Eureka - Death and Taxes: Bear McCreary Interview

Source: Death and Taxes [follow link for complete interview]



DEATH AND TAXES: ‘Battlestar Galactica’ and ‘The Walking Dead’ composer Bear McCreary would love to be an astrophysicist


By Andrew Belonsky
January 11, 2012


Arguably one of the best components of SyFy’s “Battlestar Galactica” series was Bear McCreary’s music. It is an incredible amalgamation of influences, beats and melody that perfectly fit the show’s out-of-the-box outer-space drama.

“It was not just another space sci-fi show,” McCreary told me in a recent interview. “What we were working on at that time was something extraordinary.”

Now that “Battlestar” is long over and done, McCreary’s busy scoring AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and another SyFy series, “Eureka.”

Here the 32-year old discusses his aural influences, his favorite film scores of all time, the process of making television scores and why he has trouble watching movies...


... Belonsky: What is your process? Do you receive the scripts before and read them and then think, “Okay, well the cast of ‘The Walking Dead’ is escaping from the CDC, which is exploding,” or do you watch the footage? How does that work?

McCreary: "Well I definitely read the scripts, but most of the time I do that just to get a basic idea of what we’re going to be doing, because most of the time I find that you don’t really know what a scene needs until you see it. It can look fine on paper and when you finally watch it cut together, you might realize it needs something else. Or, as is frequently the case, through the process of casting, acting, directing, lighting, editing, cinematography, the scene can take on an entirely different character, so I find that a script is a fantastic tool for envisioning what the story is going to be, but in fact is a pretty useless device when it comes to figuring out what the music is going to be.

You’ve just got to wait until you see the cut. When I watch the cut, I am able to tell very quickly what the music needs to be and the ideas come much quicker, so most of the time I wait to think about music in a practical manner until I have a cut of the show in front of me..."


Eureka season five premieres on Syfy in 2012.