Seville Film Festival 2024 – Masterclass ‘Using Music in Film’ with David Puttnam [SPECIAL ARTICLE]

On Monday, November 11, and within the 21st edition of the Seville Film Festival, the masterclass ‘Using music in film‘ was held with the acclaimed producer and filmmaker, David Puttnam.

 

Our friend and collaborator José Carlos Fernández Moscoso (Último Estreno), attended the event and brings us an exclusive article for SoundTrackFest and a complete video of the event.

 

David Puttnam: “My experience with directors is that they have wonderful eyes and poor ears.”

David Puttnam (Southgate, London, UK, 1941) was given the choice, on a well-known radio program forty years ago now, of a limited and exquisite selection of musical themes to take with him to a desert island. Among those he selected was “When You Wish upon a Star”, the extraordinary song written by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington in 1940 for the Disney film “Pinocchio”. Two others were a title by his admired Elvis Presley and Beethoven’s violin concerto in D major, “a work I could be listening to constantly,” Puttnam said on Monday, November 11, as part of the 21st edition of the Seville Film Festival, during the Master class that the producer of films such as “The Midnight Express,” “The Mission” or “Chariots of Fire” offered under the title “Using Music in Film.”

 

With the musical tastes exposed, there is no doubt that David Puttnam is an inveterate music lover. This is the reason why the Seville festival has counted on the presence of the British filmmaker to make known the close relationship that, throughout his career, he has maintained with the composers who were appointed to score the films he produced. And among them are capital movies with soundtracks that have also been written with golden staves in the history of cinema thanks to the talent of Vangelis, Mark Knopfler, Giorgio Moroder, George Fenton or Ennio Morricone. “I don’t like to use the expression ‘genius’ because it is currently overused. But Ennio is, it must be said clearly. He is a genius,” Puttnam stated unceremoniously when, already in the last third of his master class, he explained why working with the Italian composer had been practically the best of his entire career. His shared experience with the audience was further strengthened with the projections of sequences from “The Mission” or the anthological denouement of “Once Upon a Time in the West” with the arrival of the railroad while Claudia Cardinale shines in her splendorous and entangled beauty. Of course, for the height of beauty, Morricone in his maximum harmonic, eternal and hopeful example, fully identified with all that the female protagonist represents, transforming into a masterful ending that Puttnam described as “sublime, which I believe is the Spanish word that defines it”.

 

And if the contained emotion was present in the faces of some of the audience, the emotions flowed in a silence broken by an explosive applause after the minutes of projection of some of the methodological confessions exposed by Morricone himself in the documentary “Ennio: the maestro” released shortly before the death of the Italian genius, culminated with several more sequences of “The mission”. “The double mordente, the double turn… The acciaccatura, the appoggiatura. All the elements that enriched the melody… And it seemed fitting to give the film a motet. The amazing thing is that the oboe theme merged with the motet, the motet merged with the ethnic part, the ethnic part could merge with the oboe theme, so the themes could all intertwine together. It all happened unintentionally. Almost as if there was something whispering it to me, the music… Its logic”. Morricone’s word on screen. Amen.

 

But the Roman maestro is not the only one who brings musical happiness to the man, so David Puttnam gave a semblance of his experience with some of the most popular composers shown photographically on screen in a panel of ten creators who have been scoring films produced by the lecturer. From Paul Williams to Enya, Rachel Portman to Howard Blake. And Giorgio Moroder, with whom he began the selective tour.

 

There was no shortage of references to a celebrated soundtrack that represented a break in the musical classicism present in films until the seventies and the triumph of the experimental that came to change concepts and styles. Puttnam justified the Oscar for best music to Giorgio Moroder in 1978 for “The Midnight Express” on the basis of the rhythm that marked the score in the film, a detected virtue that caused the film to go back in part of the work done by Moroder. But he also confessed that the statuette for the soundtrack was collateral, at least in his opinion. The previous year they had nominated “Saturday Night Fever” by The Bee Gees, which caused a scandal in Hollywood due to the change in the musical pattern at the time of the awards. That was a breakthrough. “The Bee Gees didn’t win, but we were the beneficiaries of it all because we did the first electronic score to win an Oscar.”

 

He stopped with Mark Knopfler and “Local Hero” (1983), how the combination of the degraded photography at the end of the film with the music and the telephone rings merged into a perfect combination not only to take the audience to the desired state of mind in the script, but also to convince Warner that the Dire Straits founder was the ideal for that little gem by Bill Forsyth, who also did not hesitate to show his reticence towards the composer from the beginning of his film project. “I had heard his “Making Movies” album (1980) and thought that someone who had done that work would surely like to write a soundtrack for film,” explained Puttnam, ”so I contacted him. Knopfler was very nice to work with, but I had to arrange a lot of meetings to reach agreements between him and Bill to get the film made,” he added.

 

Vangelis deserved a special mention. David Puttnam had already confessed, in his comments on “The Midnight Express”, that he was his first choice to score Alan Parker’s film, but the Greek composer’s record company was an obstacle to it, “so I needed someone to do the score in the style of Vangelis but not him. Moroder was an option because we could work with his label. So, we agreed and he worked very hard, he did a great work. And then we were able to establish an agreement with Vangelis”.

 

It was then that the music retained by millions of spectators that accompanied the group of runners along the beach in the beginning of the story of “Chariots of Fire” (1981) was born. Puttnam avoided what would clearly have been a frustration as a producer and, after years of trying to sign the composer of “Blade Runner”, managed to get him for a film that Vangelis understood from the beginning because his father was an athlete and had passed away. “Vangelis wanted to do a kind of tribute to his progenitor,” Puttnam explains, revealing that in fact both the film’s opening theme and end credits became immortal albeit ‘on the cuff’: ”Vangelis came up with the theme, lamenting that it was too late. We had scored the film but, coincidentally, we were missing to incorporate the music into the opening and end credits, so we agreed to place the new theme brought by the composer for the beginning of the film.” Thus was born one of the most celebrated openings in film history, thanks especially to the role of Vangelis’ music.

 

Puttnam’s reference to the work he did with Mike Oldfield was not missed. In fact, “The Killing Fields”, 1984, was the only soundtrack composed by the creator of “Tubular Bells”. “He did a wonderful job, not perfect because there are a couple of moments where things could have been done better, but that score was a challenge for him. We were looking for a score that had that sense of chaos, of terror, with electronic music.” The producer explained that in the sequence of the evacuation of the city he had assimilated that they would use classical music. “Mike told me to let him try to do something with it. And he wrote a magnificent piece, an almost neoclassical piece that was perfect for the moment. With that, it was confirmed that I should have trusted him more than I did.”

 

Throughout his master class, David Puttnam also expressed his considerations with examples of music from films outside his own production, such as “Titanic” (1997) or “Star Wars” (1977), the latter used to address the controversial issue of temptracks or musical tracks used as references prior to the music finally written by the composer. Because Puttnam himself admitted having used ten tracks by Vangelis for “The Midnight Express” (although he later had to re-shoot the film, obviously, in the face of Moroder’s brilliant work). In this sense, and referring to George Lucas’ film, he related the point of reference that, according to the producer, pre-existing works such as “The Kings Row” composed by Erich W. Korngold for the 1942 film.

 

Parallel to the orthodoxy of the content of his master class, David Puttnam also expressed his personal reflections or opinions on the producer’s perspective when working with music creators. In this regard, he claimed not to recall having had any major disputes with composers. “I use the word control. It’s not that I control them (creative work), it’s just power negotiation, persuasion…you have the right to have the last word and when you exercise it, you’re going to have to be with a person who’s going to keep fighting with you. But yes, I managed to get my way in my job, and I also made mistakes.”

 

Asked by the audience about the abandonment that seems to exist in film today with respect to melody, Puttnam nodded about it stating that “soundtracks are liked by audiences, it’s a melodic thing, and it seems to have been abandoned. But it will come back. There are certain things that aren’t going to go away forever,” and he added in a relaxed manner that, although he wouldn’t want this statement to come across as his own, ”my experience with directors is that they have wonderful eyes and poor ears. That’s why if you leave the final decisions in the hands of the directors, you will always end up with a puzzle that is not going to be as perfect”, and to finish putting the debate on the table, he shared one of his experiences: ”Ridley Scott is a good friend. We started together and I produced “The Duelists” (1977), his first film. We only had one fight. Ridley wanted classical music works, it was like a puzzle, and I felt it was my duty to find a composer (Howard Blake). I always asked him why he was denying a composer that opportunity that he had had as an artist to make a hundred-minute film with a beginning and an end.”

 

Article by José Carlos Fernández Moscoso

Pictures by Rafa Melgar

 

Vídeo completo del evento – Canal Último Estreno (1h 24m 53s):