Music can make a movie hit the right note

The death of acclaimed film composer James Horner reminds Rob Long of the importance of an unseen element in most movies

British film director Alfred Hitchcock gestures as he gives a press conference in Paris to present his last movie "Psycho" in 1960.

There’s a great, creepy moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 thriller Suspicion. Cary Grant – in one of his very few bad-guy roles – carefully walks up a grand staircase carrying what we think is a glass of milk laced with poison, with which he is about to dispatch his wife.

As everyone knows, Hitchcock was a great director. But his real talent wasn’t working with actors – “Actors are cattle,” he was once overheard to say – but in the more technical aspects of film.

He was great with lighting and fast camera work, and his ability to wind up the tension with fast cuts and sharp angles pretty much defined the film vocabulary for the next generation of directors.

He also knew how to improvise. To draw attention – but not too much – to the glass of milk, he dropped a small battery-powered (and, presumably, milk-proof) light into it.

As Cary Grant ascends the staircase, your eye is drawn irresistibly to the glass of milk. It glows, with menace and, well, suspicion.

The legend goes that someone on the set – maybe Cary Grant himself – wondered aloud if that was going to be enough to create the right amount of suspense. After all, it’s just a glowing glass of milk. Hitchcock is said to have listened to this concern with barely concealed contempt. “It won’t just be the light in the milk,” he is said to have replied. “We’ll also have a lot of spooky music.”

It often comes down to that, in film and television shows. The difference between a scene that grabs the audience – either moves them to tears or gets them on the edge of the seat – and one that just plays flat and lifeless is the right kind of music.

Thrillers get away with this all the time. Often they’ll show slowly unfolding sequences that seem perfectly benign – a person getting out of bed in the morning, perhaps, or someone idly thumbing through his mail – and they’ll ratchet up the tension with a really scary musical score. Nothing ultimately has to happen in the sequence – there are always a lot of false scares in these kinds of movies – but with the right music, it doesn’t matter. Next time you’re showing home videos of a happy family holiday, or something equally non-terrifying, add a scary musical soundtrack to the picture and see how your audience reacts.

Or, if that’s too much effort, simply go to YouTube and enter “recut trailers” into the search bar. What you’ll discover is that some people with a lot of time on their hands have taken well-known movies – Mary Poppins, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, and the like – and cut short trailers, or previews, with different music and editing, resulting in very different movies.

Mary Poppins, with a little fast cutting and a horror film musical score becomes a pretty terrifying picture. So does Willy Wonka. On the other hand, teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off becomes, with the aid of a melancholy score, an advertisement for a sensitive and tragic drama. Music, in the right (or wrong) place, can make the movie.

Not long ago I was helping a friend with the final edit of his first big motion picture. He was missing an important scene, a pivotal moment in which his main character, who for most of the movie was headed in a certain direction, changes his mind and reverses course.

He had shot a scene that was intended to dramatise this moment, but when the film was cut together, it just didn’t seem right. It was forced and unbelievable. But on the other hand, he needed to indicate to the audience that something powerful had happened to the hero.

Here’s what he did: he took some spare footage that wasn’t being used of the hero looking out into the distance – it was a close-up shot, so the background and the wardrobe didn’t really matter – and at the right moment he cut to that shot and put some dramatic and uplifting music underneath it.

It was just the star, looking pensively into the distance, and a swooning soundtrack, but it did the trick. The movie went on to great success. No one noticed that in the pivotal moment nothing really happened. Music, done well, can make a big moment out of the scrap heap.

All of which is to say that when James Horner, the great and gifted film composer – creator of the musical scores for such music-filled and music-reliant blockbuster films as Avatar, Titanic, Aliens, and Star Trek II – died last week when the small airplane he was piloting crashed in the Southern California desert, the movies lost more than just a gifted artist.

Music, in many ways, is what makes movies work. Long before there was dialogue, movies were just pictures and music. James Horner knew that, and the movies he helped create just wouldn’t be the same – not nearly as great, and certainly not as successful – without his invisible and often overlooked contribution. Music, more than we realise, is the real star.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl