page.Miklós Rózsa Discusses 1977 films Providence and J. Edgar Hoover
This page originated with a project by Ken Doeckel, who sent 20 questions to film music composer Miklós Rózsa on tape, with Rózsa replying in the same manner from his home in Italy. Rozsa's comments were made July 7, 1977. The tape was later misplaced for about a year and a half, but it was eventually recovered and remastered in 1979. This page was originally part of the longer tape where Rózsa discussed his career. These following comments on films Rózsa had recently worked on in 1977 – Providence and The Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover – were transcribed from a copy of the audio tape with an AI-assisted program. The text has been edited.
- M.Q.
With Providence, I was first interested in the director, Alain Renais. He is a very unusual director, and I had my best experiences in filmmaking with great directors wherever there was a guarantee to do something out of the ordinary. I have to mention Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Vincente Minnelli, Fritz Lang, and so on.
Alain Resnais does films in which reality is combined with the the unreal, and although you don't always follow him very easily, there is a very strong method in his madness. I met him in Paris and found him a fascinating man, highly intelligent, far above the intelligence of the run-of-the-mill Hollywood filmmakers. I was delighted with him and also with his wife, who works with him, who is the daughter of the late André Malraux, one of the towering intellects of our century.
I saw the film and frankly I did not understand it, not because of the language, which was in English, and I do speak French as I do speak English. But there was something in the long silences that somehow I thought that I can do something with. When the lights went up, I was alone in a projection room in Paris. The door opened and Mr. Renais walked in, introduced himself and asked me, "Are you interested?" I said "I am."
I saw the happiness on his face and that was already part of my inspiration for the film. It belonged to my psychological film category, somewhat like Spellbound, somewhat like The Lost Weekend, although it was something else. It was the creative process of a writer who in his -- I can use the word delirium, because he is partly drugged -- is dying of cancer and partly is drinking. Here we are back at The Lost Weekend. And for his last process, the author is creating in his mind his last story, and that's what the film is about. So I thought that it needs something sensitive, something that underlines or explains musically what goes on in the mind of this man. Now this is what I've always done in my psychological films.
I had to go to London to do a recording of Ben-Hur, and I came back for a full-day session with Monsieur Renais, and then I had to leave for Washington for the first American performance of my Tripartita, and from there I came back to Paris to write the film. He had a very thorough scenario about the music. He knew exactly what he wanted. He was, of course, open-minded for ideas, but what he wanted, what was exactly what he wanted to express in the film, pictorially, enhanced, explained, and underlined with the music.
So when we went through the film on the moviola, reel by reel, scene by scene, he told me exactly what he had in mind, which I wrote down, and these 10 to 20 pages became actually my Bible for writing the music, because I knew what he wanted to express musically in his film. As the film is about death, he wanted slow, gloomy, and lugubrious music. For instance, the opening titles are nothing else but a death march and so are other pieces. It was the first time in my whole career that I could start a title music that the French call "générique" piano [softly] and end a film piano. This is maybe possible in Hollywood, but I never got away with it. In Hollywood, you always want a tremendous finale, practically explaining that "happiness is here" and "we shall live ever after with the angels surrounding us," no matter what the film was.
But when John Gielgud, the main actor of the film, goes into the house, we know that he is going to die, and the music ends softly. So all this was possible because in France, the director is the author of the film. No producer or no one else can ever change a frame. It is unlike Hollywood, where the director has only the right for the first cut. From then on, it's up to the studio and they cut it sideways and show it that way. The director has nothing to do with it any more. In France, this is not possible. The actual law protects the director as the author, auteur of the film, and it has to be in every phase of it, exactly as he wants it.
So, Monsieur Renais and I worked together. There was no interference. He came to the recording to London and was happy with every piece. And we finished it in practically half time as he thought it should be. And I am very happy to see that this very un-Hollywood and unostentatious score, where there are hardly any fortissimos during the whole score, gets noticed by the critics when they very often don't notice a two-hour score of tremendous power in other films, including mine. I have just in front of me the review in Milan of one of the leading papers, which is two long columns. And when some of the actors are only mentioned fleetingly once, they are mentioning the music three times and find that it contributes greatly to the merit of the film, which is rewarding.
The Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover is of course something entirely different. This is a piece of Americana in which the life of a very important American character is portrayed from his early days to the very end. It's an interesting study in a man's character, and that's what fascinated me. There are of course episodes with gangsters like Dillinger, Karpis, and the others from the 20s or early 30s, and the music for this will probably remind you of my approach to the late Mark Hellinger's films, which was my gangster period in Hollywood. You will find the same musical brutality and excitement. But more important is the kind of music I wrote for Hoover, who had such a complex and interesting character that it gave great scope for musical explanation and musical characterization.
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