DAILY VARIETY Sept 13, 2000

Rolfe Kent knows all too well the grind faced by film composers - the seemingly fixed practice of writing, then rewriting, then rewriting music to fit the director’s most recent cut during the last, hectic days of post-production.

But he also knows the sheer buzz of this process’s opposite.

“It happens a lot for me that directors will cut scenes to my music,” he says. “They will have already cut to temp tracks of some of my previous scoring, not believing that I’ll come up with something better, and then they like the new material so much they’ll recut to it.”

This is just one measure of how valued a collaborator Kent has become, and how he has managed to stake out a special place for himself in a highly regimented and professionalized sector of Hollywood.

Not trained as a musician growing up in England and not from a musical family, Kent says, “I just naturally gravitated toward music, without any prompting. 1 could have gone into psychology; which 1 majored in at (the University of Leeds), but friends like Peter Morgan were writing stage plays and making industrial films, and I started writing music for them. 1 discovered that the best route into the business was scoring for short and student films. “

Because the small U.K. film industry had these routes fairly blocked off, Kent gambled with a trip to the U.S. in 1991.

“I thought I would soon come back home, but my friends kept telling me that I wouldn’t. They were right, and not for the first time,” he says.

As for its director, Alexander Payne, “Citizen Ruth” was the breakout film for Kent, on which he showed a knack for slightly off-kilter music. That project was followed by scores for other blackish comedies like “The House of Yes” and this year’s “Gun Shy,” among others.

There’s already a perception floating around that Kent can write only for comedies tinged with the tragic, but his score for Neil LaBute’s “Nurse Betty” seems designed to refute that, with its soaring semi-romantic lines recalling his work for “The Theory of Flight,” as well as a wave of percussive sound. Besides, Kent has written for several noncomedies, including three thrillers by director Richard Shepard, who says, “Rolfe’s genius is that he doesn’t take you musically where you expect to go.”

LaBute had never worked with a composer before, but Kent says that “though one might worry that we wouldn’t communicate, it turned out that Neil responded very early to the scoring, partly because 1 had struggled with it so long.”

That struggling usually means two weeks of random brainstorming and tossing ideas around, such as the case with “Nurse ... .. when this little rhythm came into my head, which became the first 6/4 bars of the opening theme for ‘Nurse Betty.’ After mulling it over, I’ll have four weeks left to finish everything.”

“I try very hard not to come up with a fresh sound for its own sake,” he says, “and instead zero in on the characters. In fact, my music is entirely based on the characters and their points of view.”