Anne Dudley Composer Quotations

I think the thing about being a film composer is that you have to be pretty eclectic-be able to turn your hand to all sorts of different styles and genres and be familiar with the latest rhythms and the range of an obscure instrument.

I prefer to see a rough cut of the film rather than read a script. I find it difficult to get the feeling of the atmosphere of a film from a script.

The greatest thing you can have when you compose a film score is a bit of time to think before you have to charge straight in and do it.

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.

Composers are always going back to the past.

I like to start at the beginning and make the music develop in line with the drama developing. I've talked to other composers about this, and they don't all do it this way. Some people like to find the emotional center of it and work from the climax and then work backward and work forward, so I'm still experimenting with the actual way of doing it.