[Dave Stewart, Music for Films]

Dave Stewart: Film, how does it start? Well, it started by myself being very interested in doing something to do with film because I would always mess about with the Eurythmics film and videos and pop music.

So when this little tiny Dutch approached me if I would do some music for a film, they had no money, and I said, “Well, okay. I’ll do it for no money, but I’ll own the rights to the music because it will cost me money to make the music. But you can put the music on your film.” And they said, “Okay.” So then I got in touch with this girl I had heard about, a fifteen-year-old saxophone player from Holland, called Candy Dulfer, who now plays with Prince. And I got her to play with me and we made this film score.

And then we put a single out which everybody was against ‘cause there was no singing. It was instrumental. But I forced them to put it out in Holland first ‘cause that’s where the film was. And then it came to number one for eight weeks in Holland. So they put that in Denmark. And number one everywhere. And in the end it was number two in America and number two in Britain, number one in Australia. It became the biggest selling instrumental. So that was my great sort of opening into film.

So then I got approached to quite a number of things. I used to work a lot with a really brilliant guy who died unfortunately. He became a really friend called Ted Demme. And I did two of his movies. One was called Beautiful Girls, with Uma Thurman, and the other one was called The Ref, with Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis. And then I wrote with Robert Altman doing his score for Cookie’s Fortune.

And I would always work with the sort of more indie kind of films. And I continued doing film experiments, but you see, again, the collaboration was myself and the director. We’d get very inspired about how it would be and we’d do experiments. And I would tend to play a lot of the stuff myself and then bring in an orchestration and an arranger. I went these two great guys called Tescole and Steve McLaughlin, who would kind of produce the orchestration in the sessions and all that stuff.

And it was just something that I found I had a knack at doing and that I really enjoyed the process. And so that led to various other films and then to the film Alfie, where I suggested I do it with Mick Jagger together, and make the score – have his voice part of the score and his harmonica playing. And then the songs we would create first and then take the melodies from the songs and create them into themes and eventually work with an orchestrator and build it into the film to score, which we did. And we wrote the song called “Old Habits Die Hard” which won the Golden Globe last year and the World Critics Music Award. And it was great fun process again.

And I think it’s just you got to put your heart into it and you’ve got to hang around with the director all the time and really understand what he means. And there are a lot film companies have it as a kind of separate process and the composer is in New York and they’re making the film in L.A. and they send bits of music and they paste them in. And I’ve managed to be there with the director. I was with Robert Altman in Mississippi. And I had a Dobro guitar and I said to him, “Why don’t we just do it right now?” And he got very excited. And I got some musicians from the street in Mississippi and we recorded on set with the actors there. And that became the score.

Well, its original process is you get a script. And then after a while of a lot talking, the script just kind blocked out of where music would be. And then you wait and you get rough cuts of the shoot which are very rough edits which might be changed, which is a nightmare ‘cause you make a piece of music and it’s a minute thirty-seven seconds long, and now they chop it down to forty-six seconds. And you have to make music or sense out of it. And you keep going through that process all the way to end, but still making changes. And you try and make your music work even though it’s been busted out and chopped to bits, because at the end of the day, it’s the film that hast to work. And I’m not keen on that process.

Interviewer: And you’re not keen on it for what reason?

Dave Stewart: ‘Cause you keep making reason for no reason ‘cause it keeps getting chopped about. And it’s more like a factory job. It’s not like the marriage of two minds. _____ to kind of films like Harold and Maude where see the director and the composer had an idea together and they stuck to it; or Midnight Cowboy or The Graduate or these kind of movies.

It’s quite easy nowadays. You get a piece of film that you like or a piece of film from the internet or from – the TV and you turn the sound down and you score it yourself, right. Or if possible, get a piece off a friend who works at TV or something, who takes the music out, but leaves the dialog in, and you just record onto that soundtrack, your own soundtrack, and you use that as a demo. And you show people what you did or you play live to something on the TV.

But it’s a lot easier now than it used to be. It used to be, “Well, I have to get an orchestra together.” Now you’ve got one synthesizer. You can do so much. And usually a friend or somebody who’s got a TV that you can record something on a video and study it and make your own music to it. That’s the way I do it really.

Interviewer: And then who do you send that to once you have that?

Dave Stewart: Well, I find out people who represent – film scoring agents, like the Swartz-Gorfaine Agency, who represent sixty composers or whatever, and which all the TV stations around the world that are all looking for music all the time, and internet companies that are looking for music all the time. I won’t be able to give you the list, but there are books that do give you the list.