John's Thoughts

Brother's Keeper is about a female detective (Jeanne Tripplehorn) brought out of emotional leave to hunt down a serial killer who ends up being her brother, Ellis. But why is he killing? Flashbacks of their childhood give us clues, but the psychological reasons for his acts bring together brother and sister for the last time.

I remember during Lake Placid that I got a call from John Badham asking about scoring his HBO film The Jack Bull and agonizing about having to say no because I was working on Placid. Then low and behold Lake Placid went into re-shooting and re-editing for a month, and I was kicking myself because I could have easily done the score for his film. As I've said before, I have great admiration for John both personally and creatively, and he's easily one of nicest and inspiring people I've ever worked with; So when I recently got a call from one of his associates (the wonderful Cammie) a while back about scoring Brother's Keeper (a USA cable film thriller), I was reluctant to say no. Only this time I was inundated finishing up Bubble Boy, and beginning work on both Eight-Legged Freaks (Dean Devlin / Roland Emerich spider film) and Point of Origin (HBO film). Needless to say, I could feel the sweat roll down my back with worry if I promised a bill of goods I couldn't deliver.

The writing was on the wall that I would have to bow out again, and it killed me. I called John and told him this, hung up, thought it about it some more and then called back and asked for them to send me a video. As I watched it I realized how much fun it could be to do a straight-forward thriller with sequences I could really go at. I had a super small window of time, and it was to be a synth score. So I called John the next day and said, "Well, if I can score to THIS cut over the weekend and work on it in the evenings after recording and mixing Bubble Boy, I could pull it off. We agreed, and the record-setting began! Over the weekend, I got caffeined up and wrote and performed 32 minutes of score in two days. Then over the next few nights/early mornings I completed the other 30 or so minutes of music. It was the strangest experience just unloading ideas as they came without time to even think much. It was sort of a rush actually. I've never done anything so fast and furious before.