Here’s a post about 10 films which were massively influential on my decision to write music for moving images. I could easily have picked another 50 films, and some of these might seem a bit obvious, but they’re all classic examples of what inspired me (and continue to inspire me) to write music for visuals. So, not in any order at all:

The Taking Of Pelham 123 (1974)
Director: Joseph Sargent
Composer: David Shire
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David Shire: Main Title

Massively funky & gritty 70′s score with an unbelievable dirty low-end in the horns and fat bass ostinatos; one of my absolute all time favourites. Aiming for a sound that was “New York jazz-oriented, hard edged”, Shire ended up basing the score on the twelve tone method which gave the sound a kind of organised chaos without a definite tonal centre – basically a sinister and threatening jazz/funk score that’s full of menace. There’s something about the vibe and music of movies from this period that I’ll always love: The French Connection, Serpico, Dirty Harry, Capricorn One, Black Sunday etc. A hugely underrated composer, I also love and highly recommend Shire’s haunting, melancholy, slightly discordant piano-based score for Coppola’s excellent The Conversation starring Gene Hackman (1974) and more recently David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007).

Memento (2000)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Composer: David Julyan
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David Julyan: Memento Main Theme

Proof that every so often, independent cinema can come up with a modern classic on a shoestring budget (well, $5m, but that’s allegedly peanuts by industry standards). David Julyan’s score to Memento is a fitting combination of glitchy nervous sound effects and slow haunting melancholic strings (which became a recurring sound in much of his successive work on other films with Chris Nolan, eg The Prestige, Insomnia etc.) For a while it seemed to be almost de facto for independent directors to cite this score as an influence in what they were looking for when on the lookout for a composer. In fact it still crops up as a musical inspiration on many film job briefs to this day, the sign of a highly effective score.

Naked (1993)
Director: Mike Leigh
Composer: Andrew Dickson

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Andrew Dickson: Naked Title Music

Still my favourite Mike Leigh film, Naked is, let’s be frank, a fairly bleak tale. Dark, brutal and unsettling but bristling with amazing fast-paced dialogue and stellar performances from David Thewlis and Katrin Cartlidge (much of the final dialogue was improvised in character during rehearsals). The music by Andrew Dickson, an English composer and longtime musical associate of Leigh’s (scoring Meantime, High Hopes, Secrets and Lies and Vera Drake) is seemingly impossible to track down. Lots of mournful and desolate violins, cellos and harp, it’s a beautiful and dark companion to the stark and uncompromising subject matter.

Solaris (2002)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Composer: Cliff Martinez
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Cliff Martinez: Is That What Everybody Wants

Perfectly matching the understated visuals and narrative of the film, Cliff Martinez’ score is an exercise in pure artistic synchronicity. Using Javanese gamelan, celesta, muted steel drums and slow shifting tone colors along with more traditional strings and horns, the score perfectly captures the remoteness and subtle poignancy of the film’s narrative. A bit of a departure from the former drummer for Lydia Lunch/Captain Beefheart/Red Hot Chili Peppers. It’s a beautiful and sublime piece of work and like the score for Memento above, still a touchstone soundtrack for indie directors looking to appropriate some of that ambient existential angst for their own projects.

Assault On Precinct 13 (1976) / Halloween (1978) / The Thing (1982) / Escape From New York (1981)
Director: John Carpenter
Composer: John Carpenter (Ennio Morricone for The Thing)
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John Carpenter: Assault On Precinct 13 (Main Title)

I love John Carpenter even though his films can often be pretty patchy in quality (apart from Halloween which is definitive). When I was growing up in the 80s, his movies would regularly play on late night TV and I’d stay up late to watch them. It was also a boom time for early ‘home entertainment’ when classics like Evil Dead and The Shining were becoming available to rent on VHS from the local video store. I remember the illicit thrill of watching loads of Carpenter back then – Christine, The Fog, The Thing…there’s just something very moody about his opening credit sequences that take me right back to being 13 again. It’s that whole minimal atmopsherics thing (which was actually largely due to budget and time constraints at the time) that gives me the chills. I couldn’t really pick one film in particular, but the scores for the above four are probably my favourites. Maybe Escape From New York for consistency: big thick warm vintage synths and lyrics like “…stab a priest with a fork, and you’ll spend your vacation in New York”.

Blade Runner (1982)
Director: Ridley Scott
Composer: Vangelis
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Vangelis: Fading Away

I suppose it’s a bit of an obvious contender but this score is just so damned evocative and lush; possibly one of the most perfect combinations of visuals and music of all time. And I’m not a particularly big Vangelis fan either (a bit too new-age for me sometimes). But as with the John Carpenter scores above, it could be the powerful childhood memories attached to watching the film that trigger things in me. Either way it’s another great example of music matching the visuals perfectly. So much so that I tracked down several other versions of this score, just so I could get all the extra tracks that you don’t get on the original release version (the Amazon box set link above is excellent and contains 3 CDs with 36 tracks).

The Shining (1980) / 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Composer: Various Artists

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Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind: Rocky Mountains

It was a toss up between these two Kubrick masterpieces. In the end I went for The Shining, but both are equally fantastic combinations of image and music. Stanley Kubrick had a tendency to not use one specific composer but rather just the individual pieces of music that fit the film, regardless of who wrote it. Using a mix of experimental electronic Moog soundscapes and modernist classical music, The Shining features artists including Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind, Kryzysztof Penderecki, Gyorgi Ligeti and Bela Bartok to create a deathlessly iconic soundtrack and movie. There’s a continuous unsettling air of dread and disturbing atmosphere throughout the entire film, from the initial flyover of the Rocky Mountains to Jack’s gradual breakdown into insanity through to the (literally) chilling finale. It’s one of those films that are just inseparable from the soundtrack.

Pi: Faith In Chaos (1998)
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Composer: Clint Mansell
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Clint Mansell: 2 Pi R

Another pivotal moment (for me at least) in modern independent cinema, Aronofsky’s moody and atmospheric film probably has a few holes in the mathematical technicalities (“A paranoid mathematician searches for a key number that will unlock the universal patterns found in nature”) but is full of beautiful grainy noir visuals, conspiracies and Clint Mansell’s hard edged distinctive electronic music (Mansell was frontman with late 80s alt/techno/industrial band Pop Will Eat Itself and has gone on to become a highly regarded modern film composer). Also, another good example of a successful director/composer partnership (Mansell went on to score Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream and The Fountain).

Ghost Dog (1999)
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Composer: RZA
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RZA: Ghost Dog Main Titles

When RZA nails it, he really does nail it. Although a lot of his work can be a bit patchy, on Ghost Dog he gets it right from the off (and some of the Afro Samurai soundtrack is also pretty cool). Those ghostly lo-fi hip hop beats and spectral string samples are his trademark sound and put here to stellar use against Jarmusch’s existential story of modern-day assassins and Japanese mythology. The opening titles set the subdued tone perfectly for the rest of the movie – I definitely have a pull towards films where not much appears to be happening on the surface. Also, I’ve been listening to hip hop for over 20 years now and it’s always been a perfect genre for cinematic imagery and wordplay – yet it still amazes me that even today, there are a few who refuse to even acknowledge it as a valid musical form, especially other film composers who would prefer it to be all quill and manuscript.

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Director: Andrew Dominik
Composer: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
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Nick Cave & Warren Ellis: Falling

After a short period of being generally uninspired by recent films and scores, this beautiful elegiac and atmospheric film brought it all back home again. Again, it’s one of those films where large sections just drift by with not much apparently happening, but the camera is allowed to linger on the actors’ faces and stunning photography. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis provide a haunting and intimate close-sounding score of piano, violin and guitar. Brad Pitt was on fine form in the film but the show was completely stolen by Casey Affleck who was mesmerising as Robert Ford and rightly nominated for several awards. One of the best films I’ve seen in a long time.

OK, that’ll do for now. Obviously, the above 10 are just an arbitrary selection of some of my favourites, so here’s a few more that could have been contenders:

Monster’s Ball : Asche & Spencer
The Hours/Koyaanisqatsi : Philip Glass
The Player/American Beauty : Thomas Newman
Syriana : Alexandre Desplat:
Alien/Capricorn One : Jerry Goldsmith
Red Dragon : Danny Elfman
Taxi Driver/Psycho : Bernard Herrmann
Thunderball/You Only Live Twice : John Barry
Amelie : Yann Tiersen
Get Carter : Roy Budd
Lawrence Of Arabia : Maurice Jarre
Paris, Texas : Ry Cooder
Three Days Of The Condor – Dave Grusin
The Usual Suspects – John Ottman

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