2. Paul Giovanni The Wicker Man
You have a film like the original Wicker Man, set on the isles of Scotland, and the music completely takes you into a world that you’re unfamiliar with. It’s beautiful music but it’s weird. ‘Maypole’ and all the pagan stuff, ‘Gently Johnny’, ‘Willow’s Song’. All kinds of weird. You feel off-centre from the start, when that little plane’s flying over the islands and Edward Woodward’s going out to Summerisle. You already feel weird and different. You think about things that you don’t understand. I love that: it’s educational; it’s going to be an experience I’ve not had before. That’s what I look for a lot of the time. I can enjoy Raiders Of The Lost Ark with everybody – it’s great, and John Williams’ music really rollicks those movies along – but that’s a different experience again. In The Wicker Man, Paul Giovanni’s music is fantastic.
There’s a great documentary on the new Blu-ray release that Mark Kermode did a few years ago. That’s the thing with films like The Wicker Man which have so much depth to them – you can make documentaries on them, you can write books about the music, you can explore them deeply because they’re bringing so much to you. Alex Cox used to do a series on BBC 2 called Moviedrome, and he’d do a five-minute introduction and talk about the film. It was like being in a film club or something, but you’ve got a really smart director telling you the ins and outs of the story and how the film was made. I remember films like Dead Of Night, and a lot of cult classics. These were my film education, if you like. I never went to film school, but you would read about these films and hear these people talking about them. It was the best education you could have on stuff like that.
