Needle Drop

I’m sitting in my office right now listening to movie soundtracks. Not for fun, though I have been known to do that on occasion. Nothing says “rock out” like the score to 2001: A Space Odyssey. But not today, no. Today I’m trying to find temp music for our cut.

See we’re doing a little test screening next Wednesday, and the movie needs music. Even though this is a feature, and even though we have our composer Dana already working on cues. Because when we screen it for a handful of folks next week, we want it to feel like a real movie. We want that viewing experience to be as close as we can get it to what the finished film will look like, even though most of the people coming are film professionals. We’re doing this so we can truly see what’s working. If a cue is in there that’s not right, or it gives the wrong feeling, it makes it much harder to tell what’s not working in any given scene.

Another great thing about putting temp music into your cut is that it gets you thinking about the voice of your film. When we were first slapping cues in, it was amazing to see what felt right with the picture and what didn’t. I love the score to The Mothman Prophecies, but when we put that behind our little indie scares, it was way too big. It made al the sublety of what we were going for look forced and ridiculous.

Barbara picked out some great soundtracks, and a couple of them have been really helpful in determining the vibe of Fugue. One of them is First Snow, which I haven’t seen yet, but the score is fantastic. (It’s by Clint Mansell, who just did the excellent score for Moon, and often does Darren Aronofsky’s movies.) It’s very moody, filled with dark tones and glass orchestra stuff, but spare. And that really plays well against what’s going on in our story – a woman mostly on her own, trying to figure out what’s going on her head.

The other one that’s really helped is the soundtrack to Dreamcatcher. I have seen that movie, and apart from the weasel/toilet scene, it’s pretty bad. But the score is perfect for what we need – it’s filled with make-you-jump stings and lots of different musical flavors – searching mystery stuff, creepy Ligetti-esque atonal builds, dark flashback-y string sections.



But there are a couple sections that we still haven’t found the right pieces for. There’s a big (for us anyway) fight scene at the end of the movie. It needs to be intense musically. The most intense part of the whole story. And it needs to be scary. I’ve dropped in a couple tracks, but the orchestral stuff is still too enormous. It actually detracts from the scene, makes it less scary. Makes it cheesy, even.

And it brings back something I said earlier about honesty. There are plenty of pressures in movie making, and it takes such a long time, it would be easy to just slap something down. But we’re all listening to that little nudge at the back of our heads that tells us it’s not right yet. That the perfect, elusive track is still out there.

And yes, it’s only temp. But I feel like once we find the right temp track, it will help us explain to Dana how that final fight needs to play. It will give us a talking point. And all that will hopefully make for a good ending scene, as opposed to a mediocre one.

So I’m sitting here, listening. And I’m totally open to suggestions.