Brian Tyler [music composer]

By: Editor | August 18, 2009 | Ten by Ten Profile

Brian Tyler is an award-winning classical conductor, composer, orchestrator and songwriter signed with Sony Music. Tyler’s music was featured in the 2001 blockbuster The Fast and the Furious. His work has been featured in a number of high-profile trailers including Master and Commander, The Aviator, Cinderella Man and The DaVinci Code. His most recent projects include the scores for the fourth installment of The Fast and the Furious, the Japanese sci-fi fantasy Dragonball and Bangkok Dangerous.

Walk us through your most colorful childhood memory.
I distinctly remember visiting the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, as an 8-year-old and having an overwhelming sense of human history. It blew my mind that there was a civilization thousands of years before me in the exact place I was standing. But the structure had such an ancient-yet-alive atmosphere, which probably led to my fascination with history and majoring in that in college.

What is the strangest number you have programmed into your phone?
I have my own iPhone number programmed into my iPhone. And it is in my favorites! How useless is that?

Describe your closest brush with death.
At 15, I was riding my bike across a busy highway to go see my girlfriend, and my mind was elsewhere. I cut right in front of a bus coming at me at 60 mph. I barely got past the width of the moving bus as it nicked my back tire. I barely avoided getting pancaked.

If you could choose any five people, dead or alive, to have dinner with, who would they be and why?
Carl Sagan because he was such an amazing proponent of reason and science (great voice, too); Mozart because he was the composer who changed the way people heard music; Orson Welles because he was a legendary conversationalist (and Citizen Kane is my all-time favorite film). I would love to dine with Democritus because I cannot fathom how a man in fifth century B.C. could have come up with atomic theory so accurately. He is one of the great geniuses in history. Steven Spielberg — who I have already spent some time with, but I enjoy talking to him so much since his films influenced me to become a filmmaker myself. Can I have Mary Wollstonecraft too? I will give up my seat and stand and eat if there are only five seats. She is one of the greatest proponents of egalitarianism and way ahead of her time, and I imagine her and Orson would have an exciting conversation over some wine.

What do you consider your greatest failure?
Not spending enough time with family and friends over the years.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I receive letters from people who tell me how much my music means to them — that it has influenced or touched them in some profound way. That blows my mind. So I would have to say the music I have composed over the years.

What is your most cherished possession and why?
My Steinway grand piano. It is my lifeline to composing music.

How will you spend this evening?
I am going to the Lakers playoff game tonight! Go Lakers!

Describe a vivid or recurring dream you’ve had?
I am at camp and the country is invaded by some unseen military power, and I am trying to find all of my loved ones. It is pretty frightening yet weirdly cinematic since it usually involved me racing a Formula 1 car through the streets of L.A. to find them.

How would you define love?
That is tough! Impossible, really. But the ancient Greeks took a good whack at trying to explain it by having five words for it elucidating the different kinds of love. I always thought that was great. To me a selfless passion, yearning and a willingness to put others ahead of oneself all indicate love, which, in the end, is indefinable. Only the symptoms of love can be detected.

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