The Arrow
interviews
Jaye Barnes-Luckett
“May”
is a great horror film
which was recently re-released in a limited amount of theaters and will be
getting its full-blown dvd release on July 15, 2003. In
my opinion, one of the flick’s main strengths was the gnarly musical score that backed the
off-beat, eerie and at times,
gory images perfectly.
Arrow had the chance to blab with all-around slick chick Jaye
Barnes-Luckett, the
kool kat responsible for the film’s score and here’s what she had to
say.
ARROW: What’s your favorite horror movie?
JAYE:
It’s a tie between Jack Clayton’s THE INNOCENTS (1960) and the
original DIABOLIQUE (1955) by Henri-Georges Clouzot. I love things
that are more psychological than visceral; leaving much more to the
imagination. When a person is given a little bit of visual
information, and is allowed to fill in the blanks based upon their own
fears and life experiences, it’s much more terrifying and has a longer
lasting effect, for me. Both of these are very simple, beautiful
films that repeatedly kick me in the teeth every time I see them. They both have supernatural elements to them, but most of the horror
in each, comes from that suspense, created by using real characters in
situations that you could potentially find yourself in. Alfred
Hitchcock, of course, is a favorite director for the same reason, and
he has ties to both of these films – was influenced by one, and had an
influence on the other. And although it’s probably not considered a
horror film by most, I think that A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, is one of the
finest ever made; it still haunts me to this day. Lucky (McGee–
the director of May) also got me
into Dario Argento a few years ago, also, so I do have an appreciation
for gore, especially when it’s done as with beauty and with respect,
he tends to do it.
ARROW: What can you
tell us about the Alien Tempo Experiment 13?
JAYE:
That’s my main music project. Actually, at this point in time, it’s
just myself on various
instruments, recording mostly rock, pop and experimental songs. I
started out recording on boomboxes, karaoke machines, and 4-tracks,
and I played live with the 4-track playing backing tracks I
recorded. An electric guitar and my live vocals were the “real-time”
elements of the shows. Over the past couple of years, I’ve added in a
drum machine, a bass, and on occasion, keyboards. Recently, a
Macintosh G4 with Pro Tools was added into the mix for recording, but
still plan to do a lot with 4-tracks, just because something about it
feels more intimate, raw and personal.
Anyway, ATE
13’s been around “officially” since 1995, but I was writing and
recording a lot by myself, before that, since I was little. Lucky is
one of the only other people that have ever been a member of this
particular project. We’ve been in a lot of bands together and ATE 13
was one of them. He’s always been very excited about it and still is
the first person to hear anything when I’m done. He probably has more
ATE 13 recordings than I do! From the beginning, Lucky always wanted
some of The Experiment on the MAY soundtrack, so in addition to my
score, there’s a lot of ATE 13 songs as well. Some older ATE 13 songs
were actually turned into instrumentals and then used as part of the
score.
ARROW: Do you have
an “official” album out? If so, what’s it called and where can we get
it?
JAYE: No
official album yet. It’s in the works at this very moment. I have a
slew of cassettes that I’ve made over the years, that I’ve begun to
make available again and I’m converting some to CD right now for the
digital crowd that, sadly, don’t have tape decks anymore. But the
first full-blown album… I’m in the process of recording right now.
The CD will be called ‘Vagus (the wandering nerve)’ and eventually,
there may be two additional volumes. I plan to offer them through the
Go Little Records site, at shows, mail
order, and possibly through mom and pop stores, anywhere I can
distribute them easily. I have a Vagus journal online, at GLR which,
I’m keeping as I’m making this first one, and in the meantime, I’ll
have free downloads of some of the rough mixes of the songs, as I
finish them. I may put out some other collections of music on CD-R
while I’m working on Vagus. In 1998, a 7” vinyl E.P. came out on
Glimmerfed Records, called “Live From The Roller Derby!”, and it was
co-produced by A.J. Lambert, Don Fleming (Hole, Sonic Youth), Lucky
McKee and myself. I may have a few more copies of that lying around
somewhere.
ARROW: Will the “May” score be available for purchase? Where and when? I gotta get my
hands on that slick puppy!
JAYE:
I’m curious about the same thing! I’d love to see a soundtrack
release, but as with the movie itself, everything lies in Lions Gate’s
furry little hands. They’ve released some soundtracks on their own
Lions Gate Records imprint, that I thought were much more unusual than
MAY’s and we’ve gotten a lot of requests for a MAY soundtrack. I
have a few ideas for making a pretty cool and unique soundtrack album,
with the packaging, as well as a small library of 4-track demos of
stuff Lucky and I originally considered for the film, and alternate
versions of things we actually did end up using, and I also thought
that maybe it would be cool if the CD was enhanced with video footage
of Lucky and I playing in our old band The Disastronauts.
Just jam
pack it with good stuff, you know? But I’m sure the music has to take
a back seat to the film, since that’s what Lions Gate’s main business
is. We just have to see what happens with the movie. If they release
it in more than just a few cities, maybe a record will be warranted
and justified, you know? The way I see it is, that the people who
really want to hear it, will have it, one way or another, eventually. [As for you, personally, though… no problem at all! I’ll make sure
you have some muszak. I’m just glad you like the stuff!]
ARROW:
By your filmography, “May” is the only film for which you’ve
composed a score thus far. I guess my question is: how did you wind up
getting the gig?
JAYE:
Funny enough, my first one was the score for the short film of some
friends in school and the production of that 5-minute score was a
thousand times more elaborate than what we did for MAY. I’ve never
even heard the score with the finished film to this day, though! I
came into scoring MAY, because Lucky and I have been very much like
brother and sister, since college and we strongly believe in the joy
of being with your friends and indulging in their every creative
whim. It started out that he’d always been the biggest supporter of
my music than anybody, and in general, we seemed to ‘get’ each other’s
creative thinking right away. I was studying a little about film
myself at the time, but music was my first love. I started teaching
him how to play guitar and soon after, we became songwriting partners
in several bands, while I learned alot about screenwriting from
reading his awesome stories. The next year, I played the first
versions of the character of “May” in a short B&W Hi-8 video and a 8
mm color short he did in school, as well as a live monologue he
directed me in, for his Filmic Writing class. I also used to
contribute songs, voiceovers, and all kinds of crew work for him and
other friends during college.
Anyway, Lucky’s
class flipped out over the original video we made, as did I,
especially because he’d just improvised the character’s qualities and
the story on the fly, as we were shooting it, because it was due for
class the next day, and he hadn’t thought of anything previously! The
response was so good, that I guess that prompted him to go ahead and
write a full script about it. I was one of the first to read it and
of course, fell in love with it immediately. He told me back then,
that if he ever got to make MAY into a feature film, he wanted me to
do the music for it. Five or six years later, that opportunity came,
and he kept his word. Many of the other key crew members were also
longtime friends of ours that worked with us on a lot of previous
projects. With Lucky and I in particular, we’ve never viewed the
other as a threat, competition, or a source of envy, but instead, as
someone to learn from and who would share in your excitement about an
idea. We both know our strengths and weaknesses, and our creative
partnership is amazing for it; a great level of give and take on both
ends. We are truly one another’s biggest fan. I’m honored to have
been one of the few folks who got to come full circle with MAY, from
start to finish. When you consistently and genuinely believe in your
friends and family, you get to share the experience of all kinds of
great things together. MAY was only one of those things.
ARROW: What were
the hardest aspects for you, as an artist, when it came to scoring your
first motion picture?
JAYE:
Actually, the full answer to this question alone, would probably
justify an entire hilarious and shocking episode of E! True Hollywood
Story. In a nutshell, there just wasn’t the time, money to do
everything we wanted to do. Despite all the years and months of
preparation and planning Lucky and I had done for the soundtrack – We
were extremely confident amongst ourselves that we had never heard a
score like the one we had planned to do – the producers threw us a
curve ball in the midst of post-production. The interference cost us
two or three months of valuable time, and by the time everything was
right again, they no longer had a music budget to give me access to
upfront. Lucky and I had to throw all of our plans out and start from
scratch with a mere remaining period of 6 days (that’s s-i-x, folks!)
and no money…to recompile, prepare, record, mix and deliver the
entire soundtrack because the film was going to premiere at the
Sundance Film Festival within a week or so from then. Worse yet, was
that those 6 days fell over the holidays, when hardly anyone is around
to do any kind of business dealings, in the first place, let alone on
such short notice. This included a friend of ours who is an
experienced Music Supervisor, and who was going to take care of all
the clearances. Literally overnight, I became a Music Supervisor and
assistant Music Editor, in addition to Composer. (I also had a
regular full-time day job to juggle at the time, with long hours and
moderate pay.) I had no choice but to dive in and learn as I went
along, and now, I can do any combination of those jobs and it seems
very natural for me.
With the time
restrictions on the film, there are some rough spots in my own
material; stray notes here and there and production quality that I
would have liked to have been able to improve upon, but in the context
of it being a 6-day affair and my first full-blown experience in any
of these jobs especially, I feel very proud of what we were able to do
with what we had. With Lucky’s support, I still got to have a great
amount of freedom and trust with what I was doing even under the
crunch of time. And overall, I was free to go to the set as often as
I was able to, worked with the art department a little bit, met some
great people, and got to show a whole other side of myself that
probably no one except for Lucky ever imagined me having, so how could
I complain, really? I don’t think it was the typical experience of
any composer, even on an indie flick, so I feel fortunate in many ways
that this was my first big one and this is the way it went down. I’d
do it over in a heartbeat. My resume’ is small, but my experience is
vast, just from this one project. I’m now ready for anything. Bring
it on!
ARROW: Admittedly,
your kick-ass “May” score had some very Danny Elfman-like rings to it.
Would you say the man was or is an inspiration?
JAYE:
It’s funny you bring up Danny Elfman, because a reviewer recently gave
the MAY score an “F”
rating, because he said it was “typically Elfman-esque”. It made me
pretty happy, excited and annoyed at the same time, because that was
the entire summary of the musical part of his review. I personally
think Elfman is great, and I don’t see how anything remotely akin to
it could be seen as warranting the lowest rating possible,
even if it were a total hack doing the job. And even so, the pieces
of mine that are drawing those comparisons stem from something I wrote
as a teenager that Lucky later heard and wanted to use in MAY. Danny
Elfman *is* an inspiration, because his scores are some of my
favorites and I also grew up loving Oingo Boingo, and was pretty
excited that this rock/pop guy became this huge accidental film
composer. I never intended for there to be an resemblance to his
work, though, because again, I was a college freshman when I wrote the
stuff that makes people think of him. In truth, for the MAY score, I
was inspired more by Bernard Hermann and classical Russian composer
Modest Mussorgsky. And I’m mainly a self-taught,
play-by-ear-and-feeling type of girl that started writing music
because of people like The Beatles and The Smiths. Another thing to
look at, is the fact that I see MAY as a dark fairytale. Lucky has
been compared to Tim Burton because of that same thing, the specific
way he treated material that is an unusual combination and tone of
horror, fantasy, comedy and emotional drama.
The films and
the respective scores are almost whimsical, with a heavy touch of
darkness to them and I feel that some of the comparisons by most
people may stem from that. The classical part of my score, is what
has that type of feeling, it’s only one part of the entire score. In
actuality, some of my scoring in this film is done in a more rock,
pop, and punk sort of way, with electric guitars and a drum machine,
with maybe a keyboard here and there. Some of the pieces preexisted
as songs originally, but were shortened, broken down with lyrics
removed, and then reassembled as score to specific movements or shots
in the film. Others score sections borrow from ATE 13 song melodies,
or otherwise are very pop, punk, rock or whatever themselves, so they
do blend in with the rest of the soundtrack a lot more. If you watch
some of those parts carefully, you might be able to see some of the
visual markers, that I was playing to. I think it’s kinda cool
actually, that people don’t notice it blatantly. From the comments
that I get often, about the music really fitting the movie, I think
they get it subconsciously.
I always
felt the score itself was unusual, because it wasn’t just classical
music that was being used to underscore the picture. That’s why I
didn’t understand the Elfman comparisons before, because I felt I was
approaching this in a totally different way than he does. But it now
seems clear that people are left thinking that only a *part* of the
score was the entire score. It doesn’t matter really, if people don’t
make those distinctions. The main idea was to have all these
different parts that made a cohesive whole, and fit the tone and
purpose of the movie, as well. I feel we accomplished it, so what
more could we ask for? And hey – if Danny Elfman’s what my first real
score is compared to, I’m not gonna complain. (laughing) We got
nominated for a music award in Spain and reportedly came in second
only to Sonic Youth. I consider it a privilege if this is the company
we’re included in.
ARROW:
Did you have a say in any of the potent punk/rock bands that wound up contributing to the film? The Breeders, The Kelly Deal 6000…GREAT
STUFF!
JAYE:
Yes, indeed. The Breeders were one of the bands that Lucky and I
bonded over when we first met, and we are both mutually huge Amps,
Pixies and Kelley Deal 6000 fans. Kim and Kelley Deal are just the
coolest and I think it’s a mission that both of us have to make sure
other people know it. It feels good to know that a few more people
have either finally discovered them, or gotten more heavily into them
as a result of watching MAY. I get emails about it all the time. Nirvana is another one that we bonded over and was a huge influence on
us both. Originally, we pretty much knew even in our dreamy school
days, That Breeders and Nirvana were necessary to the movie. Well…
even if I had not agreed, while slobbering over the thought, Lucky
would have chosen those two bands anyway, along with some of my own
stuff. But it became apparent very early into the production of MAY
that there were huge publishing rights problems with Nirvana’s music
and we probably couldn’t get the rights to anything. We still had
hope for The Breeders, though. And somewhere in the middle of
production, we both realized it was only natural to use songs by The
Kelley Deal 6000, who both of us owned CDs by. That band is no more,
and Kelley’s back in The Breeders now… we were anxious for them to
release their third record, so it was impossible to forget paying
tribute to them in our own way.
Outside
of the ATE 13 stuff, which you hear in many different forms in the
movie, Lucky and I then started from scratch with our record
collections once the crunch period hit. He trusted me to pick
specific songs, and we then sat down and walked through the film
together, spotting everything. Most of the music in the film, comes
from people who are friends and acquaintances, awesome musicians and
people. We happened to have their CDs and tapes when we needed them,
the songs fit perfectly, and they were reliable enough to respond to
my last-minute call/email over the holidays. We were very fortunate
to have things come together as they did. I was so afraid that Lions
Gate was going to replace all of the music with inappropriate Top 40
big label stuff, when they bought the movie, but they didn’t. It’s
all diverse and yet all fits together perfectly, making for a really
atypical soundtrack. It’s very cool that people have been going nuts
over the music. Now about that soundtrack album…
ARROW: You attended
a Fango convention in August 2002 with the “May” cast and crew. What
would you say was the highlight of the event?
JAYE:
The
best feeling from that convention, for me, came from witnessing Lucky
meeting George A. Romero. I didn’t meet the man, personally, but when
I found out he was going to be there, all I wanted was for Lucky to
meet him… because he’d been such a big influence… And it happened in a
beautiful way, just two guys shooting the beans. Just seeing Mr.
Romero standing there a few feet from me, was an honor to begin
with. I kept giving Lucky a hard time, because earlier, he
interfered with me buying batteries for my camera before the
convention. I reminded him, “That was cool that you met George
Romero. Sure would have been nice to capture it on film… but oh yeah,
that’s right… I don’t have any batteries for the camera.” Earlier,
we’d met Stuart Gordon, and also Bill Moseley who played Chop Top in
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2.
The funniest one was that for the MAY
event, Tony Timpone, the head of Fango, was a very kind and cheerful
man, but couldn’t remember my name for the life of him and kept
referring to me by the name of “Joyce”, which I thought was hilarious,
because he’d been corrected a few times by some people. A couple of
times he said, “Thank you to Lucky McKee, Angela Bettis, Anna Faris,
Nicole Hiltz, and… … …the composer!” Once, he even referred to me
as “and…… friend!”. It didn’t matter really, because when you’re
standing there with Anna Faris, I don’t think boys care much about
anything else anyway. They wouldn’t have known if Tony had called me
a porn-loving Velociraptor.
Tony wouldn’t
have known if I told *him* that’s what my name was. (laughing) A few
people recognized Angela from other work, but the rest of us were
pretty foreign to the crowd. None of the trailers shown at The
Weekend of Horrors – or since – had any of my music in it, so no one
knew what the hell I did, let alone my actual name …and there I was
sitting next to Anna Faris giving autographs. People were asking me
how to break into showbizness, when my friends and I were still
struggling to pay our rent and wondering when our movie was coming
out, and I was taking the city bus to my *day job* the very next
morning. The difference between reality and what is perceived, was
pretty damned clear and I’m glad I had that in me to see. So I said
fuck it and decided to have some fun, since my presence was otherwise
pointless and I looked like a huge dorkfin sitting there. I made my
main purpose to offer my photo-taking services to those who really
wanted to be in a picture with Anna and Angela, but had no one else to
take the picture for them. I was stoked to be able to do that. It
just meant more to me and felt more like me to help some kid take that
picture home for his collection, then to be posing like I was
“somebody”, when I clearly was not. I was just the music chick, not
“The Hot Chick”. (laughing)
ARROW: When you
want to hang back…what CDs enter your player?
JAYE:
Ah, that could go on for days on end. It’s always going. I think
everyone who knows me would agree that I have the one of the wildest
collections of music. I’ll make a mixed tape or CD that might have
show tunes, hip hop, new wave, metal, pop, classical, old country, old
jazz, and Indian ragas, back to back. My old standbys though, are
things like The Beatles, Nirvana, Bjork, Modest Mussorgsky, Sonic
Youth, Mozart, The Breeders/Amps, Pixies, Babes In Toyland, Portishead,
Juliana Hatfield, Billie Holiday, The Police, The Doors, Roth-era Van
Halen, The Smiths, Depeche Mode and my friend Eriq’s band Parae. Lucky doesn’t have anything on CD right now, but sometimes I put in
old tapes of his. Put any of those in a grab bag, pull one out, and
I’m all set, no matter what mood I’m in.
ARROW: What’s next
on your plate touring-wise or film biz wise?
JAYE:
I would love, love, love
to tour, but still don’t have the resources to at the moment. But
I’ve recently started playing shows in Los Angeles again, now that my
schedule’s a bit more free. I also don’t have a day job anymore, and
have better equipment and resources than I did at the start of MAY, so
I’m working on music full-time, trying to get Go Little Records moving
further ahead. Alien Tempo Experiment 13 and GLR are my main
priorities as an artist, but far as soundtracks go, MAY’s been very
good for me, as it’s brought ATE 13 more attention, as well as myself
as a composer, songwriter, and publisher. I’ve been asked to
contribute to some other projects. I’d be content with just recording
and releasing my albums, and writing songs for other people, but I’ve
found that I enjoy scoring and supervision as well. It’s a whole
different creative process and outlet for me and if that helps to pave
the way for my other projects, then I am all for it. I’ve already
learned so much from MAY, and I think it’s really unlocked another
side of myself creatively, and it’s only getting better. We all
really have just gotten warmed up.
I’d like to thank Jaye for
kicking it on the site. I’m looking forward to her upcoming record,
the MAY score and
hopefully more badass film scores along the way. Keep em coming, Jaye!
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