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Every time I see a film or TV show, I think about how that composer made those choices and how that director envisioned music and how that could work onstage or in a film and how you could support that even further by putting lyrics to it.

The great composers I worked with along the way, I always felt they were filmmakers more than composers. They would talk about the story rather than the music.

One of the major aspects of film composing is that it's not so much a musical thing as it is communicating your ideas with the director, who often does not come from a musical background.

The director's job should give you a sense of music without drawing attention to itself.

I think of myself as a film composer.

The actor is concerned with his own bit of it, but the director's somehow trying to work the whole thing into a much bigger picture. It's like conducting an orchestra.

But it wasn't just a technical approach towards the piano, studying the music for this film was also a way of approaching the soul of the film, because the film is really about the soul of Schubert and the soul of Bach.

I believe that the director is really the soul. It is a collaborative effort, but the director is the one who needs to have that vision. It could be a great script, but it starts from there. You need to have good material, at least, but if you don't have someone with vision, it's just words.

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.