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The Best Music in Film
Roger Corman
(The Little Shop of Horrors, The Trip)
- S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?
- "Maurice Jarre's original score for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is my favourite because it most perfectly recreates and enhances the epic and subtly exotic feeling of David Lean's masterpiece. It mixes sweeping orchestrations with Arabian-sounding rhythms in a way that evokes the vast, mysterious expanse of the desert as hauntingly as David Lean's indelible images."
- S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?
- "Music best enhances a film when it evokes and modulates a specific emotional response in the audience to the unfolding story without the audience being aware of it. In Hollywood today, however, this can be difficult to achieve because very often music has to compete with louder and louder sound effects. As a consequence, there is a tendency for the music to oversimplify and overstate its themes. The manipulation of emotion in the audience has probably become cruder, generally speaking."
- S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?
- "I'm not sure I can point to a single most effective sequence of music in The Trip (1967), but I consider that Michael Bloomfield's score for the movie provides the most effective music in any of my movies. The music was produced in an era of instrumental, psychedelic improvisation, and it captures perfectly the alternating bliss and paranoia that is characteristic of the LSD experience, and that of the characters in the movie."