Mike Figgis - Walter Salles - Composer and Director: Exploring the Collaboration

updated: November 16, 2009

“Composer and Director: Exploring the Collaboration“ – Director Walter Salles in conversation with director/composer Mike Figgis, moderated by Peter Cowie. Berlinale Talent Campus, February 16, 2005.

Peter Cowie: Two distinguished guests. Walter is known to us this week as the host of this year’s Talent Campus, but again, I am sure there are some in the audience who didn’t come to the marathon session we had on Monday night, when Walter regaled us with his knowledge of film history as well as his own career. But basically he broke through with FOREIGN LAND in 1995, and made his definitive mark as an auteur with CENTRAL STATION in 1998, which was nominated for two Academy Awards and won a ton of prizes in various countries, including the Golden Bear here in Berlin. His recent film, MOTORCYCLE DIARIES won on Saturday a couple of BAFTA’s, for the Best Foreign Film and for Best Music. And he has just completed DARK WATER, adapted from a Japanese novel.

Mike Figgis, a fellow Brit, studied music very early on. He told me earlier that he is actually a musician posing as a filmmaker, but I think that is undervaluing what he has achieved. He helped form the rhythm and blues group, called Gas Board, which included the young Brian Ferry. And in 1988 he made his feature debut as a director and as a screenwriter with STORMY MONDAY, which was a crime movie with a jazz backdrop, and music by Mike himself involving Sting (but as an actor!).

He established his reputation in Hollywood with INTERNAL AFFAIRS with Andy Garcia and Richard Gere, and then a remake of Anthony Asquith’s THE BROWNING VERSION. But it was LEAVING LAS VEGAS in 1996 that make Mike a major Hollywood name and Nicolas Cage won the Oscar for Best Actor that year, while Mike himself was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay. Since then he has made several features, he has been a foremost champion of digital cinema, and a couple of years ago, at the first Talent Campus, he enthralled us with extracts from his work in that field. And his feature TIMECODE, with its split screen technique was another bold experiment.

"DO NOT ASSAULT BY THE SCORE"

So, without further ado, to music and film, it is an enormous subject, and we can’t cover it all tonight. I thought I would ask Walter, who is such a scholar in this field, music goes back right to the beginning of cinema, doesn’t it?

MUSIC COMES FROM THE MUSE

Walter Salles: Good afternoon. I basically came here to hear Mike talk, so?! I think if we go back to the very origin of the word music, it comes in fact from the Greek, musicos, which has to do with the muse. So there is something about music and seduction that happens very early on. The first films of course, the Lumière films, were completely silent films, but I think the first time that a composer was asked to do something for a film was in 1908, and then until 1931 several composers worked in film and the music was played live because there was no way to synchronise image and sound.

Film is a very impure medium in the sense that it is derivative of other ways of expression. If you go back to theatre, which is the origin of cinema, you see for instance in Shakespeare, when he writes, the play sometimes stops for music to come in, songs to come in. Also, cinema has a lot to do with the circus. If you remember the experiences we had as children with the circus, music is already very present. The first time that cinema was shown was actually in circus tents, and the music was played not in the tent itself, but outside the tent to call people to get into the cinemas. So this relationship is pretty interesting since the beginning.

INFLUENCIAL FILM MUSIC

Peter Cowie: And so often, music associates itself with film, or almost becomes more famous than the film itself. In films like THE THIRD MAN for example, or CHARIOTS OF FIRE, DR ZHIVAGO, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA?when you say that, very often people think of the music first. (To Mike) When you were growing up what was the film music that influenced you, or that you really admired?

Mike Figgis: What I actually admired was film sound. I used to get really bored by themes. It used to drive me nuts when people whistled. I liked THE THIRD MAN. That was kind of a groovier tune. But I remember certain films that the quality of the sound overall and the way the sound came in, and actually usually jazz scores. I felt that as an idiom that jazz and avantgarde European music seemed to work best.

Peter Cowie: What about the Miles Davis quartet in LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD?

Mike Figgis: I heard that much later. I knew the music as a record before, in fact I don’t think I have ever seen the film. Yes, I have once.

QUALITY OF SOUND IN THE CINEMA

Peter Cowie: Well, I was told the other day that it is ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS in America! It is coming out on DVD in a re-mastered version.

Mike Figgis: Probably because of Miles Davis. I remember for example from early experiences of seeing films, films that I remember are IN COLD BLOOD, which had a Quincey Jones score, and I only ever saw that once and I still remember the sound of the double-bass. I think he used two double-basses and I remember how powerful that was and how much tension you could create by using improvised music. And then I remember things like KLUTE, which had a very atmospheric score.

For me, the more it got away from the idea of formal score and tunes and themes that you would whistle once you forgot the film, that was of less interest to me. And I started to realise as a musician, and as a person who wanted to be a composer, that this was a very interesting medium, cinema, for sound. And that was my initial interest in cinema. It was purely from a sound point of view. I always remember a story. Somebody once interviewed Stevie Wonder and asked, what do you like to do to relax? And he replied, I go to the cinema a lot. In case anyone in the audience doesn’t know, he is blind. He said, he loves the quality of the sound in the cinema. And I think that is what differentiates for me cinema from theatre. They are both drama. It is interesting, I have worked in theatre, and cinema. If you take exactly the same text, put it on stage and use the music that you would use in the film, the actors would go on strike.

I have seen them do it when I have tried to do this. Because they hate the idea that when they are speaking to the audience that the music is somehow complimenting and adding another level. They don’t give a fuck if you do it in a film, in fact they are quite pleased. And they make this complete separation dramatically between the one and the other, which is very odd. The fact that we just accept the fact that when we are watching Shakespeare in a film, or any famous dramatist, it is totally acceptable to put a musical score on, or underneath it, but not on the stage.

THE MUSIC IN LEAVING LAS VEGAS

Peter Cowie: The opening clip is from Mike Figgis’ LEAVING LAS VEGAS, which is extremely atmospheric, and this opening clip shows Las Vegas by night and gives a very good sense of what is going to happen I think.

[A clip is screened.]

Mike Figgis: The good news was that that the score was recorded in my spare room, not in a studio, on a combination of an old four-track reel to reel tape recorder. I think I had just got some form of Protools. And then a little bit of work just on keyboards, because we couldn’t afford a string section or anything like that, and then my piano. With good Neumann microphones. And just really working to the picture and getting the spaces right and keeping it as minimal as possible.

Peter Cowie: I like the way that even when the music stops the sounds in the background almost provide a musical accompaniment of their own.

Mike Figgis: I always wanted to try and get a mix where the music doesn’t take you out of the film, it kind of just enhances the texture that is there. I love the sound of traffic, I love the sound of night. And if I am working with another musician, I let them hear the track when they are playing so that they are aware of the fact that they have to accompany the dialogue and their timing has to be really good.

Then the second piece of music is Don Henley. It is one of the MTV unplugged sessions, it is a great song and again, in something like this, where the material is so tough, and the novel was pretty uncompromising, I would try to get every inch of romance, or feeling out of the soundtrack just to give the audience something to get hold of, otherwise it is unrelenting. The movie starts off pretty much with him saying, I am going to drink myself to death, and ends with him drinking himself to death, so it is a one-joke movie. So you need as much help as you can along the way, not to be sentimental, it is trying to find that balance between avoiding sentimentality or feeling sorry for him, but at the same time, liking him. The three songs by Sting were all ballads. “Angel Eyes“, “Lonesome Old Town“ and the other one, a really beautiful song.

And this one, “I Am Going To Love You Come Rain Or Come Shine“, a Johnny Mercer song. Which again, for Vegas, because the story although it is contemporary now nine years ago, to me the story almost felt like a Scott Fitzgerald story that was somehow taken out of its time. So to find those old ballads and reinterpret them was also something I felt was going to be very strong for the film.

Peter Cowie: How did you meet Sting? He was an actor in STORMY MONDAY?

Mike Figgis: He is from Newcastle, we are from the same part of England. He claims he used to come and see my band in short trousers, making the point that he is younger than I am, but I think he had long trousers myself.

ANTONIO PINTO AND WALTER SALLES

Peter Cowie: The next extract is from Walter’s film CENTRAL STATION. It is a very brief extract but I like it because of the very discreet use of piano music.

[The clip is screened.]

Peter Cowie: Antonio Pinto who should have been here today but unfortunately could not be with us.

Walter Salles: We have worked together on four projects and this was the second one. When we were actually starting to communicate better. The film was edited without music, and then Antonio was invited to take a look at the picture and then we tried to determine where it needed music. And we never thought that music should be too present in certain moments, and this is why you have the delicate piano in there. It is something that came out actually pretty easily. This was the first thing that he prepared for this part and this is what stayed at the end.

Peter Cowie: Did he improvise that in a very brief time?

Walter Salles: There was more improvisation in the previous film FOREIGN LAND because we had very little time. But in CENTRAL STATION it was a little bit more about precision than improvisation.

THE FILM’S LOST OF VIRGINITY

Mike Figgis: I think it is an interesting thing that Walter has just raised. And a really important question for filmmakers is: When do you introduce your first piece of music on the film? And my experience is this, I try now not to put any music on for a long long, long time. Because I know that the minute I use fifteen seconds of music the film has lost its virginity, and has become a kind of sex maniac. In a way it just can’t have enough. And it has worked really well as a virgin up until that point, and then the minute you put something on you kind of go, wow, now it really sounds like a film, let’s get some more of that stuff. And then the temptation is just to wallpaper the entire film with delicious music that you have stolen from somewhere else.

You just feel so grown up and adult as a filmmaker because it has got music on. And then there is this horrible moment where you show the film, and you have been having this short term affair or relationship with the film, scene by scene, going yes, that is great. And then you see the whole film and it is horrible, it is a nightmare, because the film is changing colour from one scene to the next, there is no continuity, your actors have lost their personality, and it becomes like a travel film with music. It is really hard to avoid the temptation to put music on and it is almost like a zen-thing.

Okay, now it is ready, you have thought about it, you have fantasised if you like, about certain scenes and about how they might work. But if they don’t work without music there is a problem. And the thing I have noticed with a lot of Hollywood films is, I know that they suck, and if you took the music away they would really suck. Because the music is the thing that is keeping this mother going, more than anything else. You ask the question, why is there so much music in this film, why is it so loud, why is there such a big orchestra? The answer to all those questions is because the film sucks. And the producers in desperation have said: “Tell John Williams we will give him twice as much as we did before and he can have the biggest orchestra in the world.? And so you are in a situation where you are just being assaulted by the score.

Walter Salles: I couldn’t agree more with that. The other thing I would say is try to use as little temp music as you can because if you start to edit the film, and as you feel the need for music you start to add Nina Rota here and Sakamoto there, when you get to compose your music for the film it is never going to sound the same. And there is kind of a sense of displacement or discomfort that will occur. So the less music you can use in the editing phase, I think, the better it is. Actually I am now trying not to use any, from the beginning to the end.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL POWER OF THE SCORE

Mike Figgis: And the other thing is, for me, I am in a unique position more or less because first and foremost I came from music, so I have never wanted to bring anybody else’s music. For me that is real invasion of my privacy. And it has happened a few times that I have been fired by the studio and forced to go to bed with some composer so reluctantly. To have them compose music, when I have already composed music for the film that the studio has got rid of, that is very tough.

And so, when I start adding music I will literally just do a sketch, maybe a keyboard sketch, or something, just to see how it is working. And having in my own head some concept of how we can layer it later on and what the music should be doing, how it should function. But when I think about the situations for a lot of film directors who don’t have any musical background, there is going to come this moment when you have to hand over something. Probably you have written it as well. Some complex psychological scenario that you have worked on for maybe a year or more of your life.

And you are going to hand it over to some guy, usually a guy, there are some women, but predominantly men, who are maybe composing music for five other films at the same time, and will look at your film once, in a rough state, and then will go on a time-coded video on their computer, and they will have a series of cues to tick off, and they will work with an orchestra and wham through it, the whole thing. And you will be presented with a ‘fait accomplis’ at some point, which will actually completely change the psychology of your film in a way that you have no control over whatsoever.

The industry is in such a bad state with music now, it is appalling, and so many films are destroyed, by other things as well, but you cannot underestimate the psychological power of what the score is going to do to your film. If you think about writing a novel, and then just before publication, saying I am just going to give it to a complete stranger and ask could you completely change the book for me please? No, you don’t have to consult me, and I will see you at the book launch. Or a painter saying, if you want to change the colours, and if you don’t like that woman’s face then just change it. That is what a composer does to a film. And you better have a very good relationship with that person, I tell you!

A JAZZ SCORE FOR A VERY ENGLISH FILM

Peter Cowie: The next extract is again from LEAVING LAS VEGAS.

Mike Figgis: The opening of that clip, the quotation is a bit naughty. It is a steal from a ballad called “You Don’t Know What Love Is“, and I don’t think I was aware of it when I was playing it. It is one of those things, when you are improvising you sometimes come up with a phrase and you repeat it a couple of times, and then someone points out, you didn’t actually write that, it was written by Cole Porter, or somebody. And then you quickly check to see if they can sue you. I think you can get away with three notes. So this little bit starts out with the trumpet quote, you don’t know what love is, because she is about to say, I love you. And then the piano phrase that comes in is a reprise of the main theme, what one could call the ‘romantic theme’ of Ben and Sera. There is a story behind that.

I wrote that theme for THE BROWNING VERSION, produced by Ridley Scott, and in that film, which was a remake of a 1948 classic film, starring Michael Redgrave about a schoolteacher who has no contact with his pupils anymore. Because I was doing a remake, I didn’t want to do a remake, so I said let’s psychologically look at the character in a different way. I wanted to make the Albert Finney character, a guy who in the ‘90s, as someone who had lost touch with his pupils. But if you thought about his age, he was sixty-something, when he went to college or university, let’s say Oxford, studying classics, he was a hip guy.

So he would have been listening to Jerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and so I wanted to write a jazz score for this very English film. I didn’t want to make a Merchant Ivory film about how lovely England is in the summertime, and how posh people speak to each other. I didn’t want to make that film, I wanted to make a film about Albert Finney’s character, who was really a very cool, hip guy that just actually had no contact with the kids anymore, he was out of touch.

So I did a kind of Italian jazz score for him, of which the theme for LEAVING LAS VEGAS was the theme. And Ridley Scott fired me as the composer the day after I delivered the score. In fact he said, “we like the film so much we are going to get a real composer.“ So they brought in someone else and I had to sit with the other composer and Ridley Scott, while Ridley described to the composer the kind of music that should be on the film. Which is as close to being tortured as I have ever been in my life.

He kept saying things like: “In this scene we should hear the fog of time?“ “The fog of time“, I always remember this phrase, which is translated into muffled snare drums and muted trumpets, ie a military funeral! So that is sort of what happened, and it sort of became a Merchant Ivory type of score. The guy who did it, Mark Isham did a really good professional job but it wasn’t the film I was making at all.But I had written the theme and liked it so I tried it on LEAVING LAS VEGAS and it actually worked really well, as it often does with a piece of music. You can take it from one genre to a completely different one and sometimes it will still work. Either that or I am just a lazy bastard and I hate to throw things out!

USING OTHER FILM’S SCORES

Peter Cowie: This goes on all the time in Hollywood. In THE GODFATHER Henry Mancini was commissioned by Paramount to do the score, and Francis Coppola had to fight incredibly hard to get Nina Rota to be accepted. Right up to the last moment they tried to use over the scene when Robert Duval comes to Hollywood to kill Volts, they really wanted to use Mancini’s music until the very last moment. And finally there was a compromise and Francis said okay, I will use library music instead, and then they agreed. So it seems to me it has been going on forever.

Walter Salles: The theme for THE GODFATHER actually comes from another Italian film. Nina Rota wrote that and Coppola loved it, so he actually used it from the other Italian film for THE GODFATHER, and this is actually why the music for THE GODFATHER couldn’t be nominated for an Oscar, because the music had been used somewhere else. In the history of cinema, this started to occur really early on. For those who have seen NAPOLEON, the Abel Gance film, which I think is from 1927. The first time that NAPOLEON was shown with a big orchestra in its premiere, the composer, Arthur Honegger, composed the music but Abel Gance continued to cut until the night before the premiere.

So Honegger got so pissed off that he decided not to conduct that orchestra, and somebody else came and conducted it. And then it was discovered that what Honegger had composed for NAPOLEON was in fact the leftovers from what he had composed for another film called LA ROUE. And then to come back to Coppola, Carmini Coppola finally composed the additional score in the ‘80s. I would like to say something about this clip we saw from your film (LEAVING LAS VEGAS), which is so beautiful. Something that really attracts you also is the fact that at the very end, in the mix, you lower the sounds of that place, so less is actually more. You get to be much more with the characters.

THE MIXER’S FEAR OF SILENCE

Mike Figgis: There is another bit in LEAVING LAS VEGAS when he drinks an entire bottle of vodka in one gulp when he is watching a stripper. And he kind of bangs the rail at the bar and you think he is going to have a heart attack. When he hits the rail, as an experiment, which was a really interesting moment for me, I decided to take all the sound off the soundtrack, everything. And that never happens in a film. When you have nothing, they put room tone, or white noise, or something in there because there is a real fear of nothing, from Dolby, from sound engineers. When you say “nothing“ they say: “What do you mean nothing?“ “I don’t want anything on the soundtrack.“ So it goes from this ‘bang’ suddenly to a vacuum. And it is really uncomfortable. When I started previewing the film I noticed people were feeling uncomfortable.

And at the same time, Nicolas is on stage having this little attack and it was such an interesting moment. It was like when they say, “never let actors look straight into the lens“. And you go, why not, I want to try that. And it is a very powerful moment. You don’t want to do it all the time but occasionally you can do both of those things. And I noticed it has been copied a few times, this going to zero on the soundtrack.

THE POWER OF EXCLUSION

Walter Salles: This links us to the idea that exclusion in cinema is sometimes much more powerful than inclusion. I think that happens also in dialogues. You know, when you have two or three actors in the midst of a dialogue, what comes in between the lines is sometimes much stronger than what is actually said.

Mike Figgis: Yes, it is all about timing. And just a technical point, which might be interesting because you mentioned LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD, and for those of you who don’t know, what happened was Louis Malle made a film, LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD, and he was a big jazz fan. He invited Miles Davis to come and improvise the entire score. So the story goes, Miles came, he saw the film, he played to the film and I think in two days with a pick-up, French group, he did the entire film score, which is the most beautiful piece of music. It created, interestingly enough, for Miles Davis, a new direction in his music altogether. He had never played that minimally in his life before.

It is minimal because it is a film score but the result was so beautiful that clearly Miles thought that isn’t a bad way for me to play. And from the point after he did the film, his music changes entirely. It becomes much cooler, much more minimal, less piano, less fiddling around, less boring jazz actually. It is a really interesting moment in the history of jazz and the history of film. I am a trumpet player so I am very influenced by Miles Davis, it is hard not to be if you are a trumpet player. I did a film for HBO with Juliette Binoche, a half-an-hour film which was a Henry Miller short story and I decided to do an homage to the Louis Malle film and just used trumpet and basic keyboard.

This very lonely sound. So I did the score, in my room and delivered it to HBO. They cried, they laughed, they loved it. Three weeks later I got a call from the producer, David Brown, saying we have taken your score off the film and we have re-cut the film. And I said something like, go and fuck yourself then, and take my name off the film while you are at it. Years later when LEAVING LAS VEGAS came out, I never spoke to this guy again, I got a really nice letter from him saying, you will be really surprised to hear from me, but I saw your film and I think it is lovely, and I particularly liked the music. I wrote back and said how gracious of you to write such a nice letter and I am so delighted you liked the music, and I wonder if you noticed that it was the music you took off your film that I put on LEAVING LAS VEGAS. And I never heard from him again.

THE SCORE IN FOREIGN LAND

Peter Cowie: Walter, when you made FOREIGN LAND it was a black and white picture, your first real feature that went to Sundance, and I think this sequence you particularly like. It is about a young man who gets sucked into taking some diamonds in a violin to Lisbon and there he meets a girl and they meet and gradually get closer together. And in this clip they are already up close and personal. We will watch it and then you can talk about the music later.

[A clip is screened.]

Walter Salles: Two different music moments and two completely different origins. There was something composed for the love scene that didn’t work at all, it was overwritten I think for the scene, and therefore what we asked the musicians at that point was just to play to the images. There was a song at the very end of this film that they knew of, that was a song linked to the ‘70s in Brasil. And what they do there is an improvisation on the theme of that song. The second part of it had been written prior to the image, so it is a completely different approach on the two musical pieces.

One thing about the image in there is that we shot this film really rapidly in three continents in three and a half weeks. When you see the car stop, this was shot in Portugal, when you have the lower angle camera when she comes towards the camera, that was shot in Brasil. Then the boat is actually in Capeford Islands, and the feet that go into the water, that was in Brasil again, in Rio de Janeiro, and when the guy looks at her, his point of view, that is the airport in Capeford.

The only flight we managed to take from Lisbon to Capeford left on a Saturday and you had to either wait one week to take the other flight back, or the only other option was to fly out to Moscow, which wasn’t exactly where we wanted to go. So we shot that in three hours in the morning before heading back to the airport, and we were a crew of eight people including the two actors. We shot on Super 16mm on an Aaton. It was really very fast and everything is pretty much take one. But we did that because the only place we found was that boat in Capeford.

Peter Cowie: And you bring up the sound of the sea, which in itself is almost like the bridging music between those two pieces.

Walter Salles: The interesting thing is, is that we didn’t have sound when we went there. So we had to ADR it later and the sound of the sea is actually a post-sound, not the real sound.

Mike Figgis: I really like the first scene which is very erotic, and the temptation often in film is, if the images are a little bit edgy, is to make it really soft with some music, to make it lyrical and sweet, and I really like that you didn’t. That actually the music had a little toughness to it, and was edgy. And again, this is a big issue in cinema. That everybody at some point has to deal with some sexual scene.

People don’t really like to talk about it, they don’t discuss it in the way they would with a car chase or something like that. More like, that is very beautiful, just do some nice music for it and that will be fine. Just do some dissolves, and a hand on the back and a bit of slo-mo, and we have got a really nice song that we think will work. That is the Hollywood way. It is time for a needle-drop. They have a new J-Lo song, which will work really well with sex. For me this always kills it.

THE DANGER OF COMMENTING THE IMAGE

Peter Cowie: Walter, since you have worked with Antonio Pinto, do you get together with him at a very early stage prior to shooting to discuss the film and get his imput?

Walter Salles: That has changed throughout the years. In the beginning, what I used to do was to talk to him before the shoot started, but he used to wait for the film to be edited to really come in and compose to the image that had already been edited. And now, in THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES I tried to think of the film in a different kind of manner altogether, so I thought with the music you also have to go in a different direction. I think one of the dangers of adding music to film is that music can actually just comment on what the images are already telling you, and going in exactly the same direction as the image.

I thought it would be more interesting in this collaboration with Gustavo Santaolalla, the composer for MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, to work in parallel routes as opposed to him coming in after the fact. So what I have done is to share the screenplay with him, and to say, compose the music before the film is edited. Compose the music before the image is even done. And ninety percent of the music that you have in the MOTORCYCLE DIARIES has been composed prior to the editing, or during the shoot. So it is the opposite.

Mike Figgis: Was it in your mind when you were shooting it?

Walter Salles: Yes. I had a cassette of it and played it constantly. And I just inverted the sign you know.

Mike Figgis: In LEAVING LAS VEGAS I played the theme that I already had which I thought might work. I played it to Nicolas and to Elizabeth when we were rehearsing and said, this is I think your theme, this is how I feel about the two of you as a romantic couple, and gave them a cassette of it as well. And that helped I think.

Walter Salles: It is a much more creative way of thinking I think. And better for the composer because he does have the same world of possibilities as opposed to working with a narrower field to start with.

COMMERCIAL SOUNDTRACKS

Peter Cowie: But mainstream Hollywood would surely never accept that. It just happens that you, Mike, are a composer, and you, Walter, are working in Brasil and you have that kind of freedom that you probably wouldn’t with a big studio.

Mike Figgis: Sure. They think in terms of hit songs. And you have this person called the music supervisor, the studio employs someone just to look out of contemporary commercial music, who has their finger in all of the record company pies. So you are looking at soundtrack deals as part of the print and advertising campaign. It is interesting if you go to Tower Records in Hollywood because there is a huge section for the film section. And every film that comes out has a soundtrack album, whereas twenty years ago that was unheard of.

Peter Cowie: Sometimes they are out before the film comes out.

Mike Figgis: They are out before the film and they are around for a lot longer after the film too.

Peter Cowie: Because they want DJs to pick them up.

Mike Figgis: Sure. And it is just a business for them. It is a really dangerous time for film because of the power of music and the abuse of the music industry by the industry. It is really terrible. It has got nothing to do with all that crap, it really is crap, the idea of it as a marketing tool for each other. It is just like a bunch of whores doing a neon-sign together. It is terrible, film is far too good for that. They should be sent to an island somewhere!

COMPOSING FOR INTERNAL AFFAIRS

Peter Cowie: Now we are going to see a couple of clips from INTERNAL AFFAIRS. And when we have seen the first one you might want to tell the story about Robert Towne.

[A clip is screened.]

Mike Figgis: I did the temp score for INTERNAL AFFAIRS on a beautiful machine, I have still got mine, it is called a Porto-Studio. It is a cassette player that has four tracks and you can dub from track to track. It has got this amazing button called the DBX button, and it puts so much shit on the track. And if you record with the DBX button on and then take it off on playback it is just awesome, as they say in LA. So, I had that, I had a little Roland and a very early sound player, and a drum machine, with some funk track going and some synthesised base and stuff like that.

When we did the preview in Paramount state-of-the-art cinema, I can say this in public now because the regime has changed, they got a test audience in, and I was very nervous because I had never had a test before in my life, and the audience went completely nuts. They were making so much noise, and they put you next to the volume control. It is a bit like the rock ‘n roll story about the amp that will go to twelve and all the other amps will only go to ten. The guy said to me, never take it above that point, that is the top point. At the end of the film I had done all of these huge crashes like deep-base thumps to frighten the audience. But the audience was just making too much noise so the bit where Richard Gere jumps out and frightens Nancy Travis I just couldn’t hear the score because they were all shouting “look out, look out“.

And so I just kept cranking it. And so the bit where Richard jumps out it is supposed to go PWHOW, but it just went phhh (like a deflated ballon noise). I had blown all of the speakers out, so anytime that anything happened on the main speakers it was just kind of flapping with the torn stuff. So we had to do the rest of the film on the surrounds. And I thought it had gone well but Paramount would not okay me to do the full score, it was getting all of this resistance.

Robert Towne, who wrote CHINATOWN and had directed a lot of movies, had just done a movie called TEQUILA SUNRISE. I met him at a party because he was a friend of the producers and I was introduced, and he said: “I saw your movie, STORMY MONDAY, I really liked it, and I loved the music. How do you work with the music?“ And I said: “I just take a keyboard into the cutting room and then I transfer stuff onto film and I try it. And if it doesn’t work then I try something else.“ And he said: “What do you mean, you try it? You mean, you and your composer?“

And I said, “no no, I wrote the music.“ And he said: “The music is great for that film, I have used it as temp score on my film. In fact I really don’t like the music I have got now because I preferred your music.“ And about two days later I got permission to do the score for INTERNAL AFFAIRS from the producer, because I am sure that Robert Towne had said this in front of him. They made me work with two other guys but they did let me actually get in and do the music. But it was a real struggle. And I realised in Hollywood that producers think it is their prerogative to do the music. That is their power, not the power of the director. They will always point the director in the direction that they think the film should be going with the music.

NEVER CHANGE KEY WITHOUT A GOOD REASON

Peter Cowie: The next clip shows a slightly more urgent thrust to the music, again from INTERNAL AFFAIRS.

[The clip is screened.]

Mike Figgis: This guitarist is a Puerto Rican guitarist called Jorge. He plays so fast that there is another bit later on when someone is supposed to be really sad, and I said, I just want you to play slowly kind of like a ‘bling, blong,, bling’ and just do this little arpedjios. He couldn’t play slow and so he had to count in hundred-time or something and just play every 42nd beat. These guys are so nervy. The percussionist is a Cuban percussionist and is one of the best percussionists in the world. All of these musicians came in and basically improvised. We had laid down harmonic base and used a lot of low frequencies and then had a lot of percussion playing to film.

Peter Cowie: But instead of sadness, as a result there is a feeling of anger.

Mike Figgis: There is a lot of tension there. And that is one of those lovely moments for any composer, where you have got a lot of strong actors just looking at each other because something very bad has just happened. And no one is speaking so the music can make all those comments. So you cut to Billy Baldwin’s face and he is dead, and he is just about to be covered, and whhoom, you can change the key there.

One of the golden rules of composing, laid down by Maraconi, which is really useful, is never ever change key unless you have got a really good reason to do so. And don’t worry so much about harmonic complexity, worry about combinations of instruments. That is going to give you your personality. The minute the texture becomes harmonically dense, I think you have lost the film. It then becomes about a piece of music accompanied by a film, not the other way round.

Walter Salles: You told a wonderful story that maybe would be interesting to share, about a producer sending you a memo about one key.

Mike Figgis: This is in an autobiography of André Brevin, who was a fantastic pianist, now classical conductor, but in his early career was a film composer, a child prodigy. He tells a story about, in the early ‘40s, some studio mogul going to a preview that had gone badly. And at one point he is listening to the music and he hated that music. He said, that fucking music, what is that? What is the musical term for what I am listening to? And they said, it is a minor chord. And the next day there was this memo that went round the studio, ‘no more minor chords’.

THE QUANTITY OF MUSIC IN TODAY’S FILMS

Peter Cowie: Walter, do you think music is played too loudly now in theatres compared to what it was? Do you think that we have got to a point where you are just enveloped by this music, and the front speakers for the dialogue is almost covered?

Walter Salles: It is not only a problem of volume, it is also a question of quantity. As I was saying the other day here, you now see a film that is two hours long and has three hours of music. It is a Hollywood tendency to fill in all the gaps that could be interesting and fill them with whatever gives direction to the film. And you are not invited into that film anymore. People just impose on you a narrative, and this is becoming more and more common. The other thing is that when you go outside of North America the films are subtitled.

Not here in this country, or in Italy, but in most other countries where you don’t have dubbing, the films are subtitled. And therefore, the voice channel, the dialogue becomes less important because people can actually read the subtitles. So what the theatres and the multiplexes have been doing outside of the U.S. speaking world, is augmenting the channels for music and sound effects, and diminishing the ones for dialogue. It affects a lot. For instance in Brazilian cinema, every time one of our films is shown in a multiplex, people say the dialogue, the voices are low, they are difficult to understand. But no, it is just that the whole equilibrium of the room has been jeopardised.

So we do pay a high price for that. The basis of it is really the fact that there is no more space for people to think in mainstream narrative. It is as full of elements as you can get. And they are all going in the same direction. Which is not what happened in European cinema for instance. If you go to Antonioni’s use of music, he would always say, use music against the sense of the scene so that you can add another layer to it. Don’t just go in the same direction. Godard for instance used music as he used editing, as a form of collision. He just cut the music as violently as he cut the image, and that gave an incredible narrative vitality to his films.

SUBTITLING GODARD’S WEEKEND

Mike Figgis: But also what Godard does, which is really interesting, and I will give an example. In WEEKEND, in the first or second scene, is a very erotic scene. There is a woman sitting in her underwear, smoking a cigarette, very French, very cool. There is a very bored looking French guy smoking a cigarette. She is telling an incredibly erotic story about some crazy things she did with Jean Paul and Marie the day before, that involved milk, eggs, scotch, a lot of nudity, a lot of cigarettes.

And she is telling it in this really boring way, “and then he did this, I took my clothes off, they poured scotch over me?“, and he brings in this piece of music against this dialogue, and he just drowns the dialogue out and it is this fantastic moment. However, in the English version, which has subtitles, they obviously got the shooting script so they carry on with the dialogue in subtitles, which was not Godard’s intention. So the English audiences get to hear what she actually said, and the French audiences get to hear the music. It is an interesting thing about how something can go against the intention of the filmmaker.

But I love the fact that often he will drown out the dialogue, and the music comes in as a different force altogether. He is the only director I know who does that, where he regards the music as being as powerful a tool in its own right as anything else in the film. And in the same way, if the camera chooses to go off the actor that is talking, the music can also obscure the dialogue. And that is a very interesting way to go as well. Not very conventional but very powerful.

THE MUSIC IN THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES

Peter Cowie: Well, we come now to THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, which uses music very sparingly I think but very effectively. In this episode we see Ernesto who is being confronted perhaps for the first time in the film by the real injustice of the labour conditions in Latin America. Just to pick it up for those who haven’t seen it, you will see him throw a stone at a lorry that is taking away poor people who he know will probably never come back or be exploited. Then the music comes in.

Walter Salles: That has been composed before the film was made actually. It had to do with the idea of not only serving that moment of the film, but also making us understand that we were crossing a frontier. So the two travellers abandon Chile and they enter into Peru. They are changing internally but the geography also changes, so that kind of introspective quality is in there but also the choice of the instruments give you the idea that they are getting into a new territory, a new geography. An interesting thing here is that Gustavo Santaolalla plays all the instruments that you are hearing.

Peter Cowie: Road movies tend to lend themselves to great music. So often a road-movie tends to inspire both the director and the composer.

Walter Salles: I think that road-movies are basically about characters being transformed but also as countries are being transformed. That has a lot to do with where we come from. We are part of cultures that are still in the making, it is as if our identities are still being defined as we speak here. So, it is always interesting to capture that and interpret it either visually or musically. If you take a look at Brazilian music today there is a big change in regards to what existed fifteen years ago.

LOSS OF SEXUAL INNOCENCE

Peter Cowie: Our last extract is from Mike Figgis’ film LOSS OF SEXUAL INNOCENCE, which I think is your most allusive film in a way, filled with all kinds of allusive references and tantalising sequences that end on a high note, or you are not quite sure how they are going to go. This clip I have chosen, I think shows how music can be used to underline a kind of semi-dream state, or something that is imagined.

[A clip is screened.]

Mike Figgis: The scene is basically about the Julian Sands character in a very unhappy marriage. He is driving away and he has the sense he won’t come back. It is that thing of seeing yourself how you wish it could have been, having a kind of encounter with yourself, and the contradiction in what you wanted and what actually happened. This is a theme that goes through this film quite a lot.

And so I just used a drone, and again, this was no-budget scoring so I did all of the pads and everything myself, and then I brought in brilliant musicians. This was a guy called Tony Coe who is one of the greatest jazz musicians in Europe. He is known as a saxophone player but I happen to know he is a brilliant clarinet player. I love clarinet as a voice, it is very good for film because it is so pure and it has no vibrato and it is not funky. He is a musician that I know very well, have admired since I was a young student and so when I finally got to work with him I was overjoyed that he would even consider working with me, because he has always been a hero of mine.

And he is a wonderful man who I can just talk to, show him the film, say this is what the scene is about, I am just going to give you a drone and I just want you to kind of voice quietly with no vibrato, low register, on the clarinet. On that film I also worked with a singer called Maggie Nichols. Again, who is just an improviser. She is someone I have known for a long time who I can just explain what I want. Funnily enough, I was thinking whilst I was watching these clips, that on the films where I actually had a budget, where someone said, I will give you some money to do the score, and you get an orchestra, it is always a real shock, because if you are sitting alone in your studio and you want to just play a drone with some string samples for five minutes, you just do it and then you can start adding things.

If you want that as an orchestral sound and you score it and you come into a recording session with maybe seventeen musicians and say, okay, I just want you to play G and C for four minutes very quietly. These musicians are quite tough and they just want to play, and it is a contradiction. I realised that often film music is so frisky because they want to entertain the orchestra. I don’t want to entertain the orchestra, I just want them to play quietly, very simple things, that will work for the film. And then you have to have this awful moment where you go, I wish I had written something more complicated for the orchestra because they look really bored.

Finally I had some revenge last year when I did the Disney film. They gave me a budget, and it was a thriller with Sharon Stone, and I thought I am going to write some really complicated music. So what I did was, on a keyboard and a computer, I played some things really slowly, and then I speeded them up ten times. I wrote this full orchestral score, I wrote it in slow motion and gave it to them at the right speed, and then watched in delight as they struggled, for the first time in my career I saw an orchestra struggle with something I had written. They were going, this is really complicated, and I said it is nothing really! It was a moment of revenge.

QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE

Question: I have two questions, one for Walter, one for Mike. Mike, what do you do if the director gets in touch with you and wants the score before the film, if that has ever happened? Because I am an editor as well and like to edit my film to the music.

And to Walter, in Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, he did all the scenes with music in the background so they had to dub the film afterwards. I would like to know if there are times when you can use that to get feeling in some kind of situations.

Mike Figgis: No one has ever asked me to write music for another film. And I would do it but it would be a new experience for me. That is the extent of my knowledge about that. I am really cheap as well by the way!

Walter Salles: The fantastic thing about being both the director and the composer is that you can fight with the composer and still have dinner with him that night. The question of editing to the music. I think if you prepare the music beforehand as you have seen in the last two clips you can actually do that. What appears to me more interesting is not to have one thing serving the other but that there are two creators having their own take on the same material, on the same screenplay, on the same theme.

DUBBING AFTERWARDS

Mike Figgis: But was the question getting at if music is supposed to be playing in that scene?

Walter Salles: Yes, I will come to that. I am answering the first question, which had to do with if you prepare the music in advance can you cut it to that. I think you can and you should. It is easier than if you cut to somebody else’s music because if you cut to music that has already been composed to a film you are imposing an external rhythm to that scene that your composer will ultimately have to serve. And his piece will have to somehow resemble what has been there before. And if you ask the composer for his interpretation of that moment, then maybe you will be able to work in parallel routes. For us it worked really well and I want to continue to work in this direction. And then you have to redo thirty percent of it. Of course you cannot hit it a hundred percent but you can actually go back to it.

Talking now about Sergio Leone, you know the Italians have this tradition of not using too much direct sound, and this has to do with Neorealism, when they took the camera outside the studios and brought it to the streets. And Rosselini, and De Sica created neorealism and the cameras were pretty noisy and a lot had to be re-dubbed. The whole nouvelle vague films were also all dubbed afterwards, the cinema nuovo in Brasil, they used a 2C Arriflex camera, which were very noisy, so you had to dub the films. You probably know that Fellini for instance didn’t really record sentences but numbers. The actors just said seventeen, eighteen, twenty-four. Fellini filmed with music as well. I didn’t know the example of Sergio Leone but? what I do a lot is to play music just before a scene is shot just to kind of put the people into the mood of that scene. But I never actually recorded a scene with the music playing in the background.

BEING BOTH COMPOSER AND DIRECTOR

Question: Mike, how much of an advantage is it to be a composer who is also a director?

Mike Figgis: It is a huge advantage. One of the main things is that I have developed a technique for myself, which is a kind of camera music technique as I could call it. I will try to explain. I was very influenced by Sven Nykvist and his use of what I call the creeping zoom. I don’t use track, or dolly because I don’t like that the edge of the frame is unstable when you move the camera on a dolly.

And you certainly become aware of the movement in a way that I think is distracting. Sven uses this micro-force zoom control at the lowest possible speed, so that in order to give tension, say in a dialogue scene, you are not zooming in but you are creeping in so slowly that you can’t really tell, but subconsciously so that the audience knows there is some movement, and it creates a certain tension. I know when I use that kind of a camera move that the music, if there is going to be music that will go with that, will be a drone and a very low frequency at a level that the audience doesn’t hear. It will just be sitting at the bottom of the soundtrack, hitting you somewhere in the stomach.

And a combination of the creeping zoom and this low-end sound will create some tension. That is score. Now, on top of that, if I want to add just one piano note, a low-end bottom C or something like that, and hold it and let it just die over thirty seconds, that is score. And then on top of that I want to float a tiny little voice or something. In certain scenes where you are not aware that there is any score there, there is a lot of score happening, and it really has come from my understanding of the psychology of a camera movement linked to a specific sound or a specific frequency of sound.

And that is so useful to me when I am directing a scene, when I want to start getting a certain kind of tension without pushing the boat too far out too quickly. You want to just start building something slowly. So by the end of it the audience is really uneasy but they are not quite sure why they are uneasy. You haven’t graphically explained anything, you have just created something, which is going to go somewhere else, and maybe pay off in ten minutes. So I become more and more wary of camera movement, a hatred of excessive crane movement or of a camera move that is just for the sake of the movement. If you start off by cutting that down and tying it in with a certain understanding of sound, and I would include sound and score together, to me they are the same thing.

DUBBING AT INTERNAL AFFAIRS

In INTERNAL AFFAIRS for example, talking about dubbing, we had a re-shoot problem because Paramount were so cheap that they wouldn’t hire decent equipment. So the 35mm magazine had that noise like a spin-dryer. We hit it, we did all the things that you do, but nothing, it continued to make this noise. We had no choice and they said, well we will have to dub it. Richard Gere hates dubbing and he is not very good at it, he hates it. For good reason, it is never as good as the original.

We tried to do a dubbing session and he just got more and more pissed off, and eventually I said, forget it, we will deal with it. So what we did was, we sampled the camera noise, worked out exactly where the pitch was on the camera problem, and made the score in the same tonal key as the camera problem. And this spin-dryer looping effect we put that into the score as well, and then just brightened up the voice. The camera noise became part of the score. It was better than replacing it. There is always a way, and particularly now, the most amazing things you can do with computer technology such as clean up voices and find ways of losing extraneous noise which were not available ten or fifteen years ago.

What do directors do if they cannot do that? Tough shit! No, I think all directors should be forced, frogmarched to music school, for three months as part of any part of their education just so you know what a minor chord is. Just so you know basic rules about harmonics, harmonic structures and what a rising fifth is. Everyone loves the James Bond theme but does anybody actually know what is happening? It is used over and over again in all film music because it is called a rising fifth.

You should know just enough from a crash course in music so that when you get into that situation when you want to start using music, you are just a little bit more knowledgeable if you don’t have that background. Just to kind of at least know the basic rules of what you are dealing with. And they are not so complicated. But it almost something that is so missing from people’s education in film.

HOLLYWOOD VS. INDEPENDENCE

Question: Where do you think the tendency of film music is heading? You are speaking about trying to find a lot of freedom in composing, and composing either before or at the same time as the film, but most of the time you have to deal with being at the end of a chain. So you have to adapt and make music more flexible so that it can adapt to cuts or changes. I think there are two different directions. One is doing music that suits to the schedule, and another which is much more freedom and more free. It is a completely different direction, maybe because you are shooting something with picture and the other you are editing at the same time, so what do you think is the real tendency?

Peter Cowie: Mike, I think you already answered that to some extent when you talked about the difficulty with the studios creating these soundtracks in advance, or these CD albums.

Mike Figgis: Both Walter and I come from a non-Hollywood background, so one could say there are two kinds of filmmaking. There is the one that pays really well, Hollywood, which is why in a way everyone wants to go there because you will never get paid that well anywhere else in the whole world doing anything else. So there is this temptation to go there and get a shit load of money and then get out before they trap you. But if you go there you have to accept their rules, which is they control the music probably and it is almost a waste of energy to argue with that.

The other way is to make independent films, which are now much easier. And as part of that, as you are starting your filmmaking career, you need to form very good relationships with producers and distributors, and think of alternative ways of doing that yourself. That is crucial to any future success of what we are doing now. And in the same way you need to form relationships with composers or musicians that can be your partners. A friend, rather than a stranger that comes in and changes your film but someone who is really from your culture, from your social scene and understands what is going on. As I understand from what you said, Walter, the guys you work with have been your friends, right?

TWO FAMILIES OF FILM

Walter Salles: Absolutely. And I completely agree with what you just said. I think that there are two families of films. One is the mainstream cinema in which I think it can be characterised by the fact that you watch this film and nothing is unclear, you understand everything, you understand too much. And then there is independent cinema where you are actually invited to complete that film.

If you are working in independent cinema you should have one thing that is the luxury of time. It makes no sense to be a composer for an independent film in which you have to rush. This makes no sense because you would be working with the worst of two worlds. If there is one thing that I think is important to say is that one should work with as small a crew as you can in all fronts, in the filming, in the preparation, in the location scouting, in the shooting, in the editing room.

The equipment is on your side. It is getting more and more compact, you can actually edit a film in your computer if you want to, and you couldn’t even think of that years ago. So the technology brings a kind of democratisation possibility. Sometimes this happens. If the film doesn’t cost a lot you should have the freedom to explore new paths and try to be innovative. Now, if you work with no money and you have to accomplish it in a time-frame that is exactly what you are imposed to in the Hollywood world then it makes absolutely no sense.

Mike Figgis: There are also so many good bands around now. If you listen to somebody like Radiohead, so much of their instrumental stuff, and even the way they use vocal sounds, very integrated into an instrumental context, that sort of sound works so well with a lot of new film too. There is a jazz guitarist called Bill Frisell who just churns music out. He works with combinations of all kinds of people, for example Ry Cooder, and all kinds. His music is so filmic. And there are so many choices of musicians now, who are not known as film composers but who would be just brilliant for film I think. Because they are fairly minimal and they also have much more of a root in the culture that exists now.

If you think about it, all the STAR WARS films and Spielberg epics, that music is nineteenth century. It rips off Wagner, Tchaikowsky, if they want to get a bit freaky they do a Bartok rip-off, if they want to get a bit strange they do Shernberg rip-off. But it is really nineteenth century, early twentieth century rip-off culture. And you are thinking, why are we listening to this very charming rip-off music, but it has really got very little to do with the culture that we now live in, or usually the subject matter of the film. And it is odd that we just accept that tradition that that is what film music sounds like.

Watching the Own Films

Question: In an event very much like this one, for example I saw Martin Scorsese at a screening followed by a discussion, during the extract of his films he would never look at the screen. I couldn’t help noticing that and I asked him why and he said I cannot stand it, even twenty years later, it is too personal, I cannot see it. You, Walter, on the other hand are always the first one to turn around and look at the screen. May I ask you how you feel, what are you looking for?

Walter Salles: In the discussion the other day we screened a documentary that I hadn’t seen for ten years and when I saw it I said, “oh my god“, I would cut half of the music out of this. It is very difficult to watch something that you have done. Also if you work, as I personally do, you have to watch it a lot of times. For instance I accompany the whole grading process in the labs so I normally stay two months in the lab watching every single proof print come out and discuss it. And then in the mix you also see the film a hundred or more times, so at the end you possibly see your film more than three hundred times. So you know it by heart and it is very hard to dissociate from it in order to be able to find a new way to narrate a different story, without paying tribute to the previous one. This is why for me it is very difficult to do two road-movies in a row, almost impossible, because one will ultimately move into the other. It was very interesting to hear Mike talk about the use of the zoom, and I think there are so many ways to get to Rome. For instance, I never use it, I don’t even bring it on the set because I tend to believe that… you use it in a very sophisticated manner and Sven Nykvist is such an incredible reference for that, but it is always an easy matter to solve a scene. So I prefer not to bring it.

In the MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, after a certain moment after the bike breaks and they start to improvise their journey, we decided to leave everything behind, including the tripods. There is nothing anymore. It just goes on the hand until the very end, it is all improvised. And nothing had actually been pre-planned from that moment on. Now, there are travelling shots and stuff before that. And I can’t take this to the next film. I am going to do a very small film in Brasil next, a kind of an urban road-movie and I have to completely reinvent the form to narrate that. And if I keep watching this, I won’t be able to forget it, and so one can empathise with Martin Scorsese very easily.

Mike Figgis: I like watching these little clips, because I never see the film after it is done, and I love the process up to the point of release where you are exhausted and you let it go, and then hopefully you are already thinking about something else, so you kind of go, okay, I have done everything I can now do, the film has to go. You start work on something else. Funnily enough on Sunday, LEAVING LAS VEGAS was on British television and I saw it by mistake. I was watching a tiny TV and it suddenly announced, next, LEAVING LAS VEGAS and I immediately said, that is going off! But the person I was watching it with said, no leave it. So I said, “okay we will watch the first ten minutes and then turn it off.“ It is too depressing anyway!

But we ended up watching the whole film on this crappy little television, and I cried at the end. I was really moved by the film. I remembered watching the film how torturous it was doing the scenes, because the actors were great and, it happens very rarely, but sometimes on a film where it is heartbreaking to do the scenes, plus the writer had killed himself just before we did the film, and his family turned up half way through the shoot, which was only three and a half weeks, and the producer was very ill and died afterwards. I mean there was a lot of tragedy around that film and I remember all that, it is all welded together. So I was very moved by the film.

DVD Commentaries

Peter Cowie: Have you done any commentaries for DVDs of your films? Because that forces you to watch the film again.

Mike Figgis: MGM own I think six of my films and they have not invited me to do a single director’s commentary. They are terrible. They throw those films out like disposable films. They have no interest in the directors, they have no interest in the films. It is a commodity. Sony have now bought them, maybe things will change. It was always a source of great sadness that for some reason all my films ended up in the same dustbin.

Peter Cowie: They put out five of the Bergman films that they had the rights to and they had to withdraw them because they released them in the wrong ratio.

Walter Salles: I profoundly dislike to comment on films because I think that part of it has to be completely a mystery.

Peter Cowie: Mike Nichols refuses absolutely to do commentaries.

Walter Salles: One time, somebody asked Antonioni if he could talk about L’AVENTURA and he answered by mentioning Pirondello. He said: “What do I know, I am only the author?”

Mike Figgis: On the one I did do, I think it was for LOSS OF SEXUAL INNOCENCE, unfortunately the day that I was supposed to do the voice-over the reviews for ONE NIGHT STAND came out in America, and they were the worst reviews I have ever had in my life. So for some reason I was doing this voice-over and I went off onto this rant about film critics. And I said, it crosses my mind that maybe it would be a good thing if a certain group of people just took a critic out and beat the shit out of him, till there was blood coming out of their mouth. And I got onto this very creative thing about how to beat the shit out of a film critic. I forgot all about it until the film came out, and then of course it got reviewed and they all listened to the director’s commentary for some reason, they obviously don’t have enough of a social life. And I forgot that I said it, so there is a kind of warning there that maybe you should not do it and just keep your mouth shut.

Using Live Music

Question: I was quite struck by your comments about the film KLUTE, because as you say it is quite minimalist but quite striking. My question was, in terms of the film ONE NIGHT STAND you used some classical music as opposed to composing your own. Why did you make that choice?

Mike Figgis: I used the classical music because they were at a concert, and I thought it would be presumptuous for them to be at a Mike Figgis concert. Much as I would have loved that from an ego point of view, to see the sign outside Carnegie Hall. So, they were watching one of my favourite pieces of music, which is the slow movement from one of the late Beethoven string quartets, which I think is a very profound stunning piece of music and I have never heard it in a film and I always wanted to use it. It is a scene where they are sort of thinking about falling in love with each other, or there is some developing tension between them, so I was able to get a string quartet to play it live.

Sometimes when you have a bit more money to make a film, other directors indulge themselves in cranes and camera equipment, I would like to spend my money on live music. So whenever possible I try to put live music in the film. It ended up really bizarre because in order to film it in this deserted cinema in downtown Los Angeles we had Wesley Snipes and Natasha Kinski on a balcony as if it was not a balcony but the ground floor, and we had to elevate the string quartet up a couple of meters on a kind of rather flimsily constructed rostrum. There was this moment when we were getting them up and then we were passing up their Stradivarys up to them, insured at about two million each or something. And it was a very shaky platform.

And then getting them to play live, this Beethoven piece of music. By accident this recording was magnificent. And I realised afterwards it was because a string quartet has never been recorded before off the ground. Musicians conventionally play on the ground. If you put them up in the middle of nowhere the sound is not bouncing off the floor, it is going off evenly in all directions. And we recorded it on a pair of stereo microphones. They themselves said they thought it was the best recording they had ever done of that piece of music.

They kept saying, the sound is so clean, you can hear such separation with all the instruments. And I was convinced it literally was because they were up in the middle of nowhere, and the sound wasn’t bouncing off any hard surfaces. You know, it is a piece of information, which will be so useful to you when you come to do score. I realised when I was telling this anecdote it is the most useless piece of information of all time. I will shut-up.

Peter Cowie: On that note, or should I say chord, we should wind this up and thank Mike Figgis and Walter Salles for giving us so much time.