Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore has been talking to Canadian news site The Province about his imminent return to Middle Earth for Peter Jackson’s two-part adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
It’s nice to see Shore back with Jackson again. Their previous collaboration actually earned the composer two wins at the Academy Awards (for both The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King), although Jackson is not the first director Shore has had a long and fruitful working partnership with. He has scored almost all of fellow Canadian David Cronenberg’s features since his 1979 debut The Brood, and has been Martin Scorsese’s preferred choice of composer since 2002’s Gangs of New York.
Shore’s working relationship with his most recent collaborators is fast becoming as important as the one Steven Spielberg shares with his long-time musical partner John Williams, in the ability to perfectly compliment the director’s vision (his score for Shutter Island in particular, is a brooding masterpiece which adds an enormous amount of weight to the film itself).
The Oscar winner had this to say about his trip back to New Zealand:
“We’ve talked about making these movies for many years, at least since 2002. It looks like finally it’s going to be happening. I’ll be working on it for the next three years – it’s going to consume a lot of my time and work now.”
Before he begins on that film, Shore is currently working with both Scorsese and Cronenberg’s new features (Hugo Cabret and A Dangerous Method, respectively).
