[MUSIC PLAYING]
Traditionally, music-- which is a hugely powerful force
in anything, in life.
It's probably the quickest art form.
It is.
It gets in there like mainlining heroin.
It's like two notes and you're there,
and something's being felt.
Traditionally, in film production,
with the exception of some temporary tracks that you
might use during editing, music is an afterthought.
Music is something that you add to the existing film
once it's more or less done, where
you hope-- you hope it will amplify emotions that
are there, that you've created.
And it is very much about amplification.
But that, to me, always felt a little artificial,
that something as powerful as music should
take some kind of secondary-- or at least,
some step that came in at the end.
We sort of felt that music, because
of its centrality and its power, ought to be recorded first.
So it has been our process from the very, very beginning
to record music either before we start editing or very
early in the editing process, so that the music itself
is one of the directors of the film,
rather than something that's added as an afterthought.
And rather than have something scored--
which is, you know, once you've locked the picture,
a score is kind of a mathematical term.
It's got to be exactly 53 seconds and 20 frames till this
hit.
We would rather record music that we're
drawn to emotionally, that we think fits a variety of needs,
record many different versions of it,
and permit the music to dictate--
in many cases-- the pace and rhythm as we
develop those scenes.
So sometimes we might actually shorten a sentence of narration
or lengthen a sentence of narration,
if that's appropriate, to--
to meet a phrase of music that's ending.
It's the exact opposite of scoring.
It's baking in this.
It's not the icing on the cake.
It's the fudge.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The power of music is so great that we can actually
use recurring themes of music to build
a kind of emotional structure, and give
more force to the narrative arc that we're trying to--
to create.
One can think of David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia,"
when those five or six notes-- da, da, da, da, da, da, da--
I mean, he plays it, in a three-hour film, 250 times.
I mean, I'm sitting here with editors sometimes
and I'll say, well, use that.
And they go, well, I've already used it.
I say, so?
You know, there's something-- it's like an establishing shot.
But it's an establishing shot in your heart.
You're not seeing it.
You're feeling something.
And so what happens is as you begin
to work with these beds of music, that
might be 50 different versions of 50 different songs--
think of the mathematical possibilities.
What happens is you begin to gravitate,
using a particular theme at a particular kind of moment.
And when you do that, then it becomes not incumbent upon you,
but it becomes a possibility to use that music again
at another moment that's similar in feeling.
Or you find out that a character has
such a force that their entrance works really
well with this piece of music.
And it might behoove you to experiment,
seeing if that repetition of that theme
helps to reintroduce them again.
And then sometimes, it's just the collection
of the ideas and feelings of the film, the themes of the films.
When you do that, you get an accumulated set of emotions
that then help you make your whole narrative point.
It's-- it's much better that way, so that, you know,
by the end of the film, when that theme comes back
for the very last time, I am--
I hope you are--
weeping out of the sympathy and the understanding,
the complexity, the loss, and just sort
of the vividness of the narrative
that you hope that you've created.
And that's where music is--
is just always the best, the quickest, the fastest,
the most emotionally powerful.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We've taken essential anthems of the United States,
like "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," and we
have played it every which way.
And more often than not, we've played it
as a kind of ghostly echo of a failed promise.
I've dealt with race in almost all the films that we've done.
We've seen the fact that our inability
to deal with the question of race in the United States
has left us in really serious jeopardy
throughout our history--
right up to the present moment.
And so quite often, sometimes "My Country, 'Tis of Thee,"
played in a different kind of key, or played in [INAUDIBLE],,
often counterpoints, say, the violence of the Ku Klux Klan,
you know.
And you-- you hear in Jack Johnson
about the sort of rabid railing against miscegenation,
the mixing of black and white, that you
hear the echo of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee"
as a kind of reminder of maybe our better angels
that aren't being fulfilled at that moment.
KEITH DAVID: Millions of white Americans already shared
their view.
The fledgling National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People
mounted a national campaign to ban the film,
and only succeeded in publicizing it.
"Birth of a Nation" opened at the Liberty Theatre
on Broadway the following month, beginning
a record run of 44 weeks.
It would become the most-seen movie of its time.
Miscegenation was the supposed evil at the heart of its story.
And its moral was that every self-respecting white man
had a duty to avenge it if he could.
And you just go--
whoa.
And all of a sudden, music and picture--
one and one isn't equaling two, but three, because something
else is produced.
The free electrons that give off create yet
another thing, which is all that we're looking for.
You know, you can't have the father and son.
You also need the Holy Ghost.
So you know, I sort of feel like--
particularly with music, but certainly art in a bigger
context is that Holy Ghost.
It takes the conflict, the dialectic, the good and bad,
the yes and no, the red state-blue state, the gay
and straight, the black and white, the rich and poor,
or whatever thing you want to do,
and reconciles it with something else.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Nothing could be more important than the effectiveness
of music.
So the period music that we select
is an attempt to help wake the dead of that particular time
and understand what they listened to, what kind of music
they liked.
And it has a hugely important role
in sort of gluing all of the things together.
And so each film has a different set of exigencies and demands.
Each film is going to require a different kind of music.
So at any given time, we're looking for the hip hop
music that's appropriate to "The Central Park Five," back
to the early schottisches and waltzes and horn pipes,
as they're called, in any kind of revolutionary period,
or the Native American music in "The West"
or in "Lewis and Clark" or "The National Parks."
[NATIVE AMERICAN MUSIC]
FILM ACTOR: You will probably meet with parties of the Teton
Sioux.
On that nation we wish most particularly
to make a friendly impression, because of their immense power.
We want it to be organic and appropriate to the moment.
And we feel that what happens is,
because of the power of music, the amplification comes
from within.
It's really authentic to the exposition.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The thing that we've avoided, or tried to avoid,
through most of our--
our professional lives is to go to those music places where--
they're called needle drops, from the old days of--
of vinyl records, where you drop a needle on a particular song.
You say, that's what I want.
And it's sort of the idea.
That's where temp music is often from, where you get--
get me something before my composer comes in at the end
and does the real themes.
And I don't want to belittle any of that.
And music is a hugely expensive part of it.
And when we set about budgeting, we
know we want to never not use a piece of music
because it's suddenly prohibitively expensive.
And we've done everything we can to get most favored nation
deals, and get folks, like the Beatles in the Vietnam film,
to say, yeah, we--
we want this part of it.
You know, we have 120 music cues.
I couldn't have afforded 12.
You know, I have 10 times as many
as that because these musicians were willing to say, we get it.
So I would just urge you, starting out, to aim high.
I mean, the-- the worst thing that can happen
is that you say, you can't get this piece of music.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I wanted to be a feature film maker.
And I think I migrated a lot of the laws of storytelling
and of music to the documentary film.
And one of them is, of course, sort
of finding if not one theme, then some themes.
And I think there's been no piece of music I've ever
employed that sort of had more legs
and had more effect than a tune called "The Ashokan
Farewell" that I used throughout "The Civil War."
The interesting thing is, it's the only piece of music
that is not of the period of the Civil War.
It was actually written in the early '80s
by one of my session musicians.
And I would go into a recording studio
with a guy named Jay Ungar and his partner, Molly Mason.
And it was this extraordinary Scotch-Irish lament.
And I knew right then and there that it
had to be the bridge to the past,
and conversely, to the present for the Civil War series.
To me, the biggest lesson is to be open always
to doing something the opposite of the way
you've decided to do it.
I decided early on, in all of my films,
that I would try to do music that was contemporary
to the subject matter, that I would--
as much as possible-- play it on instruments that would have
been--
that music would have been played on at that time.
And I did that.
And then, almost in every film-- not all of them--
there were exceptions.
And I think that you, as a filmmaker,
have to be aware of your own feelings about something.
It isn't just the abstract idea of a soundtrack.
Yeah, that's great, we've got this name, this stuff.
You've got to say no.
You've got to be able to say, that does not feel right,
or yes, that feels right.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is the most important event in American history.
And I began with an image of the ruins of Richmond.
As the retreating Confederate government left,
they blew up and set fire to their munitions.
It wasn't the Union destruction of Richmond,
it was the Confederate destruction.
You get the sense of tension with this.
The main reason that I've done this
is that it's silent here, except for the music,
to give me a chance to play the entire A music twice,
and then to begin the repeat of the A music right here.
As we're sort of upping the stakes,
we've got a single violin.
It's now a second violin has come in.
We're beginning to hear a few guitar chords periodically
there, as we're witnessing the totality of the destruction
of the Civil War.
And there's no commentary needed.
It is impossible to think that this could have happened here.
And I want to do this just visually, and have
the music be a counterpart.
There's the beginning of the B music.
And now you can begin the narration.
NARRATOR: The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places,
from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee,
to St. Albans, Vermont.
There's something in this piece of music
that is of the period of the Civil War.
And then, of course, it isn't.
And because it has a freshness and a newness,
it is going to be the connector not only to all the other music
from the period, but to us in our hearts about what happens.
And so we're now adding more instrumentation.
We're-- we're beginning to say all of the sort of essential,
30,000 feet of the Civil War.
But at the same time the--
the imagery is intimate.
I mean the idea that--
NARRATOR: Americans slaughtered one another wholesale.
Americans slaughtered one another wholesale, right here
in America, in their own cornfields
and their peach orchards.
NARRATOR: Along familiar roads.
Along familiar roads, and by waters with old American names.
It's just saying, how could we do this to each other?
And the music is a perfect complement.
And because it's new, it has the ability
of permitting us to see something
new, much in the same way Lincoln is saying, you know,
"four score and seven years ago," not 87 years ago.
I think this music sort of is a poetic dissonance that
permits you to then pull yourself right into the story.
And because of its plaintive wail, you are--
are pulled in inexorably, just by the power of the music.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: Men who had never strayed
20 miles from their own front doors
now found themselves soldiers in great armies,
fighting epic battles hundreds of miles from home.
They knew they were making history.
And it was the greatest adventure of their lives.