NEVER LET HER GO: An Interview with Rachel Portman

Rachel Portman, b. 1960, rightfully holds pride of place as a groundbreaker, having received her first professional scoring commission from David Puttnam at age 22, and being the first woman to receive an Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1996 (for Emma). Portman all but invented the sub-genre of ragtime-infused, licorice stick-flavored quirky comedy scores with Benny and Joon (1993). She earned additional Oscar nominations for The Cider House Rules and Chocolat, back-to-back scores she composed in 1999 and 2000 for director Lasse Hallström. In 2010, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) and is an honorary member of Worcester College, Oxford. Her “high water period” was arguably the 1990s, but she has remained every bit as active during the early decades of the new century, and the score that perhaps best defines this phase of her work is Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Probably her most beloved melody, however, is the main theme from The Cider House Rules, so closely associated with that equally beloved film that it can’t even be used as temp score. It is one of those melodies that seemed to pre-exist its composition, as if it had existed for all eternity, just waiting for the right frame. It epitomizes Portman’s “homespun” sensibilities, and demonstrates the continuing vitality of tonal music for film.

But let’s let Rachel speak for herself. Her is the transcript of a talk I had with her on the subject of women’s remarkable entry into the film music “clubhouse,” and her role in paving the way.

AH: This is obviously an important topic. …from the perspective of the 80s or anytime before, it was largely a men’s club…for reasons that may be historically understandable, but nonetheless shut half the species out of the profession. When I look at someone like you, I see someone who, irrespective of gender, would have made an entry. …but publishers look for stories of struggle, of overcoming odds…and you must have had days when you faced your own kind of struggle…

RP: I was fortunate in that I went to a boy’s secondary school, where there were hardly any girls at all. And from that point on, without anything happening consciously, I never batted an eyelid about being the only girl in the room. And because of that, coupled with total determination to write film music, it never occurred to me that the fact that I was a woman would be an obstacle. Occasionally someone would say to me, in the late 80s and throughout the 90s, “Well, this is going to be interesting. I’m going to hire you and you’re a female.” But because it wasn’t part of my makeup to be worried about it, I didn’t project that. Whereas I think now there’s much more awareness…women are far more aware of how they’re treated out there, and hence more politically sensitive. I just sort of barreled in.  But I will say that on one of the first films I scored, the director was much more interested in taking me out for dinner than in hearing my ideas about how the music could be dramatically effective, and when I declined, decided in short order that I wasn’t “right for the film.” Now, in hindsight, that could easily have become a MeToo narrative, but I was lucky. He was just an asshole. But I learned from the experience, and vowed that from then on I would make sure that I held directors I worked with responsible for truly hearing the music and knowing what’s going on with it, and did not allow them to “go off topic” with me…

AH: Which, of course, can happen because it is indeed a different dynamic and a different chemistry when a man in a position of power works with a woman.

RP: I will say this. I had to work incredibly hard, especially as the mother of three kids. I was lucky in that I’d already done three, maybe four films before I had children, so I had that confidence that I was in a career and that wasn’t going to change. I had my first child when I was 34, and a year later I was doing EMMA (Note: Rachel won an Oscar for that score). In fact, the wonderful director, Doug McGrath, sent me the script saying please, please do the music, and I’d just had Anna—she was all of five months old—and he had to persuade me to come back to work, which I did. And I never stopped working again. I worked through pregnancies and all the accompanying drama, but again, I was lucky because I could work from home in a quiet, isolated place. I wasn’t traveling, so I could be there for my children and still be there for the music. I’d put them to bed at night and then go right back to work. I had this incredible energy—still do.

AH: I don’t think it’s possible to sustain that sort of juggling act without it. And I suspect that many professional women, when they face that choice with regard to kids, fear that if they leave the field, they may not be able to get back in the game. But you just plowed on through. We talk about the curse of professional women needing to “have it all,” but in a sense, you did.

RP: Oh, I was an incredibly hands-on mum. It pained me greatly to be away from them when they were little, so I’d fly out to Los Angeles to meet the director and then fly back the next day. I had my husband, of course, but he was out making films and was even busier than me.

AH: I would imagine that in order to pull this off, you have to be a pretty disciplined writer when it comes to managing time. Not to mention efficient and productive. The greatest fear my students have is that they won’t have the stamina for the juggling act, for the long nights and the weeks without weekends….

RP: But the thing is…I didn’t go to school to study film music, so I didn’t know what was coming and therefore couldn’t fear it! Now there are students everywhere in brilliant masters programs, and they’re counseled about maintaining mental and physical health and good business practices, and so forth. I just had to find my own way, somewhat blindly.

AH: Yeah, I’m not sure which is preferable. To be forewarned or to jump blithely into the fire.

RP: Not to say that stress hasn’t taken its toll. It’s a cumulative build-up, like what happens to an athlete’s joints after years of taking a beating. Now I’m wiser, and I simply won’t take on more than one project at a time. I want to enjoy what I’m doing. And you never know for certain when you take on a project if it’s going to turn out well. I try to choose carefully, but in the end all I can be certain of is that I like the people I’m working with, from the producer on down.

I talk to a lot of students and to a lot of “up and coming” women composers, and I tell them, “it’s all possible.” But something I do think is interesting—and this applies to society and the professional world generally—is that women do feel that if they’re to be given a big job they’ve got to prove that they can do it just as well as men. Whereas men can relax into it a bit more, women feel that they can’t afford to sit back because they may not get another chance. They have to be “on it” at every turn. I know that’s a huge generalization, but my soundings bear out that this is how women today feel, and part of it is because they’re getting so much more information. I felt this performance pressure, too, but intuitively, not because I’d been warned to expect it. A huge part of this job is mind-reading, and this need to over-perform was just something I sensed. Fortunately, I’m by nature very diligent, very organized. For all composers, being organized is just an incredibly important thing.

AH: Even more so now, with technology being such a commanding force. I started teaching in the early 00s when composing in the DAW and making great mock-ups had now become the dominant workflow, and I would sometimes have my female students come to me privately and say, “Do I really need to master all this tech? Because what I really want to do is write for orchestra.” And I would answer, “I’m afraid you do. It’s the world you’re going into.” But that may not have been quite as true when you came into the industry.

RP: No, I slipped in just under the wire. And I still get away with it. I work with a programmer, of course, but I am very low-tech. Writing for orchestra is what interests me, and I’ve gotten away with it. I’m very lucky. As far as mock-ups go, particularly when they involve non-orchestral elements, I tell my team exactly what I want, but I don’t actually do it myself.

AH: But if you’re coming into the field today, you don’t have a choice. You have to do it, because it’s how you sell your ideas to the filmmakers and persuade them to budget your live scoring session. And your demo has to be good enough that it can stand in for the real thing if that budget doesn’t come through. That would certainly intimidate me, so I feel a lot of sympathy for low-tech people who say, “God, just please let me write music.”

 So let me ask you…this combination of tenacity and fearlessness that had you saying, even back in 1990, “Nobody’s going to tell me I can’t do this,” do you attribute that in any sense to the support of your family? Did you have, for example, a super-supportive dad?

RP: No, not exactly, but I do attribute it to the fact that I was the last of five children, and I knew that my father wanted another boy. I was never interested in being girly, and maybe there is a connection. One of my earliest memories—my parents would take us to church on Sundays—is lying in the grass and refusing to put on a skirt! I was a tomboy. And much later, when I went to Oxford University, again I enrolled in a men’s college, with its first intake of women. But I didn’t even notice. It was completely natural for me to belong in a world that was male.

AH: I have to wonder if those “tomboy-ish” qualities are a sort of adaptive advantage for women breaking into this industry.

RP: Yeah, I think they are. Or they certainly can be.

AH: And now it’s my turn to ask your advice. What if an aspiring female composer doesn’t have the natural qualities you had, doesn’t feel instinctively that she belongs in this world…she knows she has talent, but she’s not sure she has the ‘moxie’ to survive and excel. What do we say to her that doesn’t come across as patronizing or even unconsciously sexist?

RP: It depends on the person, and could apply equally to a male student who’s just incredibly sensitive and is likely to be buffeted by the forces of the industry. Everybody’s got to find their own way. But in the case of women, women seeing other women doing it successfully is the most powerful confidence-builder. To feel that you’re part of a body, a corps, that you’re not alone and that others have paved the way for you.

AH: Others like yourself.

RP: And the fact is that you can suffer self-doubt behind closed doors…we all do…but the music will speak for itself. If your music is confident, if you have something interesting to say, no one’s going to care particularly if you don’t radiate charisma. All of us composers are a little odd, a little socially awkward. I know I was when I was in my late twenties, early thirties. I was very, very serious. Too serious. And in hindsight, I must have been deeply worried without even realizing it. I was only thirty when I was given this huge film—THE JOY LUCK CLUB—and I was sweating. But you know, you just go through it , and you don’t realize how scared you were until you look back.

AH: That’s a wonderful score. I was there as a music executive for most of it, but you were probably too preoccupied to know it! I think my personal favorite Rachel Portman score, though, and the one that’s permanently engraved on my brain, is NEVER LET ME GO. It’s perfect.

RP: Thank you. Well, on JOY LUCK, I’d get up at six a.m. and insist that my boyfriend—who later became my husband—be out of the house so that I could work in complete silence. But silence couldn’t be had, because of those awful hedge-cutters that are everywhere in Los Angeles…

AH: Right, and the dreaded leaf-blowers.

RP: It drove me mad, and then of course, made me even more worried because I was falling behind, and you start to think, “I’m going to fail.” But you don’t fail in the end because you can’t.

AH: Right. You can’t. And you won’t, and maybe that’s the best counsel to give a composer who doubts her own strength of spine. One last question, and I hope it’s not overly provocative. Now that circumstances have turned, and the doors are open to women, is there any sense in which it might actually be an advantage to be a woman in this still male-dominated industry?

RP: Yes. A good case-in-point is NEVER LET ME GO. They were really struggling to find a composer. They’d been down the road with their first choice, a wonderful composer, but it just wasn’t working out. And then they got—I think five--other composers, including me, to pitch for it. I came in with a completely different perspective from everybody else. I didn’t see it as a sort of cold, sci-fi film. I saw it as a beating heart film. I wrote that score and they said, “That’s what we want.” And it stayed that way. And that was just me, without the benefit of any brief from the director. So maybe, just maybe, there is a different sensibility. And I do think that the world, and film and media, really needs women’s musical voices and their sensibilities, because we are different. We feel things differently, so we come at them differently. There’s a whole other world out there—the other half, so to speak—and in the same way that women writers reveal that world, women composers bring it into the film. It’s an incredibly important perspective.

AH: Crucially important, I’d say. Thank you, Rachel, for sharing a bit of it with me.