Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1126636
DGA QUARTERLY 63 Beatles used the word 'love' 10 times more [than] it's [used] in the whole of the Bible, so this celebrates love in the way that their work did constantly." Blinded by the LightandYesterdayobviously take their titles from popular songs, ones the fi lmmakers' knew they would be using all along. Many a writer- director has given their fi lm a title long before they've cleared that title, and it can become a crapshoot when it's time to start slapping the credits on a fi lm. Brian Koppelman, the director, writer and producer who makes the music decisions for Showtime's Billions with partner David Levien, worked in the record business as an A&R executive for a decade before becoming a filmmaker. He learned the realities of music rights late in the game on his first feature, Solitary Man. (The title is from a Neil Diamond classic.) "That was one of those where you don't worry about the realities and you hope for the best," says Koppelman about securing the rights to the title tune. "But it came down to the wire." Johnny Cash recorded the song for the film. "Rosanne Cash and her brother helped us get the song when we were on the mixing stage and almost lost it," Koppelman recounts. "We built the whole movie around it, obviously. So that was maddening." The masterful combination of song and image owes a considerable debt to the backgrounds of the filmmakers and TV producer-directors who have come to define the best of the best in synch placement. Crowe and Tarantino start with their record collections; Scorsese used sense memory of his childhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the way songs playing on the radios reverberated out of open windows across lower Manhattan, to create the groundbreaking placements in Mean Streets, GoodfellasandCasino. "It comes from my 78s and 45s, from my old collection which I still have," Scorsese said in answering a question from Bruce Springsteen at a recent Netfl ix event. "In fact, inMean Streets, we used the old 45s with the scratches. It's a fi lm that sounds like the music." "Scorsese and Cameron Crowe and Quentin are the three fi lmmakers that use music in a way that makes you understand the characters," says Koppelman. "I think we just absorbed the lessons of what all three of them have done and then tried to create our own stamp on it." Boyle acknowledges a similar debt. "I was liberated, really, by Scorsese, where music provides the emotional landscape for the film. It's always been a major force for me in the telling of the story." And it can't hurt to be a regular avid record collector: Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino discovered a CD by the Barry Sisters, a Jewish equivalent of the Andrew Sisters, at the L.A. music store Amoeba a couple of years ago. They've used three of their songs inThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Tarantino, early in the conceptual process, flips through his record collection "trying to find the personality of the movie, fi nd the spirit of the movie," he wrote in the liner notes for the CDThe Tarantino Connection."When you take songs and put them in a sequence in a movie right, it's about as cinematic a thing as you can do. You are really doing what movies do better than any other art form." ® "You obviously want that adrenaline hit when people recognized the song. But also you want it to have an extra currency in the scene." —DANNY BOYLE On The Beatles' music in Yesterday PHOTO: JONATHAN PRIME/UNIVERSAL PICTURES