When a Song Becomes a Scene

1. The new season of the MUBI Podcast looks at moments when pre-existing songs become inseparable from the films that use them. What do you think makes a needle drop feel essential rather than simply clever or nostalgic?

I feel like the best fall into two categories.  The first is when, in a quiet movie where characters never quite say what’s on their minds, a song on the soundtrack suddenly “speaks” for them.  The example I always give is Charlotte Wells’ AFTERSUN, about a tween girl and her Dad who’re trying to deal with his depression, which neither of them is really equipped to talk about or even understand.  Over a climactic scene towards the end, Wells drops in the Queen/David Bowie classic “Under Pressure,” and it’s as close as she gets to finally spelling out what these people are going through. It’s a huge, emotional song in juxtaposition to all this subtlety that’s preceded it.  And then Wells, her sound designer, and her composer by turns magnify and pare down stretches of the song,until it becomes kind of harrowing.  Anyone who’s seen it will tell you it just brings you to tears.The other category is kind of the reverse: It’s when the filmmaker drops a song over a scene that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it, and the contradiction gives the moment a weird depth.  My favourite example is the scene in GOODFELLAS where Joe Pesci and his mafia crew beat the hell out of another mobster in a bar, and for some reason it’s scored to Donovan’s “Atlantis.”  That’s a song that might actually have been playing on a bar jukebox in 1970, when the scene is set, but otherwise it’s the last song you’d ever choose for a beatdown: this mystical folk-pop epic.  The choice of music doesn’t totally make sense even if you try to take it ironically.  But maybe that’s the power of this kind of juxtaposition — it creates a moment unmoored from obvious logic.  Your mind reels.

By the way, you actually see this a lot in Scorsese flicks.  In fact, I once got to ask his go-to music supervisor, Randall Poster, if this was Scorsese’s conscious philosophy: to use needle drops that have barely any obvious connection to the scene.  Poster said, “I've never really heard a philosophy explained, except that he thinks it's cool.”

2. Music can completely alter the way we remember a scene, sometimes more powerfully than dialogue or plot. Why do you think certain songs become such strong containers for cinematic memory?

You’re totally right, but I don’t think the phenomenon is especially true of certain songs — I think in the right hands, images and story can lend almost any song that kind of power.  Like, you can play someone a song they’ve never heard, and they might go, “Good tune.”  But put it in a movie where it becomes associated with a mood, a character, a historical era, a place, a dramatic moment, or all of the above, and now you get it.  I think what’s happening is that the song starts to carry emotional associations, the same way it might if you heard it at your high school prom, or after a breakup.  It’s been put in emotional context.

The most important personal example for me is the two goth tunes Wim Wenders deployed in WINGS OF DESIRE: Crime and the City Solution’s “Six Bells Chime” and Nick Cave’s “From Her To Eternity.”  Up til then, I didn’t “get” goth; I think I almost thought of it as “horror rock,” music about death.  WINGS made me understand this was actually romantic music — it’s about finding beauty and sensuality in darkness and decay.  Now, for me, it’ll always evoke late nights, sexy bohemia, and the faded glamour of an old-world bar.  It’s music I listen to a lot while travelling. 

3. The season looks at the work of filmmakers including Gurinder Chadha, Andrew Haigh, Akinola Davies Jr and Hype Williams, each with very different musical worlds. What surprised you most about the way they choose music for their films?

I think Chadha and Williams were the most surprising to me. I’d seen Chadha’s BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM when it came out, and I knew the soundtrack was this fun blend of pop hits and Indian dance tracks.  But I hadn’t realised just how important music is to Chadha — maybe more important than movies.  Her first film was actually a BBC documentary called “I’m British, But…” about the explosion of bhangra music in the UK in the ‘80s and ‘90s — this fusion of traditional Punjabi sounds with modern pop and dance.  That music is all over the BECKHAM soundtrack and carries really specific connotations for her about 2nd-generation British-Asian identity.  So what I thought of as this frothy, upbeat bunch of tunes has serious stuff going on that was fascinating to learn about.Meanwhile, Hype Williams is one of the biggest hip-hop music video directors of all time.  But in researching him, I was surprised to learn he really wasn’t some huge music head when he started out.  He was a graffiti artist, then got really into film and photography, and he just happened to be growing up at a time when his hometown of Queens was exploding musically.  He saw all these rap videos being made, and not many of ‘em were visually interesting, so he figured he could fill a void. That said, you can tell he was intimately dialled into the music world.  Our episode is about his only feature, BELLY, and its iconic opening scene — a robbery set to the a capella version of Soul II Soul’s “Back To Life”.  And it seems to me that he uses that tune in the same way hip-hop DJs used it in clubs in the ‘90s: As a suspenseful prelude to something dramatic.  On the dance floor, it’d precede a big beat.  In the movie, it’s a shootout.

4. Has hosting this season changed the way you watch films yourself? Do you now notice when music is doing more emotional or narrative work than the image?

My Dad’s a dramatist, and my Mom was an opera singer, so I was brought up to love music and movies in equal measure – at various points in my life I would’ve told you I was more into one than the other, but really the best, for me, is when they’re combined.  And like a lot of people, I’ve been exposed to a ton of great music through movies — in fact, some of my biggest musical influences as a teen were the punk and new wave soundtracks for REPO MAN and SOMETHING WILD.  So I don’t think doing this season has changed how much I pay attention to music in movies, but it’s definitely been a dream gig.

5. Streaming has made almost every song instantly available, while cinema still depends on selection, timing and context. Do you think the perfect needle drop has become harder to achieve now that audiences arrive with so many pre-existing associations?

It’s hard to achieve, but I’m not sure the internet has made it harder — even before the internet, filmmakers had put a lot of music in a lot of movies, and conjured a lot of associations.  I mean, if I can drop Randall Poster’s name again, he told me a lot of directors he works with will eventually ask him if a certain needle drop they’re considering has ever been used for another film, and the answer is almost always “yes.”   But he also tells them, “Don’t worry about it — if you use it right, it becomes your own.” Because a great needle drop has always kind of boiled down to the element of surprise, right?  I remember when BRIDESMAIDS used Wilson Phillips’s “Hold On” almost as a theme song.  That’s a giant, well-known hit, not some deep hipster cut.  A lot of people have a lot of associations with that tune (it was even part of a recurring bit in HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE seven years earlier).  But at the time, I remember it still felt fresh because it hadn’t been a cultural “thing” for a while, and maybe even had gone through a period of being a little maligned as a cheesy throwback.  The song itself wasn’t a discovery, but the filmmakers' unabashed embrace and celebration of it was a surprise.  There’s always a way to make a song feel new, and that’s also the challenge.   

6. Finally, is there one use of a pre-existing song in cinema that you wish you could experience again for the first time — and what made it unforgettable?

The first one that flashed to mind is actually about listening to music!  It’s the scene in Richard Linklater’s BEFORE SUNRISE, where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s characters — who’ve just met on a train like a couple of hours earlier — go to a record store in Vienna.  They crowd into a little listening booth and literally drop a needle on Kath Bloom’s folky love song “Come Here.”  And while they listen to it in silence, the camera holds on them for what feels like minutes, as they sneak shy glances at each other.  We’re basically watching them fall in love in real time.  

In another context, that tune might feel hokey; it’s so earnest.  In fact, at first, Hawke’s character actually rolls his eyes at it, because it’s almost too on-the-nose for the moment, even in the world of the film.  But then he, and we, succumb to it. 

Sometimes when I’m feeling down on humanity, I go watch that scene on YouTube and read the comments — most of ‘em are from people who’ve been moved to remember their own fleeting romances, or their youth, or perfect moments from their travels. It simply evokes all those things.  One shot, one song, no dialogue, pure cinema.