Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1126636
DGA QUARTERLY 61 PHOTO: NICK WALL News' "Hip to be Square" in a murder scene from Mary Harron'sAmerican Psycho. Harron took the idea from Bret Easton Ellis' book. "The book had these three chapters that I really wanted to use, where he's in the basement writing about music," the director says of the famous scene in which Christian Bale's character lays out a critical analysis of Lewis' recording career before taking an ax to his victim. "It was just the idea of doing a monologue about music as he prepares to commit a violent crime and just as the music starts, he kills somebody." In Harron's most recent film,Charlie Says, about the three women who fell under Charles Manson's spell and committed the Tate-LaBianca murders, she used four of Manson's songs, peppered the dialogue with conversations about the Beatles and Tiny Tim, and showed the women harmonizing a capella on The Moody Blues' "Ride My See-Saw." To capture the dark flavor of Manson's world in late '60s Southern California, Harron filled the soundtrack with the psychedelic rock of Love, the 13th Floor Elevators, Blue Cheer and the Swedish band International Harvester. "I've always loved psychedelia, and I've always loved the band Love," says Harron, who found subtext in the psychological issues and struggles of Love's Arthur Lee and the 13thFloor Elevators' Roky Erickson. While she would have been thrilled to add a song from the Beatles' White Album or the Beach Boys, Harron had to make a decision not unlike those she made for I Shot Andy Warhol, set in 1968, and The Notorious Bettie Page, set mostly in the pre-rock-n- roll 1950s. Warhol'ssoundtrack includes the Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic," Hugh Masekela's "Grazing in the Grass" and MC5's "Kick Out the Jams"; Peggy Lee, Fats Waller, Esquivel and Charles Mingus are among the artists on the jazz-leaningPagesoundtrack. "Do you choose what was really popular at the time or do you choose ones that you think can express the spirit of the time?" Harron asks rhetorically. "I think the Manson family definitely listened to the Beach Boys and the White Album, but licensing that is out of the question fi nancially, and because it is a Charles Manson story. You have to use music of the time, but it has to set a tone." She compares the music to the dialogue and acting. "The actors can't behave in a completely modern way—that is ridiculous," Harron says. "You have to really do work, go back and reimagine how people talk during the era and sort of immerse yourself in it. You have to know how people really behaved; otherwise, what's the point of doing a historical story?" For Blinded by the Light, Chadha received a carte blanche seal of approval from Springsteen in chronicling Sarfraz Manzoor's story of his teen years in Luton, England, in the mid-1980s, when Springsteen was becoming a global superstar. Manzoor, a journalist, finds the meaning of life in Springsteen's lyrics and the inner strength to break free of his parents' hold on his aspirations. "The songs had to keep pushing the story forward so they were part of the narrative," says Chadha, who used 19 of the Boss' songs in the film, including an unreleased track over the end credits, "I'll Stand by You Always," which was written for a Harry Potter fi lm "The songs had to keep pushing the story forward so they were part of the narrative," says Gurinder Chadha about Bruce Springsteen's music in Blinded by the Light. "What you hear in my fi lms is made up entirely of my music collection." —GURINDER CHADHA