Music for car chases is one of the most demanding tasks for a film composer.
The soundtrack has to be in the same key as the gunfire, the roaring engines and the noise of metal on metal;
the rhythm should be clear and yet it has to overtake itself and collide with itself again and again.
And how well Bill Conti, the American composer, masters this art can perhaps be heard most clearly in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, in which there is a chase in the snow, with skis and motorcycles - and if if you turn down the sound, you can see how lame and uninspired the sequence is staged.
Only Conti's soundtrack gives the images panache and style.
And because action in the cinema is mostly the triumph of form, pure movement, body art, one could almost call Conti a ballet composer.
Except that, in addition to a symphony orchestra, most of the time he also needs dirty funk guitars, a jazz piano and the grooves of electric bass and drums.
Not because he's an eclectic with no style of his own.
But because musical purism in the medium of cinema sounds unrealistic, prudish and mostly like handicraft.
Once Conti mentioned himself and Beethoven in one sentence;
he spoke of the challenge of composing a heroic soundtrack for "Rocky" and of the fact that the Eroica was the valid standard for this.
"Gonna Fly Now" is the name of the song, which, however, very discreetly, only plays around the theme of the fourth movement of the Eroica.
Rocky's run up the stairs got longer and longer during the shooting, but he, Conti, ran out of ideas and so he kept repeating the same theme over and over again.
Nevertheless, the song became his biggest hit, which was deserved – and inappropriate at the same time: because his soundtracks for, for example, “Gloria” or “An Unmarried Woman” are just as complex and stirring.
Bill Conti turns eighty today.
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