Modern scores meaningless, says Oscar-winner
By Charlotte Higgins, Arts Correspondent
The Guardian (UK)
Thursday, February 10, 2005
The film composer John Barry - whose stellar 50-year career has encompassed scoring the great Bond movies, Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves - has lashed out against his musical successors.
"[The composers] have nothing to say. They are just messing around with notes. I'm at a loss," he told the Guardian.
"I walk out of the cinema bewildered these days. I think, what was the producer or director thinking of to allow 45 minutes or an hour of music that doesn't mean a damn thing?"
On Saturday, the 71-year-old Yorkshireman receives the Academy Fellowship at the Baftas for an outstanding lifetime contribution to cinema, an honour previously awarded to Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and, last year, John Boorman.
Talking about the generation of Hollywood composers such as Miklos Rozsa, Franz Waxman and Bernard Herrmann, many of whom were exiled from central Europe in the prewar years and ended up defining a golden age of film music, Barry said: "They were my heroes. The people I adored and learned from. But today I don't see there's anything to learn."
"Today it's very empty. There's a whole thing of loading films up with songs - it's a commercial choice. The composers seem to ignore what's going on on screen. I look at movies; in the old days you knew what the composer was about. Today you don't - the scores are like a filler."
Asked whether he could be tempted to write a score for Casino Royale, based on Ian Fleming's first 007 novel and due for release in 2006, he said: "It would depend. Films like From Russia With Love and You Only Live Twice were based on an old tradition of moviemaking. They were great stories - the idea of raiding Fort Knox is a great story. But the Bond movies have totally changed. They don't have any stories any more.
"Sean [Connery] was marvellous. George [Lazenby] - well, we won't talk about that. Roger Moore was good. Pierce [Brosnan] was fine. But the films wouldn't have made it without Sean. We don't have those stars any more.
"The formula has run out. It was great and it had its day. Now they are just treading water."
Barry, who is based in New York state, has recently received poor reviews for his musical version of Graham Greene's novel Brighton Rock which premiered in October at the Almeida theatre in London.
"When people think of musicals these days they think of Mary Poppins," he said. "When there is murder and deceit they are confused. But I think that's wrong. Think of West Side Story, which is very dark."
The four-times Oscar winner, born the son of a cinema-owner and a pianist, recalled his earliest memories of film. "My father had eight movie-theatres in the north of England. I remember his taking me to the Rialto in York when I was about three or four. I was taken to the back and I saw a big black and white mouse on the screen - and there was all this wonderful music and people were going crazy. I forget what I did last week but I remember this so vividly."
AMÉN AMÉN AMÉN JOHN
