What I addressed in Red Dawn was the upheaval, the off-balance, the nature of the people, and that it could be anywhere, when a conquering force comes into their land. Red Dawn is one of the few twelve-tone based scores I've ever written. I wanted this sense of being offkey - there's no tonal center in the music. There are very few times when you can say, "Oh yes, that's the tonality, this is the key we're in now."

John Milius' original script was much stronger than the film: he had some really interesting comments about American icons that unfortunately never got into the film. For instance, he had an execution scene, and the bodies of the people executed hanging in front of a billboard saying, "Things Go Better With Coke". In a way it's John's kind of comment about urban America. There was a scene where the Russians drive a tank through a MacDonald's, to the take-out window, and wonderful things like that.