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The Best Music in Film
Neil Tennant
(Singer of the Pet Shop Boys, who contributed songs to Scandal and The Crying Game)
- S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?
- "Ryuichi Sakamoto's music for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima, 1982) because it makes the film. The soundtrack really pushes the dynamic – revealing the film's emotional heart through a repeated musical motif which is amazingly powerful. It's a very unstereotypical soundtrack, managing simultaneously to be Japanese and western, an idea that is central to the tension of the film's story. The soundtrack also contained a version with vocals by David Sylvian, and I remember having to check the words of the lyric when I worked at Smash Hits magazine. It's difficult to imagine having a lyric like that nowadays, with the central line, 'My love wears forbidden colours', which is quite an old-fashioned, 'love that dare not speak its name' idea of being gay."
- S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?
- "People use music in a film to reveal something which is not necessarily evident on the screen. For example, if someone is seen walking down a street, and all we hear is the ambient sounds of traffic and so forth, the audience will receive a particular impression. But if you then add a minor chord to the same scene, it will create a totally different effect - suggesting tension or forthcoming drama or whatever. In the music of Pet Shop Boys we have always been interested in the relationship between ambient soundtrack and musical effect, and in particular that sense of drama and tension."
- S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?
- "In many ways this is the most ambitious project which Pet Shop Boys have undertaken. I think that writing the soundtrack to a silent film is completely different to writing the soundtrack to a contemporary film. You are not just enhancing the film musically; you are creating the sound on the film. In this much you have a continuous piece of music, which is quite rare in a film nowadays, despite the current trend in more 'action' films to have virtually continuous soundtracks. What has been interesting for us, is that you can add elements which are not necessarily relevant in style or period, but which can make you see the film in a new way. And this is very sympathetic to Eisenstein's ideas about the film's soundtrack. While usually The Battleship Potemkin (1925) is associated with a Shostakovitch symphony, we are creating a very modern soundtrack. Eisenstein said that the film should have a new soundtrack for every decade - and this complements his imagery has remained so fresh and vivid. There is the romantic notion of a 'good revolution' and of people wanting positive change in The Battleship Potemkin. And this seems to resonate down to the recent anti-war and anti-globalisation protests. As the soundtrack is being premiered in Trafalgar Square, London, there is also the sense that the film and its new soundtrack will be experienced in a public space which is historically very politically charged. We haven't used sound effects in the soundtrack until the scene when the soldiers open fire on the Odessa steps when we put the gunfire into synch and it really does create a shock - emphasising the relentlessness of this killing machine. We have collaborated with Torsten Rasch, who is a wonderful composer in the school of Alan Berg or Schoenberg, and while matching contemporary pop music to his style has not been easy, we feel the results are extremely successful. For Pet Shop Boys, this project maintains our career-long interest in working with not just other contemporary artists, but specifically with artist film-makers, such as Derek Jarman and Sam Taylor-Wood."