Original subtitles

[MUSIC - JULEE CRUISE, "MYSTERIES OF LOVE"]

Yes?

Yeah.

(SINGING) Sometimes a wind blows and you and I--

Music, as everybody knows, is magical.

And what you try to do in a film is get the correct music.

Music, to my mind, has to marry with the picture.

It has to form a union.

And it can't just be any piece of music.

It has to be the correct piece of music.

There might be, out of 10 trillion pieces,

10 that will work.

But when you pick the one, you pick it because it marries.

And then the way the music enters--

I love you, Jeffrey.

--and how it rises and falls--

I love you, too.

--and how it goes out is also critical.

So it feels correct as it's moving.

And a hope is, when all these elements get together,

that the thing can jump and be that thing-- the whole is

greater than the sum of the parts.

This-- oh, it's a long story, this-- this-- this thing.

It's a story of me meeting Angelo Badalamenti.

I wanted the "Song to the Siren" by This Mortal Coil

to be in "Blue Velvet."

And Fred Caruso, bless his heart, looked into it.

And they wanted a whole lot of money.

And Fred said, David, you're always

writing these little things on pieces of paper, these things.

Why don't you write something and send it to Angelo?

And he'll write a song for this.

I said, Fred, there are 25 trillion songs in the world.

I want "Song to the Siren" by This Mortal Coil.

What makes you think I can write these little things

on a piece of paper, send them to Angelo,

he's going to do something to top that?

There's no other song that I want.

So one thing led to another.

And eventually, I sent these little shrivels up

to Angelo, these lyrics.

Angelo laughed at them.

He said, they don't rhyme.

They're not like traditional lyrics.

He tried one thing that didn't work.

And he said, well, what's wrong?

I said, it's gotta sound-- sound angelic.

It's gotta float.

It's gotta, you know, have this angelic floating.

So he got Julie Cruz.

And Julee Cruise and Angelo worked on it.

And then it had this very, very beautiful feel.

I still loved, and always will love,

This Mortal Coil's version of "Song of the Siren."

But I got to use it in "Lost Highway", you know, after this.

So-- but "Mysteries of Love" does have a good feel for this.

And it's turned out to be, in my book, a good song.

When we started working together,

I would sit next to Angelo on the piano bench.

It was a Rhodes piano.

I would talk to Angelo with words.

And Angelo would play my words.

And if I didn't like what he was playing,

I would change my words.

And then, little by little, my words changing

caused Angelo to play something that was just right.

And once Angelo caught that thing that I liked,

he would take off.

And it was a magical--

a magical thing that was going on.

Once he caught a thing, this great talent of Angelo that

pulls your heart strings, this most beautiful stuff comes out.

And many times I'd start crying, it was so beautiful.

It was incredible.

I work that way with Angelo still to this day, talking,

and him playing.

Alan Splet was legally blind.

He wore contacts.

But if he did have glasses on, they

were the classic Coke bottle glasses.

And so he couldn't get a driver's license.

So I always thought that this sense of hearing

went way up in Al to compensate for his, you know, blindness.

And also, Al loved, um, high quality sounds, clean, full

sounds.

So miking things and getting-- and he'd love to experiment.

So he loved to you know collect sounds and, at least with me,

make sounds.

But he just had a great ear and authentic--

authentic, natural things recorded

in the most perfect way.

And technical, you know, genius, too.

He was really a perfectionist.

That's what Al-- he knew that that's what I wanted.

And so Al, when he worked with anybody,

he would try to find the sounds, the best quality

sounds, or best--

you know, create the best quality,

particular sound for that film.

I can tell you an example of a sound Al

and I built for "Eraserhead."

We filled the bathtub with water and floated a Sparkletts water

bottle just barely, barely touching the water bottle,

and a microphone down inside--

you know, halfway down inside the Sparkletts water bottle,

and just gently moved it around the tub.

And it had this fantastic ethereal--

it was a unique sound.

It had a ethereal quality that sort of danced and it moved.

And it's in "Eraserhead" in the scene with the beautiful girl

across the hall and Henry in the bed-- you know, love scene.

[BABY CRYING]