{"id":11076,"date":"2023-11-03T17:37:19","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T17:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=11076"},"modified":"2023-11-20T17:53:55","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T17:53:55","slug":"john-barry-on-his-favourite-directors-and-composers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=11076","title":{"rendered":"John Barry on his favourite directors and composers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nBy Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2014 English film composer John Barry, who was born on this day in 1933, won five Academy Awards and created the definitive music for James Bond but he remained very fond of his early British films and spoke warmly of comnposers he admired.<\/p>\n

He told me he had a \u2018terrific time\u2019 in London making films such as \u2018The L-shaped Room\u2019 (pictured below with Leslie Caron, Brock Peters and Tom Bell), \u2018King Rat\u2019, \u2018Seance on a Wet Afternoon\u2019, \u2018The Whisperers\u2019, \u2018The Wrong Box\u2019 and \u2018Deadfall\u2019 with British director Bryan Forbes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Bryan loved music,\u2019 Barry said. \u2018He understood it and he always listened to what I had to say. They were all interesting and different. Some of them were very successful. They were beautifully made movies with extraordinary performances. There\u2019s a lot of very good filmmakers that I\u2019ve had the pleasure of working with. I loved working with John \u00a0Schlesinger on \u201cMidnight Cowboy\u201d and \u201cDay of the Locust\u201d, Sidney Pollack on \u201cOut of Africa\u201d and Francis Ford Coppola on \u201cCotton Club\u201d, \u201cHammett\u201d and \u201cPeggy Sue Got Married\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Barry was a huge fan of Erich composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold\u2019s music in the Thirties for Hollywood movies \u00a0such as \u2018The Adventures of Robin Hood\u2019, \u2018Captain Blood\u2019 and \u2018The Sea Hawk\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018They were wonderful, larger-than-life scores and they still hold up,\u2019 Barry said. \u2018I love Nino Rota, all the stuff he did for Fellini was so original, so fresh. Fellini really understood how to use music in a movie probably more than any other director of his generation. Of the American composers, I admire Alex North. Still one of my favourite scores is \u201cWho\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?\u201d, an incredible and very unselfconscious fusion of jazz and classics.\u2019<\/p>\n

When Barry decided to quit scoring 007 films, producer Barbara Broccoli met him at George Martin\u2019s Air Studios. \u2018I didn\u2019t know David Arnold at all but Barbara said he was in another studio and would I like to have lunch with him? I said I\u2019d love to,\u2019 Barry told me. \u2019We had lunch together and he was terrific. After lunch, he played me some tracks from the album he was making, \u201cShaken and Stirred\u201d. I really liked them as he retained the essence of Bond music, the character of the way of writing Bond music, but he gave it a contemporary feel mainly in terms of the rhythm sounds, I think he\u2019s great.\u2019<\/p>\n

Arnold went on to score four Bond pictures. Barry died in 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2014 English film composer John Barry, who was born on this day in 1933, won five Academy Awards and created the definitive music for James Bond but he remained very fond of his early British films … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1263,8,2257],"tags":[5340,488,668,710,5427],"class_list":["post-11076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-music","category-recalling","tag-bryan-forbes","tag-david-arnold","tag-james-bond","tag-john-barry","tag-wolfgang-korngold-sidney-pollack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11076"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11096,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11076\/revisions\/11096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}