Skip to main content
It's Mark Orton's job to make you feel something.
"You can imagine a couple of hobbits walking through the woods with no music," says Orton, a Portland-based composer of film scores. "Two and a half minutes seems like a really long time. But you put music behind it, and you can do any number of things to it. You can add tension. You can make it just seem like good friends walking in the woods."
To be clear, Orton has yet to score hobbits. But Laika's boxtrolls, National Geographic lions and Kevin Kline have all strode the screen to his music. Orton's latest score is for My Old Lady, which opens at Fox Tower today. The directorial debut of playwright Israel Horovitz, the film stars Kline as a broke New Yorker who inherits his father's Paris apartment, only to find Maggie Smith living there and expecting to be paid an annual stipend thanks to some kooky Gallic real estate practices.
Orton is an ideal composer for a film about aging and preservation. He specializes in what he calls "timeless" music, an all-acoustic blend of old-world sounds from across the globe. It's a sound he first pioneered with his band Tin Hat. After licensing some of the band's music to films, Orton started writing scores. He caught his break as a composer on 2002's The Good Girl, a movie that served as a big break for a number of stars, including Zooey Deschanel and writer Mike White (School of Rock, Freaks and Geeks). Since then, Orton has gone on to score films ranging from organic farming documentary The Real Dirt on Farmer John to last year's Nebraska, which was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
Orton talked to WW about antique instruments, how he arrived at his distinct sound and the craft of film scoring.
Willamette Week: The music you make with Tin Hat sounds similar to the material in My Old Lady. Do people approach you for that sound or do you tailor it to specific movies?
Mark Orton: I'm usually approached by directors already aware of what I do. I'm doing an organic kind of scoring. I collect antique instruments. They're usually coming to me because they're not looking for a synthetic score. The root of my sound, and the sound I've evolved with my band, is what ends up attracting most directors.
There's a real age about your sound. Is that something you and the other members of Tin Hat strive for?
These are guys I've known since we were kids. At its root, honestly, it's just that we're buds. We're all very attracted to old-world sounds. We got sucked into the Knitting Factory scene in New York doing avant-garde stuff. Back then, we had this goal, that rather than just making music as a composer collective, we wanted to keep it acoustic and kind of timeless. It's not like we're after some synthesizer that's going to be dated in five years. Instead of going for pedals or for synths, we would go for a piano and put chains in it, or put putty on the strings to fuck with the sound, rather than going into synthetics or modern stuff. We wanted our stuff to have that kind of timeless quality. But, by the same token, we are trying to do something new.
Do you write music while watching the film, or do you try to write separately?
I write away from the picture. I try to because I like to write music in my head and then put it down on various instruments. There are many composers that do great, awesome jobs who sit at a keyboard and improvise along with the film. That's just not how I write.
Have you scored any movies that you really didn't like?
Yes. Of course. There's one movie that gets made, but there are a lot of movies that existed besides the one that got made. There's the movie that the director wanted to make. And there's the movie that the editor wished he could have made. There's not a composer's cut. Obviously, if I had my chance, I would put out all kinds of composer's cuts of these films. But I'd also probably run tag lines along the bottom—subtitles that said, "This is the worst cue. Mark Orton didn't write this. He didn't like it, either."
WWeek 2015