100 Film Scores Quotes

Following is our list of film scores quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about film music.

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Famous Film Scores Quotes

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading. — Igor Stravinsky

For me, the sound design and the musical score is a big part of what makes scary movies work. — James Wan

Music is a defining element of character. — Plato

I like films where the music and the sound design, at times, are almost indistinguishable. — Christopher Nolan

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. — Ingmar Bergman

Music is the soundtrack of your life. — Dick Clark

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. — Stanley Kubrick

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. — Quentin Tarantino

Music is the soundtrack to life. It plays the melody of our being. - Michael Jackson

Music is the soundtrack to life. It plays the melody of our being. — Michael Jackson

I suppose subconsciously I was thinking in terms of having the scale of it matching the scale of the images. Hence the sort of string quartet, jazz band and electronic stuff. — Jonny Greenwood

Electronic music lends itself to an abstract way of storytelling, so it keeps evolving. Theres a whole movement truly driving music further and there is no other music innovating as much as film music — Hans Zimmer

Music gives a soul to the universe. — Plato

Music is the shorthand of emotion. — Leo Tolstoy

Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions. — Alex North

We're a bit flashy, but the music's not one big noise. — Freddie Mercury

Short Film Scores Quotes

  • Music gives color to the air of the moment. — Karl Lagerfeld
  • The composer...joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds. — Alan Hovhaness
  • The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing. — John Cage
  • Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle. — Thomas Beecham
  • I write music with an exclamation point! — Richard Wagner
  • Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul — Plato
  • Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized. — David Sanborn
  • Music is an outburst of the soul. — Frederick Delius
  • A symphony is no joke. — Johannes Brahms
  • Music should always be an adventure. — Coleman Hawkins

Film Scores Image Quotes

Film scores quote The score will take care of itself when you take care of the effort that precedes the score.
The score will take care of itself when you take care of the effort that precedes the score.

Film Scores Music Quotes

I've always worked on all different types of music, some with specific project goals and deadlines and some not. Sometimes I would write a piece of music that is almost like a film score or weird electro pieces, wherever the muse took me, and I still do that. — Serj Tankian

I had great inspiration from a Japanese composer named Toru Takemitsu. He wrote over 90 film scores and a lot of concert music, a lot of classical music, and he gave me a lot of inspiration, as well as composers from other countries. — Howard Shore

It is when music is added that a film can come to life for a director. A live orchestra, playing the score as a conductor watches the film on a huge screen, often gives a fimmaker the first real glimpse of his soon-to-be-completed work. That's where the magic is. — Robert Paul Wolff

Film scores quote You can't score a goal, if you don't take a shot.
You can't score a goal, if you don't take a shot.

It could have been extremely boring to write musical scores for only westerns of horror films. It was really exciting for me to work in all these various genres. — Ennio Morricone

When I have to score a film, I watch the movie first and then start thinking about it. And from that moment on, it is as if I were pregnant. I then have to deliver the child, so from that moment on, I think always about the music - even when I go to the grocery store, I think about it. — Ennio Morricone

In a film score, the last thing you want to do is take people out of the movie. The music is secondary. In opera, the music is the main event. — Stewart Copeland

Film scores quote A teacher is more than a test score and so is a child.
A teacher is more than a test score and so is a child.

But that's something that I like about scoring film: it makes me reach out of the parameters of my self, it requires me to do things musically that I wouldn't normally do left to my own devices. — Jim Coleman

When the script was written, it was sent to me with asterisks marking where he felt a song would be appropriate. Before the film was shot, the score was written. I made a demo of it, so they lived with the music as they were making the film. — Alan Price

I want people to know about all the kinds of music that I write. Some believe I just write film scores, which is not true. — Ennio Morricone

There are some directors who actually fear the possible success of music. They fear that the audience or the critics will think the film has worked because there was a very good music score. — Ennio Morricone

Film Music Quotes

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. — Ansel Adams

Starting in the mid-1990s, the end-to-end ubiquity of the Internet, combined with its cheapness, spontaneously combusted to give us Napster - a site that revolutionized the music industry overnight. We got P2P file swapping in the film and TV industry as well. — Max Keiser

Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die. — Francois Truffaut

Film scores quote I'm not interested in a realistic look - not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel
I'm not interested in a realistic look - not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel.

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization. — Fredric Jameson

Advertising, music, atmospheres, subliminal messages and films can have an impact on our emotional life, and we cannot control it because we are not even conscious of it. — Tariq Ramadan

I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets. — Spike Lee

Film scores quote Great moments are born from great opportunities.
Great moments are born from great opportunities.

I feel like I'm a trendsetter. I try to always stay on the edge of everything I do, whether it be music, fashion, film. I just like to stay abreast of what's going on. What's going on in the street and what's going on in the hood I put in my music and I feel like a lot of people follow that. — Gucci Mane

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art. — Chuck Palahniuk

I’m in a band. I don’t go to church every Sunday. I love punk rock music. Sometimes I use swear words a lot. I respect and admire gay men and women. I’m obsessed with horror films. I know what shame feels like. And guess what old man? Jesus is still my Savior. — Hayley Williams

I think one of my favorite things to do is just lock myself up in a small room and listen to music and watch films for a day. Also I just like seeing my friends. We have pizza parties which means I get four friends round, we eat a pizza and we're really lazy and we play PlayStation. — Daniel Radcliffe

Film Composer Quotes

With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and realizing that one must keep up, I maintain, nonetheless, that the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer. — Henry Mancini

A film just doesn't involve actors, a director and a producer, there is also the cameraman, the sound engineer, the music composer, the lyric writer. So many people come together to make a film. When we all feel satisfied with the film that we have created it's a win for all of us. — Aamir Khan

I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions. — John Towner Williams

Film scores quote To make a great film need three things - the script, the script and the script.
To make a great film need three things - the script, the script and the script.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered. — Ralph Vaughan Williams

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan. — Alex North

When you're working in the [film] industry and you're working with people who are well known and are so regarded, you do just pick up on things. Seeing the way that people hold themselves and compose themselves before a scene - it's inspirational. — Asa Butterfield

I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium. — Danny Elfman

The art of making films is a collaborative art. As a composer, you're always working with the cinematographer because he's so much the heart of the world they've created on film. — Howard Shore

I'm a person of the arts. I love the arts very, very, very much. And ah, I'm a musician, I'm a director, I'm a writer, I'm a composer, I'm a producer, and I love the medium. I love film very, very much. I think it's the most expressive of all of the art mediums. — Michael Jackson

It all depends on the directors. Working closely with a director is the main job of a film composer. Interpreting what he perceives as a color, an emotion or mood is very abstract. A director tells you something he wants and then you have to run back... — Danny Elfman

People Writing About Film Scores

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Read quotes by Plato

Plato
quotes on life, love and reality

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Read quotes by Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky
quotes on education, life and leadership

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Read quotes by James Wan

James Wan
quotes on life, movie and love

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Read quotes by Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan
quotes on filmmaking, movies

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Read quotes by Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman
quotes on film

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Read quotes by Dick Clark

Dick Clark

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More Film Scores Quotes

I'd like to produce, direct, write, score, and star in a film in exactly the way Chaplin did. I'll do that before I'm thirty. — Eddie Murphy

I'm not saying that there weren't other inherent problems with the score that couldn't have been overcome with a bit of remixing, but why did they ask me to do it, and why did Griffin ask me to do it this way, for a film that had nothing to do with American vernacular? — Michael Nyman

My tastes range all over the place, from vocal standards to Motown to 70s funk & soul to 80s pop to film scores to artists like R.E.M., Ben Folds, Prince, Annie Lennox, the Police, Elvis Costello, Cat Stevens, the Ditty Bops, local bands that friends of mine are in, and the list goes on... I have no single favorite genre or artist. — Stephanie D'Abruzzo

My grand plan is that I can master having a better life by making sure I have a regular flow of songs. Then I can give myself time to tour or celebrate or write a film score. — Imogen Heap

Obviously in Art of Noise, I'm just part of the group, and when I do film scores, it's always in collaboration with the director and other people involved. — Anne Dudley

I grew up on film scores and scores from films. — Skitch Henderson

I can write songs, I've had songs in movies, but I can't compose film scores, you know? — Brian Wilson

I'm a member of the Recording Academy and I see the way it works and even with the whole voting process it's broken down into specific categories. There are Pop categories and Dance and Rock and Metal and Film and Score and everything else. Basically when you are voting you are urged not to vote in the category that you don't know anything about. — John Petrucci

I want to write a score for a film. It can be a proper film, maybe for a film kind of like... I saw that movie 'Drive', or a bit of a 'Blade Runner' vibe. A little bit sci-fi, but I don't know. I've just always wanted to write a score for a film. — Flume

That's such a big part of film scoring that people don't realize. There's a portion of film scoring that's writing the music, but a lot of it is how do you get along with the guy you're working with, how do you interpret what he wants? It's so subjective, you know? Your version of sad is probably different than my version of sad. It's my job to figure out what your vision of sad looks like. — John Paesano

My acting is a bit like basketball. Most females in my films come off very well. I give great assist. And if I'm lucky, I even score. — Burt Reynolds

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously. — Anne Dudley

I've explored the worship side, the pop side, and the film scoring side of me. — Michael W. Smith

There's always a question of duration, there's a question of who the orchestra is. No one is free to write what you want - you collaborate on a film score, and one of the good things is that someone else's work is motivating you. — Michael Nyman

My interest in music tends toward being orchestral music. And the repertoire of music that exists is, to me, far more emotive than what is standardly used in movie scores. That isn't always. I think there've been some excellent movie scores by excellent directors. But for the most part, watching a film, one of today's movies, I think that the emotional undertone of movie scores is pretty poor. — Crispin Glover

When scoring a film, empathy is the key. And it is just as important to use music to express the actors' emotions as it is to move the audience. — RZA

The score is always the wonderful icing. The score tells you the emotional content of the film. What the characters don't say, the music can say. — Taylor Hackford

I always write the lyrics first. There are one or two exceptions over the years, but that's pretty much the way it's been. The process of applying music to words is a bit like scoring a film. You've got imagery. — Bruce Cockburn

Composing for concert performance is a somewhat lonely occupation, but composing a film score is highly collaborative. — William P. Perry

Singer/songwriters spend two or three years making an album, and then it goes up for sale and everybody pirates it and you don't make any money. Whereas, writing a film score you still get presented with a paycheck. — Cliff Martinez

I love film scores and opera, and I wanted to work in those forms. But theater was more accessible. And no one was doing this in the late 1970s, when I began working in the theater. So, I have written scores for thirteen plays, which are not musicals, but straight plays. — Jeff Britting

Jumping twenty or so years later, Ann Ciccolella, artistic director of Austin Shakespeare, approached me with the idea of staging Anthem. She had heard my film score to Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. And she said, I want to do Anthem as an oratorio. Well, I figured what she meant was a straight play with music. — Jeff Britting

I love touring, I love making records, but eventually all I want...I want to score. I want people to ask me to score their film or use my songs in cinematic ways. I think the ultimate media is a story that you can watch and feel and have a musical moment to. I think it's my favorite. I love watching something when music is creating motion within the motion. — Justin Vernon

Ennio Morricone is royalty. He doesn't really do this a lot and Quentin brought him back [in Hateful Eight]. Quentin [Tarantino] basically went back and made his The Good, The Bad and The Ugly-kind of film, the ultimate epic spaghetti western, and then you've got mister spaghetti western himself scoring your movie. It's gonna be hard to not vote for him in a landslide. Probably the easiest win of the night. — Bun B

After working as a producer on many pop, electronica and some soundtrack, incidental music projects, I became more focused on film and TV scores. — Paul Wardingham

I'm happy to say that I have not been fired off a film. The score is usually the last thing to be done. So a lot lands on the scores shoulders. A lot of problems that seem to have nothing to do with the music gets blamed on the music , because it's relatively cheap to change, where as a reshoot etc is not. Music is often expected to help or fix bad cuts, bad acting, bad filming, bad timing, you name it. — Trevor Rabin

I was writing a film criticism book on Sergio Corbucci, the director who did the original Django. So, I was kind of getting immersed in his world. Towards the end of the Inglourious Basterds press tour I was in Japan. Spaghetti Westerns are really popular there, so I picked up a bunch of soundtracks and spent my day off listening to all these scores. And all of a sudden the opening scene just came to me. — Quentin Tarantino

After moving to Los Angeles in the early '90s, I started looking into "music for picture" more seriously and in broader scope. My collaboration as a programmer and arranger with Graeme Revell exposed me for the first time to the full spectrum of film music, including the hectic demands of orchestral scoring and the power politics surrounding the finalization of any score for a major motion picture in Hollywood. — Paul Haslinger

A good portion of my work with Tangerine Dream at the time involved film music, and I remember approaching it as any 23-year-old would - without much fear or respect. Also, Tangerine Dream was typically asked to deliver a monochromatic kind of score, the electronic-analog trademark sound that TD had become famous for following landmark films such as Sorcerer [Universal, 1977], Thief [MGM, 1981], and Risky Business [Warner Brothers, 1983]. — Paul Haslinger

A lot of modern film scoring is about a lack of themes, so I try to find ways of using music that doesn't necessarily have thematic material in it to make the points when there is thematic material even stronger. It's cool to be able to combine old and new. — Joseph Trapanese

That's what I love about film scoring. Every situation is new. Every show is a new adventure. — Joseph Trapanese

What I love about film scoring is that all the answers are in the story. You just need to get in tune with the story and realize it musically. — Joseph Trapanese

I still want to be an architect and score films and do other things. I always said as long as I've still got teeth and hair and I look cool when I look in the mirror, then I'll do it. — DJ Quik

I did some songs for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. I had done a jazz album of Roxy songs, and they used bits of it in the film. It would be nice to score a movie one day. — Bryan Ferry

The way that I write songs is pretty simple. I hear music first, much like you would when you're scoring a film. I usually hear a soundtrack in my head, and after I get that soundtrack, it tells me what it's about, what it feels like, what the emotion is, and the words come after. — Lauren Hart

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