Mark Kilian: Through Echo Lake Entertainment who made the film. They had worked on Tsotsi and being familiar with my work hired me to do and Indian film called 'Before The Rains' and when 'The Ward' came up they put me up for it. But it really was John who made the decision. I wrote some suites for it and he really liked what I did and so I was hired. TW:  Were you a fan of John Carpenter’s movies before hand?

MK: Big time! The 'Halloween' theme being so simple, effective and yet in 5/4 time was amazing. And all his movies I really loved - 'The Thing' - 'Escape from NY' etc. But when I studied composition at The University of Natal (as it was called then) in Durban, South Africa, I was fortunate to study with Jurgen Brauninger who had studied and worked with Dan Wyman from California who had worked with John Carpenter as orchestrator/synthesist on 'Halloween' and 'The Fog'. So Dan came over for a semester here and there and I got to study with him and I thought I was in heaven studying with someone who had worked with John. So yes, I was (and am) a big fan.

TW:  How early did you get involved on the project?  Were you onboard before principal photography or did you just watch the film and score it after it was edited?

MK: The film was closer to the final stages of editing by the time I was hired. 

 

TW:  What was it like working with John Carpenter?  Was he hands on or did he leave you alone to do your thing?

MK: I can honestly say it was one of the best experiences of my career. John is a guy who knows exactly what he wants. But he also has a way of leaving you alone. I was extremely free to try all sorts of things and because he is a composer himself he doesn't let the music get mired in that awkward place between personal taste and what is good for the film. His notes always made complete sense dramatically and emotionally which is rare enough, but to have them make complete sense on a musical level too was really neat. 

 

TW: Did Carpenter’s work as a composer influence you at all?

MK: In general for sure. But on this project specifically? I absolutely tried so incorporate his sound. Not as a tool of departure for the score, but as one of the 'instruments' of my ensemble. 

 

TW: Your score is rich and diverse.  You’ve got beautiful melody mixed with hard charging horror music.  How did you come up with this wide range of music?

MK: Well as I was saying in the previous answer, I wanted to incorporate John's sound into the more traditional setting of the orchestra doing conventional harmonic and melodic stuff, but also some aleatoric and avant-garde stuff too. The female vocal came about from this LA singer, Toddy Walters with whom I was making an album with at the time. I asked her to try to sound like a deranged little girl and I think the creepiness comes from the fact that this is not her normal style of singing. She totally pulled it off. 

 

TW: Your composition captured the feeling of being trapped (in prison) with a hopeless future.  How were you able to encapsulate this?

MK: By trying to eschew the more traditional approach of theme and development where a theme or 2 or 3 gets it's series of developments as you progress through the movie and all themes are attached to characters. In this score I wanted to keep this feeling of static and claustrophobia throughout the score. The thing about mental illness is that it has no beginning, middle and end. It's a totally unpredictable state of mind. So I didn't want to give the audience the sense of development as we work through the story. The pieces come and go and they are definitely related, but in a fractured kind of way. 

 

TW: Had you scored any scary movies before THE WARD?

MK: No, (well a short!) but I cut me teeth in Hollywood working as a composer's assistant with possibly the best horror movie composer out there - Christopher Young. So I've been dying to get an opportunity to do that and could not believe my luck that the first one I got was a John Carpenter film!

TW: Your music has a clean, big sound.  How’d you capture that?

MK: My engineer Casey Stone is just great at getting things sounding big and yet clean at the same time.

TW: Did the film get any kind of theatrical release?  I think it deserved it.

MK: It did although small. It's unfortunate that so many people chose to whip this film down - a sad side of our culture is that we love nothing more than to take somebody down once they've been up. Neither John nor this film deserved the response it got. The film is way better than it got credit for.

TW: What lies ahead in terms of your scoring assignments?

MK: I just finished a beautiful film called 'Bless Me Ultima' which will be coming out next year. I'm doing a very interesting documentary at the moment with a chamber orchestra.  And I have an exciting film starting next year, again with orchestra. 

www.markkilian.com