4. Gabriel YaredBetty Blue
It’s such a sexy film. It’s tragic but it’s passionate, it just looks so beautiful and that music – the piano and the sax. I actually revisited this recently. I hadn’t seen the film in ages, but the moment it starts, Betty and Zorg: "C’est le vent, Betty…" It’s so evocative. I just feel like I’m on that beach where they’re painting the houses. The soundtrack combines with the images and the emotions beautifully. I love that one. It’s probably got to do with growing up in Stourbridge in the Black Country at that time, which is a great part of the world, but different from living in France on the beach in the summer and not having a care in the world. Not that I had many cares really, but there’s a romance to it and the music captures it. It really brings out the longing in you, a longing for something that you can’t have. That’s a fantastic thing to be able to do.
Without wishing to sound like old Father Time, I grew up as a teenager in the seventies, and back then we had three channels on the TV and nothing to do on a Sunday. You couldn’t download movies. You watched them on the TV at that time, and that was it. The BBC would show movies on a Monday night, I particularly seem to remember, and at twelve or thirteen or fourteen, I also remember things like The Parallax View and The Man Who Fell To Earth. They were intelligent, they were educational. They made you think. Nowadays, people constantly make movies and put things in that "you can relate to" so you’ll like the film. I think that’s the opposite of what we should be doing.
