A Composer in Conversation: Bill Conti

Interview with Bill Conti, Brandon Drake, and Dillon Selph. 

Conducted September 16, 2022. Transcribed July 25, 2026

Brandon: Bill, we would like to understand your creative process, how you work with Pete Myers or whoever orchestrates for you, and how you approach scoring.

Bill Conti: Well, it always begins, of course, with getting the job, which is, always that phone call to meet with the director and see if everybody agrees on the concept and if you want to get together and do this job. And the answer is generally going to be yes. If they want music, they call a film composer. And if they've cast, like they've cast everything, you know, they cast all the actors, they go location scouting, they get the script, they decide what they want to do. So it's the same thing with a composer. They all feel, "This guy would be right, this would be better than this guy, we like what he did on this picture or that other picture." So they have a point of reference and have something in mind when they call you.

So they have a script or they have a— actually they're in post-production. So they're going to want to show you what they've shot, explain the parameters: "It's got to be done in a hurry," most of the time, or or there's a reasonable amount of time to do the work. And  it begins with a meeting and a screening, usually. And you agree to want to do it, then you formally agree to do it. You actually have a contract, you have agents, lawyers, everything that you need to make it legal. You don't have to have signed anything, you don't have to really— they would call it a deal memo between some kind of communication between you, your agent, and them that you have agreed to do the movie based roughly on these parameters.

So then, you're going to have a what's called a spotting session, you're going to see the movie and you're going to decide when the music begins, what's the nature of the music. Someone might say, "One thing I really don't like are violins," or "One thing I really don't like is synthetic music," or "I don't like a lot of drums." All those words can be shared because they have all lived with the project for nearly two years from the time someone agrees— has a script and they go shooting. So they've really gone to school on what their likes and dislikes are. So it's not like they don't have an idea of what they want from the music the same way as what they want from the director. It's all talked out, and then you agree.

The music begins here, it's of this nature. What we're trying to do emotionally is make the audience feel this. And with words, we try to agree on a concept, a musical concept, even though the best way for them to give you a musical idea of what they want: rough cut, or their assemblage, or their fine cut. The director and the editor would have picked pieces of music that they feel appropriate and put it in the places that they think would be right. Now, they're buying my opinion, too. So if I thought it was in the wrong place and of the wrong nature, I would give my opinion, and they expect my opinion. And we would talk about that. At the end of, well, I'm going to say a spotting session or or many sessions, you would end up having, let's say, 45 minutes of music. Maybe that's 30, 45 cues. If it's a  movie that requires lots of music, there could be 90 minutes of music. If it's a “talkie,” it could be 20 minutes of music. So you have agreed on where it is, of what nature it is, and when you have to be finished by, and all of these parameters are all talked out.

Now, at some point, they're going to want to hear something. They have a right to hear something either by keyboard, if you're a keyboard player, or a synthetic mock-up of what you're doing. It doesn't have to be complete, but each director has his own ideas of what will satisfy him to know that you're on the right track. I mean, more communication is always better than less, because let's say if it's going to be traditionally done and there will be an orchestra, then there will be large expenses of orchestra, studio, copying, arranging, recording, and it can't be a complete surprise the day of the recording because it's too dangerous.

Now there could be complete confidence, which is at one extreme, and there could be complete no confidence at the other extreme, requiring, you know, more hand-holding in the beginning or less, because everyone is different. Each relationship is different. But the process of sitting down and having a blank piece of paper and filling in the blanks is what all writers do. I mean, you have to come up with stuff  if a guy's going to tell a story or script or novel, then he begins with some kind of plan. With the music, you have a plan. There it is! They just killed the baby, the mother's got the baby in the arms, we should–the audience should–be crying. And you should write the kind of music that would make them cry. Maybe it's more subtle than that. But all those things are part of what you're required to do when you've got 45 minutes of music to do in a certain amount of time, because in most cases, there's a play date.  It's opening, you know, it's opening in 2,000 theaters, or 1,500 theaters. Since music is post-production, it comes at the end. Everyone has been over budget, overtime. The bankers want to know when it opens. The distributors have set the dates, and you got to have it in a hurry, and we're opening. So there's always pressure on the post-production people. That would mean the effects, dialogue mixers, effects cutters, and  the composer who has to create the music, record the music, cut it into the film, and when they begin the mix process, that could take two or three weeks of of mixing, so the lead time is always jammy at the end. And [for] TV,  it's beyond jammy, it happens in a day or two that you're on the air, so...

The process is not magical if you know how to write music. It's magical to everybody else, but writing music has been done for thousands of years. Writing dramatic music has been done for thousands of years, and there's really no mystery to it, but the same way that you couldn't, you know, make a cake if you've never made a cake before. [laughs] It seems magical to some somebody else, but it's not in any way magical. And if it's a flop, meaning if no one goes to see it, it's a product that is not successful, [if it is successful] everybody's successful. If it's not successful, you don't want it on your resume. [laughs]

Everything has happened to me. [laughter] You can't be in this business this long and not have everything happen to you.

Brandon: So, when you actually do sit down and pencil hits paper, are you working at the piano or do you sit at a desk?

Bill Conti: Well, it depends. It depends. If you have the luxury of time…I can write at the keyboard, or I can write on an airplane, or I can write on a train, in a hotel room,  it depends on the conditions. The most ideal, of course, is to be in your studio, at your piano, with plenty of time. But that's not always the way it is.

I've begun a movie on a plane, that was going to score in London, and the plane ride to London is 11 hours, so I begin writing when I get on the plane, the copyist could meet the plane at Heathrow and have it copied in 3 hours, and make a session in the afternoon, and then go home and write all night to do the same thing for the next day. It's not ideal, but it's part of the [job]. In other words, if you keep saying no to the conditions, if it has to be perfect, then you're not going to work very much.

[Scoring For Your Eyes Only] was a very comfortable experience because it was a comfortable production. This was not like a one-off, "I hope we make a good movie, we have unknown people, we have..." No. It had been maybe 20, 25 years of James Bond movies at the time. So the Broccoli people, Cubby Broccoli was the producer, he had been making hits for those 20, 25 years. You had Roger Moore, he's a star. A James Bond movie, even today, as it was when I did that, it's anticipated, it's got a market, it's got an audience. You can say “I prefer [this],I don't like this one, I like this one better,” but people are going to see it.

The big deal, at least for a composer, at least for me, was this is an opportunity to have a hit song. Now, you don't have to have a hit song, because you're hired to do the score. But that's a movie that carries the song with it. If they like the song that you write and it ends up in the movie—because it doesn't have to end up in the movie, and they don't have to like it. I mean, all of those things, I mean, you you might have the job to do the score, but you might not get the job to do the the song, because the song is a from the earliest days of the record record world, everyone and his sister could be writing a song that they thought would be right for a James Bond picture. And they would have submissions from just people, plumbers and electricians, to other songwriters that thought that they just wrote a great song for the James Bond picture.

But there was going to be a song in it, you know there's going to be a song, and you know the movie's going to go around the world. You don't know whether it's going to be a big hit, but it's a Bond picture, for goodness' sakes. It's going to do business. So, you as a composer can't do any better than your best effort, no matter what it is. I mean, in the back of your mind, you go, "Well, it'd be really nice if I could connect on this." But even if it's a movie that no one's ever going to see, you're still going to write the best music that you possibly can when you sit down to do it. And that's the same way with everybody doing their job. They go to work and want to put in the best effort, do the best they can. The difference about making a product is, all your best efforts may not come to anything if the people don't like it. And you don't know what the people are going to like in general. But a Bond movie, it's going to go around the world, people are going to see it, and you hope that you can go along for the ride.

Brandon: Was there any expectation that you would be carrying the torch from John Barry and emulating his Bond sound? Or were you just given the freedom to just do whatever you wanted?

Bill Conti: Well, first of all, John Barry recommended me for the job. There was some reason why John couldn't do that particular one, and I don't know the reason why, but he recommended me to the Broccolis. And when I came on, they quite embarrassingly said, "If you don't mind, when James goes into action, if you'd play his theme." And, of course, that wasn't even John's theme, [laughter] the Bond theme. It was Monty Norman, I believe, his theme. And, but it's an identity, you know. It was, I had learned the hard way, on Rocky II, I didn't want to do anything, but we did what we did in Rocky I, and I was the only guy that was arguing with everybody that we should I wanted to do something different, and they said, "No, you've got to do the same thing."

But it made sense when I did the Bond picture. Cubby says, "You know, if you don't mind..." and it made total sense  to me that if Bond goes into action, well, you've got to hear that tune. And then it all clicked. "Yeah, I guess if we're going to make a lot of Rockys, if he's going to train, I've got to do that tune whether I want to or not." So I didn't have a problem. The tune had to be there, but it comes through me. In other words, the style of whatever I'm doing, even if I'm doing Monty Norman's theme or trying to do James Bond the way John Barry does James Bond, which is not what I was trying to do at all, but James Bond has an identity and I kind of did it my way. 

Any guy that does the job, [the] James Bond thing, is not going to do it like John Barry. It is the same way if you're going to copy the Mona Lisa, you think you're copying the Mona Lisa, and you go, "Well, this is my copy of the Mona Lisa," but you know, it's not Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. [laughs] You might have copied the Mona Lisa, but it ain't it, you know? So it was a minor concern that you had to play his tune, but as a matter of fact, it was a disco-y era, so my drum beat has some kind of a timestamp on it. If John Barry was doing a big band '50s and '60s, well, I'm disco all the way, but when it came out, it sounded contemporary.

It makes you wonder, though, like I mentioned [regarding] spotting, if it was a directive or a choice, because if the director says, "I want this," you kind of got to do it. I remember doing a movie called F.I.S.T. and there was one theme that the director fell in love with, and he used it every time he wanted to, and I was annoyed by it. I would have never made that choice. I mean, I didn't have a problem with the theme, I had a problem with how he used it everywhere. You're sitting in a room with a producer, a director, the film editor, and you argue, but in the end it's the director's picture.

[John Glen] was fine. I think it was his first directorial thing. He was a cutter before, film editor before. It was one of the reasons why they asked me to come to London for three months, to be near John, because it was his first time directing. They moved me and my family to London for three months. I didn't want to go, I mean, I said, "Why do I have to go to London? I can write it here, I'll come and record it." And [Cubby] says, "Well, this is John's first time directing, and you should be close to him." I agreed, of course, but there was a question of that being a nervous production. They had all the money in the world, and they spent it.

On that project I worked with Pete Myers.

I don't have a specific recollection of specific cues or anything like that. I can tell you that when you're writing a sketch, you can go from what's called a piano sketch, which is just a treble and bass, in other words, it would be like as if you played it on a piano and you wrote it down, and that would be the sketch that you would pass on to an orchestrator, with a thousand words of "this, violins play this, that play that." Or, you can write out a four-line sketch. Now, a four-line sketch is going to be much, much more specific, because it's not to be played at the piano, it's like a small score. And then you can go to a six-line sketch. So on the six staves, you would have, without a doubt, all the choirs of the orchestra. You would have the woodwinds, the strings, the brass, the percussion, the keys. I worked on either four- or six-line sketches.

As a matter of fact, Dimitri Tiomkin, who is a name from the past, when I pulled his sketches at Warner Brothers, he wrote two-line. There were like a thousand notes between the treble and bass clef, it almost could be played by the piano, but there's just too many notes and it’s really illegible. The guy following him, meaning the orchestrators, really worked with him closely, because it was very hard to read. The orchestrator has to take that to the full score before it can be extracted by the copyist, so the flute player is only looking at the flute parts, etc. So when there's a lot of music most people work with orchestrators, because of the time, not for anything else. Well, there are some people who couldn't do the full score, they can only do the piano, which is also traditional. But mainly it's time to get it all on the full score.

I think that Pete may have pulled in [Bobby Richards] on that project. The same way when I used the musicians in London, which is not my main—I mean, I work in Los Angeles, but I would want the contractor, I'd want the musicians that have played on other James Bond movies that are familiar with the nomenclatures of what's going on, in this particular film, the people who have done it before, so you would use that contractor. You would want the people that have been on the project before, if you could. That would be an ideal situation.

Brandon: Looking at the sketches for For Your Eyes Only, it varies between four and six staves. Some cues are fully orchestrated and complete, some look like there must have been lots of verbal instructions given to Pete. Comparing sketch to full score, the structure is all there, but the colors aren't necessarily specified, or there'll be a tuba line that Pete revises a little bit in the orchestrations.

Bill Conti: Yeah, once you've established the color and the way it's going, you don't have to be, I mean, you can just be as specific as you want as the composer, or as loose, if you trust the guy has really understood what you're what you're doing here.

Brandon: Pete was like that? He knew exactly what you wanted, and he could fill in the gaps?

Bill Conti: Well, by that time we had done a bunch of movies together. Yeah, for sure. The idea of coming together on the references that you know musically, always referring to the literature of what it should sound like, and if you have the same background in terms of studying music, knew the same things to call for,  then you could use a shorthand. Like if I said to him, "This is like Tosca in the third third act, the way the horns are used," and he goes, "Oh yeah, I got it." Now to someone else, they'd go, "What? What does that mean?" If you didn't know the music of Puccini, then you couldn't orchestrate [like that]. So, you have to use that kind of terminology, and then if you feel that you can trust [the orchestrator], then you're going to move down the road as fast as you can, you know.

I did a thing called North and South, which was a miniseries, hours of music, just hours of music, and hours of source music that just cannot be done. I had a two-week lead to do 12 hours. [Greig McRitchie] was the best! Just the best, and he had a stutter, you know? He didn't feel good around the producers. He loved orchestration and he did the first [episode of North and South], and I think the next 12 hours was someone different, but the very first North and South was definitely Greig McRitchie. He was the best. He's another one that was so educated musically that he knew the references. If you're talking about Tchaikovsky's strings, he knows what to do. I mean, you don't have to draw it out there. Tchaikovsky has a way of writing strings in three octaves that if you've pulled his scores, you know exactly what it is, so you don't have to write it out. It's wonderful.

Bill Conti: I have [arranged] for other people. I was called in by Lionel Newman. He would call you if he had a problem and needed some cues done overnight. You weren't going to get any credit, but he had a jam, he had a composer that didn't come through with the goods. I can remember Johnny Williams doing a cue, me doing a cue, Goldsmith doing a cue at the end of a movie. Oh, yeah. I'm not going to go there [name the film]. Lionel, would call you with a favor. He would need a favor and what they would do is, they'd send you the [spotting notes] in those older days. They had spotting notes and details with timings on it. A messenger would deliver the notes and they'd tell you the size of the orchestra. He needed it right away. [laughter] He needed it like overnight, so, yeah, that happened.

I did a movie called Harry and Tonto, which was in 19-, I'm going to say, '74. It was at Fox and Lionel wanted me to work there in the bungalows with everybody else. Johnny [Williams] was doing The Towering Inferno, Jerry Goldsmith was doing something in another room, and we'd all have coffee. I was like 30 years old, 34 years old, something like that. I was the youngest guy there, and I kept my mouth shut and listened to the great stories. They all had great stories. Lionel's brother, Emil, oh, great stories of the past, you know? So Lionel was always in the studio system. If he needed 20 minutes of music from somebody, he just thought that he could call anybody and say, "Give me some music," and he did! [laughter] He did. "I need five minutes, it's a chase at the end," and he said, "Don't worry, there's a lot of helicopters," and [laughter] and the thing would come by messenger with the [spotting] notes. Later, you put the thing in the mailbox and the copyists would pick it up at 6:00 in the morning. You would say, "How'd it go?" [Lionel] said, "Oh, it worked fine." [laughter] You didn't know what it was, didn't ask, didn't care.

There's a movie called Neighbors that I did in seven days. It was John Belushi and the other guy, Aykroyd. Someone else had [written] the score and they wanted it done in a week. [Pete] Myers and I killed ourselves. I probably didn't do any more than a piano sketch on that, as fast as I could, and he wrote as fast as he could, and there were a million mistakes during the recording because we wrote too fast. He and I didn't get any sleep. [laughter] I was writing every minute he was writing.

I worked on Bound by Honor [Blood In Blood Out] for nine months, but nobody saw the movie. It came out, nobody saw the movie. The Right Stuff had a score before I did it, and I did it in three weeks. It was a long movie, three-hours. Sometimes it comes out, most of the time, it's passable, and then sometimes it comes out really good. Whether it's [composed] fast or slow, I have not noticed a difference about time. 

Brandon: In For Your Eyes Only you used six trumpets, and they'll all be playing in unison to have this big wall of brass sound that is distinctly Bill Conti. Why that color in particular, and where did it come from?

Bill Conti: Well, it came from Rocky, because there were six trumpets in Rocky, on the little fanfare in the beginning. It was a package deal and there were 39 musicians– six trumpets. You can't get that sound without that many. So, I guess I was fascinated with a power sound, coming out of the Rocky thing. I used six trumpets because nothing quite sounds like that. During the recording, John Richards the engineer, had the mics turned off on the trumpets. I couldn't believe it.

Brandon: So it was all just the room mics that picked it up?

Bill Conti: Leakage! It was called leakage! I'll never forget it either. [laughter] We pulled it up in the mix, and he had a bad mic. He didn't know during the session for some reason. But with six, I mean, you can't have a microphone that didn't have a little bit [of damage]. 

[laughter] It's just sound mass. Think about a marching band–it's just a lot of brass, [laughter] really nasty. The Rocky stuff got out of control because I did six [trumpets], and then I did nine horns, and I did nine trombones by Rocky III, I mean, it was just embarrassingly brassy, terrible, loud, [laughter] you know? But if you had a hit with six trumpets, you know you're going to do it again, right?

[Reminiscing] Well, I had a moment [in music history]. I had a moment that I enjoyed. I felt like a Baroque composer, you know? If someone says, "What do you do for a living?" "Well, I'm a composer." I mean, people pay me to write music. Now, it's not like Bach being an organist, I mean, not in the same breath, but in the sense that he wrote music for a living.