favourite film music composer

What I most admire is when the film and the score are seamless, and one plus one makes five. Alfred Hitchcock’s stuff with Bernard Herrmann is a good example. Although I’m not fan of Hitchcock or thrillers particularly, the relationship between the music and the visuals in "The Ghost" and "Mrs Muir" is almost perfect. You can’t imagine one without the other. It’s the same with Stanley Kubrick. He had a really sensitive, deep understanding of using music in film, even although a lot of the music he used wasn’t composed specifically for him. Something like "2001 : A Space Odyssey" is a good example, but just generally speaking, it’s the music that drives his films forward.

The independant, July 15 2005