The Best Music in Film

Charles Bernstein

(Composed the music for A Nightmare on Elm Street)

S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?
"I have many favourite film scores. Some are well known, such as Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Some of them are less well known, such as Jerry Goldsmith's A Patch of Blue (1965), or Under Fire (1983). And some are virtually unknown, such as Luis Bacalov's Polish Wedding (1998), or Patrick Williams' Julian Po (1997). The reasons, of course, vary with each individual film, but the overriding reasons are essentially the same. They are distinctive, unique to the film, thematic, evocative, memorable, unified, and well written."
S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?
"Perhaps music best enhances a film when it captures the essence of that particular film, when it renders the very spirit of that film into sound, when it serves both the separate scenes and unifies the overall structure of the story, when it is fresh, original and a pleasure to listen to. (I have a lot more to say about this in my book, "Film Music and Everything Else." It's a fascinating subject, worthy of more than just these few words)."
S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?
"Like most film composers, I would be happy to have written just about any score by John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone, and a few dozen other masters of our profession. As to re-scoring, I prefer not to think about re-scoring or, for that matter, about re-shooting, re-directing, re-writing, or re-editing a finished film. Once it's finished, I like to think of it as a fete acompli, that's it. Love it or hate it, it is what it is. In fact, I wish we could do away with the notion of re-scoring altogether, then all those great tossed out scores by Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith and others would still be with us. In that ideal world, producers would have to leave rewrites to the great composers they hired in the first place. But sadly, most all films today are actually re-scores in the sense that virtually every film we see has been previously scored with a "temp track" for test audiences before the composer ever writes a note of music. This, of course, has had a huge impact on the sound, the quality and the direction of contemporary film scoring."
Last Updated: 29 Sep 2008