Hi, I'm Christopher Young,
film composer here in Los Angeles, California.
I have scored a lot of movies; about a 125.
My career kicked off with a bunch of horror films including Hellraiser,
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2.
But some of the other films I've done are both dramas,
actions, comedy films, pretty much everything but animated movies,
including pictures like the Hurricane with Denzel Washington,
Shipping News with Kevin Spacey,
Entrapment with Sean Connery,
Swordfish with Hugh Jackman.
Lots of different films have been very,
very blessed and having had a career that's lasted this long.
Why am I still involved in film scoring?
Film scoring, it's a drug.
Once you get it into your system as a composer,
it's very, very hard to walk away.
There's something about us and I mean you that makes us different.
We're different because apparently we need
a moving image to generate musical thought that's valuable.
Why? I can't say.
I didn't choose it.
It just happened.
I didn't want to be a film composer when I was young.
I wanted to be, fucking Ringo Starr,
John Warner, Paul McCartney.
But then I got the film music book.
I discovered it because I fell in love with the music.
In this instance, it was the music of Bernard Herrmann and that through open
the door to a whole different universe that I had never been aware of before.
I can't leave it because apparently I love it more than I hate it.
There were times, my God,
I wish I could strangle it so there was not a breath left in its existence slide of me.
But I can't, I just can't walk away from it.
The wonderful thing about film music again,
is its immediacy, is that the best film scores,
there has to be a clarity in the music.
Because you are delivering a dramatic message to the audience [NOISE] immediately.
Nothing vague about it;
you have to tell your emotional message.
You have to deliver the message in such a way that
everybody in that theater is going to know exactly what you mean.
I just find that appealing.
I've always loved dramatic music,
aggressive, vital, dramatic music.
The fact of the matter is,
I encourage anybody and everybody out there to get involved in film music.
You will not regret it.
Isn't it weird and wonderful that right now in my,
I'm very lucky, and this can happen to you too.
Somebody's probably watching, or many people are probably watching a film that I scored.
They're listening to my music right now.
They're not paying close attention to it,
but it's affecting them somehow.
It's supporting the picture and if
they like the picture they'll probably going to like the music.
Believe that film music is worth the effort you're going to put into it
because I'm wondering what my life would have been without
it and I bet you're asking yourself the very same question right now.
Can I go through life without being this film composer I'm convinced I need to be?
Be it. Do it.
[MUSIC]