My favorite music is by filmmaker Peter Weir
A recent podcast of NPR’s All Music Considered took a rare detour into classical music. Tom Huizenga brought in a new recording of Polish composer Henryk Górecki’s Symphony №3, a haunting piece of strings and a single soprano voice. Recorded in obscurity in 1976 it became a huge hit in 20 years later in the UK, selling over a million copies and bringing many a listener to tears (Górecki’s source material is devastating, hence the subtitle: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs). The new recording is without a trained soprano (it’s Portishead singer Beth Gibbons) which gives it a less polished, more fascinating sound. I didn’t recognize the tune, but it reminded me of some movie music I remember loving from Fearless, a 90’s film by director Peter Weir.
I have the CD soundtrack buried somewhere, but I thought it would be easier to just look it up on Spotify. Except the soundtrack isn’t on the service (and no fan-made playlist either). Looking up the credits at IMDb, I found it: Weir had used the first movement of Górecki’s piece, the perfect music for Fearless’s cathartic ending: a different perspective of the plane crash that opens the movie. If anyone remembers anything about Fearless it’s the plane crash, the most realistic, terrifying sequence of its kind before digital effects took over such things. The movie is a gem, with Jeff Bridges leading the likable cast (including Rosie Perez in her only Oscar-nominated performance), and Allen Daviau’s hyper-realistic camerawork.
The film’s original music is by Weir’s frequent collaborator Maurice Jarre. But it’s the additional music on the soundtrack left an impact. This includes The Kronos Quartet (Mai Nozipo), the first time I’d heard The Gipsy Kings (Sin Ella), and probably the best use of a U2 song in a film (Where the Streets Have No Name).
As I thought about Weir — a director I’ve always greatly admired — I realized his use of music shaped a lot of my musical palette.
Part of the Australia’s New Wave of the 1970's and 80's (that brought us filmmakers Gillian Armstrong, Bruce Beresford, Fred Schepisi, George Miller among others), Peter Weir’s first wide release in the States was Gallipoli (1981). (Weir’s Aussie Films Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave had been darlings of the indie circuit.) The sprawling story of two runners, played by unknowns Mark Lee and Mel Gibson, starts in the open wilds of Australia and ends up on a narrow spit in Turkey where many a young Australian died in the famous World War I battle. I don’t remember a note of Brian May’s score, but it’s the soundtrack’s additional music that is striking. First, there’s the electric music of Jean-Michel Jarre (Maurice’s son). I had never heard the younger Jarre’s music before and bought the 1976 LP Oxygène second hand. Then there’s Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor which brings the film to a close, and many viewers to tears. Oliver Stone used another classical Adagio, by Barber, in his war film Platoon, 5 years later. I bought both pieces of music, probably of compilation LPs/CDs of classical music used in movies.
Gibson, now famous with the release of The Road Warrior, paired up with Weir two years later for The Year of Living Dangerously. Maurice Jarre composed the score, but, again, I was more intrigued by the additional music (and like many other listeners, disappointed it wasn’t on the LP). The movie’s love theme is Vangelis’s L’Enfant from an unknown 1979 documentary Opera Sauvage. Vangelis had just become a star with his seminal scores for Chariots of Fire (that took home an Oscar) and Blade Runner. So back to the used record store to buy a few of Vangelis’s earlier works including spending extra money on my first imported CD (Entends-tu les chiens aboyer, which was used in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos).
Weir then came to America and made a string of memorable films from 1985–1998: Witness, The Mosquito Coast, Dead Poets Society, Green Card, Fearless, and The Truman Show. I procured every soundtrack. The first three were scored by Jarre (Witness being his most memorable score since Oscar double-whammy of Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago). Green Card displays the more lyrical side of Hans Zimmer’s synthesizer, and The Truman Show is odd hybrid by little-known composer Burkhard Dallwitz and master composer Philip Glass (but mostly his older tracks, including one from his great score of Mishima). The music won the Golden Globe but wasn’t even nominated for the Oscar. It probably didn’t have enough “original music” to qualify for the category.
Almost all of Weir’s films contains a classical number, usually masterfully weaved into the film (Chopin in Truman, Mozart in Green Card, Handle and Beethoven in Dead Poets).
Classical music was more in the forefront in Weir’s great Master and Commander (2003), creating an even an odder hybrid of a soundtrack. Some music by Iva Davies, Christopher Gordon, and Richard Tognetti inspired Weir to hire them and even use elements of that music in the film’s score (all were film score neophytes). They also arranged a few of the classical pieces including those played onscreen by the captain and his doctor, Mozart’s Violin Concerto №3, and Boccherini’s La Musical Notturna delle Strade di Madrid that memorably ended the film.
I never caught up with Weir last film (as of now), The Way Back. Maybe Dallwitz’s score is memorable or there’s some classic or electronic piece to discover. I’ll put that film into my queue. Maybe you should put some of Weir’s films in yours. As for now, I dug out the CD collection.
NOTE: Composer-songwriter Randy Newman finally won an Oscar in 2002 after 15 nominations, the last several with Pixar. His amusing acceptance speech included this, “(Pixar) made four pictures in a row that were good, and Peter Weir did that once, but I can’t remember another instance exactly.”
I wrote and talked about film and video in the Seattle area from 1989–1998 in print, radio, and TV including The Seattle Times, KIRO Radio, and KING TV. Then I did a lot of the same things in Amazon’s VHS/DVD Store. For now, this is first article on film I’ve written in more than a decade.
