The score

That's what this movie is. You mentioned folk songs. That's interesting because we should talk about Peter Schickele, who wrote the score, who is also, of course, PDQ Bach and had a successful... Yeah, you'd better explain who that is because the waters have kind of closed over. They have. Who knows who he is now? So they were a series of popular arrangements of Bach which enjoyed a vogue.

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The use of music in science fiction cinema is a whole fascinating subject, isn't it? Probably the most influential musical score in science fiction in the 1950s would be Louis and Bebe Barron's Electronic Tonalities on Forbidden Planet. And that sort of established that...

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John Williams' Star Wars score, which is... It's not classical music, is it? It's old-time Hollywood music. It's also pure 19th-century symphonic music. Now, you mentioned Kubrick's use of music, which is interesting to compare with this. So when Kubrick uses Also sprach Zarathustra, he's using music which is about rebirth. This is a film which is almost, correct me if I'm wrong, totally lacking in a philosophical dimension. Oh, I think it has a philosophy, but it is very much a...

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Francis Ford Coppola

basically making a mistake, but I guess no one else notices it. It's an interesting story. I chose to work with Nino Rota to write the score, and the studio was not very comfortable with this choice.

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Francis Ford Coppola

The Last Godfather, we actually went back to each of those places again, and if you see the pictures, you'll see a continuity of them over and over again. Interesting thing about the love theme from this movie, it's very famous now, but the composer was having a terrible time coming up with something. I had wanted a theme that was a little almost...

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Francis Ford Coppola

and the other had like a BB in compressed air, so on the cue for the effect, the ball bearing or the BB was shot outward, and the air blew any shards of the plastic lens away from the eye, and then the blood came out second. This was A.D. Flowers dreamt this up. I thought, very, very ingenious way to do that.

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Actually, the score that we play over this, the cue, is the main title theme. And originally, there was some other music scored by the composers Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave. And in listening to the whole, the score as a whole, I realized that the real guts of the music is that main title theme. And so we just took it and put it over the scene because I really felt that this is where the movie gets going and where the real

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This is a good time to talk about Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave, the composers of the film. Fred has been a guru to me for many years, has taught me a lot about film. And one of the things that I learned in this scene he taught me was the fact that you don't always have to add music to create an effect. You can actually take it away. Because if you listen to the soundtrack here, what happens is we have an atmosphere playing. And right now, we start to take the atmosphere away so the ear starts to reach, listening and listening for the effect of it.

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And how we would shoot that, you know, Mike still keeping them on fire. I think we, uh, didn't they shoot the, uh, the smoke right up into your clothes there just before the takes? Yeah. So you actually looked like you were burning. And this is the door to their planet. Yeah. These guys are all ready to go. You can hear the dwarves talking there. If you listen to the soundtrack, they're, like, saying no. No.

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Double Life of Veronique. And Kieslowski talks about how important it is for not just the actors, but everybody, the director and the cameraman and the composer, for everybody to get in touch with their unconscious. And that's a hard thing to do. And so anything that interferes with that, I think, is detrimental. Yeah.

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I don't know if these guys, you know, you get a sense that they're almost like an old couple in a way, that they're kind of shorthand with their talk. They don't have to talk as much because they kind of know everything that's going on there with each other. Well, I always likened the dialogue to an effects or a music score.

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propels something. Here it doesn't do anything other than act as a kind of score. Right. Well, you still have, I mean, this movie lives on in a whole other subculture besides film people and film fans because you've got the car, the people who are fans of the car who are in love with the movie, but also I think that

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As I say, being only 27 years old now, I was writing a James Bond movie with Sean Connery, no less. Composer John Barry remembers the first time he played the title song for producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Cubby was very good about music. He had a good ear. He knew when he heard a song or a melody. He always had very good instincts about that. Harry was absolutely toned up.

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But they were very humorous. The villains were humorous in the early ones. And even when the tarantula was crawling on him and he started pounding the tarantula, the score went with the pounding. I mean, it was done with a tongue in cheek. And I found that they got very serious after a while. And Sean, as it turned out in Diamonds Are Forever, there was a lot of humor in that, and he was so thankful for it.

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Francis Ford Coppola

The score of course was done by Nino Rota and my father had a more elevated position in which he was officially writing all of the source music and dance band music and Italian, what we call source music, the music that's played when you really see the orchestra, the band on screen or it's coming from a radio.

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Robert Sommer

She is in a situation where she is the wife of a composer.

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In contrast, the gritty sounds used for the film's main score. And so Shire said, well, that's a good idea. It's one of the great scores of the 70s. And there's never been anything remotely like it. No. Thank you, David Shire. Thank you, everybody involved. Yeah, all my faves. Thanks for listening.

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I had no idea that nobody had asked me to write the music for this film. In fact, it had been an idea that was banded about. And I constructed a thing which in the death never became the soundtrack to the movie, but became the album Lo. Some of it went on to Station to Station, but another chunk of it went on to Lo, which was the album that I did with Brian Eno in Berlin a few years later.

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Love and redemption are very Christian themes. Yes. The music by Wagner is a great match for that. But sometimes it is called into question whether his themes are in fact Christian. In a way, Yes- In "Tannhäuser", for example, is almost a Catholic opera. You have to see Wagner differently. He took a completely different path with his themes. Before this movie, had you already worked with Wagner or did that not happen until later? That came much later. I didn't discover Wagner's music until very late, just before I started shooting this movie. I never really knew who Wagner was and what he did.

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