A musical thread to his movies

Alan Parker laughs loud and long when asked if his career represents some sort of musical safari. “A great phrase, very good. Yes, I suppose it has been a strange journey.” Few directors spend as much hands-on time with the music that accompanies their work as Parker, who understands that it is a vital storytelling tool. Parker recently sat down with Calendar writer Geoff Boucher to talk about the backbeat of his career, which continues Friday with the release of his 14th film, “The Life of David Gale.”

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“The Life of David Gale,” 2003

Parker’s new thriller presents Kevin Spacey as a death row inmate who may be innocent. The music is by the director’s sons, Alex and Jake Parker, who helped shape the film’s “chapter” breaks: jarring images of text.

I had this idea and I’d shot these words, which was not in the script actually. I never thought it would work. Gerry Hambling, my editor, who has cut everything I’ve ever done, was having difficulty and told me he didn’t know what I was getting at. So I described it to Alex and he did all those sounds, and I gave that to Gerry and he cut the images to fit. That’s a luxury you don’t usually have.... When Gerry heard the music he got the idea of what I was getting at.

For the thriller parts of the film, I wanted modern sound, I wanted it to be driven by a rhythmic center. Alex experimented, and then his brother, Jake, who is classically trained, gave me the more conventional, emotional string pieces. So I showed him as I was cutting it -- I was at the beginning of the five-month editing process -- and he went away and worked on these pieces for me. They were part of the editing process and experimented with music throughout.

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“Evita,” 1996

Parker had been approached years earlier by producer Robert Stigwood to handle the adaptation, but Parker was loath to do another music film after “Fame.”

It was 1979 when they asked me to do it. Robert took me and my family out on his yacht and we went to the Caribbean. He asked me if I wanted to play tennis, and I said yeah. So we got in this motorized taxi and went to where the tennis court was on the mainland, but it was locked. The launch had gone back. We didn’t know what to do. We were walking down this dusty road and he said, “Well, are you going to do ‘Evita’ or not?” And I told him, “I don’t know how to tell you, but no, I don’t want to do it.” He started hitting me with his tennis racket .... Through the years a lot of different directors were going to be doing it, and I always kind of regretted not doing it. Then it came back to me again.

I was pretty open-minded about the casting. Michelle Pfeiffer was mentioned. But Madonna really wanted it. She wrote this four-page letter, begging for it, really, and it was very articulate and passionate. She’s not easy. But it was quite pleasurable working with her because she is extraordinarily smart and hard-working. So for a director, that’s pretty great. Is she opinionated? Yes. This was so important for her she kind of subjugated a great deal of her will, which she would never have done on one of her own albums. The music was absolutely relevant to a dramatic story, so those decisions she deferred to me.

I was missing a song, there was no song that cements the relationship, the love that she feels for Peron. I had to get Tim [Rice] and Andrew [Lloyd Webber] together to write, and the two don’t get on that well and hadn’t worked together for years. Madonna and I actually started writing the lyrics, and the first verse is still ours, I believe. They were so appalled that we were doing this that it goaded Tim into writing. He thought what we had done was completely asinine and juvenile. The result was “You Must Love Me,” which won the Oscar for best song.

The song “Another Suitcase” in the original show was never actually sung by Eva, it was actually sung by the mistress. I changed it for two reasons, really. From a dramatic point of view, it’s a mistake because the mistress is someone you don’t know until you see her sing the song and then you never see her again. And it’s one of the best songs, so it’s like giving the best monologue to a character that nobody knows. The second reason is it does fit Eva’s story. And, well, there’s a third reason: Madonna wanted to sing it.

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“The Commitments,” 1991

Like “Fame,” this film explores the energy of young people in a music life, but the heroes here are scruffy amateurs in Ireland.

I had auditions for 3,000 musicians in Dublin because, as you know, everyone in Dublin sings or plays an instrument.

This movie was the exact opposite of “Fame.” “Fame” was really hard. And not very pleasurable. The overall mass of kids was pleasurable, but of the eight main kids, you know, maybe three I really kind of liked. I cast them because the movie is about ambition, the double-edged sword of fame, and someone that really wants to push themselves is not necessarily a nice person. All 12 of the Commitments I really loved by the end of that movie. But on “Fame,” by the end I had had enough.

A funny thing: In one scene they are talking about Joey “the Lips” Fagan. It goes like this: “Yeah, he’s really good.” “What’s he done?” “You know the Beatles song ‘All You Need Is Love’? He did the da-Da-da da-da-da.’ Just that sound cost us $10,000 because we used the music.

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“Mississippi Burning,” 1988

The thriller revolves around the disappearance of civil rights workers in the 1960s. It was nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture and best director. Parker cites the film’s closing as his most effective use of music in a scene. It shows Lannie McBride leading a congregation in song as they stand in the ashes of their church.

The singer is a music teacher, a beautiful woman, and I had been told she was quite special so I went along to rehearsal one evening. I found Lannie in a small church in Jackson, Miss. She ran the gospel choir.... We recorded “Walk on by Faith” and then she had us all standing in a circle afterward. She wanted to pray for all of us. We held hands and she prayed for us that the film would do well at the Academy Awards. And, obviously, God was listening. But that was nice. This woman turned out to be the most sensational singer that no one would have ever heard of if I hadn’t recorded her.

The score was by Trevor Jones, and he did this system for me, my tool kit method: He would give me layers of rhythmic pieces and I would experiment and layer up more than one for the final mix. In this way it’s not preconceived. A lot of composers won’t do that. They say, ‘I’ll do my mix and send it over to you and you lay it against your picture.’ But that can be very dangerous. If you’ve got the music and then the moment you put the [sound] effects on top it can completely unbalance the music. You have to have the variables to coordinate ... when we do a sound mix, the music is 30 tracks, but so are the sound effects. And I want all of them there so I can mix it so what happens up there on screen is balanced, which is the only thing that’s relevant.

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“Pink Floyd, The Wall,” 1982

Parker argued against the original idea (a movie with giant puppets and less narrative), chose musician Bob Geldof to star and wrangled with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.

I mostly worked with Roger on it, it was his baby. I stayed friends with [guitarist David] Gilmour but not Waters -- Waters doesn’t stay friends with anybody. There’s a scene I like where a schoolteacher is speaking and the words he’s saying are from the song “Money.” I wrote that scene from Roger’s lyrics. The teacher is chastising a little boy for his crappy poetry, and I didn’t know what to use for the bad poetry, so I used the lyrics. Roger wasn’t pleased by that when he saw that. I loved doing that. He had the last laugh though: Those lyrics made him a few bucks.

This film began life obviously as a very successful album and an extraordinary piece of theatrical rock ‘n’ roll. In concert they built this gigantic wall between them and the audience -- Roger’s ultimate cynicism about how he regards his audience. The film started out to be more theatrical, and I talked them into making it more a narrative. It’s a complex, difficult overall story in the music that, to this day, probably only Roger understands.

The film is an astonishing example of a great film editor, Gerry Hambling, cutting to music. He’s got this preexisting music and then he’s cutting images that I’ve shot. And the shots were sort of conceived. There’s no storyboard as such. We had a script that was about 15 pages, and I made everything up every day. It was the most expensive student film ever made. It’s a cartoon, as such, but with real people.

Musicians as actors are generally not very good, but Bob Geldof was quite good. He understood what he was doing. He’s not a big fan of Pink Floyd or of “The Wall,” but fortunately he didn’t have to sing. I gave him a screen test and he chose a monologue from “Midnight Express,” which was quite bold.

This film preceded all of MTV. I wish I had a dollar for every shot I’ve seen stolen from the movie on MTV.

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“Fame,” 1980

Parker spent months at an urban high school for the arts, and his observations largely shaped this film. Michael Gore won Oscars for co-writing the title song and for the score.

The scene with “Fame,” the song, with all the people jumping on top of the taxis, that was not shot to that song. The song was done afterward. The scene was shot to Donna Summer singing “Hot Stuff.” But we didn’t get the song. We had very little music done while I was shooting. They were dancing to a totally different song. Unlike a lot of the other movies, much of the music came afterward. But we needed something to put over the taxi scene, something that rhythmically copies “Hot Stuff.”

I was the first to hear the song “Fame.” I was shooting and I had lunchtime and I went into the music room in the school where we were filming. Michael played it. I told him I thought it was terrible, just terrible. It went on to be quite successful of course, showing once again my inabilities.

I spent so much time with the kids. If I saw a kid at the school who was good at cello, I put the kid in the movie and built a scene around it. It was [screenwriter Christopher] Gore’s idea to follow the kids around, but I actually kind of wrote the final draft ... almost everything comes out of something I saw there in a corner. The original [film] title was going to be “Hot Lunch,” the song from the big cafeteria scene. I was walking down Broadway one day, though, and saw a marquee for a porn movie called “Hot Lunch.” So I came up with “Fame,” and we recorded the song after we were done with the filming.

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“Midnight Express,” 1978

This harrowing film tracks Billy Hayes, a young smuggler imprisoned in Turkey. For the music, Parker tapped record producer Giorgio Moroder, a hero of disco, to create an unlikely soundscape of electronic music. Moroder won an Oscar, and Parker was nominated as best director.

I met with Giorgio, and most of it we did in Munich. His guide to everything was that I had already laid other music down to give him the sensibility I’m trying to get at. The significant thing about this was this was the first all-electronic soundtrack to win an Oscar for best music. Up until that point I think it was kind of frowned upon. One man and an engineer in Munich could do the entire music for a film, which is exactly what happened here. It was all Giorgio.

When I was working on the movie, I played Greek music to give a sense of the place in my mind. And in Istanbul I went to the local market and bought every kind of Turkish cassette I could. I looked for clues of what music should be. In the more energetic pieces, it’s very Giorgio, you hear the same rhythmic patterns you’d hear on a Donna Summer record. To fuse that into something truthful to the narrative was quite a departure for films at the time. Now it’s quite commonplace.

You can be seduced by wrong leads when you’re searching for the musical direction. The real Billy Hayes, for instance, had the Doors going through his head all the time. But I decided not to do that. The music I bought in the bazaar I used in the scene where Billy bites out the tongue [of a prison rival]. There are four or five beds of music from Giorgio, which holds it together, and then all the things I got at the bazaar, and I sat there and mixed it myself. It creates total cacophony, a sound of madness.