Rózsa interview on the BBC, date and announcer not known (probably early 1970s). There are excerpts from films under discussion in the original, suggesting this was on BBC-TV and these excerpts had audio *and* video. This interview has been edited.
ANNOUNCER: Miklós Rózsa, the score for Ben-Hur took, I believe, nine months to write and is in fact one of the longest scores ever written in the history of the movies. How did you manage to get the studio to allow you this amount of time?
MIKLÓS RÓZSA: Well, I was lucky enough that I could go to Rome right from the beginning and work in Rome with Mr. Wyler, the director, during the production, and then immediately when the cutting started, I worked along with it. And actually, shortly after they finished their work, I was finished with the music.
BBCA: This must be very unusual, though, in normal movie activity.
MR: Yes. Normally, they call in the composer when the picture is already finished, cut, and I remember very well that I did Spellbound about 25 years ago with Mr. Hitchcock, and he asked me, "How long will it take you to compose the music? I said "Six weeks," which was really not too much for one hour of music. He said "Six weeks? I shot the whole picture in six weeks." And I said, "I beg your pardon, how long did you take to write it?" "Oh, well, that's another matter." Well, of course, I can record the picture in three days or two days, but first the music has to be written. [Excerpt is played]
BBCA: Although the theme from Spellbound is perhaps one of your most famous themes, especially the love theme, have you ever been tempted to write an out-and-out commercial theme like, say, High Noon or The High and the Mighty?
MR: No, never.
BBCA: But surely there must have been pressure upon you to do this, because it does give a film a certain sort of identity, doesn't it?
MR: Well, this is a new phase in films, and you mentioned High Noon. It probably started with the tremendous success of High Noon, where a theme taken from a film, with lyrics, becomes an international success. Well, I never attempted that, and I don't think it harmed me. I tried to write music for the film purely from the artistic point of view to make the film dramatically better.
BBCA: You went on to score a film called Naked City in 1948, which led to a television series years later. What do you remember of that film now?
MR: Well, there was an interesting incident connected with this film. I wrote Mark Hellinger's first picture's music, and that was The Killers, the second was Brute Force, both with Burt Lancaster. Mark Hellinger was a wonderful man, one of the intelligent Hollywood producers. And then came The Naked City and its director, whose name was Jules Dassin, a very good director, wanted his own composer so Mark Hellinger called me up and said "You understand." I said, "Well of course, go ahead." Anyway, Dassin didn't like the score that he heard and suddenly one day, the telephone rang and it was Mark Hellinger. "Would you...?" I knew that what happened, and I said yes, I would do it. Next day he was dead. Mark Hellinger died. So this was sort of a work of honor that I had to do and it was the most horrible thing to go to his funeral and to go back to the studio and the picture started, "This is Mark Hellinger speaking," and they had just buried him. But I did my best to live up to his confidence.
BBCA: Well, let's then look at just a moment from that show. [Excerpt is played]
BBCA: One of the most famous thrillers to come out of this period was The Asphalt Jungle, the Houston film.
MR: Yes.
BBCA: Now I've heard contradicting stories that Houston at times could be very, very dogmatic with his writers and with his composers as to exactly what he wanted and would tell them in no uncertain terms what he wanted. In other ways, he would be completely freewheeling and let them do exactly as they pleased. How did you get on with him?
MR: We got on quite well, and I remember that when I was nearly through with the score, writing it, I asked him to come to my office and listen to it on the piano. And I wrote what I thought that The Asphalt Jungle should have a very strong and forceful opening music. And he said, I still remember this very well, he said, "Now, every Hollywood picture is telling you, you are going to now experience the biggest picture … this is the greatest … never anything has been done like this," and this is just a picture. Let's not do this in this one. Don't be so forceful. Don't tell them that this is "the greatest." It is not the greatest. Be a little bit more gentle. And so I rewrote it, and this is what was used in thefilm, and he was absolutely right." [Excerpt is played]
BBCA: Can I at this point ask a very basic and perhaps naďve question about the writing of film music? How precisely do you match your music to what's happening on the screen?
MR: The picture can be cut in different ways because its short scenes are put together. A scene like ours now during this interview would be photographed from a long shot, would be photographed over the shoulder, you and me, and this is then it's up to the editor to put it together in the most advantageous and most dramatic way. When this is all done, which is a big jpb, then the composer gets the finished product to write his music to. And this is done broken down like a timetable. Usually an assistant helps him, and this is very serious work, you know. And you get a timing sheet. On this sheet it says by seconds, feet or seconds, what happens at this very moment in the picture. And there's a complete description. At zero seconds this happens. At two seconds this happens. At three seconds somebody says something, this is usually underlined red, so you see the dialogue. Now the composer gets a three, four, or five-minute sequence like this, which could be about ten pages of timing sheets. Now it's up to him to decide whether he wants to underline something with his music, to focus the attention at a certain point or he wants to have just atmospheric music covering the whole thing without any cues, without any synchronization. This is up to him. This is his choice. But once this is done, but let's suppose there is a very dramatic scene when you want to underline certain things, you want to focus the attention on certain points, there it has to be synchronized exactly. In other words, if I write just a nocturne or a pastoral, it doesn't matter whether it's two seconds or three seconds off. But when somebody draws, let's suppose, a gun and points at you, and the music at that point wants to have a strong accent, then this has to synch up exactly at that very second or a fraction of a second. So when you score, then you write with a musical stopwatch. The composer works with a pencil in his right hand and the stopwatch in the left hand. If he wants to play the piano, he has to hit it with his nose in the meantime. And then we write our music according to the stopwatch. And as I said, from here up to here is 20 seconds. So you have to have 20 seconds of music with a stopwatch.
BBCA: Well, let's illustrate that with an example of your work. It's not one of the big scores that one usually associates with you. It's, in fact, one of your very rare comedies. It's Adam's Rib, which was made in 1949 with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. [Excerpt is played]
BBCA: Composers who haven't normally composed for the screen often denigrate "stopwatch composers" as you call them. How do you answer this charge?
MR: Well, I just heard this accusation on British television, not the BBC, saying that music written for certain scenes, dreamt up by other people, and written for certain lengths, cannot be any good. Well, this is utter nonsense. This would be exactly the same as we would say that Michelangelo, who worked in space, and for us musicians space is equal to time, who was asked by Pope Julius II to decorate the Sistine Chapel, which was that many feet that way and that many feet this way. Michelangelo said, "Yes, but I need ten more feet. My imagination runs over." He had to curb his imagination. And you work within a certain given space or a certain given time.
BBCA: Would you say that perhaps the very secret, the whole essence of good composition for the movies is knowing, as it were, when to, strictly speaking, illustrate the visuals and knowing when to let the visuals speak and maybe simply let the music provide an atmosphere. Is this really the secret, do you think?
MR: Yes. I do not quite believe in the word "illustrate." I taught film music at the University of Southern California for 20 years and tried to get my pupils to shy away from illustration. See, illustration would be if somebody runs up a staircase and the music is part of it [Rózsa sings a scale going up], then he runs down and the music goes down [he sings a scale going down], in other words, express musically what we already see on the screen. I think that music should go far behind that and beyond that, and music should explain psychologically the happenings and should complete the psychological meanings which cannot be expressed with words, with acting, or with directing. There is only one medium: music that talks to your soul. [Excerpt is played]
BBCA: Mr. Rózsa, do you think a really imaginative film score can make an otherwise indifferent film really good?
MR: I think I would go too far if I was really good with an indifferent film. I think it could make it better. As Max Steiner, who was a very fine film composer who recently died , said that you can make an average film better, but a bad film you never can make good with music and there's a lot of truth in that.
BBCA: You have scored something like a hundred films. Are there any you look back on in particular horror or shame as ones that you would rather not have had your name on?
MR: Oh yes, many. Many. Half I would say. I won't mention them.
BBCA: The ones you would mention, the ones that you're proud of, which of those is the best?
MR: I think Ben-Hur is such a great picture, you know, you couldn't miss. I did my best and it was inspiration from beginning to end just to look at it. And I like my music for Quo Vadis, I like El Cid, and from the old days I do like The Lost Weekend, which I accidentally saw on television about two years ago, and I was most impressed by my own music.
BBCA: And what words of advice would you give to a young hopeful just beginning a career of composing for the movies?
MR: I would say the same as I told my students for 20 years. First of all, try to be a good composer. Forget the movies. Don't try to be a movie composer. Develop your own style, write a lot of music. If you have a dramatic vein it will come out anyway like dramatic music as well and the movies will either accept you if you are a good composer or they won't but I don't like movie music specialists. I think that a composer should be a thoroughly schooled artist who also writes for movies, but he should do also other things. And I always told my students, my course was in two semesters, that in two semesters you will learn everything that is necessary to learn for films, with the exception of one thing, and that is how to get a job. I can't help you with tha7.
BBCA: Miklós Rózsa, thank you very much indeed.