BFI - page title here for accessibility

The Best Music in Film

Olivier Assayas

(Irma Vep, Demonlover)

S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?

"With not a second of hesitation David Mansfield's music for Heaven's Gate (1980). Its the one movie soundtrack that I can listen to on its own. And then it's also the very soul of this film. Somehow it embodies everything the movie is reaching for, especially a heartbreaking sense of time passing. I remember the catch line on the poster, it went something like (I'm not sure of the precise wording) what one loves in life is things that fade. Usually this is stuff to make fun of, in this case it was pure poetry to me. And exactly what Mansfield's soundtrack is about. I haven't seen Heaven's Gate since the time it was made, and as much as I liked it then, I always felt that my taste for the film had to do with my fondness for its score that seemed to have it's roots at the deepest of the disturbing emotions of immigration, loss, vanity of human fate. Possibly the film doesn't have the most structured narrative, but then it's mostly about feelings, images, dreams, visions, in ways similar to those of poetry, unlike most of cinema. And the key is in the music. Runner up is Pyaasa (1957) by Guru Dutt. Possibly one of the most remarkable transpositions of poetry on screen. Dutt plays the poet himself and when he says the verses, he actually sings (using the beautiful voice of Mohammad Rafi). It's just out of this world. More than once I've had tears in my eyes listening to the audio tape I bought in Delhi in the late eighties. And yes it's music even sadder than the music in Heaven's Gate. In terms of recent films, it's Basquiat (1996). Schnabel has great taste in music (ie : I like the stuff he likes) and this instinctive sense of the dialectics between image and score."

S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?

"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."

S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?

"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."