's music for 10 seconds. That's it. 10 seconds. So on the title card, we went, ba-ba-bum-ba-bum, ba-ba-bum-ba-bum, you're out. That's it.

[00:23:23] So I had to write a- That was a legal rights issue then. It was a legal rights issue. Financial issue. I don't know. I don't know what it was. It was a lawyer stuff. And I've gotten to know Brad quite well in the years since. And he's delightful.

[00:23:40] At the time, I would have loved to use his Terminator theme. But it belongs- I mean, that's studios, lawyers, bean counters, all of it. But check this out. This is my point, guys. Even if I had access to it, the right thing happened.

[00:23:52] The right thing was not to use Brad Fidel's Terminator theme because it's so associated with Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Linda Hamilton, with our collective memories that I wrote for Sarah Connor, the Sarah Connor theme. Because this show really focused on her and John. It's a character study.

[00:24:14] And I wrote this melody that I think is really beautiful. It evokes Brad Fidel, especially in the first half. Ba-ba-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da. And then this new chord comes in. Ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's so beautiful. It's the story of a mother and her son trying to connect.

[00:24:41] And I found that the show was better because I was forced to do that. The exact opposite scenario. Godzilla, King of the Monsters. We did not have the rights to the Toho music from the 50s. And I'm scoring this movie where Godzilla fights Rodan

[00:25:03] and King Ghidorah, Mothra is in it. And I said to the director, we gotta get the old music. This is crazy. This music is to this franchise what James Bond's music is to him. In fact, this music predates James Bond.

[00:25:22] The fact that the Sony American remake didn't use it, then the legendary 2014 remake didn't use it, nor did they use the Blue Oyster Cult song, Godzilla, I thought was outrageous. And I said to the director, let's just do this. Let's correct this problem.

[00:25:40] They went and got the rights. They had to pay for them separately. But everybody felt passionately that was the right move. I knew in my heart of hearts now was not the time to write a new theme for Godzilla. No, I wanted to hear,

[00:25:55] bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. And it worked out. So I bring up those two disparate examples and we can get into the Lord of the Rings one, which is a whole other story.

[00:26:09] But I bring them up to show that there's no right answer. You just have to follow your instinct and make the best out of whatever scenario presents itself. That's a nice segue into my next question, which is how much prep do you like to go?

[00:26:24] Oh, well, let me really quick. Apparently Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles is on Hulu. So just for anybody who wants to follow up on that. Excellent. I feel no shame in plugging this show. If you like all the other stuff that everybody's watching

[00:26:40] and you want to see a show that should have gone on and become like Foundation or Battlestar, go watch Terminator. Okay. It's going to go up on my board. So the question of research and prep, I mean, there's only so many hours in the world.

[00:26:59] I think all three of us are parents. I've got an eight-year-old who we just took her to the Taylor Swift show last night. And there's only so much time in the world. There's the world that we grew up in and all of these properties, Battlestar Galactica,

[00:27:13] Star Wars, John Williams, whatever. But when you're getting a fresh project and like you said, you've got to take with what's before you and when they come to you and when you're actually signed on and legally, at least for the content, say with Foundation or Rings of Power

[00:27:28] or even Battlestar Galactica. Did you go back to the 1978 television series and binge watch a bunch of that? Or do you just dip in? Or how deep do you go? Did you already read Tolkien before Rings of Power came to you? Yeah. It's interesting. I research as needed.

[00:27:44] For example, I had seen many Godzilla films growing up but I didn't remember what the Akira Ifukube music was. When I got hired on Godzilla, I must admit it's not a name I would have been able to pull out of my mind. So I researched it

[00:28:01] and watched a bunch of the movies, listened to the music and I am an analytical enough mind when it comes to music that I started piecing it together. I got it. This march came from this movie then it ended up in here. That's the Godzilla theme.

[00:28:18] I got to preserve the essence of that. In Lord of the Rings, I had read the books when I was young. I had seen the Peter Jackson films and all 24 hours of the Peter Jackson making of DVDs so many times.

[00:28:40] No, I did not go watch Lord of the Rings when I got hired. If anything, I knew I shouldn't because I knew it so well. It was already so ingrained in my writing that I wanted to get some healthy distance from Howard's work. When I wrote music

[00:29:00] for Nori Brandyfoot, it would not be helpful to watch Fellowship of the Ring and hear that Shire music for the billionth time and say, well, time to write a piece of music as good as that. Not going to happen. All I had to do was wake up,

[00:29:20] go into my studio and write a piece of music that tells the story at hand. The story at hand is about a young hobbit who looks up to the stars metaphorically, knows there's more out there. She's optimistic, she's naive. She's going to go on a big journey

[00:29:40] and explore Shore's music. I research immensely. I often research cultural music from around the world. I researched Japanese folk music intensely when I started Battlestar Galactica. I became somewhat of an expert in traditional Japanese drumming. And I researched, again, when I did Godzilla, I researched Japanese music

[00:30:08] even more deeply. I've researched folk music from around the world when I think that there's some connection to that story. Norwegian folk music was something I knew very little about before I started God of War. That changed radically when I got hired on that project. So I research,

[00:30:30] but to get to your question, it's not something that is like work in my mind. It just becomes part of my life. It becomes music I listen to, movies I watch. It becomes a process. It's an ever-evolving process. And sometimes that leads me down

[00:30:49] paths where I end up doing research just for fun and looking later for a path to apply it. And there's cultural music that I've been obsessed with for years, and I have attempted to jam it into scoring projects that it doesn't ever stick.

[00:31:07] But it'll stick one of these days. So that's the thing. When you're an artist, research and life experience and your creative mind are all the same thing. There is no difference. When you're an artist, taking your kid to a Taylor Swift concert

[00:31:27] is going to show up in your life. I'm sorry, in your work, in your art. You're going to be a part of who you are. So I think that's one of the cool things about creativity, and it's something that I always intrinsically and intuitively understood,

[00:31:43] but I never thought about until I got a little older and started thinking about how does this work? And people like you would ask me questions and I would think, I don't know, I just do it. I never thought about how I come up with these ideas

[00:32:01] or how I research these ideas. Human beings need to be creating art and not programmed large language models need to be creating art. We can use them as tools, but we are creators. Human beings are creators. Absolutely. There is something truly magical about creativity.

[00:32:21] And to word it another way, I'll talk about one of my favorite scores, The Omen by Jerry Goldsmith. It would go on to be his only Academy Award win. And I always say that if someone had made a rough cut and told a composer, any composer,

[00:32:39] or even a large language model, write a score to this movie using Carmina Burana as an inspiration, but the text is satanic. Write a satanic mass for this horror movie. A lot of people would have done a good job. But that's not how it worked. Jerry Goldsmith

[00:32:59] watched that cut and thought, I'm going to take that satanic mass and turn it into the score for a horror movie. And from there, history was made. Horror was redefined. It takes moments like that. Another great example, my mentor and dear friend Elmer Bernstein

[00:33:20] scored a movie called Animal House. Even when he scored it, he said to the director, why am I scoring this? And it was John Landis. John Landis said, to them, it's a drama. To them, it's a drama. And Elmer Bernstein single-handedly changed the way comedy music

[00:33:43] appeared in movies for all time. His career diverted an immediate 90 degree angle to the point that he had to swear off comedies for the rest of his life a decade later because that's all he did. To say he was a groundbreaking score is an understatement.

[00:34:03] Anyone could have probably implemented that idea. And it would have been a fine movie. It would have been okay. But an AI would have never thought of that. It was John Landis and it was John Landis thought of it because he knew Elmer.

[00:34:19] John Landis was friends with Elmer's son. Elmer took John and his son Peter to see the Beatles when they were boys. So he knew Elmer's music and when he got a chance to make a big studio movie, he goes, I want Elmer, I want a fabulous

[00:34:35] national lampoon comedy. But that is how history is made. That is how ideas change the way we think about art. And that is the magic of it. It's absolutely magical. So speaking of technology in art, there's this rumor going around. I guess it's not a rumor.

[00:34:55] It's been talked about that you had some kind of special device for the foundation music. Oh, can you talk about that? Before I knew really what AI was, I thought about how I wanted to score foundation. Every project I take on, I should have answered this

[00:35:13] as the first question because this is the true answer. Every project I take on, the first thing I do is I try to think about what I can do different on this project that forces me to learn something. So when I got hired on God of War,

[00:35:31] it forced me to learn about 18th century folk music and the music that was being taken on sailing ships. Also to write pretty damn kick-ass main title theme, if I do say so myself. That was a fun one. With foundation, I thought, okay, the premise here is that

[00:35:53] what would function in another show like magic? Let's say it's Jedi's or it's Star Wars. It's sorcery. It's mathematics in foundation. The premise, the central premise is that Harry Seldon has a grasp of mathematics that to everyone else appears magical. He is able to foresee

[00:36:23] the future in long-term models. So I thought about the image that David Goyer was creating, how the math was being visualized so you can see this in what would become the main title sequence. How could I use math to write music?

[00:36:42] I got together with a friend of mine, Jonathan Snipes. He's most famous for being in a band called Clipping with Davi Diggs from Hamilton who I also worked with on Snowpiercer coincidentally. I said to Jonathan, I want to make mathematical music but I don't want to lose control.

[00:37:02] I want to create essentially like a tornado of music but then use my hands and my mind to shape it. I want to shape it into exactly what I want. Play these chords, play this melody. He came up with a piece of software inspired by foundation

[00:37:24] that he called Seldon Black. Seldon Black is essentially a random number generator that is applied to every aspect of music that you apply it to. I created a virtual orchestra, winds, brass, strings, percussion, all the different articulations but instead of me sequencing those sounds like I normally do,

[00:37:45] we splashed the mathematics into it. I was able to, using random number generators, trigger which sounds in the orchestra played, what notes they played, what register they played in, how dynamic the volume was, how long the notes were, the odds that the note would exist.

[00:38:15] Wait, the odds that the notes would exist? Exactly. That means if it's a zero, there's no sound. Yes, that's what I'm saying. It gets quantum, man. It gets quantum. If it's a zero, it's dead silence. You go up to one, once in a while you'd get a note.

[00:38:36] But you find the spot where I would tell it, use these pitches, use these colors. Ultimately if you want to hear what this sounds like, listen to the foundation main title. That is the beginning of the foundation main title. It's all built from

[00:38:57] what is a mosaic of rhythms that are awkward for human players, basically impossible for human players to play with that kind of robotic accuracy. I'm using the parameters in that software to shape the harmonic bed. Now of course I'm me, guys.

[00:39:15] Am I going to be satisfied with that? Am I going to be able to answer that core question, what do you want the audience to feel only using a hurricane of randomly generated information even if I can control it? No, I need to have more control. So finally,

[00:39:34] my goal was originally to score the entire show with nothing but that sound. And I realized I had to have a live orchestra. I had to. So you also hear that in the foundation main title that on top of the sprinkling of mathematically generated orchestral pitches,

[00:39:52] which are samples, that is not real, but then the cello section comes in and I start singing. That's our human hands on strings. It's evocative, it's emotional. Then I start bringing in more and more orchestral performances and create what is for me a hybrid.

[00:40:10] But that's the core of the show. The show is not just about math. The show is not a thesis. It's about people. Exactly. And you're supposed to feel it. You're not supposed to think about it. So ultimately, this mathematical software was something that moved into the background

[00:40:34] of my score. But just like the folk instruments in God of War or Battlestar Galactica, I used that as a way to get my creative juices going. And that's often the way it goes. It was ultimately, if you look at the amount of time we spent

[00:40:51] versus the amount of impact it literally has on your experience, you could make the argument, is it worth it? I spent two years on that software. I could have just sat there and gone like, blub blub blub blub blub blub on the keyboard.

[00:41:06] Would have been the same thing maybe, but not for me. That was how I got into the show, which put me in the headspace to be exhilarated and excited and inspired, which I would argue in turn translated to music that augments your experience much better.

[00:41:24] When I feel it, you feel it. It goes into the production. That sense of I'm giving my best and I'm having fun with this and I'm creative, that goes down to the grips, to the script writers, to the script writing.

[00:41:40] Everybody feels that when a show is firing like that. When you talk to a costume designer and you say like, hey, is there detail in the costumes that I'm not seeing on my HD screen? And they laugh. Of course there is. Of course there is.

[00:41:56] The details are there. But it's something that they do not knowing where the cutoff is for what you are going to experience, but for them it's vital. It's a good way that the actor carries themselves wearing that costume. It's the way that the light

[00:42:15] is going to fall off from that. I could go on. John, stop me. No, it's all right. The foundation theme in general has been one of my favorite themes in recent years, particularly because the melody is so, I don't want to say simple, but it's more traditional

[00:42:34] than the chord structures. The chords are bringing you to an unexpected place each time. My first degree was in music and I've lost a lot of knowledge since then. Well, I'll tell you, just real quick on that topic. I don't want to go too deep here. Chordal structure

[00:42:52] is often where I start. I love harmonic progressions. They make me feel things in a way. When you see an artist, a cartoonist, like a Disney animator, and they're going to draw something that looks incredible, they start with these big circles that are the anatomy of a person.

[00:43:12] Then they fill them in and they start to erase the circles. For me, that structure in music is harmony. What are the chords? Even in that Sarah Connor thing I was singing, that inspired me. One of the things that's fun that I did with Foundation

[00:43:28] is I write a chord progression that feels almost like it doesn't work. How do you get from here to there to there to there and then back again? Then what I do is I write a melody. I think to myself, I'll bet there's a melody I can do

[00:43:45] that hooks around almost like a thread stitching it together. There's common tones between this chord and that, between this chord and that, and that chord and this one. Then if I write a melody that feels very natural and evocative and singable but also threads between,

[00:44:04] it's like stitching pieces of cloth together. Maybe I can come up with something that I hope feels organic, natural. When you're listening to it, it just feels like Mary had a little lamb. It's just a little tune with some pretty chords, but it's kind of a weird tune.

[00:44:22] In a way, I think that that's maybe where if I have anything resembling a musical signature, that interlacing of strange harmonies with melodies that I find beautiful is probably where it comes from. Right. It feels to me like longing when you go to a new chord

[00:44:43] and it's not where you expect it to go with that melody. It's a really nice sentiment to leave the listener with, I think. It really sets the mood for the episode. Longing is one of the things I always want to feel with music.

[00:44:58] When I'm talking with filmmakers, in fact, there are certain words I never use. I don't use happy. I don't use sad. I don't use angry. They're vague. Longing, yearning, bittersweet, resentful. These are all more nuanced emotional terms. When I say, what do you want the audience to feel?

[00:45:20] Don't say happy. Tell me wistful, sentimental, bittersweet, you know, victorious. I appreciate very much what you are saying because what you are saying is a reflection back that the messages I'm trying to put in the music are getting to you and bouncing back to me,

[00:45:41] which makes me feel very rewarding. Oh, great. We actually have some questions from some of our listeners. LoremasterDoof71 wrote in something that ties in nicely here. Hi guys, my question for Bear would be how does he keep his music so distinct and different from each project?

[00:45:58] I already answered that. There it is. Truly, whether I'm writing for an orchestra or 8-bit Nintendo chiptunes or heavy metal or bagpipes or taiko drums, people tell me, they go, oh, it's your signature. It's so easy to not sound like anything I've ever written before.

[00:46:20] Why do people keep telling me that it sounds like me? Truly, why? But that's why it is ultimately the way I approach the fundamentals, melody and harmony. And to go back to those things I talked about, it's not training, it's not skill, it's my life experience,

[00:46:38] it's my DNA, it's what I had for breakfast this morning, it's who I am that makes it impossible for me to write a melody to go to rings of power. I could not write in the style of Howard Shore to save my life.

[00:46:56] Gun to my head, I couldn't do it. I don't know how to do it. I'm me, he's him. So all I can do is draw from the well and write what makes sense to me. That's probably the short answer to that. Yeah, no, I appreciate that.

[00:47:10] And Eric F. wrote in, touching on a lot of the things we already talked about, what's more rewarding or challenging and how is the process different for TV movies and video games? To be honest with you, they are very similar because I approach them through themes.

[00:47:30] When it comes to video games, hats off to the guys that score like Fortnite or FIFA. That's not me. That's not my way in. When I got hired on God of War, Cory Barlog sat me down and told me it is a story of a grieving father

[00:47:48] and an estranged son who take the ashes of their deceased wife and mother to the highest peak in all the realms because it was her dying wish. And I said to him, I know how to do that. Grieving. It's all there. You were just listing off

[00:48:07] all of the emotional nouns. Estrangement. It's all there. I'll figure that out. That's not hard. But ultimately, the challenge comes from each unique project. And to be honest, I've been doing this 20 years and in the next year I'm going to be announcing a number of projects

[00:48:32] that I've put an increasing amount of time into that are not scores for video games, films, TV. They're not scores for anything. And I think because of those challenges I've gotten really good at it. And they don't offer challenges in the way they did 20 years ago.

[00:48:50] And in many ways I take joy from them. They refill the well. I love getting to work on the projects I choose to work on. And the challenges are coming in other mediums where I'm expressing my creativity in new ways. I like to be challenged.

[00:49:08] I like to feel like I'm being challenged. And that's what activates part of that lizard brain and gets you going. Absolutely. The exhilaration and terror. So I don't mean to say that with ego when I say that I've gotten really good at writing music for other people's projects.

[00:49:28] But that is the objective truth here. 20 years in the industry you should be able to. That's why you can do what you can do is because if I told you I was struggling, I was struggling every day the challenge comes from the endurance. That's real.

[00:49:44] Just to be able to keep it up. But ultimately I have found a very healthy balance in being able to compartmentalize the film, game, TV scoring part of my world. I've compartmentalized it and I've said I want to take joy from this.

[00:49:59] I don't want to take stress from this. I have figured out a way to minimize the stress, take joy from it, and then I'm going to go across the high wire over there where there's no safety net and write other projects where I could I could seriously fail.

[00:50:15] I don't know what I'm doing. I got to learn. I feel like I'm 20 again, like figuring out how to do it. And that's a great part of being successful. I am acknowledge how fortunate I am in my scoring career that I've been able to

[00:50:30] arrange that life for myself and just, you know, with a little foreshadowing, you guys will be hearing me talk about a lot of these projects. Probably I'm excited to see this. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Brandon, the bard, my co-host for the Lorehounds play, and we

[00:50:43] have God of War on the short list for things to cover. He asks, I'm always interested in what inspires character themes for composers. Do characters themselves make you think of specific instruments or instrumentation? Does Kratos conjure a low guttural chorus in your mind?

[00:50:58] What is your process for crafting a leitmotif? Yes, I emphasize the importance of melody. I've always emphasized how much melody matters. But the complexity of my job is that I can't write a melody without imagining what type of sound it would be played on.

[00:51:17] So while I'm sitting at the piano trying to craft the perfect melody, what I imagine it's going to exist in has a huge effect on that. Here's a funny story about Kratos. If you play God of War or listen to the album, you will hear a theme for

[00:51:33] his deceased wife, the mother of Atreus, sung by this artist named Ivor. It's a beautiful feminine melody that starts off with a woman humming a cappella. It's very beautiful. That was originally the Kratos theme. Why? Why was it that? Because Cory Barlog told me the story.

[00:51:55] What were those words I used? Grieving father, estranged son, taking, you know, fulfilling her dying wish. And I heard this evocative voice going, that tells me that story. So for a year, melody there. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And that was inspired by Nordic folk music.

[00:52:28] I heard how the seven is sometimes a dominant set, sometimes raised, which gives it this feeling of like tension, that emotional tension that is so yearning. It's so sad. So for a year, that was the Kratos theme until finally they came back to me and they were like,

[00:52:45] it's just not it's just not working. They said, throw it out. I was sad and I threw it out. Then it was like, OK, they want something that's more masculine, muscular. He's a warrior. Now I'd seen gameplay. He's got L3 and R3 and he goes into rage mode.

[00:53:04] It's like, OK, let's do that. And yes, I thought of massive French horns. I thought of low guttural men. He's a man of few words. His theme had to be a theme of few notes. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That's it.

[00:53:26] It's in fact, it's really just the first three notes. And. As you're saying that, I can feel those moments where he picks up a new weapon or something and just he really relives his past. And you have it's really a great experience. So I really appreciate

[00:53:42] you talking about that. And guess what happened? Corey was not wrong about the story being about a grieving father. Ultimately, as I said in the beginning of this, that theme lived on as a theme for the deceased wife. So there are scenes all

[00:53:59] throughout God of War where he's struggling to connect with his son. And it is not his theme that is playing. It's the mother's theme. That theme actually gets as much play in God of War as what was written as the main theme. And it was I was delighted

[00:54:21] when I brought it back into the game. They told me to throw the theme out and I obliged. And then when I got the cinematics, this was now about a year later, I worked on the game for four years. I got the cinematics a year later

[00:54:33] and I see the son. Weeping over the wrapped body of his mother, and I just thought, OK, I'm not even going to ask him about that thing that they told me to throw out. It's coming back. And it's getting it's coming back. There it was.

[00:54:52] That's awesome. That's awesome. I know we only have a few minutes left with you, so I want to get to a couple last questions. Marilyn Arpukula, I mentioned her before, our favorite Tolkien scholar asked, please tell him that the opening sequence of Foundation is absolutely

[00:55:04] brilliant and gives me chills every time I hear and see it. So there's there's her compliment. She her question, she says, dovetails nicely with Brandon's question. Once you have all of your themes composed, what is your process of turning them into a soundtrack?

[00:55:19] How do you decide to blend them? Use different instrumentation and in essence flesh out and amplify what we're seeing and hearing that isn't music? The most important thing is the most important thing a theme can do is tell the story that you have at hand.

[00:55:36] I don't always know that whole story. I learned this on my first job, which was Battlestar Galactica. Couldn't ask for a better training ground than that one for nuance in storytelling characters like Baltar, like Carith Race. Even Adama himself went through arcs that shocked

[00:55:57] me. They were not the archetype that they seem to be in the beginning. And in fact, in a few of those cases, I had to write them a new theme. I just got to a point where the theme that I had written broke, just broke in half.

[00:56:11] Kara, for example, is the great one where she. I won't even get into it. I won't spoil it. Go watch Battlestar Galactica. However, what I got to do with Lord of the Rings, I had the advantage of knowing the whole story. If you get my

[00:56:26] listen to my soundtrack album for the Rings of Power, check out Elendil and Isildur. And that's a theme for this father and son. Also a theme for a group called The Faithful. In hindsight, I should have just called it that. That's what it is.

[00:56:41] It's a group of people in Numenor who believe in the old ways. And at the end of that track, you're going to hear a statement of that theme that is tragic, massive and orchestral. It's not in season one. It's not in the show at all. I wrote that

[00:57:01] when I sketched out the theme for this father and son who have this little argument in season one and they become estranged and they come together briefly. They don't get a ton of screen time. So why is that massive fanfare on the album?

[00:57:15] It's there because I had to test it to know when I eventually need it much later down the road in events that you probably saw in Peter Jackson's movies that it would work. And in fact, I was so gratified to see fans on Twitter

[00:57:32] before I had explained what that was. They figured it out. They took that passage and they superimposed it on top of the Peter Jackson footage. And I replied and I go, that's exactly what it is. It's exactly what it is. Great. And you figured it out and it

[00:57:47] works. So there are times when I was sketching a character theme and I would go, OK, five seasons from now, I'm going to need it to do something else. Can it work? And I would put it through its paces. And if it didn't work,

[00:58:01] I threw it out and I started over. I can go a few minutes late. These are fun questions. I feel bad that I answer so long. No, no, this is awesome. This is where we're the lore hounds. We dive deep. This is what we this is all that

[00:58:12] we're doing. And I really want to think when you're talking about that wraparound of something, do I need it now or later? I remember the first time I traveled to France as an adult and I'd been in England for quite a while. And a lot of the

[00:58:25] statuary was, I guess you could just say two dimensional. It was very just busts and flat and went to France. And suddenly everything is three dimensional. The statue is like fully round. Yeah. It gives you depth and light and shadow and form and like all

[00:58:40] of this other visual information that if they if that artist hadn't actually made the thing incomplete so that, you know, on the backside, the dress, the belt, the clothing is all tailored back there. But if you're not going to see it, no one's ever going to see it.

[00:58:55] It still lends itself to the whole and to my appreciation. Thousands of hundreds of years later, whatever, of going, damn, right? Like that's well, that's creativity. Art is a thing. Art is a thing that we make. To save our lives. I, I could make much more

[00:59:17] money with my talents elsewhere. And yet I do this because I. I would be miserable if I didn't. I mean, art is something I mean, and in many ways that's why I alluded to other projects that I'm doing. I have an insatiable need to challenge myself and express

[00:59:38] myself. And if I were a sculptor, I would do exactly what you're describing. I would be obsessing over the details at the back of the sculpture that no one would see. The guys that make those gargoyles that are going to be on the top of Notre Dame.

[00:59:51] And back then, who would even see them? You know what I mean? Like, right. No one would see them, but they did it anyway. They put the detail in. And that's the human experience. That's the artistic experience. And in many ways, I find that it's

[01:00:08] fun to talk about all the details that I put into this work. I'd love to think that all these details add up to an experience that augments the viewer. But the truth is, I do it because I don't know how else to do it.

[01:00:24] I don't know how to score Lord of the Rings and not put that much work into the thing. If I did, I could do it more efficiently, you know. But that's I think that there's something I've been really embracing, especially as I get a little older and I'm

[01:00:39] starting to really evaluate how much time I spend doing certain things. I have a family to balance. And it really makes you wonder, like, why am I doing this? And the reason, like there's a reason. There's a deep burning reason. And it's not just

[01:00:56] it's cool to work on shows or it's cool to make music people want to listen to. It's like I would be doing this if no one was listening. What is that about? Yep. Yep. Well, I think I have one more question from Alicia that is

[01:01:11] a good one to close on. She says, thank you for your prolific work on Lord of the Rings. Thank you for your prolific work creating music for the shows, films and games I love. Is there a reason you were drawn to creating music, especially genre horror, sci fi,

[01:01:25] fantasy worlds? Are there any special tricks you use to capture a specific genre like go to sci fi sounds versus fantasy or horror? I grew up consuming genre media for lack of a better term. Sci fi, fantasy, horror, westerns. I was fascinated by genre and the trappings. Exactly.

[01:01:48] The trappings that came with them. When I was a teenager, I started I was maybe 12. I started really focusing on writing music and I was almost obsessive trying to figure out what made a genre tick. When I discovered westerns, I started writing western themes. I wrote action cues.

[01:02:05] I wrote science fiction music. I wrote horror music. That is definitely where my heart resided. When I got a little older, I became equally obsessed with drama, although drama is just another genre. When I was working with Elmer, I did a deep dive on his

[01:02:24] dramatic writing and learned so much from studying and getting to ask him about the bird man of Alcatraz to kill a mockingbird. He was doing movies at that time like Twilight with Paul Newman. He had done The Grifters. I mean, I would just watch these

[01:02:41] movies and just think, you know, he did Scorsese movies. He did Bringing Out the Dead when I was working with him. It's like it was just another genre to me. It's like bringing out the dead with Nicolas Cage, this Scorsese movie. It's a psychological horror movie.

[01:03:00] Ultimately, I was realizing all these tricks, it's just language. Music is just another language that you use. I would study the age of innocence and you know, you look at my career and yes, I've done a lot of horror, sci fi and fantasy,

[01:03:19] but I've always looked at the opportunity to do dramatic writing. I think Outlander is a fantasy technically, but in name only. It's just a drama. It's a period drama dressed in with a with a dash of time travel. I did a film called The Professor and the Madman,

[01:03:41] which is a really good movie. And one of the scores I'm the most proud of because it allowed me to just draw from that other well, Age of Innocence, Elmer Bernstein, those dramas, period dramas. I researched neo romantic music from the Victorian era and in England.

[01:04:04] And it was an incredible experience. I felt as at home doing that as doing a show about zombies. So I would say that like once you become versed in the language, you start learning the accents. Right. And that's all it really is. I never think there

[01:04:25] are sounds that are specific to a genre. I never go, I'm doing a sci fi show. So I'm going to use since I'm doing a fantasy show. So I'm going to use choirs, even though I have used since in fantasy sci fi shows and choir

[01:04:39] and fantasy. It just kind of like what the genre or what the project at hand needs. But it is something that I think you just develop an instinct for as you go through life as an artist, but also as a consumer of media.

[01:04:57] Yeah, we really have grown up with all of this stuff at our fingertips. Remember the buddy, you know, first VCRs and first video stores and we would get the Kung Fu action movies and we get the movies and, you know, obviously grew up seeing 70 Star Wars 77

[01:05:12] when it came. It's just there. It's just like it's the soup we swim in. Right. Absolutely. And there's and there's much to be said for referencing it or not. One thing that's interesting is something is is is saying something like not say like referencing it.

[01:05:29] Absolutely. And the other thing is one of the things I've noticed as I've gotten older. There are generations that do not have those cultural references. Mm hmm. They don't have them. And, you know, for example, I am now at Liberty as of a

[01:05:43] couple of days ago to talk about Percy Jackson and the Olympians. OK, a show I'm doing for Disney for a show I'm doing for Disney Plus comes out in a few months. That was my generation, David. Don't worry. OK, well, it wasn't mine. That's my point, David.

[01:05:57] I'm with you, bro. I missed it. It was not mine. Younger people on my staff that I actually turned to. They were like, oh, my God, I grew up on those books. And I'm like, bro, you got to know, you know what's what's going to is this

[01:06:11] character? Is this character going to be a big deal in the books? And they do. But my point is the score that I wrote along with my team at Sparks and Shadows. My role was predominantly writing themes. Sparks and Shadows did the score. I was writing themes

[01:06:30] that evoke an old school tradition, David, that you and I would recognize as that Star Wars. That's Indiana Jones. That's Star Trek. That is a swashbuckling hero theme, a romantic love interest theme. The comedic sidekick theme. I'm just like, yeah, man, it's that I'm not putting

[01:06:49] a twist on it. It's just that. Yeah. But what's interesting is that a few years ago I would talk so much about the homage. I did a show called Human Target that blatantly homaged Indiana Jones. But it's different now. It's different now that I'm older. Star Wars is

[01:07:10] 40 years old, man. More than 40 years old. Raiders, 40 years old. Is it an homage? Or are we actually doing what George Lucas did for us? Because all he did with John Williams was did the serials from the 40s. He didn't invent that. It was his childhood.

[01:07:33] And we thought it was new. Right. And those of us who heard it for the first time in that moment. Exactly. And when I'm doing a proper property, when I'm working on a property like Percy Jackson that has a younger audience, it's not a given that

[01:07:48] they're going to listen to my main title and go, bro, he's just ripping off Indiana Jones. It's really not. It's if you think if you recognize that you'll smile, David, you'll be like, all right, bear. All right. I see what you're doing. But if somebody else might

[01:08:03] actually kind of use that to show me what they grew up on, just like George Lucas and John Williams used what they made to show me what they grew up on. Right. And I think there's something beautiful about that. And to go back to full circle to

[01:08:19] a question you asked about, you know, IP and known properties in a way I don't take for granted now that everyone knows these things. And part of the thing I think about is I have a responsibility as someone who has been around for a long time

[01:08:34] and I've been around for a long time, for a long time in the 90s and the 80s and the 90s, et cetera, to show younger people what it is. I loved about that stuff. And if I can do that by making a kickass arrangement of blue

[01:08:49] oyster cults Godzilla from 1976. Yes. From the child's play theme song. And, you know, from Battlestar Galactica while simultaneously putting my own spin on the movie. And I think that's what you get from it. I think that's what you get from it. And I think that's what you get

[01:09:11] from it. And I think that's what you get from it. I think that's what you get from it. I mean, you know, I think that we have a we have a Patreon exclusive benefit, which is called Second Breakfast. You know, I take off of the Tolkien thing where

[01:09:27] we talk just about our lives and get a little bit more personal with our lives. But I have my old man movies list, which is like Cross of Iron, Dragon Slayer, Logan's right. I love Cross of Iron. First of all, right. Right.

[01:09:42] Of Iron. I could nerd out about because I loved Westerns. So it was like Wild Bunch is still one of my favorite movies. And one of the writers on Battlestar Galactica, David Weddle literally wrote the book on Sam Peckinpah. He was his biographer. Wow. Very cool.

[01:09:57] I did this deep dive on all his movies and Cross of Iron. I'm like, oh my God, this movie is crazy. And it's crazy when you know the circumstances under which he made it. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm an old man.

[01:10:10] Look at me. Look at my enthusiasm for the old you. My enthusiasm for the old man movies. Well, that's right. In your point. Yep. Well, you heard it here, folks. Bear McCreary has selected our November old man movie for Second Breakfast. I think it's done.

[01:10:23] I think it's a done deal. Yeah. Because that one we have is over. Yeah. All right. When you when you watch it, when you watch it. You know that he was under he was always known for being a difficult man to work with and going over

[01:10:35] budget. And he was at a point in his career where he was losing control. He had the movie taken away from him. He didn't shoot the ending he wanted. The movie just stops. And if it feel like the movie stops and it's still it's it's a cool

[01:10:50] ending. You're like you're like, wow, what a cool Kubrick in decision. Just know that like, no, he just they just took his money away. They just did. That was it. Wow. And it's fascinating. But nevertheless, it's a it's a great movie and one of the rare Western American

[01:11:09] made films about the German perspective. Yeah. Soldiers who were against against the Nazis. I mean, I say one of the rare. But David, I can't I can't name another one. It's the only one I know. No, we've got British. We've got American. Got some Australian or

[01:11:25] ANZAC forces, you know. But yeah, where are the where the point of views? It's it's and and to have it made by an American, I'm sure there's German made movies. I'm sure of that. But but it have an American tell that story was

[01:11:36] interesting and maybe also part of the reason that people got cold feet about it in the 70s, you know? Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, I enjoy that. No. Thank you for the recommendation. Well, I want to be respectful of your time and you've already been so

[01:11:51] generous with it and with all your answers. So thank you so much for talking with us today. where can people keep up with what you're doing and are there a couple of projects besides Percy Jackson, you wanna plug? Yeah, well they can definitely keep up with me

[01:12:05] on most places where they exist. I'm on Twitter and Facebook because I'm old, but I'm also, I've started a new TikTok channel which I would highly recommend. All my content there is exclusive and I'm doing, if you like this conversation, I'm doing very informal casual breakdowns

[01:12:24] of all the projects we've talked about, including the Pal brand theme and some other interesting things in Lord of the Rings. I talk about foundation and God of War. So I would recommend you check me out on TikTok cause I'm having a lot of fun there. Excellent. Cool.

[01:12:39] Yeah, we'll definitely give you a follow with our account. Nice. All right. Well, I hope everyone will go give you a follow on all those platforms. Bear, thank you again for being with us today. Looking forward to seeing what you have coming

[01:12:51] with your mysterious projects next year too. Thank you so much. And let me also, let me plug my blog. If you guys are serious deep dives, divers into lore, go to bearmcquery.com. I've been blogging about this for 20 years. I wrote 12 entries about Lord of the Rings alone.

[01:13:09] I have such detailed breakdowns of what I do. I don't mean this in a way to brag, but there is no one else I know of who writes about the detail of what they do in the music world more so than I do.

[01:13:25] So anything you want to go back to, going back to firsthand accounts of Battlestar Galactica, I mean, starting with season three, I started blogging about every episode. It gets pretty deep. And any question you can ask me is probably answered if you dig it up there.

[01:13:41] So I just wanted to get that in there. Yeah, for sure. We'll definitely put that in the show notes. Yeah, a hundred percent. Bear, thank you so much. I feel like we could probably light it on fire for another couple of hours. So maybe- I'm sure we could.

[01:13:52] Maybe next time. Yes, exactly. Look forward to it next time. Thanks, guys. Thank you to everyone for listening to our interview with Bear McCreary. I hope you found it super informative and enlightening like we did. I know David and I were really just ecstatic

[01:14:06] after we hit stop on the record button and after Bear signed off. So I hope that it was the great experience that we had over on your end. For now, I want to talk quickly about our programming notes. David's not with me,

[01:14:19] so it's just me for the end of the podcast. We have Wolshift Dust back covering the fall of the House of Usher. Alicia is doing coverage with her sister on that. I know she also did a crossover episode with Anthony from Properly Howard on her feed

[01:14:36] where you could hear about the crossovers between Edgar Allan Poe's works and the works of George R.R. Martin. So that was some really great podcasting, really great conversations over there. Alicia also joined me to cover the fall of the House of Usher on Netflix on our feed.

[01:14:51] So you can check that out now. We did a Lorehounds play that should be out soon. We did a Earthsea episode with Marilyn Arpukila and also a Silmarillion stories with Marilyn Pukila. You can check out Loki full coverage with David, John, and Alicia over on our main feed.

[01:15:08] And of course, you can go to Properly Howard Movie Review for their remake season, which just wrapped up, or you could head to the Severance feed in our show notes and listen to their coverage of season one of Severance, which they're right in the middle of.

[01:15:23] We're gonna be joining them for season two and all of those episodes are only gonna be on that feed. So I hope that you will join us there. All right, well, thank you everyone for listening. I wanna give a quick shout out to our Patreon Loremasters,

[01:15:35] Samartian, Cyrus, Mark H., Michael G., Michelle E., David W., Brian P., Nick WSC, Peter OH, Bettina W., Adam S., Nancy M., Lavinia T., Dove 71, Brian 8063, Frederick H., Sarah L., Gareth C., Eric F., Matthew M., Sarah M., DJ Mewa, Andra B.,

[01:15:56] Kuan Yu, Laura G., Deadeye Jedi Bob, and Nathan T., Alex V., Aaron T., Sub Zero, and Adrian. Thank you everyone so much for your support to the Loremasters and to all of our patrons. It really, really, really helps us

[01:16:13] secure more time in the day to do these things like interviews with Bear McCreary. So thanks again. We'll see you on the next show. The Lorehounds Podcast is produced and published by the Lorehounds. You can send questions and feedback and voicemails at thelorehounds.com slash contact.

[01:16:31] Get early and ad-free access to all Lorehounds podcasts at patreon.com slash the Lorehounds. Any opinions stated are ours personally and do not reflect the opinion of or belong to any employers or other entities. Thanks for listening. Okay, David, this is where we're supposed

[01:16:52] to choose a side, green or black? John, my soul is as black as night. Your turn. I am black for life. So we're not fighting? I thought this is where HBO wanted us to pick sides and fight and stuff. Don't worry, I'm sure we'll find plenty

[01:17:11] to disagree about on the pod, but we seem to agree on one thing. We both really like this show. The politics, the drama, the lore. It was made for the Lorehounds. And since we just finished recapping season one, we couldn't be more ready to defend our black queen

[01:17:26] in the Dance of the Dragons. And with the season pass option in Supercast, listeners can get early ad-free access to each weekly scene by scene deep dive, plus our custom show guide with all the characters and connections. See you in the Lorehounds podcast feed each week

[01:17:41] for our dragon fire hot, but probably positive, takes. The Lorehounds House of the Dragon coverage is also safe for team green consumption. Side effects may include a deeper understanding of dragon lore, a heartened conflict with itself, and an inescapable urge to read the book

[01:17:53] Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin. Dragon seeds may experience burning.