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How would you describe the best or most satisfying use of music in a film?
DAVID SHIRE (All the
President's Men, The Conversation): Film music is so often an art of
juxtaposition. When the music is more about subtext ' adding an element that
isn't on the screen ' that's the most satisfying. The most simple-minded
scoring is what you get in most B-movies and bad television, where they want
happy scenes made as happy as possible, love scenes made as loving as
possible, and action scenes made as fast and furious as possible. It's not
as creative, and it doesn't leave much room for your imagination, except to
try to find some new way to write the same old music for the three-hundredth
time. And usually they just want the same old music anyway, a generic, same
old score that isn't going to tax anybody. I've had scores thrown out
because I did a subtext score and they wanted something vanilla, right down
the mainstream. You struggle and struggle, and they throw things away, and
then I'd hear the score they finally put on the movie and I'd think, "I
could have written that with my hands tied behind my back."
The fun is when the score can find an element that weaves into the whole mix
' if there's a love scene, instead of making it just more loving, there's an
underlying tension. So the melody is saying "love" but there's something
underneath that's saying, "Wait a minute, there's something else going on
here." There's an ambiguity about it.
DAVID RAKSIN (Laura, The Bad and the Beautiful): There are times when music
is at its best when it's saying what you can see in a different way, but
actually the whole business of amplifying something that you cant see,
[that] you wouldn't otherwise know, is the really defining phrase, and music
can do that.
ELMER BERNSTEIN (The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven): What you're
describing is really a very good use of film music: doing things which are
not totally explicit on the screen, to get behind and inside the character,
so to speak. If you have an opportunity to do that, I think that's very
effective.
Its real significance is, what does music do in the film? That's what it was
composed for. If you're writing a piece for film, the film is the spine of
the music, because if the music is properly done for the film, the film is
the form. Whereas if you'r writing music on its own, it becomes a different
kind of spine, a tighter form that stands on its own. That's why, generally
speaking, if you take symphonic music (like Beethoven symphonies or a Bach
fugue), that doesn't work well in a film, because the music has so much form
of its own that the music stands away from the film, not in the film.
Of course you can change the shape of the film to suit the music; for
instance, in Fantasia, the Bach "Toccata and Fugue" is fine, but that
sequence was designed around the music ' I don't want to be accused of
citing it as a great artwork; what I'm simply saying is if you have music
that has tremendous internal strength then you have to design the film
around the music .
I've done a lot of films for Ray and Charles Eames that were little films,
one a thirteen-minute film called Toccata for Toy Trains. In that instance I
wrote a divertissement first and then the film was shot to the music ' So
the music in that case stands very easily on its own, because it was
composed beforehand.
PATRICK DOYLE (Henry V, Sense and Sensibility): I suppose film music has to
be acceptable instantly because it's an instant medium and people have to
instantly get ideas. it's not very often films are revisited in the same way
that a symphony or a poem or a great piece of literature is; it's very
instantaneous, and I try to deliver the instantaneous but to give it a
longevity so that it will last through time.
What are your own standards for what makes a successful piece of film music?
DOYLE: Well, first of all it should totally serve the picture. It should
always sound like good music, it should always in the end have a structure
to it. But basically it should always be musical, and listenable. And it
should be able to, away from the picture, conjure up the same sort of
feelings and images that it was meant to at hand.
DeadAgain had so many elements: it had a very strong, romantic feel; it had
a lost, melancholy feel; it had the danger of a psychopath; and it had a
retrospective quality, because it was harking back to a golden era of
Hollywood. All of the elements hopefully still come over when one listens to
the music, even after the film's gone.
Maybe the music should be providing something which is not on the screen, or
it should be playing against what's on the screen ' in that case it could be
misleading [when heard away from the film], but if one has seen the picture
then one knows the intention behind it. That contradicts itself because it
may give the listener an idea of what point in the picture it was
representing when in fact it would be a red herring.
ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL (Drugstore Cowboy, Heat): When Bernard Herrmann in Psycho
took the sound of a screetchy bird and sort of morphed it into what it might
feel like to be stabbed, the music took on a better, more significant role
than a sound effect would have in that scene, in the sense that when you
abstract something you create a different reality you've created something
more significant because you've entered into a state of dreams. And when you
enter into a dream state, things become more and more long-lasting. It's not
just hearing a tire screetch, but to hear an orchestration of how that tire
screetch makes you feel, is one step into the world of art and not just
craft.
MYCHAEL DANNA (The Sweet Hereafter, The Ice Storm): The role of music is to
enlighten the audience about the film from a sonic perspective, and to bring
some kind of sonic understanding of the theme of the film.
