The Conversations

Most movies use music the way athletes use steroids. There’s no question that you can induce a certain emotion with music—just like steroids build up muscle. It gives you an edge, it gives you a speed, but it’s unhealthy for the organism in the long run.

M: (Barks!) Later, when we were assembling the film, that was one of the sounds the editors used in the track simply because it was there and it sounded okay. But it was still there when we were doing the mix for the previews. I asked, Aren’t we going to change this dog-bark? The editors said, What do you mean? I said, Well, that’s me! And they said, What? We thought it was the dog! So then they began a search for dog-barks. We tried many different versions, but in the end nothing sounded better, in some mysterious way, than that impromptu dog-bark.

When you listen to Beethoven’s music now, and hear those sudden shifts in tonality, rhythm, and musical focus, it’s as though you can hear the grammar of film—cuts, dissolves, fades, superimposures, long shots, close shots—being worked out in musical terms.