For film music website editors, writers, or journos living outside of Los Angeles, the composer interview is almost always conducted on the telephone. So for an entire night, I kept calling composer James Dooley at home, over and over again. The first few times I was quite nervous, so all I could do was breath heavy. He called me an asshole and hung up the phone. The next day I tried him at the studio formerly known as Media Ventures. When the receptionist put me on hold, the hold music was “This Is Going To Hurt” from The Ring. I was startled, and hung up. I was afraid that after seven days of hearing that cue, my television would leak water and I’d be found dead hiding in my closet, possibly paler than I already am.

James Dooley

Finally, the authorities and I brokered a deal (after they traced the calls to my apartment, raided it and found the stash of Varese club Piranha discs I’d been selling at inflated prices on eBay). I would have the opportunity to submit a set of questions to James about his recent score for the money-making, tween-friendly horror hit When A Stranger Calls. The movie, which centers around a series of lewd phone calls made to an enticing young brunette in a vacuum-formed camisole, had strange echoes of my own embarassing ordeal with James. It turned out that he was busy working on The Da Vinci Code, and I was keeping him from scoring the scene where Tom Hanks’ character explains his hairdo. Thankfully James found a few minutes to respond with his answers to my questions.

RK: How did you land the When A Stranger Calls gig?

JD: I was contacted by my agent and put together a reel of selections of my music. After actually landing the gig, I was informed that upon listening to my reel, the director, producer, and film editor said, “this is the guy.” So the best music won in this case. It wasn’t political at all, just musical.

You went through an elaborate recording process for When A Stranger Calls. Can you describe this process?

After watching Stranger the first time, I realized I didn’t have a sample library that would encompass everything that I would need to mock up the score. So, before writing to picture, I wrote out, with my orchestrator, aleatoric sample ideas to be recorded in Prague. By aleatoric I mean pieces in the style of Ligeti, and Penderecki. We wrote and recorded a lot of long pieces that slowly develop over time. We also did a lot of dissonant drones as well as some fast and vulgar gestures. I felt that this idea would help to color the score in a specific way so that it would be less generic, as sometimes horror films can be. In addition, after the mock up process, I went to Seattle to record with a 95 piece orchestra to record the other parts of the score. It feel that it helps give a slightly supernatural feel to the score.

Often composers who have worked for Hans have been hired to score movies and the results have been what you could call “Media Ventures-like”. ‘Stranger Calls’ is not that kind of score. Was this your opportunity to try something other than that “sound”?

I agree that When A Stranger Calls presented an unusual opportunity to go and do something entirely different from a ’sound’ that has had a tendency to come out of the studio in the past. I do believe, in general, that horror films give some of the best opportunities to try unusual musical ideas.

What were some of your influences on this score?

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity early on in my career to study with Chris Young. He is one of the masters of horror. His score to The Exorcism of Emily Rose was temped into the film and helped give some general impressions of where the score needed to go. Once I had the samples from the Prague session, those became very influential on the sound and color of the score. It presented a great opportunity to have many pieces play at once, at different tempos, and keys, and to be very controlled.

The horror genre is usually a good one for a composer to let loose - although you were required to score the first half of the film with considerable restraint. When you scored ‘Stranger’, did you work chronologically or did you shift around and write particular parts of the score first?

I did work in ’show order.’ This presented some interesting problems. I had finished writing the first half of the movie when our preview numbers came back. It turned out the front end of the score would need to be significantly darker. So, I ended up rewriting a lot of that. The first piece in the end credit sequence is my original driving sequence from the beginning. It is much more lyrical and elegant. You can see what changes had to be made by contrasting these two pieces.

‘When A Stranger Calls’ is a squeaky clean horror pic for young teenagers. It relies heavily on your score to generate tension.

This presented a serious challenge. How do you keep interest over time when there isn’t that much going on. You don’t know where the scares are so it is scary when you see it for the first time. It is the most musically dependent film I have ever worked on. Everyone working on the film knew that it was musically sensitive so close attention was paid to the scoring process.

Surprisingly there are no major sequences that feature pop songs. While the film relies on a modern twist (a girl runs up cellphone charges and must babysit to pay the bill) to setup the story, your score is old-fashioned in a contempoary horror sense. No loops!

Thank God! I am very happy that it was more traditional. It needed that to give it a depth that could have been lost if it was strongly contemporized, I believe.

Was this approach a result of collaboration with director Simon West or wast this the direction you initially considered?

This was the direction of Simon West’s. It was to be a traditional, but elegant, horror film.

What moment in the score should listeners be looking out for that you felt you were doing something particularly interesting, outrageous or cool?

In the scene where the killer brushes his hand across the glass, I feel I did something cool. There is a very slow pulsing orchestra ostinato that is going on. The brass and the high strings are in two different keys and the middle strings are doing overlapping tension riffs to keep the excitement. The slow brass chords were written to give the killer some weight and strength in addition the heart racing excitement in the rest of the strings.

What is one thing about James Dooley that we don’t know that you’d like us to know?

I am a certified scuba diver. HA!

There have been many successful composers who have “graduated” from working with Hans Zimmer at Media Ventures (now Remote Control). How did you end up at MV and where do you see yourself going?

I started there as Hans’ chief technical assistant. After proving myself over the last few years, I feel that with Stranger having done so well, and with Impy’s Island going to release in Europe in May, I will have a chance to make a voice in film scoring. All I can do is what I can do.

James’ When A Stranger Calls album was released by Lakeshore Records on May 16th to coincide with the film’s DVD release.

Thanks to Tom Kidd, Costa Communications, Special Thanks to James Dooley. Visit jimdooley.com for more info on the composer.