As I said earlier, I don’t want to “mickey-mouse.” I want the score to say something that nothing else in the picture is saying.

For instance, in The Verdict, nothing much was ever revealed about Paul Newman’s background. At one point there’s an indication that he went through a rough divorce and was the fall guy for his father-in-law’s shady law firm. But we dealt with nothing in his youth or childhood. I told Johnny Mandel that I wanted the deep, buried sound of a religious childhood: parochial school, children’s church choir. He was possibly an acolyte. Since the picture was about this man’s resurrection, he had to have been brought up religiously, so he would have somewhere to fall from. The picture could then be about his return to faith. The score’s function was to provide the state of grace from which to fall.