Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1126636
58 DGA QUARTERLY D Feature and television directors talk about needle drops as character-builders and scene-setters By Phil Gallo Danny Boyle tapped into his own music collection to use such songs as Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" and Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" for his 1996 fi lm, Trainspotting. PHOTOS: (ABOVE) PHOTOFEST; (OPPOSITE) SARAH SHATZ A N N Y B OY L E WA S A 3 9 -Y E A R - O L D M U S I C E N T H U S I A S T when he was assembling the soundtrack on his breakout fi lmTrainspottingin 1996. Digging into his own collection of LPs and CDs—along with the songs referenced in the source material of Irvine Welsh's novel—Boyle wound up creating lasting visual references to Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," Underworld's "Born Slippy" (NUXX) and Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" that have been acclaimed as among the best music and fi lm marriages in history. "There's something very special for me about the pop song," says Boyle, whose music-driven films include Slumdog Millionaire, T2 Trainspotting and this year's Yesterday. "The needle drop, as they call it, becomes part of the landscape of the fi lm. It literally lives with the characters at the time. "Early on, everything that I was using was because I loved it," adds Boyle. "One of the things that saddens me about growing old is that you lose that immediacy. Now I get [music ideas] more precariously through my kids—and by having to work at it." Dating back to the late '60s, when Mike Nichols' The Graduate, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider made ample use of either archival recordings or contemporary pop that refl ected the times, found music has taken its place beside original scores to emphasize tone Beyond Score