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psycho by Hitchcock
Q: In what way does music best enhance film?
Jonas Åkerlund
"In any way. That's what its for. Enhance anything you do."
Woody Allen
(Annie Hall, Manhattan, Anything Else)
"Too broad a question. Let's just say it covers a multitude of sins."
Roy Andersson
(Songs from the Second Floor)
"From a general point of view film music should be contrapuntal. That´s how I see it. The music should not play with it should play against in order to get dialectics, which enhances the energy and tension in the movie. As always there are exceptions to the rule. A fantastic film soundtrack is that of Kubrick´s Barry Lyndon (1975). It is actually a very conventional application of film music, almost playing with instead of against, but it is made with such good taste!"
Olivier Assayas
(Irma Vep, Demonlover)
"Usually I'm happy when the score doesn't spoil the film. Redundant music can absolutely put to pieces the work of actors. Ultimately what I think is if the emotion is in the acting, or in the images, or in a combination of both ( = directing) and that's what we supposedly aim for, then it shouldn't need music. Often, scoring a film means underlining what we're supposed to feel, or plainly explain us what we should feel, monitoring our reactions to what's going on up on the screen. I find that offensive and I consider it to be the parting line between good and bad filmmaking. What I am trying to say is that when using music in films you always deal with the danger of adding a layer of fakeness to something that might have had some truth, of complexity, or humanity on its own. Music should be organically linked to the very substance of a film, it should come from inside and not be a coating. Meaning that as every element of a film it should contribute its own dimension : express something that is not expressed by the other elements. Dare I use again the word dialectics ? I can't find a better one. Putting together the images and the music something should happen that is essentially different, and hopefully beyond, whatever they are on their own. The most obvious example of what I'm saying is also the most commonplace : Strauss in 2001: A Space Odyssey. They don't seem to connect, actually they seem to contradict and then their intertwining creates the very feeling we associate with this specific film. Its terribly simple and then its as powerful as the hugest and most ambitious aspects of Stanley Kubrick's film."
Patrice Chéreau
(La Reine Margot, Intimacy)
"Music is one of the essential elements of a film. It is also important for dialogue, lighting, set design, montage, etc. A film without music is one-legged. And I would prefer not to make cinema rather than return to an age without cinematic music."
Francis Ford Coppola
(The Godfather, The Conversation)
"Music is a big factor in helping the illusion of the film come to life. The same way music brings back different periods of our lives."
Roger Corman
(The Little Shop of Horrors, The Trip)
"Music best enhances a film when it evokes and modulates a specific emotional response in the audience to the unfolding story without the audience being aware of it. In Hollywood today, however, this can be difficult to achieve because very often music has to compete with louder and louder sound effects. As a consequence, there is a tendency for the music to oversimplify and overstate its themes. The manipulation of emotion in the audience has probably become cruder, generally speaking."
Alex Cox
"I don't think it does anymore, music is overused and someone should do a film without any music at all."
Cameron Crowe
(Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous)
"The best soundtrack music by-passes your mind and goes straight to your soul. It sort of trips something in your brain, you know you're being transported."
Joe Dante
(Gremlins, Matinee, Small Soldiers)
"Sometimes even dramatic movies are "musicals", when the score dominates and carries the mood, and sometimes events play better with no musical accompaniment at all. As I recall Targets (1967) has nothing but incidental AM radio music and Ronald Stein's tracks for The Terror (1963) as source music, and works all the better for the lack of score. And there are films like Judex (1963) in which Maurice Jarre's music is used so sparingly that when it does appear the effect is almost magical. The effect an absence of music can have is illustrated by Philip Glass' recent attempt to add a score to Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), which sounded like someone had left a radio on in the next room, pretty much nullifying the movie's aura of creepy, otherworldly early-talkie dread. This may have simply been a case of the wrong music, though, as a drenching of familiar studio horror themes from the forties might have worked just fine."
Lewis Gilbert
(Reach for the Sky, Alfie, Educating Rita)
"Film music is another weapon in the armoury of the director. The score should inevitably have a strong theme which reflects the mood of the film either in a leading character or the action of the film. Thus any form of music from symphonies through pop to synthesiser can be used. Music is more powerful when it is used sparingly and should never be used when it is thought to enhance a poorly written or badly played scene. This is something to be avoided. Sometimes natural sounds are more effective than music."
Jason Groves (Shynola)
(Music videos for Radiohead's Pyramid song and The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers, among others)
"Music played over film provides a context for which the visuals can be interpreted. Crudely speaking, music will either emphasise the feelings created visually or juxtapose them. The music almost becomes a filter through which you see the film. A good choice of music/sound during a scene should add another element to the film. Becoming something greater than the sum of the parts. In Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995), Neil Young's improvised guitar adds a dreamlike and stream-of-consciousness quality to the film. The perfect accompaniment to a character who is slowly dying and barely aware of what is happening around him. With this music playing over his scenes Jarmusch is free to tell a simple story in a simple way, knowing that you will know how the main character is feeling without the character ever having to state it."
Guy Hamilton
(Battle of Britain, Goldfinger, Force 10 from Navarone)
"I cannot improve on Maurice Jaubert's "We do not go to the cinema to hear music. We require it to deepen and prolong in us the screen's visual impact."
Chris Harding (Shynola)
(Music videos for Radiohead's Pyramid song and The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers, among others)
"Music is a powerful tool in film making, it can add layers of emotion, or even change the impact of a sequence entirely, but it can be a short cut to emotion and can make directors lazy. An example of really inspired use of music is the climax of Rintarô's animated re-interpretation of the sci-fi classic Metropolis (2001). A huge doomsday device is exploding in mind boggling anime detail, whilst Ray Charles' version of 'I can't stop loving you' plays, transforming a catastrophic event into a thing of sombre beauty."
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
(Abouna)
"For me, music is very important. I think about it when I write the script. It's a part of the movie...so, we have to use it very carefully, as part of the story, and not only in a artificial way...Music must bring something more, something that you can't express only by images and words. It must let us feel the rhythm that the characters have inside themselves."
Arthur Hiller
(Silver Streak, Love Story)
"Music enhances a film by joining the other creative juices helping, indeed sometimes making the audience not only see the film but feel the film with their emotions. I'm always indebted to my composers and to the other creative juices that pour into the pot,"
Dennis Hopper
(Hot Spot, Colors)
"Colors (1988) was the first time rap music got major exposure, and was on the charts. This soundtrack sold over a million copies, first rap to go gold."
Norman Jewison
(The Thomas Crown Affair, Moonstruck)
"The marriage of the moving image and music is perhaps the most powerful visual communication we have. You can take almost any edited visual film sequence and change the emotion and feelings engendered by the use of music. When I made Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) from a double LP musical rock opera score by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, I did not realise that we were actually making the first rock video. It was 1972 and I was trying to visualise on film the operatic musical score. It remains one of my best films from a cinematic and original visual concept. Music is as important to most films as is the written text."
Isaac Julien
(Looking for Langston, Young Soul Rebels)
"Music enhances a film in two ways it either directs the audiences attention to what it wants it to feel and think in relationship to mood and character identification and this general theory is applied to most narrative films. Or it subtly alludes, sometimes in contradiction or creates a sonic space in the film itself, creating another larger meaning of interpretation, forcing the spectator or audience to think and feel between the images and its content creating that third meaning. To enhance a film it has to have music which either can direct the scene or create an unconsciousness to the world, if it is depicting. Some of the most powerful films are films that don't have musical scores in the traditional sense but nonetheless create a space for its own narrative of filmic music /space to enhance its sonic vision, to exist and to inhabit a haptic space, for the viewers identification, the best music in film is when it consciously moves the audience to think and creates a space of disidentification for its spectator while making he or she identify somehow with a poetic musicality examples Jean-Luc Godard's Éloge de l'amour (2001), Touki Bouki (1973) directed by Djibril Diop Mambety, Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Charles Burnett Killer of Sheep (1977)."
Nelly Kaplan
(Le Regard Picasso, Néa)
"Music should never be “pleonastic”..."
Bruce La Bruce
A Case for the Closet, Skin Gang)
"Music for movies can serve to reinforce the tone of a scene, or it can work contrapuntally and at apparent odds with the visuals. Kubrick was always the master at using odd or unexpected music which might not at first seem to support the scene, as when he used Singin' in the Rain to accompany a brutal beating in A Clockwork Orange (1971). His infamous use of classical music in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was famous for giving hippies who dropped acid to watch the movie in the sixties a bad trip because, according to them, the music didn't match the visuals. Obviously Kubrick was doing something right."
Neil LaBute
(Possession, The Shape of Things)
"I love music when it's used as a counterpoint to the image--the beautiful frenzy of Michel Legrand's music in Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels (1962) (gorgeous sounds as we watch compulsive gamblers) or Kubrick's use of "we'll meet again" at the end of Dr. Strangelove (a heart-warming classic used against images of nuclear devastation). Obviously, music can be used amazingly well in many contexts, but I love when it is used in an ironic way by a filmmaker."
Ken Loach
(Kes, Riff-Raff, Sweet Sixteen)
"Well usually by it's absence! It's usually used in a way that exaggerates the emotion to make it sentimental or suspenseful, and covers cracks in the filmmaking, I think it has to be used very sparingly. It's like salt in cooking, you use to much and it just overpowers the flavour. It shouldn't be used to manipulate the audience – you might make an additional comment with the music that you want the audience to consider, but you don't manipulate their feelings in a dishonest way. Whatever the sensation it has to be earned by the content of the film, by that I mean the characters, relationships, events and the narrative, and not induced by the music. It can't replace these things. You don't weep for Hamlet because there is some offstage music; you weep because of the inexorable tragedy of his situation."
Sidney Lumet
(12 Angry Men, Serpico)
"By revealing something that is not dealt with in the rest of the movie. It should be treated as another leading characters."
Jonathan Lynn
(My Cousin Vinny, The Whole Nine Yards)
"Music is used to create or enhance a feeling that would not otherwise be present in a scene or sequence, or would not be sufficient without it. Music can help create tension and suspense. However, if there is sufficient suspense already, using music is overkill. Music also can be used to create or increase a feeling of momentum and pace. A beautiful melody can intensify romance, pathos, nostalgia. Bad music, however, can have the obverse effect in all of these cases, drawing attention to the shortcomings that it is designed to help. As for comedy, I never use music to underline something funny. That's known as "Mickey-Mousing" the film. Music only helps comedy in a montage."
Kevin MacDonald
(Touching the Void)
"That's hard. In the cutting room I'm constantly amazed at the transformative power of music when combined with images. The effect of combining one with another is very rarely what you thought it would be. You see the images and hear the music differently when they are together. The purest moments of cinema are for me when music and image combine without dialogue or other interruptions."
Gillies MacKinnon
(The Grass Arena, Hideous Kinky)
"I personally love the way Tarkovsky integrates Bach into his sequences. This is a hard trick to pull off without seeming pretentious. He objected to commercial cinema's common use of music as a halo around the characters to enhance their performances. Still, this is what most of us do."
John McNaughton
"Music best enhances a film by focusing emotion. It can enhance in other more mechanical ways such as setting pace or creating tension but it is the emotional quality of music which best enhances a film. Music can reach an audience emotionally beyond the ability of picture and sound. As an example I think of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976). A yellow cab drives down a street in Times Square; we see the driver, people on the street. Now add the jazz melody composed by Bernard Herrmann and played by Tom Scott on the alto saxophone and the scene is transformed. The music gives the scene emotional focus, it tells us what to feel."
Fernando Meirelles
(City of God)
"In the obvious way: Music or its absence is the soul of the film."
Nicholas Meyer
(Star Trek The Wrath of Khan)
"It has been noted that sound always dominates picture. The happiest child, bounding through a field of daisies, accompanied by Chopin's 'Funeral March', is doomed. Drive anywhere and study the landscape as you listen to the CD or radio station of your choice and you will see how the music colours the scenery. This fact was known well before films when plays employed incidental music to influence the audience's perception of the scene. In this sense Mendelssohn, Bizet and Grieg, writing music of A Midsummer Night's Dream, L'Arlesienne and Peer Gynt respectively, were composing the first soundtracks. Since music has the ability to drench any scene or sequence in ambience, the primary function of movie music is to aid the director and his team in evoking the desired atmosphere at any given moment - fear, love, rage, curiosity, suspense, doom... what you will. But there is a second perhaps equally important function music can play and that is to provide each film with its own, unique voice, to become the musical embodiment of the movie, so closely associated with it that mere themes (or instrumentation), are sufficient to bring the whole movie flooding back through the mind's ear. Who, for example, can ever forget The Third Man (1949) when listening to Anton Karas' haunting score, played entirely on a zither? Even though Scott Joplin's music for The Sting (1973) is an anachronism, George Roy Hill's use of it ensures that everyone who saw the film will always associate Joplin's rags with the movie and vice versa."
Paul Morrissey
(Trash)
"Music seems to me at it's best when used, not for mood or drama but to enhance the emotional content of a film."
Jonathan Mostow
(U-571, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines)
"In my opinion, the best film music helps a movie touch the heart of the viewer. Whether the goal of a scene is to inspire, amuse or terrify, great film music should enhance the moment-to-moment emotional experience of watching a film."
Ronald Neame
(The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Horse's Mouth, The Poseidon Adventure)
"Used correctly, music will enhance a film. It is a fourth dimension. It can add to the drama, the comedy, the story and the characters, but used badly it can be destructive. There is nothing worse than the wall to wall music, popular at one time in almost all Hollywood movies. If over used music becomes dull and ineffective. And let us not forget sometimes, just one instrument is more exciting than a large symphony orchestra. The perfect example, the zither in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). There are times when a film is remembered by a song, 'Raindrops keep falling on my head', from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), comes to mind, or 'Mrs Robinson' , from The Graduate (1967), and from a film I very much admire, Midnight Cowboy (1969), 'Every body's Talking At Me'."
Alan Parker
(Birdy, Evita)
"When music and images gel they can take the audience's brains to another plane emotionally and dramatically. Bad film music intrudes without complimenting the action. A great score gets under your skin, triggers your subconscious, enhances the drama and helps drive the emotional power train of the movie."
Pawel Pawlikowski
(Last Resort)
"In some films music manages to lift the world on the screen to a mythic or dream-like level. The instances that come to mind are Days of Heaven, 1978 (Ennio Morricone), The Time of the Gypsies,1989 (Goran Bregovic), Taxi Driver, 1976 (Bernard Herrmann) or The Mirror, 1974 (J.S. Bach). But then, maybe the reason the music works so well in these films is because their directors had real poetic vision in the first place, because they managed to create a world for the music to interact with. In industrially made films, or in those which strike pretentious poses, the same music would appear vacuous and irritating. Conversely, Kes (1969) proves that no amount of bad music can destroy a good, emotionally honest film."
D. A. Pennebaker
(Don't Look Back, Monterey Pop, The War Room)
"When the music is right, really right for a film, or anything that's performed it gets you about two feet off the floor and the whole time you watch is like a spell cast on you by an angel, or a witch. Maybe a witchangel."
Sally Potter
(The Gold Diggers, Orlando)
"Music can 'enhance' a film in many ways, but for me it is at its most interesting when it argues with the image rather than underlining it, and therefore demands to be heard in its own right. The argument can be between contradictory atmospheres; softness where the scene is hard, spaciousness where the scene is claustrophobic, or lyricism where the scene is emotionally or physically violent. Alternatively, the argument can lead to cross-referencing, where the music brings surprising meanings, jokes, or associations to the image. In this way a sort of meaning-mosaic can be built up and connections made that otherwise would not be evident or possible. The least interesting and most traditional use of music on film tends to be emotionally descriptive of the scene we are watching, an is specifically designed not to be heard at a conscious level. But emotionally descriptive music can be wonderfully interesting when pushed to an extreme, for example in The Cranes Are Flying (1957),directed by Mikhail Kalatozov."
Bernard Rose
(Ivans xtc.)
"When it drives a sequence - I'd rather hear the music or not have it there at all unless it's purely "source"."
Ken Russell
(The Music Lovers, Tommy)
"By bringing the image into super-sharp focus."
Martin Scorsese
(Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Gangs of New York)
"Music and cinema fit together naturally. Because there's a kind of intrinsic musicality to the way moving images work when they're put together. It's been said that cinema and music are very close as art forms, and I think that's true. Take a filmmaker like Kubrick. He really understood the rhythmic impact of two images coming together. He also had an extraordinary feel for the pace or tempo, a musical term, of a given scene. And he knew that when you add a piece of music to a scene, and if it's just the right piece of music, hitting at just the right instant – like the refrain of Handel's Sarabande, the main theme from Barry Lyndon (1975), over the little boy's funeral procession, or 'Surfin' Bird' by the Trashmen fading up over the panning shot of the soldiers in the second half of Full Metal Jacket (1987), or the use of the 'Blue Danube Waltz' in 2001 : A Space Odyssey (1968)– you've given that scene an extra dimension, a sense of mystery, of life beyond the frame, that it would not have had otherwise. Of course, that's very hard to do. It requires a lot of concentration. Because it's very easy for the music to become a kind of security blanket, for the filmmakers and then for the audience. It's bad enough when it's used for nostalgic purposes, or when it's used to place a scene in time, but there's nothing worse than when music is used to tell the audience what they should be feeling. Unfortunately, it happens all the time."
Santosh Sivan
(The Terrorist)
"The music or the themes give you a haunting recall of the films visuals and thoughts, even after a film screening is over."
George Sluizer
(Dark Blood, UTZ)
"I think film music should enhance the silent moments between the scenes accompanied by music. Each film should find its own musical style and needs. No rule for me."
Penelope Spheeris
(Wayne's World)
"When music can make a scene have great emotional impact, it is at it's best. When it accentuates human feelings, whether it be elation or fear or confusion, it can really be more powerful than a visual."
Ron Underwood
(City Slickers)
"As a tool for communication, music can help the director reach the audience. The music establishes mood, point of view and tone. The music can make a statement by mirroring the action or by playing counterpoint to the action. The music often brings out the majesty of the imagery, the comedy of the actors or the tension of the suspense. It can transport the audience into another land, either geographic or fantasy or into a character's mind. Music can help speed up the action or give the images a sense of poetry. Music has enormous power and often the audience is unaware of the effect it has on them. This makes music one of the best tools to help the director."
Wim Wenders
(Paris, Texas, Buena Vista Social Club)
"By not changing the meaning of the imagery, but just filling them with air, and longing, and time. Music can really "ground" a film, but only if it is not overwhelming the visuals."
Sight & Sound
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This month: Romanian cinema, A Mighty Heart and more...
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Last Updated: 05 Sep 2006
S
The Best Music in Film
Sequences & rescoring
Directors
(see also: Musicians)
Sight & Sound
Q: What is the most effective sequence of music in your own films?
Jonas Åkerlund
"Billy Corgan acoustic version of Iron Maidens 'Number Of The Beast' in Spun (2002). In our opening credits it sets the tone for the whole film. Also the emotional ending. Also Billy Corgan."
Woody Allen
(Annie Hall, Manhattan, Anything Else)
"I've had many sequences, otherwise dull, saved by music. Naturally the track of Manhattan (1979)was a favourite of mine. Also Stardust Memories (1980)."
Roy Andersson
(Songs from the Second Floor)
"I am very happy with the end music in my last feature Songs From the Second Floor (2000). It is created by the former ABBA member Benny Andersson. I never get tired of it and that is a good sign of good film music."
Olivier Assayas
(Irma Vep, Demonlover)
"Teenagers smoking a joint in the ruins of a manor in the middle of the woods at night listening to Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Before that I couldn't even dream that one day music by Bob Dylan would fit in any of my films. Not in terms of paying the rights, in terms of deserving it : in terms of creating images, moments that could give justice to the beauty of those songs. And in the case of Cold Water (1994), everything did fit into place in an unexpected and obvious way. In terms of scoring, usually I have an idea in the back of my mind when I'm writing, when I'm shooting and when I start editing, the problem is that it's three different ideas. Then I suppose I just try them : most often the film flatly rejects them. But the way it does reject them gives me a hint of what it wouldn't reject. That's when I seriously start looking. Many times I have tried songs by musicians I admire like Syd Barrett or Nick Drake, but in every single occasion what happened is that the piece is so strong on its own that it just doesn't blend with the images. So I consider it as a minor miracle when a song as beautiful as Knocking on Heaven's Door fits in as graceful as it did in that film."
Patrice Chéreau
(La Reine Margot, Intimacy)
"The knife-throwing scene in The Girl on the Bridge (1998) accompanied by the rather beautiful and bewitching song by Marianne Faithfull. As one does in scenes without dialogue, and owing to the pre-existing song, I was able to play it out loud, allowing the music to diffuse across the set. When we returned from shooting, we were all bathed in the same emotion, by the same rhythm, by the same fever. It was an unforgettable experience for me."
Francis Ford Coppola
(The Godfather, The Conversation)
"I liked the use of the single piano in The Conversation (1974)."
Roger Corman
(The Little Shop of Horrors, The Trip)
"I'm not sure I can point to a single most effective sequence of music in The Trip (1967), but I consider that Michael Bloomfield's score for the movie provides the most effective music in any of my movies. The music was produced in an era of instrumental, psychedelic improvisation, and it captures perfectly the alternating bliss and paranoia that is characteristic of the LSD experience, and that of the characters in the movie."
Alex Cox
"A film I made called Walker (1987), the music was by Joe Strummer. The was one piece of music over images of a town burning and the music works in complete contrast. The music is very sweet and the images very violent."
Cameron Crowe
(Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous)
"Bruce Springsteen's "Secret Garden" in Jerry Maguire (1996). The song starts as Dorothy is watching her child kiss the shiftless Jerry Maguire in the kitchen, before their first date. It captures her guilt and advancing melancholy -- she knows this guy won't be around much longer in her life. Then she decides -- fuck it -- she's going to have a great time on that date, and the music continues as she runs across the lawns of her neighbourhood to meet Jerry Maguire by his car. I kept hearing the song in my head while we were filming -- nobody could figure out why I was so happy. The other instance I remember is when we were putting music on Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Sometimes the wrong song in the right place can be a powerful thing. There was a scene where Damone, the big talking lothario, finally slept with Stacy and came instantly. No song worked, and finally we tried Jackson Browne's "Somebody's Baby." It was an upbeat song, and there was no reason for it to work -- but it did. Years later, I went to see Jackson Browne in concert and he introduced the song like this: "So I wrote this love song, and somehow it turned into a theme for premature ejaculation... ""
Joe Dante
(Gremlins, Matinee, Small Soldiers)
"I've always been grateful for how much has been added to my own films by gifted composers. Probably the most yeomanlike work has been contributed by Jerry Goldsmith, whose soaring music for Explorers (1985) did its best to disguise an unfinished movie, but Pino Donaggio's organic scores for Piranha (1978) and The Howling (1980) certainly classed up their low-budget origins as well. It's always hard to pluck out sequences from your work to illustrate articles like this one....I guess I'd have to nominate the "New York, New York" musical number at the end of Gremlins 2 (1990), but if that's cheating then I suppose it might be the assembly-line main title cue Jerry wrote for Small Soldiers (1998), another of my "why doesn't this picture have a consistent tone?" big-studio train wrecks."
Lewis Gilbert
(Reach for the Sky, Alfie, Educating Rita)
"This is a most difficult question for me to answer as I have directed some 40 films and worked with some of the greatest living composers. I can only hope that I practice what I preached earlier. If I have to choose it would be the sequence from Reach for the Sky (1956) where Douglas Bader is learning to walk after having lost both his legs in an air crash."
Jason Groves (Shynola)
(Music videos for Radiohead's Pyramid song and The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers, among others)
"This is a difficult question for us. We approach the music/film choices from the opposite direction to most film makers. Our choice of music is always fixed from the start. Our visuals accompany the sound, rather than the other way around. I think that the most effective mix of music and film in our work is the video for Queens of the Stone Age 'Go With The Flow' we made last year. I look at this video in the way I look at Flash Gordon: a genre exercise, but made with love. We set out to make a video that was most definitely a 'rock' video - lightly touching on all of the clichés, but make it as visually stunning and interesting as we could. The 'story' and the music seem to be so well matched that I can't see or hear one without the other. To me they are inseparable. This is the highest compliment I would pay to a music video - and one that can only be applied to a very few in my opinion. I think we've come the closest to this ideal in our Queens video"
Guy Hamilton
(Battle of Britain, Goldfinger, Force 10 from Navarone)
"Battle of Britain (1969). Sir William Walton's masterly ' Battle in the Air '."
Chris Harding (Shynola)
(Music videos for Radiohead's Pyramid song and The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers, among others)
"Being music video directors, we approach the issue the opposite way around, ie we make a story that we think suits the music. I can't decide on a single video of ours that I consider the most effective, it's a bit like being asked to choose your favourite child!"
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
(Abouna)
"It's in Abouna (2002), when the two brothers are running. The music of Ali Farka Toure brings a touch of magic...to this very realistic scene."
Arthur Hiller
(Silver Streak, Love Story)
"There are innumerable effective music sequences in films that I've directed but the one I'll mention was a sequence that wasn't in the script. When we were filming Love Story (1970) in Boston we bumped into the worst snow storm in twenty years. We shot a couple of sequences we could get away with and then there was nothing we could do. The producers decided to call a halt for the day but I insisted on continuing and made up all the playing in the snow montage...all done with the operator at my side with a hand held camera just listening to my directions to the actors and filming “ad lib.” It worked well, but it reached its emotional strength when Francis Lai added wonderful music to the scene. The music lifted their love for each other and their love for life to such wonderful heights. I cried when I first heard it and as I think back, the film just wouldn't have been as moving and worked so well, with different music or with no music. It made you love them and feel their love for each other so much, that you were devastated when later you learned the wife is dying young. Music enhances a film by joining the other creative juices helping, indeed sometimes making the audience not only see the film but feel the film with their emotions. I'm always indebted to my composers and to the other creative juices that pour into the pot, are mixed together and out comes this new entity....a film. I've been overwhelmed by so many great scores that I just can't pick one or even ten favourites. I hope this is of some help for what sounds like a terrific “special issue.”"
Dennis Hopper
(Hot Spot, Colors)
"Easy Rider (1969) is the most effective sequence of music as it was the first film to use found music. Everything previously had been soundtracks before that."
Norman Jewison
(The Thomas Crown Affair, Moonstruck)
"The most effective sequence of music in my own films has to do with Michel Le Grand's score for The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), a film I made starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. The song, 'Windmills of Your Mind' with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman was used for the glider sequence and titles. It won the Academy Award for best song. This was Michel's first American film score, and I think the chess scene he scored, catching every cut and every body move was sensuous and it built to a fantastic climax. Of all my films, this is by far my favourite score. Totally original, an exciting mixture of jazz and vocalisation. Michel sings on the score and it really soars."
Isaac Julien
(Looking for Langston, Young Soul Rebels)
"The most effective sequence in music in my own films would be the approach to something like Looking for Langston where I got a jazz quartet headed by Julian Joseph to improvise a year before I shot an inch of the film and then got the musician Blackberri to compose the actual scoring of the film & he sang the title song 'Blues for Langston'. Then my most recent film installation pieces which utilised for one of the first times Video Art 5:1 surround sound in its soundtrack creating a sonic landscape as a sculptural presence in the experience of watching the film itself."
Jonathan Kaplan
(The Accused, ER)
"When we were auditioning for the role of Sarah Tobias in The Accused (1988), every actress that read asked how the gang rape would be shot. Everyone, that is, except Jodie Foster. She wasn't worried about the graphically written scene. What concerned her was the action that led up to it: “Do I really have to dance?” I told her that she did, and that she could pick any recent hit she liked. She chose Prince's 'Kiss', and in the fall of 1987 we shot the gruelling sequence for five days with that song ringing in our ears. Ten months later as we were about to start the final mix producer Stanley Jaffe received word that “his Purpleness” refused to allow his minimalist masterpiece to be used to underscore a rape scene. It was at this moment that composer Brad Fiedel unveiled a song he had secretly written for this eventuality: “I had this in my hip pocket just in case”. And thus what had been two distinct pieces of music, Prince's song overlaid by a cue from Brad's score, became one cohesive piece of movie music. The seamless transition from original pop tune to orchestral underscore - from objective jukebox source to subjective musical statement - slowly shifts the point of view within the sequence so that what starts as a seemingly harmless bar room flirtation ends as a brutal assault. When it's over, you're hard pressed to remember the precise moment when it all changed. When did playful rowdiness become vicious cruelty? It happened right before your eyes...and ears."
Nelly Kaplan
(Le Regard Picasso, Néa)
"The song 'Moi je m'en balance', in my film La Fiancée du Pirate (1969)."
Bruce La Bruce
A Case for the Closet, Skin Gang)
"In my new movie, The Raspberry Reich (2004), I steal an obscure piece of music from a sixties Italian soundtrack to accompany a montage of Gudrun, the leader of a group of would-be terrorists, as she walks around the streets of Berlin, meets her fiancé, buys a gun, and reads the Communist Manifesto in a cemetery. The music gives a retro-romantic feel to her character while also establishing the theme of the glamourization of terrorism."
Neil LaBute
(Possession, The Shape of Things)
"I've probably utilised no music more effectively than music in my work, although i recently loved being able to liberally sprinkle Elvis Costello's acidic pop throughout The Shape of Things (2003). I also had a blast using Apocalyptica's cello version of Metallica's Enter Sandman at the beginning of Your Friends & Neighbors (1998)--I think that music signalled that something interesting was about to happen. probably the best piece of scored music I've been associated with was a fifteen minute arrangement by Gabriel Yared for Possession (2002). It is a section of the film where present-day scholars read letters from two Victorian poets, which are visualised during the same sequence. Gabriel had to essentially write two scores and aurally weave the two together. it's a very beautiful, satisfying passage for me. A tight, precise blend of music and image."
Ken Loach
(Kes, Riff-Raff, Sweet Sixteen)
"It's not for me to judge whether it's effective or not, but the one example that comes to mind is George Fenton's development of the internazionale in Land and Freedom (1995) when some of the volunteers on the republican side have been killed in battle and they're being buried, and one man begins to sing the internazionale and it's taken up by the others around the grave, and then very gradually George introduced a drum, and then more instruments and gradually built a sense of overwhelming solidarity with the people there. And the point of it was to say that this may be two dozen people here, but they stand for many millions. And he did it with such tact and sensitivity and didn't make it thumpingly obvious and insult the audience's intelligence by pointing out something they already know."
Sidney Lumet
(12 Angry Men, Serpico)
"The train departure in Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Richard Rodney Bennett's idea of a waltz was brilliant. It gave the train glamour and an almost feminine character."
Jonathan Lynn
(My Cousin Vinny, The Whole Nine Yards)
"Either the sequence in The Fighting Temptations (2003), when the church choir sings 'Rain Down' and a montage shows three weeks of their growing success. Or 'Down By The Riverside' in the same film, as a traditional gospel song turns into a rap number."
Kevin MacDonald
(Touching the Void)
"Probably the most obvious: the use of 'Immigrant Song' (Led Zeppelin) in One Day in September (1999). It accompanies a montage of athletes competing. It brings out the sense of agony the athletes are feeling but loss their beauty. Without us having to say anything it communicates to the audience that there is some deep link between violence and sport."
Gillies MacKinnon
(The Grass Arena, Hideous Kinky)
"In Regeneration (1997), Dr Rivers (Jonathan Pryce) chases Sassoon who has fled the hospital. He finds him lounging on the lawn. For some reason this was hard to score without being obvious. In the end, Mychael Danna came up with an unlikely medieval sounding melody which still makes me chuckle."
John McNaughton
"I think the most effective sequence of music in my films is George S. Clinton's main title music for Wild Things (1998). Pictorially the sequence starts in the swamp. An alligator rises to the surface, frightened birds take wing and we follow them out of the swamp to the first signs of civilization then beyond through the sub-divisions on to the skyscrapers of Miami and finally to the green playing fields of Blue Bay High School where our story begins. The intellectual conceit of the sequence is that we are tracing the path of life from the primeval swamp onto land and ultimately to modern civilized humans. The hook being that the humans in our story are operating from the reptile portion of their brains. We can't know this yet since we have yet to meet our characters, but the music sets it up emotionally. George's music is swampy, it seems to slither us along on our journey, never letting us forget where we came from, neither literally nor metaphorically. It speaks to us emotionally, letting us know by the time we arrive on the ground at Blue Bay High that we're still very much connected to our distant relatives in the swamp where each creature preys upon another."
Fernando Meirelles
(City of God)
"There is a sequence, in City of God (2002), where Shaggy runs away from the police in which I cut off all the sound and the only thing left is an old Cartola recording. Cartola is one of Brazil's most traditional samba composers; our Cole Porter. Unfortunately the mixer in Los Angeles decided to "enhance" the quality of the recording, filtering, remixing the guitar duo and the bassoon and making it all sound greater, in 5.1. It was a real pity. Most of the music's charm was gone. It was a pretty song in an old stereo recording. It lost its simplicity, but it is still a very nice moment in the film."
Nicholas Meyer
(Star Trek The Wrath of Khan)
"Choosing amongst the scores written for my own films is a bit like selecting a favourite child. I'm glad my name isn't Sophie. I've been privileged to work with some of the most talented composers in the relatively brief history of the medium, from the grand old men of the business like Miklós Rózsa, to more recent arrivals like James Horner and Cliff Eidelman. I have a special soft spot for the Rózsa Time after Time (1979) score, which I felt did so much to provide the 19th century (symphonic) perspective for H.G. Wells as he wandered about the alien 20th. In addition, Rózsa's affinity for what may loosely be termed "fantasy" came in very handy in selling what was essentially a tall tale. Wells' whole time travel trip was made immeasurably better, more exciting and convincing by Rózsa's music. By the same token, James Horner's "nautical"-sounding score helped reconfigure Star Trek in viewers' minds as the navy in outer space, which I had explained to him, was my goal. There's a musical sequence in my unsuccessful film, Company Business (1991), for which the late Michael Kamen supplied what I regard as an especially successful accompaniment. There's to be a spy swap in the underground Berlin subway system. What might otherwise have been a mere succession of trains travelling in opposite directions, was transformed by Kamen into a terrifying pas de deux between east and west. Another particular favourite is the music the underrated John Scott wrote for The Deceivers (1988), my film of John Master's British India novel of "The Thugs". The story tells of an British officer, who, in order to break up the murderous cult, joins them, and, discovering that he is good at his deadly work, proceeds to lose his marbles. Scott's wonderful score begins very conventionally, employing western harmonics and traditional instrumentation, but the father afield Captain Savage strays from his moral base, the deeper into the heart of India he journeys, the more "native" the music becomes, taking the audience along with our hapless hero as he travels deeper and deeper into his own heart of darkness."
Paul Morrissey
(Trash)
"Although I've done films with non-stop dialogue and without any music at all, in Beethoven's Nephew (1985), to tell the final 20 minutes of the story I used the entire 20 minutes of the 3rd movement of the 9th symphony, with almost no dialogue during this long sequence, hopefully telling a composer's story through hi music. Whether it was “effective” or not isn't for me to say, but I thought so."
Jonathan Mostow
(U-571, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines)
"I think one of the most effective uses of music in my own films was the opening credit sequence in Breakdown (1997). It was an unusual non-orchestral piece of music that set an arresting tone right from the beginning. Interestingly enough, we had originally scored the cue with an orchestra, but one day in the mix I happened to hear the percussion tracks by themselves and liked them so much that I tossed out the orchestral tracks and replaced them with a solitary breath-controlled electric piccolo."
Ronald Neame
(The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Horse's Mouth, The Poseidon Adventure)
"One of my favourite films as a director was and still is The Horse's Mouth (1958), with Alec Guinness. Alec plays a talented eccentric artist, who is difficult, conniving, uncouth and disreputable. But he has a jauntiness that somehow endears you to him. The Horse's Mouth is a comedy and I wanted the music to reflect both Alec's character and that jauntiness. I made what may seem to be an odd choice. Instead of using a contemporary composer, I chose Sergei Prokofiev's 'Lieutenant Kije'. It works beautifully and if you ever see the new DVD of that film, I think you will agree. I feel it is the most effective sequence of music in any of my films."
Alan Parker
(Birdy, Evita)
"I always think that the greatest compliment to the music from your film is when they use it in another film's trailer. (As with Clint Mansell's music above, for instance, which was borrowed to flog Lord of the Rings, even though they had hours of their own music.) There is a Randy Edelman cue in my film Come See the Paradise (1990) called 'Fire in Brooklyn Theatre' that has been used for the trailers of at least a dozen other movies at last count. I even have to listen to it every weekend because it's also been pinched for the theme music of the Premiership Plus matches on Sky. My favourite music from my own films is Peter Gabriel's score for Birdy (1984) — still very modern and sampled all over the place."
Pawel Pawlikowski
(Last Resort)
"As regards my own work, my favourite musical moment is in the 1990 documentary From Moscow to Pietushki in which I used Handel's 'Per le Porte del Tormento' for a sequence evoking delirium tremens and death. The aria, sang by a contralto, seemed to make the moment feel lyrical, transcendental and brutally ironic all at the same time."
D. A. Pennebaker
(Don't Look Back, Monterey Pop, The War Room)
"When I listen to films I've worked on, Monterey Pop (1968), Down From the Mountain (2001), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1982), and the recently released, Only the Strong Survive (2002), I don't think I'm hearing a sound track really. It' always just the music coming straight from the musician's soul, or wherever musicians get their music from."
Sally Potter
(The Gold Diggers, Orlando)
"It is hard for me to judge the most effective music in my own films but Orlando (1992) was the first score where I discovered some principles which I have continued to apply and develop in successive films. For the sequence when Orlando first meets Sasha on the frozen river Thames David Motion and I created a long sequence of overlapping, interlocking harmonic 'fields' (in A minor). Then Fred Frith recorded some guitar lines which I edited to precise moments on screen - especially the eye movements of the protagonists. This combination of apparently unstructured, floating sounds with sudden moments of musical precision locked to the characters' inner change points or thoughts (which eye movements tend to indicate) seems to create a very particular, spacious tension between sound and image."
Bernard Rose
(Ivans xtc.)
"The penthouse orgy in Ivans xtc (1999). Because it's so diverse: starting with Schubert then going through a club beat and ending up with a Chopin mazurka. I'm also proud of this sequence because I made the piano recording myself."
Ken Russell
(The Music Lovers, Tommy)
"The music John Corigliano wrote for the Mexican hallucination sequence in Altered States (1980)."
Martin Scorsese
(Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Gangs of New York)
"Mean Streets (1973): when Harvey Keitel's head rests on the pillow on the opening drumbeats of 'Be My Baby' by The Ronettes..."
Santosh Sivan
(The Terrorist)
"In my own film The Terrorist (1998) music is added on to the sounds that exist in the visuals of the film . The whole orchestration that happens when water makes sounds in all its subtleties and in its anger."
George Sluizer
(Dark Blood, UTZ)
"I am very fond of Nicola Piovani's composition for UTZ. I think the music is melodic and beautiful, the choice of voices and instrumentation delightful, but foremost I think that Piovani expresses very profoundly both the tenderness of the Baron von Utz for his porcelain objects as well as his obsession for them."
Penelope Spheeris
(Wayne's World)
"The movie going public might say it is 'Bohemian Rhapsody' in Wayne's World (1992). Many people have told me the head-banging scene is like no other and makes them feel so exuberant to watch it. However, my favourite piece of music is from Phil Suchomel who did the score for The Decline of Western Civilization: Part III (1998). It is a version of Merlin Albéniz's 'Asturias (Leyenda) [Suite Espanola, Opus 47]' played over the woeful faces of many teenage runaway gutterpunks."
Ron Underwood
(City Slickers)
"The sequence I like most in City Slickers (1991) for its use of music is the cattle stampede which was scored by Marc Shaiman using an upbeat Gospel choir. I like it because it is counterpoint to the scene while giving it great energy and fun with an unexpected approach. The film is a comedy and that music in that scene makes you smile. This was something that Marc played for me one day in his home studio and I was surprised and transported into the scene by his music."
Wim Wenders
(Paris, Texas, Buena Vista Social Club)
"That must be Ry Cooder's work for Paris, Texas (1984). Probably the opening scene, but any other moment in the film was just as effective. Maybe because there was no other music in the movie, not a single piece, but Ry's score."
