Interview by Jon Burlingame
Recorded May 30, 2017, at Randy Newman’s home in Pacific Palisades, California
Randy Newman grew up in a family steeped in film music: his uncles Alfred, Lionel and Emil Newman were all film composers, and as a boy he sat in on scoring sessions at 20th Century Fox, whose orchestral sound he says he still hears in his head. He describes studying theory and composition as a teenager, writing songs from the age of 15, and working in the Fox music department before scoring his first film, Cold Turkey, for Norman Lear.
After a decade of making albums, he returned to film with Ragtime for Miloš Forman and The Natural for Barry Levinson, and he discusses Avalon, Awakenings, Parenthood, Maverick, Seabiscuit, and writing the songs (and co-writing the script) for ¡Three Amigos!
Much of the conversation centers on his work with Pixar: why Toy Story wanted an orchestral score, how “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” grew out of the filmmakers’ focus on the friendship between “the boy and the toy,” writing “When She Loved Me” for Toy Story 2, and the demanding scores for A Bug’s Life and Monsters, Inc., the two he is proudest of. He also talks about The Princess and the Frog, recorded in New Orleans with Dr. John.
He reflects on winning his first Oscar after 16 nominations, when the orchestra stood for him, and on the craft: film music is always in service of the picture, and writing for an orchestra, he says, is “a phenomenal privilege.”