How (And How Not) To Make A Movie Soundtrack

WARNING: The following essay contains spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Baby Driver, and Suicide Squad. 

I’m a huge fan of music as well as a fan of film, and one thing that I find fascinating is the various methods filmmakers use to marry the aural and visual. Music and film have a relationship as old as film itself. Even before sound was implemented, theaters would often have a pianist on standby to play along with the pictures, which would evolve into what we know now as the score. But there’s a big difference between score and soundtrack. A score is made specifically to compliment or enhance whatever is happening onscreen. A soundtrack is taking other people’s music, appropriating it for the same purposes, and giving the world of the film a life of its own. It can be used for comedic, romantic, or horrifying effect, and in some cases, they become so ingrained in a film’s DNA, that the two become inseparable.

While scores are used to set the mood and tone, or tell the audience what a character might be thinking or feeling, a soundtrack can tell us about the world of a movie that a score can’t. The surf rock of Pulp Fiction helps add to the pulpy cool factor of the movie. The country, blues and gospel of O Brother, Where Art Thou? adds to the story’s mythologized Americana. The classical pieces in A Clockwork Orange act as a stark juxtaposition of the violence on display, but also serves to highlight how the main character sees artistry in these violent acts. Directors like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Cameron Crowe are known and lauded for finding and perfectly implementing the right song for the right scene.

Some movies are known for their use of one song in particular, with the song choices in some cases being the key to their iconography. Thanks to Easy Rider, “Born to Be Wild” by Steppenwolf will forever be associated with motorcycles. It’s because of Saturday Night Fever that you feel like a badass strutting down the street whenever you listen to “Stayin’ Alive” by The Bee Gees. “Don’t You Forget About Me” by Simple Minds incapsulates the final thesis statement of The Breakfast Club so perfectly that it’s impossible to hear it and not picture Judd Nelson storming across a football field with his fist in the air. Other times it can rely on the sounds of a single artist, like Simon and Garfunkel with The Graduate, Curtis Mayfield with Superfly, or Daft Punk with Tron: Legacy.

But most of these are examples of movies that use one song exceptionally well, and why use one tool when you have the entire kit at your disposal? Which is why I want to focus on films that use their whole soundtrack to its full advantage. And what better place to start than with the movie that started it all?

My original intent for this essay was to write a piece where I just gush about why I think Fantasia is Disney’s best movie, but my thoughts about it can really be summed up in one sentence: Fantasia is the pre-cursor to the music video. Walt Disney’s goal with this film was to bring the symphony to the masses, going so far as to insist that theaters install special sound systems to create the feel of being in a concert hall, which would later become the basis for stereophonic sound, but he also wanted to create a simulation of what we might imagine when we listen to music. Have you ever listened to a song and caught yourself dreaming up these big, fanciful, elaborate music videos in your head? That’s the sensation that Disney tries to capture here.

At the beginning of the film, our MC Deems Taylor explains that there are three types of music: the kind that tells a story, the kind designed to conjure certain images in the listener’s mind, and the kind that exists simply for its own sake, which he refers to as “absolute music”. Each of its eight segments represent this idea to one degree or another. The first segment with “Toccata in Fugue” reflects absolute music exceptionally well. It’s an experimental piece that begins with a group of silhouettes of the orchestra, before drifting into a series of abstract shapes, colors, lights and shadows. “The Dance of the Hours”, a piece written to reflect the different times of day, is interpreted as a ballet with different animal dancers representing these times before having them all collide. The rest of the segments stick pretty close to a narrative structure, with “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and “Night on Bald Mountain” being the only ones that stick with the original composer’s intent. The rest go off script and present their own interpretation. For example, “The Nutcracker Suite” is turned into a ballet of flowers and fairies to represent the changing of the seasons. “The Rite of Spring” is changed into a retelling of prehistoric life. “The Pastoral Symphony”, itself a piece of absolute music, is used to show a day in the life of various characters and creatures of Greek myth. None of this is a problem though, because it shows how classical music can mean something to different people and that each interpretation is unique in its own way.

But most films nowadays use pop songs, which more often than not have definitive lyrics. Sometimes they’re used sparingly or as background noise, other times they’re an integral part of the movie itself. And for a prime example of that, I present to you…

For this segment, I wanted to choose a movie where the soundtrack is important to the story. I was torn between Guardians of the Galaxy and The Big Chill. The latter would’ve been a good choice since I have a personal connection to it (my mom used to play it around the house all the time when I was little), and its eclectic mix of 60’s R&B and classic rock perfectly complements the story of a group of college buddies reliving their halcyon days, but I never saw the actual movie until well into my adulthood. Guardians of the Galaxy uses its soundtrack in a similar fashion, but here it also plays a big part of the plot. Literally.

Star Lord is the only human character in the entire movie, and the soundtrack helps us relate to him by playing off our nostalgia. The cassette tape that he listens to and brings everywhere with him is a mixtape made for him by his mother, who he watched die of cancer on the same day he was abducted by space pirates. So not only is it the last memento of his mother, it’s the last remnant of a world that he no longer knows. These songs may seem disposable to us, but to him, they’re a security blanket, a catalyst of his humanity to spread to the group of aliens that he’s adopted as his new family.

This is driven even further home in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Star Lord bringing the gift of music to the rest of the gang is just one of the things that binds them together, to the point where Rocket Raccoon brings a stereo to the battlefield so they can jam out while fighting a giant tentacle monster. But whereas the mixtape in the first movie was treated more like a single unit with individual songs usually acting as typical needle drops, here the individual songs are given a definite purpose. The biggest example is Looking Glass’s “Brandy (What A Fine Girl)”. When Star Lord meets his father Ego, a celestial being who wants to help his son hone his untapped abilities so he can aid him in assimilating the entire galaxy, one of their first bonding moments was over their mutual love of this song, with Ego using the lyrics to coerce Star Lord into joining him and carrying on his legacy. And to drill this point in even more, he later tries to sever him from his humanity by destroying his Walkman. For a subtler example, there’s Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain”, a song about another quintet of big egos who can’t stand each other but are nevertheless bound by love. It’s used twice: first when the chain is broken after the Guardians split up, and then there’s a reprise when the chain is reforged after Star Lord finds the inner strength to face his father. The whole movie has an overarching theme of surrogate families with a focus on its characters working out their daddy issues, which is why the death of Yondu, the closest thing Star Lord ever had to a father, is so effective, and why Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” serves as the perfect emotional endnote during his funeral.

But that’s the movie dictating the music. What happens when you have it the other way around?

In Guardians of the Galaxy and Fantasia, the music is there to enhance the story. In Baby Driver, the music is the story. The seed of Baby Driver was planted when writer and director Edgar Wright first heard “Bellbottoms” by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion when he was 21 and imagined a highly elaborate car chase. This would be tested when he directed the music video for Mint Royale’s “Blue Song”, and later become the basis for its opening scene. Like Guardians of the Galaxy, there’s an in-universe reason for the constant stream of music. Our main character, Baby, was in a car accident that left him with tinnitus, so he listens to music to drown out the constant buzzing in his ears. Because there’s music in his ears all the time, he starts seeing rhythm and songs in the world around him, and we begin to see it through him.

Edgar Wright’s films have always had a distinct rhythm to them, using edits and cuts the way a conductor would use a baton, and his knack for synchronizing action with music is just one of the many weapons in his arsenal. Look no further than the pub brawl in Shaun of the Dead, or the pub crawl in The World’s End. Baby Driver takes this to the next level by having every single action and motion synched to the beat of whatever’s playing on Baby’s iPod. Every. Single. Motion. Wright even went so far as to put time markers in the script to indicate what is happening in relation to the music, and the fight and chase sequences were carefully choreographed to match up with it. When they’re not adding punch to the action, they’re acting as commentary on the story. When Baby first meets his girlfriend Debora, she points out that there are hundreds of songs named after him (the soundtrack has six of them), while she only has one. They find out they’re talking about two different songs with the same name (one by Beck, the other by T. Rex), and that becomes their first exchange as a couple. Some choices are a bit on the nose, like when “Nowhere to Run To” plays to convey that Baby is trapped, but it gets the point across.

We’ve seen some great examples of how to incorporate a soundtrack into a film, but I believe that if you want to really learn something, you need study the bad ones.

There is so much wrong with Suicide Squad that has been thoroughly picked over (its troubled production history, its sloppy script, its atrocious editing, the way it nakedly tries to ride the coattails of the trends set by Guardians of the Galaxy and Deadpool, the way it tries to play Harley and Joker's toxic relationship straight, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg), that it’s no surprise that the soundtrack has fallen to the wayside. Which I’m amazed by since it’s not just a lousy soundtrack, it’s emblematic of just about everything bad about the movie.

See, there are two soundtracks to Suicide Squad: the one that’s advertised, and the one that’s actually in the movie. Warner Bros. put together a collection of original songs from contemporary artists like Imagine Dragons, twenty one pilots, Skylar Grey, Grimes, Skrillex and Panic! At The Disco, and often paired them with rappers like Rick Ross, Action Bronson, Wiz Khalifa, Logic, Kevin Gates and G-Eazy. While I’m not a huge fan of most of these songs, I love the idea behind it. One of the goals with the DC Extended Universe was to make a grittier, more realistic alternative to Marvel. Part of this was their reinvention of The Joker as this druggy, blinged out modern gangsta type. (They failed spectacularly, but that’s another subject for another day.) With the line-up they assembled, they would have a lot to play around with. Rappers could be representing Gotham City as this place of danger and struggle the way they do for cities like Compton or Detroit, and name-drop The Joker as this larger-than-life figure like Tony Montana or Tony Soprano. The idea is there, and it matches up with the film’s aesthetic.

The problem is that it’s false advertising. The soundtrack that you can buy is completely different from the soundtrack used in the actual movie. Of the twenty-four songs used in the movie, only six are from the soundtrack, two of which are shoved into the credits.

If I were to make a list of songs that should be banned from movie soundtracks forever, nearly every song used in Suicide Squad would be on it. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re incredibly overused and almost never have they been utilized in a unique or creative way. At the beginning of the movie when we’re introduced to our characters, we’re presented with a seemingly never-ending parade of gratuitous needle drops used in the most blatant, uninspired way imaginable. It opens on an establishing shot of a prison in Louisiana, so they play “House of the Rising Sun”. Amanda Waller is a manipulative person who uses people like chess pieces, so they play “Sympathy for the Devil”. Captain Boomerang is an Australian crook, so they play “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”. Will Smith is bald in this, so they play “Black Skinhead”. When the crew is brought together for the first time, they play “Seven Nation Army”. Then they’re all in a helicopter, so they play “Spirit in the Sky”. The entire first half of the movie is like this. It’s worth noting that the movie went through massive, last-minute reshoots and recuts, and a lot of edits were made by a company that puts together trailers, which explains the lack of subtlety, but if this proves anything, it’s that it’s not just about what songs you use, but how you use them.

If there’s one thing that I hope you take away from all of this, it’s that soundtracks aren’t just there to fill in time. It’s a tool, and like any other tool, there are right ways and wrong ways to use them. Think about your favorite movie soundtrack. Whether it’s The Big Chill, Heavy Metal, The Crow, Juno or High Fidelity, chances are it’s not just because you like the songs, but because those songs have a succinct synergy with the film. You could assemble a list of the greatest songs ever recorded, but it will all be for naught if they’re not properly utilized. So make it count.