I am scoring a film right now with a director/film maker that loves to micro-manage. I am scoring a film which I would term a romantic comedy. She has already told me she wants the music to 'sound like' the Sandra Bullock film, "The Proposal". Just to see if we were on the same 'wavelength' since with her I am trying to minimize the number of reworked 'cues', I scored the opening 15 seconds and gave her a mockup. I explained we want to hook in the viewers right from the beginning that it was a romantic comedy and the music should be similar to 'the proposal'. She listened and suggested I change my instrumentation to use a piano as primary instrument. I responded it could be done but that based on the many studio feature films of the last 10 or so years, there is a certain sound and instrumentation/arrangement that is often used to identify comic music to the audience.
I am going to hold off on my response and exactly how I scored it so as to encourage discussion here. Who knows, I may still need to change my opening.
On my last short, the director wanted something heavy. I scored it light. the film just went to its 50th festival. Everyone these days says what they want, without really knowing exactly what they do want or what will work. The value of a creative person, is that they show people things they never knew they wanted, they create the product, the market; never just service or chase it. It's your job to be firm Joel, do what works for the film, not what the director thinks will work for their film, unless those two things are in agreement.