Exclusive Interview with Jim Dooley
Composer’s first Emmy nomination comes from one of his all-time favorite jobs, composing original music for the quirky drama Pushing Daisies.
by Pushing-Daisies.com

Jim Dooley’s love of music stretches back to childhood when he started playing guitar at age 7. He started studying piano as well, then in high school a classmate’s film project changed his life.

Emmy-nominated composer Jim Dooley

Recalls Jim, “Somebody made a short film in high school and essentially what they did was take a cue ball from a pool table and ran it really fast down the hallway and just put the camera on the floor at these bizarre angles. So it would come really slowly in the distance and then really fast across the front of the screen. And with this simple idea of rolling the cue ball around at cool angles, they put Danny Elfman’s Batman score over it. And I’m like, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life! What is this music? I found what it what it was and one thing led to another and I started to really get more into it. So the beginning for me was listening to Dan’s music.”

In pursuit of his dream, Jim studied Music Composition at New York University, then moved to Los Angeles for his graduate degree, studying the art of composing for film at USC under the tutelage of scoring legends Christopher Young, Elmer Bernstein and Leonard Rosenman. He joined Media Ventures (now Remote Control Productions) in 1999 and began collaborating with the world-renowned Hans Zimmer both as his Chief Technical Engineer on Gladiator and as an additional composer, arranger and orchestrator on a few features you may have heard of: The Da Vinci Code, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, The Ring, Tears of the Sun, King Arthur, Ridley Scott’s Hannibal and Black Hawk Down.

Moving on to solo projects, Jim composed an original score for Simon West’s remake of When a Stranger Calls, as well as scores for best-selling videogame titles such as SOCOM 3: U.S. Navy Seals and U.S. Navy Seals: Combined Assault.  He also fully scored the German animated release Urmel aus dem Eis (”Impy’s Island”), DreamWorks Animation’s musically acclaimed short First Flight, and worked with director Fred Savage on the theatrical sequel Daddy Day Camp.  Jim stepped into the television arena by providing scores for episodes of the ABC television series, “What About Brian“, and has recently completed work on such projects as Little Mermaid 3: Ariel’s Beginning, a sequel to Urmel aus dem, and his first amusement park attraction score for the Simpsons ride at Universal Studios. You may have also heard Jim’s work in various commercials and theatrical trailers.

Clearly the man was already keeping busy, but fortunately for us he decided to take on the task of composing for Pushing Daisies, a show with a unique aesthetic that Jim’s music enhances and uplifts. Nominated for his first Emmy for his original dramatic score for episode 1.04, “Pigeon”, Jim is already immersed in the second season of the show. When Pushing-Daisies.com spoke with the composer, he was working on the second episode of the season and although he said he was exhausted from the rather grueling schedule (he has a six-day turnaround per episode), his enthusiasm for the work hid any hint of tiredness.

Pushing-Daisies.com: Congratulations on your first Emmy nomination!
Jim Dooley: Thank you very much. Be careful what you wish for! (laughs)

PD.com: Pretty exciting but causing a little extra work on your part?
JD: Well, in addition to the writing schedule [for the show], there are press events and everything. It’s a pretty tight schedule; the show is very demanding. I’m on a six-day turnaround on an episode.

PD.com: Whoa! That’s not normal, is it? Isn’t it usually about 10 days?
JD: Yeah, but they take longer to shoot an episode, and I’m the last guy to work on them. I usually start working on an episode on Thursday morning for airing the next week.

Composer Jim Dooley works on a musical number with Pushing Daisies actress Ellen Greene.

PD.com: Wow!
JD: It’s pretty insane. The first season was like that as well. We do have more time in the beginning; I had additional time on the first couple of episodes and then it has a tendency to get more condensed. You know, the show is pretty complex with the visual effects shots, and I’m the last guy on the pole before it gets shipped out, so if something else takes longer, then my schedule is the one that tends to get bumped.

PD.com: Speaking of those complicated visual effects, this is a show that has a very specific aesthetic. When you look at a single shot from the show, you know which show it is, and I think the music really adds to that. Did you create the show’s sound or did you work with Bryan Fuller and Barry Sonnenfeld to create it? How did that come out of you?
JD: Thank you very much. Bryan had some very specific ideas of what he was looking for. You know, one of Bryan’s favorite movies is Amelie, and he loved this kind of French style music, which is essentially where we started from. But he likes high energy at the same time, so that was a challenge. There was a lot of very intense back and forth during the pilot and there were some things that just kind of worked out. Like that cue when Chuck is walking around the house and she goes in to find the monkeys, that was version one. I said, “What do you think of this?” and Barry Sonnenfeld and Bryan were like, “That’s fantastic, done.” So I would kind of run with this love, French, energy, mystery theme and send them stuff, then in morning Barry would call me and say, “Can we have this scene?” and I’d say, “Sure!” Like the love theme, I only had 15 minutes to write that.

PD.com: Oh wow!
JD: They called me and said we need this, so I said OK, I guess it goes something like this… (laughs) It’s amazing what you can come up with when you have to really sit down and focus.

PD.com: What inspires you when they call you up and say, “We need a love theme in 15 minutes!”? How do you get there?
JD: You have to think about the characters, especially for this theme because the love is never fully fulfilled. I could’ve written “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for this show, but it wouldn’t have been the right love theme for [Ned and Chuck]. It’s too grand, they needed something that kind of really never “gets there”. That’s why it always keeps going back and forth. (Plays some of the theme on the piano.) And to have it be kind of fairytale-esque. It’s trying to get there, and it has a plausibility and some hope in it, and to have some wistfulness that it hasn’t quite arrived yet. So that’s where I started on the love theme, it couldn’t really be grand, it needed to be small and sentimental in some way.

PD.com: I think “wistful” is a great word for that theme.
JD: Yeah, that’s a word that Bryan uses a lot, “Could I have this sound a little bit more wistful?”

PD.com: So you have all these permutations of “wistful” coming out of your piano.
JD: It’s funny because right now I’m on the second episode [of season2], called “Circus, Circus” and it’s a blast. I don’t read the scripts ahead of time because most of my inspiration comes from the visuals. I started reading the scripts, but it just didn’t make sense to me until I saw it on screen. So I was watching “Circus, Circus” with

Composer Jim Dooley conducts the orchestra for a scene from 'Pushing Daisies'

Bryan during the spotting session [when we sketch out what music is needed in a episode], and I said, “OK, there’s a trapeze artist and he has to have his theme, there’s the clowns and they have to have their theme, and they collide with the mystery theme” and Bryan said, “Great!” So then I have to come back and actually write it all in six days. I have to quit digging myself into these holes! (laughs)

PD.com: The challenge of turning these great ideas into music.
JD: Right. This is also happening with “Bad Habits’ (episode 2.03). I haven’t even started writing this thing yet, but there’s a nun with a potty mouth and she keeps getting interrupted, her dialog, by the chiming of the bells at the convent. So I said, “OK, what if we did ‘Ava Maria’, sort of a really bizarre version of that, and keep the bells tolling at key points in the music over her curse words.” Bryan liked that, and then I thought, “Oh man, what did I just do? Now I have to go write it!” (laughs)

PD.com: Whoops!
JD: (laughs) But that’s the great thing about the show. Bryan is mostly who I speak with about the music for the show these days, and he’s really supportive. I can pitch these kind of bizarre ideas and he gets it. Like for “Smell of Success” (episode 1.07) with Paul Reubens and Christopher Sieber, and their characters are kind of opposites. I said, “What if we do something like Journey to the Center of the Earth where the smeller is all woodwinds and brass, like the Bernard Herman score [from the movie], but then when you get to the crust of the planet, we use “honking” instruments, and then when you get to Lenez, we have really bright, airy strings and high woodwinds.” And Bryan said, “Yeah, sounds good, run with it.”

PD.com: It sounds like you two have a pretty good working relationship. You know where some people have worked together so often that they can finish each other sentences, you’re finishing each other’s symphonies.
JD: Yeah, it works out very, very well. Sometimes I’ll do something that wasn’t what we’d talked about, but he usually gets it. More often than not, we’re on the same page.

PD.com: It shows, because it’s so cohesive - the visuals and the sound and everything is so cohesive. I think that’s what’s appealing to a lot of people when they watch the show is that you’re just completely immersed in this world. It’s firing on all cylinders, so there’s never anything jarring that’s bringing you back. It’s all just working together in this wonderful, quirky, weird way.
JD: Let me ask you this. I’ve asked a lot of people this and I’m curious what you think about how the songs integrate into the show, like when Olive sang “Hopelessly Devoted” and when they sang “Birdhouse in Your Soul.”

PD.com: I’m going to preface this by saying that I do not like musicals.
JD: Uh oh.

PD.com: I love it.
JD: (laughs) That’s great! Some people wonder why they just keep breaking into song.

PD.com: Because it’s Pushing Daisies!
JD: Right. And why wouldn’t she want to sing “Hopelessly Devoted”?

Greene and Dooley after a session working on one of 'Pushing Daisies' musical numbers.

PD.com: It makes perfect sense for the character, and when they’re singing in the car, who doesn’t sing in the car? It’s just that we’re all stuck with our radios; we don’t have Ellen Greene and Kristin Chenoweth.
JD: (laughs) This is true!

PD.com: Since you brought it up, I hear we’re going to get more singing in season 2, at least with Kristin. She’s let slip that there’s sort of a Sound of Music moment coming up.
JD: Yeah, actually I wrote a piece for Kristin for 2.01 (”Bzzzzz…”). She’s moved into a convent, so she comes down the mountain a la Sound of Music, but they didn’t want a truly Sound of Music sound. They wanted something more sprightly and energetic, you know, kind of like Kristin. (chuckles) Something with a little more attitude. I wrote 2 versions and sat down with her and Bryan in her trailer one day to talk about them, then went to the studio where she rehearsed it and sang it, then went to the set when she filmed it. It’s pretty time consuming, especially considering it’s a six day turn around, so thank goodness this happened at the beginning of the season. I mean, then I had to spend 3 hours on the set with Kristin, which was actually kind of nice because I also got to see Ellen and Swoosie [Kurtz].

PD.com: Yeah, it’s a tough life, Jim. I really feel for you.
JD: (laughs) It’s an amazing show. Never before have I been befriended by the cast of one of my projects and they’ve all just been so supportive. Actually the only members of the cast I haven’t met are Chi [McBride] and Anna [Friel].

PD.com: So I guess that means we aren’t going to hear Chi sing.
JD: I don’t think Emerson is going to sing, no. Although that would be interesting…

PD.com: He could sing his Ode to Pop-Up Books.
JD: Hmmm…pop-up books…

PD.com: OK, if Emerson ends up with a song about pop-up books…
JD: It will be appropriately credited. (laughs)

PD.com: So what I’m hearing is that we only have one song so far this season. Are there plans for more songs?
JD: There are plans for more songs with both Kristin and Ellen, but the details at this point I don’t know. I try not to know too much ahead so I don’t accidentally tip our hand.

PD.com: Given all of your feature credits, how is it different writing for television versus writing for the big screen?
JD: You know, I get asked this question a lot and I have to think about it a lot when I’m switching between the two mediums. It’s funny because Pushing Daisies is the one exception to everything I talk about with this kind of thing… I’d say probably the biggest difference is that when you’re in a movie theater, it’s a fairly controlled environment. You can crank this and you know how loud it’s going to be, but with a TV show it’s in someone’s home and there are kids running around so we have to be a little more clear in laying pipe and coming in and out of people selling soap and cars and things. (laughs) So sometimes it’s better to make things as clear as possible. With Daisies so much of my job is keeping the energy up in the show because it’s dialog driven, so I have a tendency to write more energy in the show than I would if it was a feature film just because of how you keep getting pulled in and out of it. That’s kind of emotionally draining, so my job is to really keep the energy up on the show.

PD.com: I think you do a fine job of it.
JD: Well thank you. It’s a joy to be a part of it. I couldn’t imagine being involved in a more perfect project. There are so many exciting things happening this season, I hope you really enjoy them and the music as well.

PD.com: I’m sure we will. Thanks a lot for taking the time to talk with us.
JD: It was my pleasure. Thank you for being inquisitive about this part of the show.

We look forward to hearing more of Jim’s work when Pushing Daisies season 2 premieres on October 1, and in the meantime we’ll be rooting for him at the Emmys, airing on ABC Sunday, September 21. See more photos of Jim at work on Pushing Daisies in the Gallery and check out his official website, which includes the Emmy-nominated score for “Pigeon”, at www.JimDooley.com.