The Graduate, Trainspotting, Jaws, Star Wars, Citizen Kane – films you can’t picture without thinking of the music. Mark Kermode has been gripped by the marriage of movie and soundtrack since Dougal and the Blue Cat (aged 6) and, with Jenny Nelson, has just published ‘Surround Sound: the Stories of Movie Music’. We talk to him here about…  

… Scorsese, Cameron Crowe, Sofia Coppola, Edgar Wright: the new generation “who grew up with a headful of not just music, but records”

… how John Williams is “the last Whistle Test composer”: two bars of ET, Jaws or Star Wars and you instantly know the film

… how “silent cinema was never silent” and his band the Dodge Brothers playing live soundtracks

… Butch Cassidy, Easy Rider, Blackboard Jungle … pioneers of the music video

… the genius of American Graffiti: “Lucas wanted it so marinated in music the town would sound like a pickle jar”

… how scores are recorded and edited and what happens when a director tells an orchestra he’s changed his mind

… “by the time each Lord of the Rings soundtrack reached New Zealand, Peter Jackson had re-cut the film”

… Forbidden Planet in 1956, the days when electronic scores weren’t real music

… Martha Reeves, Jonathan Richman and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver

… Tarantino’s kitsch use of “his own scratchy vinyl” and why Jonny Greenwood‘s There Will Be Blood is unique and exceptional

… plus the “atonal squonking” of the Exorcist and the greatest soundtrack of all time.

Order ‘Surround Sound: the Stories of Movie Music’ here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/mark-kermodes-surround-sound/mark-kermode/9781447230564

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