MOVIES

Making sounds that make movies move

Austin film composer Brian Satterwhite considers himself a filmmaker first, composer second

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, May 26, 2009

"I'm probably the most pop-music ignorant person you'll find," Brian Satterwhite says. "I've got no clue what the hell's going on."

Cue "duhn-duhn-duhn" chords, something conveying dread and shock, pure horror. A composer of music, admitting baldfaced heresy. Cover your ears, hear no evil.

Where's Bernard Herrmann's screaming "Psycho" score when we need it?

Ah, speaking of Herrmann ...

And we are, because we're talking with Satterwhite, a self-proclaimed Herrmann acolyte, who can diagram and anatomize every note that works and why in Herrmann's classic score for Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo." Satterwhite, an Austin movie composer, knows films scores in and out, without blink or pause. He has scored about a dozen movies and hosts "Film Score Focus" each Saturday at 10 a.m. on Austin classical station KMFA. He owns more than a thousand film scores on CD and listens almost entirely to them and them only.

As he sips a bottle of Izze Sparkling Grapefruit in the dining area at Whole Foods Market, I, with a cup of coffee, sit back and listen to the sweet tones of Satterwhite vetting the intricacies of the "Vertigo" score and how Herrmann wed his sounds to Hitchcock's pictures.

"Herrmann knew so much about the art of storytelling," Satterwhite says. " 'Vertigo' could never belong to anyone else. The music is connected to the tiniest, microscopic degrees of the film. Take 'Madeleine's Theme' in the film. You can follow that piece of music from the first time it plays, when (Jimmy Stewart) sees her in the restaurant at the beginning, all the way to the very end. That transformation in the thematic material completely contours the thematic transformation in her character as she progresses in the movie."

By now, Satterwhite is rhapsodizing, and we listen to his exegesis, rapt, as if to an aria.

"Herrmann's music is like a needle and thread," he continues. "It takes you by the hand and shows you what each cue is, what they mean, all while keeping your interest. Hitchcock is setting you up to see the cues visually, yet without the music you're just not going to get them."

Satterwhite is 34. His head is shaved to a sheen and he sports a compensatory goatee. A period-size diamond twinkles on his left ear lobe. He has a crisp, erudite voice suitable for radio, which he deploys with plummy aplomb during "Film Score Focus."

For almost four years, the radio show has been his playground, an open field where he concocts programs about the music in Stephen King movies to a recent show titled "Is There a Psychotic Doctor in the House?" focusing on soundtracks for medical thrillers featuring "evil, crazy doctors who experiment on people," such as "Coma" and "Extreme Measures."

"You name it," Satterwhite says. "If I can find an excuse to put together film music, I'll do it."

Satterwhite cites Danny Elfman's whimsical, whooshing score for "Edward Scissorhands" as his lodestar. He was 16 when he first heard it. It was a done deal.

"In high school I knew I wanted a career in music and I wanted it to involve composing. Beyond that, I didn't know what it meant," Satterwhite says. "When I saw 'Edward Scissorhands,' I instantly fell in love with the score, and a light bulb went off slamming together all of these elements. I realized that was the kind of music I wanted to write and that is what I wanted my music to do. I've never looked back."

A native of Beeville, Satterwhite attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he earned a bachelor of music with twin majors in film scoring and composition. He lives in Austin with his wife and two children, ages 1 and 6. ("I love being a dad. It's the greatest thing." He smiles uncontrollably.)

In his scores for the IMAX feature "Ride Around the World," the acclaimed documentaries "Making the Modern" and "The Children's War" and the comedy feature "Artois the Goat" — a hit at this year's South by Southwest Film Festival and his most ambitious and frolicsome score to date — Satterwhite demonstrates his scoring philosophy, which goes like this: "Film composers are filmmakers. I consider myself a filmmaker, not a musician."

That means Satterwhite's favorite contemporary movie composers — Elfman ("Terminator Salvation"), Thomas Newman ("American Beauty") and Michael Giacchino ("Star Trek," "Up") — are filmmakers in their own right.

"You have to show some storytelling talent," Satterwhite says of the greats, and himself. They "internalize the music in a compositional way and express that through the story, and they think and feel like a director. The task of assembling images together to serve a narrative is not that far removed from composing music to serve a narrative."

Satterwhite is currently scoring "The Retelling," the latest horror feature by Austin teenage wunderkind Emily Hagins. He writes liner notes for film scores, lectures and has started to get into film editing.

"There's a synonymous parallel between composing and editing, and there's a huge inherent advantage for moviemakers to have their editor and composer be the same person," Satterwhite says, sounding like a true filmmaker.

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649