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The Best Music in Film
Dickon Hinchliffe Tindersticks
(Violinist and arranger with the band Tindersticks. Composed the music for Claire Denis' films Nenette et Boni and Vendredi soir)
- S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?
- "My favourite soundtracks are those that go right to the heart of a film, that get inside the characters and drama in ways that visual images alone cannot. In Bernard Herrmann's score for Taxi Driver (1976) it is the music that expresses the raw emotions of Travis Bickle more than anything. His face is almost expressionless and his voice monotonic, but Herrmann's music - deceptively simple dark brass and low woodwind chords and stark percussion - take us to the very heart of his loneliness and alienation on the streets of New York. The music is both brutal and tender, beautiful and disturbing at the same time. It builds the tension of Bickle's desires and outbursts of rage and the world it creates is inescapable. If you listen to the soundtrack on its own, you are instantly back in the world of the film - inside Bickle's head."
- S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?
- "Many people say that the sign of a good soundtrack is when the audience does not notice it. In Taxi Driver and in many of the best soundtracks ever written, the very opposite is the case. For me, it is not a question of writing music that sits passively within the picture, but to rub up against it and create something vibrant and new. Dull soundtracks simply ape the visuals - they are a tool to help the rhythm of the narrative, the editing, character development etc. The best soundtracks create a third dimension, beyond these functional devices as music has a more direct and unconscious route to people's emotions and memories than images. These scores give films the power not merely to entertain, but to hit you in the gut."
- S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?
- "I'd have liked to have written the Morricone scores to Sergio Leone's films. He probably had the biggest impact as a composer on a particular genre of film - in this case, the Western - ever. His use of unusual and groundbreaking orchestration and recording methods combined with more traditional use of melodic themes and motifs for characters (an approach that stems from opera) created some of the most original and dynamic film scores ever written."