Latest / MUBI Podcast / FERRIS BUELLER to WOLF OF WALL STREET — Cinema's top music supervisors break down their greatest hits

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FERRIS BUELLER to WOLF OF WALL STREET — Cinema's top music supervisors break down their greatest hits · MUBI Podcast

• 0:03
  Tell me about young Margaret Yen.
• 0:06
  As a music lover, what's like the first music you remember getting into?
• 0:10
  I love that question because I just got to meet the Olivia Newton-John estate and I was able to pull out my very first purchase with my own money.
• 0:21
  This Olivia Newton-JohnTotally Hot album.
• 0:24
  That's the one with Physical on it?
• 0:25
  No, that's before.
• 0:27
  It's 1978 and it has Totally Hot.
• 0:30
  ♪ You must know♪ 'Cause baby I can't begin to keep it in♪ My love is so hot, totally hot♪ You got to me Just, it just, is crazy, her vocals on that.
• 0:44
  So I highly recommend taking a ride down that, down that lane.
• 0:50
  I think it was overlooked, but it made a huge impression.
• 0:53
  How old were you at that time?
• 0:56
  - I was ten.
• 0:56
  - Wow.
• 0:58
  But do you remember what the appeal of...?
• 1:00
  Yeah, it was reading the lyrics in the vinyl, you know, all the lyrics were there, so you could just sit with that and you could listen over, and over, and over again and memorize them and sing along.
• 1:10
  And I think I got my, my desire to relisten to things all the time.
• 1:17
  Like if I like something, I'll listen to it over and over again, like a song, I'll just keep replaying, replaying, replaying, I don't care.
• 1:25
  I think it started from that because it just kept me in that world.
• 1:32
  Years later, Margaret Yen's job is to use music to pull people into worlds they never want to leave.
• 1:38
  And in the oughties, thanks to an indie movie no one thought had a chance at the big time, she'll put together a record another generation of kids just couldn't stop spinning.
• 1:59
  I'm Rico Gagliano, and welcome back to the MUBI Podcast.
• 2:03
  MUBI's the curated streaming service that champions, great cinema.
• 2:07
  On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 2:10
  Today we wrap up season three.
• 2:12
  We've been calling it'Needle on the Record' because we've been taking a look at movie history's most iconic needle drops.
• 2:18
  When filmmakers take preexisting tunes, drop them in their films and end up with something legendary.
• 2:24
  And today you are going to hear about a ton of those because I am talking to the folks who make those needle drops happen, Music Supervisors.
• 2:32
  Three of them, who are collectively responsible for some of the best known movie music moments of the past few decades.
• 2:38
  From the guy who helped Ferris BuellerTwist and Shout...
• 2:41
  Twist and Shout went back in the charts.
• 2:43
  It's the only Beatles song that was a hit twice.
• 2:46
  To the woman you just met, Margaret Yen, who helped deliver the music for a little flick called Juno.
• 2:51
  You know, there were super low expectations for the soundtrack.
• 2:54
  A lot of labels even passed on the soundtrack.
• 2:57
  They would come to regret that.
• 2:58
  But first up, pick a movie by a major American auteur between late 1990 and now.
• 3:04
  And there's a very good chance Randall Poster was involved in pulling together the tunes for it.
• 3:10
  He has been the longtime go to music supervisor for Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson, and more recently, for none other than Martin Scorsese.
• 3:18
  We talked about his career and how he does what he does.
• 3:20
  But first thing I wanted to know was what movie's music first got him hooked on soundtracks?
• 3:29
  I would say thatAmerican Graffiti was probably a gateway movie for me.
• 3:35
  If you remember the movie, it's all source music.
• 3:37
  There's no score in the film.
• 3:39
  And for me, it was just transportive where the musical component helped me travel back into time.
• 3:47
  It made every aspect of that story more vivid to me, and I guess maybe that was one of the first times where I ever even had any thought, where I said,"Well, somebody... who picked the music?" or how did this, how did these particular songs get into this movie?
• 4:03
  Somebody or some people consciously placed it.
• 4:07
  What was the circumstances under which you saw that movie?
• 4:10
  How old were you and where were you?
• 4:11
  You know, I think I was probably like twelve, eleven.
• 4:15
  And Del Shannon's Runaway became my greatest secret pleasure.
• 4:20
  It was just something that I was just mad for.
• 4:22
  It seemed like it was a relic from another world.
• 4:26
  I'ma walkin' in the rainTears are fallin' and I feel the painWishin' you were here by meTo end this miseryAnd I wonderI wo-wo-wo wonder It was a whole new world of music.
• 4:45
  This is something that I'm kind of interested in, is like what do you think it is about a movie that can take a song and suddenly make it your favorite?
• 4:52
  Well, I would say I mean, if you saw American Graffiti, there's songs in the diners and songs in the cars and songs in the convenience stores.
• 5:01
  It was just so completely detailed and so perfectly integrated into the story.
• 5:08
  Eh! Yo! Is that you in that beautiful car?
• 5:12
  Geez what a waste of machinery.
• 5:16
  To me, what you're saying gets to something that I think is the, what's at issue here, which is that it provides context.
• 5:22
  It's not just a song that kind of exists and you have nothing to connect it to.
• 5:26
  Now you have something to connect it to, a story, or a feeling, or an era.
• 5:31
  And maybe you can recreate it once you're out of the theater.
• 5:34
  Yeah, I mean, it was also a record that I brought home and played to death.
• 5:39
  I run-run-run-run runaway So let's jump forward a little bit.
• 5:45
  Before you became a music supervisor.
• 5:48
  You co-wrote a movie called A Matter of Degrees.- Right.
• 5:51
  - Describe the plot of this movie.
• 5:53
  Well, basically, it's about a group of friends who are graduating from college who've been involved with the college radio station.
• 6:01
  And the radio station is going from being a free form student program station to an actual commercial radio station.
• 6:10
  We're shutting down at the end of the semester.
• 6:11
  Orbital, as part of its deal with the university, is giving us new studios.
• 6:16
  So the station is back in the fall, newer, better with a broad commercial support.
• 6:20
  Hey, that is a whole new ballgame.
• 6:22
  It also has nothing to do with what this station's about.
• 6:24
  And that's sort of the spark for cultural crisis in the storyline.
• 6:30
  So it's set at a radio station.
• 6:31
  I got to wonder, is that where you sort of started making playlists, in college radio?
• 6:36
  Were you a college radio guy?
• 6:38
  No, I mean, I think I was spinning records in my dorm room, really, and listening to a lot of college radio, you know. But that was the moment it was corporatizing.
• 6:48
  Right. So I wasn't interested in that.
• 6:51
  You were kind of more of a punk.
• 6:52
  You were like, into the underground.
• 6:53
  Well, I just was more like, I just really wasn't thinking about, like, having a career in show business at that point.
• 7:00
  How'd you end up co-writing a screenplay?
• 7:02
  I had to do something, you know?
• 7:05
  I had to do something.
• 7:07
  Seriously? That's your answer?
• 7:08
  Yeah.
• 7:10
  Wait a minute, what were you considering at the time?
• 7:12
  I was not considering anything, really.
• 7:14
  I just knew that I needed to do something.
• 7:17
  And so my friend Jack Mason and I wrote this script, then got into the lab at Sundance, and that was the trigger.
• 7:24
  But clearly, I mean, you were already deeply interested in music, if you made this the theme of your film.
• 7:29
  Yeah. I was 15 years old when the disco era exploded, which was happening simultaneous to sort of all the punk rock that was happening down at CBGB's.
• 7:42
  It was a very rich musical landscape in New York City.
• 7:47
  So I was just caught up in it and just played records and listened to the radio and went to the movies.
• 7:53
  And so I guess that was my sort of version of film school.
• 7:57
  My guess is that you were too young, but were you going to places like CBGB?
• 8:00
  Yeah. Yeah, no, 'cause the drinking age in New York City was 18.
• 8:04
  - Oh, yeah.
• 8:04
  - Back then.
• 8:06
  So basically at 16, you could, you could get yourself, you know, set up.
• 8:13
  I remember, by the way, just before I turned 18 is when they started shifting everything to 21.
• 8:18
  And it was like, "What!" you've been dangling this carrot for years and years and now you're just moving it away from me.
• 8:24
  - That's not fair.
• 8:24
  - Yeah.
• 8:26
  Tell me, well, okay, so you start out, you make, you get into movies writing them and making indie film.
• 8:32
  How do you end up as a music supervisor?
• 8:34
  So I worked on the music for the movie and it played in film festivals and it had a theatrical distribution, but really it didn't make an impact.
• 8:45
  But people like the music, you know, people were very taken with the way the music was used.
• 8:51
  And again, that movie,A Matter of Degrees, had no score.
• 8:54
  It was all songs.
• 8:56
  And I came out of the experience thinking that, like, what I really wanted to do was work with great film directors.
• 9:03
  So I figured, okay, I'll focus my attention on the music and that'll be the touch point with directors.
• 9:09
  And then a few years later, in 1995, the first movie comes out with you as a music supervisor which is Larry Clark's Kids.
• 9:17
  So I think I started The Crossing Guard before I did Kids, and it came out later or something like that.
• 9:21
  That's my recollection of it.
• 9:24
  Well, let's talk about Kids, because I feel like it had a huge impact.
• 9:26
  Yeah.
• 9:27
  Certainly for me as a, you know, film school kid in the nineties when that came out.
• 9:30
  Especially for an indie film, you could almost call that soundtrack era defining.
• 9:36
  I mean, certain songs really became hits and you heard them here in L.A.
• 9:39
  - on K-Rock all the time.
• 9:39
  - Right.
• 9:41
  The thing that I want to know is how you collaborated.
• 9:43
  Like, it seems like everyone involved with that movie is like an incredible creative iconoclast.
• 9:50
  You got Larry Clark directing it, a young Harmony Korine writing it.
• 9:53
  I think it's his first screenplay.
• 9:55
  Lou Barlow of Dinosaur Jr.
• 9:55
  did like some of the music for it.
• 9:58
  - Right.
• 9:58
  - What was your collaboration with these people? I can imagine just very opinionated people.
• 10:04
  So I was Harmony's champion, right?
• 10:08
  I got involved with Kids because I'd read the script, and the title page it said "Kids by the world famous writer Harmony Korine." And and I just thought that was the funniest thing I had ever read.
• 10:23
  - He's like 18, right?
• 10:23
  - Yeah, 18.19. Could have been 20.
• 10:27
  But so I sought Harmony out and just completely was smitten with him, you know, he was just so funny and such, had such a fresh take on things and, and that he had been communicating with Lou Barlow who was playing as, mostly as, I think isSebadoh, during that time.
• 10:47
  He was in a two man band called Sebadoh, right?
• 10:48
  Sebadoh. And I guess I went up to Boston and sat with Lou a couple of times in the studio.
• 10:55
  And I mean, that's the crazy thing about Kids was that we actually had a top 40 single on it,Natural One, which really was one of those things where it was a piece in the film we just said,"Well, let's put some vocals on it." Oh, so it was originally an instrumental?
• 11:11
  Yeah, it was originally going to be score, and then it became a song.
• 11:15
  I'm the one natural one, make it easy We can take it inside I mean, this is one of your first soundtracks that you worked on, and it becomes, I would call it an out-sized hit.
• 11:28
  I don't know that anyone would have expected...
• 11:29
  I would say out-sized hit is a good way to describe what Natural One was.
• 11:35
  What was the reaction or like, how did that change your life?
• 11:38
  - Like the script?
• 11:38
  - It didn't change my life.
• 11:40
  It helped me get some money to spend on the Gummo soundtrack.
• 11:43
  That was pretty much what it did for us.
• 11:45
  Harmony Korine's debut directing gig.
• 11:48
  Yeah, but it was fun.
• 11:49
  I mean, that track, if you listen to it, it's I mean, it's a super cool track.
• 11:56
  Natural One still sounds great.
• 11:58
  Like directors always want to know like,"Well, has some song been in another movie?" You know, and you can pretty much say yes with confidence.
• 12:07
  That pretty much everything has been in something, right?
• 12:10
  But I tell directors, like if you use a song perfectly, you'll own it.
• 12:14
  And sometimes like, you know, I say,"Oh, I don't want to use this song" in the movie cause I already used it once in a movie ten years ago. Right?
• 12:21
  But like, Natural One, I'm like, I think I try to put Natural One- in, like, every movie.
• 12:25
  - You still do?
• 12:29
  I try. I haven't, I haven't, it hasn't stuck in another movie.
• 12:33
  Good because we made itThe world is falling down and you may as well crash with me I feel like the nineties were just in general a time when it sometimes felt like films were almost being made for it to have a soundtrack.
• 12:53
  Yeah, I never got into it that way, you know, like I was never really keen on working on the movies where the record companies were funding the music budgets.
• 13:02
  Is that what was happening?
• 13:04
  Well it happened when, like, you know, people were still buying CDs by the basketful.
• 13:08
  Soundtrack albums sold a lot.
• 13:10
  And so record labels, in order to get in on certain movies and get their artists in the movies, they would basically finance a movies' music budget.
• 13:20
  Do you think anything's changed between the nineties and now?
• 13:23
  I've gained probably 25 pounds, I think, since then.
• 13:27
  Industry wise?
• 13:29
  - Oh I don't know...
• 13:29
  - So far as what you do.
• 13:30
  It's always a challenge doing the music for movies because it's the money that goes out the door last, right? And everything costs more money than they wanted it to.
• 13:39
  So by the time you get around to paying for the music, they've already dipped in a couple of times.
• 13:45
  So that's never changed.
• 13:46
  That's always the same.
• 13:48
  This actually brings up an interesting point because that implies the movie's been shot, and now they come to you and they say,"Here's our budget to pay for this music,"some of which is kind of baked into the fabric of the movie." Like you've worked a lot with Richard Linklater, right?
• 14:03
  And his movies, sometimes specific songs are, you know, referred to in his scenes and constructed around them.
• 14:10
  Right. School of Rock is a film that we did together that was all about preparing music for shooting.
• 14:16
  Well, let's use that then.
• 14:19
  Here's the song that I would most pick for that- would be Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks. - Yeah.
• 14:23
  Which has absolutely defined the character in the scene that that plays in.
• 14:27
  I love this song.
• 14:29
  - Really?
• 14:29
  - Yes. Stevie Nicks.
• 14:32
  - Yeah. Stevie!- You know, she came to town and she did a concert and she was just so...
• 14:40
  - Wiped!- I know.
• 14:42
  But so then doesn't that put you in a situation where you've got to negotiate for the rights to a song that's baked into the movie and now you have to get it by hook or by crook?
• 14:51
  Well, I mean, it's always by hook or by crook, right?
• 14:55
  So there was a song that we, an Italian pop song from the sixties that we wanted to use in a short film that Wes Anderson made.
• 15:07
  You know, what could I get like a little plate of spaghetti or something?
• 15:10
  About a race car driver.
• 15:12
  - Oh, Castello Cavalcanti it was called.
• 15:12
  - Yeah.
• 15:15
  Thank you.
• 15:16
  The writer of the piece was named Wolfer Beltrami.
• 15:19
  That name I remember.
• 15:26
  And he had passed and we were trying to track down his heirs.
• 15:30
  And ultimately we found Wolfer Beltrami, his daughter's husband, through his hairdresser in Italy.
• 15:38
  And I don't remember how it was that we got to that, but that was our own detective work.
• 15:50
  - So you've worked with Martin Scorsese. - Correct.
• 15:53
  Guy who maybe created, maybe not created, but like one of- the pioneers of needle drops in film.
• 15:57
  - He expanded the qualities.
• 16:01
  Certainly. So his soundtracks, I feel like, are just poured over.
• 16:06
  He has used the Rolling StonesGimme Shelter multiple times in his films.
• 16:11
  - Right.
• 16:11
  - And I've always wondered how knowing that people are going to be like pouring over his soundtracks and having, being Martin Scorsese and being able therefore to have any song he probably wants, he could probably get, eventually.
• 16:23
  What is it about that song?
• 16:25
  He just goes back and back and back to.
• 16:27
  I know that you haven't worked on those soundtracks, but I'd like to know from your point of view.
• 16:30
  Well, you know, I mean, I think that there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of repeats in the Scorsese movies, like he uses Moonglow all the time, I think like, I was saying, like I wanted to put Natural One into another movie.
• 16:45
  I think you just, he gets a kick out of it, you know, and he loves it so much.
• 16:50
  I would say that's why he would useGimme Shelter is just because he, Scorsese does what Scorsese does...
• 16:58
  Scorsese does.
• 16:59
  I mean, I will tell you one story.
• 17:02
  I was working on The Wolf of Wall Street, and there's a sequence in the film where Leo's character gets married, right?
• 17:09
  And so for the wedding band, we had Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.
• 17:12
  - Oh, yeah. - They both recorded the music and they were the on-camera band.
• 17:17
  We recorded Goldfinger, but we did say another half a dozen songs. Songs that I talked about with Scorsese.
• 17:25
  So we're shooting the wedding and I get called to camera.
• 17:30
  Marty's there, Leonardo DiCaprio is there, and they say that Leo wants to do a dance toBaby's Got Back, right?
• 17:38
  - Yeah.
• 17:38
  - Okay.
• 17:39
  We haven't recorded Baby's Got Back, but I have my real musicians there on stage.
• 17:45
  - You know.
• 17:45
  - This is the rap song Baby Got Back? Yeah. Sir Mix-A-Lot.
• 17:48
  And so we go and we play it, like on a boombox a couple of times.
• 17:52
  And the band basically, like, they get it down and I figured I can, they look like they're playing the song, right?
• 17:57
  So they shoot the sequence that really incredible dance sequence where DiCaprio does that crazy robotic, mixed up dance.
• 18:06
  It's one of the iconic sequences in that movie.
• 18:11
  And so then the movie comes out or I see it finally see a cut of the whole movie.
• 18:16
  And in that sequence, all of a sudden it goes.
• 18:17
  They start playingBaby's Got Back and he's dancing.
• 18:21
  She gotta pack much back. So Fellas!So, fellas (yeah)... And then all of a sudden...- ...shake it- Ooooh...pretty thing A Bo Diddley record,You Pretty Thing comes over it.
• 18:37
  It makes no sense, except that it's, it's coming from this brilliant mind, this instinctive musical mind, and it works.
• 18:49
  I've actually heard people say that he does this on purpose, that he wants music that has nothing to do with the scene that you're watching.
• 18:57
  Is that his actual philosophy?
• 18:58
  I've never heard really a philosophy explained, except that he thinks it's you know, he thinks it's cool.
• 19:10
  Music Supervisor Randall Poster. In the spirit of Scorsese, I've dropped in this musical cue by our show's very own composer, Martin Austwick.
• 19:18
  Not because it makes any sense here, but because I think it rocks and we haven't used it since season one of this show.
• 19:29
  Oh, it's garage rock-tastic.
• 19:30
  Anyway, coming up, a conversation with the guy behind a bunch of the needle drops that defined a whole generation of teenagers.
• 19:37
  Music Supervisor Tarquin Gotch on Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
• 19:40
  Coming up in just a minute, stay with us.
• 19:49
  All right everybody so MUBI is is a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe, all of them handpicked by real people who really know movies, and who love to talk and write about movies.
• 20:02
  The evidence being this very podcast you're listening to, of course, and also MUBI's online magazine, Notebook, where you will find articles about cinema past and present from some of the best film writers around.
• 20:13
  And forgive me for putting myself in their esteemed company, but I do want to tell you that you can find right now on Notebook the transcript of my whole interview with Randall Poster.
• 20:23
  All the stuff we couldn't fit into a single act of this podcast.
• 20:26
  He gets a little more into his work with Wes Anderson, among other great stuff.
• 20:30
  Do check it out. You will find that piece at MUBI.com/notebook Also, real quick, if you've been loving these episodes about movie music, I heartily recommend after you're done listening to this final installment of our season that you check out the podcast Soundtracking, hosted by UK arts media mainstay, and Scotland's pride, Edith Bowman.
• 20:51
  Every episode she talks to filmmakers about their music influences and the music they drop in their films.
• 20:54
  It is delightful.
• 20:58
  You may have heard Edith talking about the film Donnie Darko on our episode about that movie's music.
• 21:00
  She is delightful.
• 21:04
  Go listen to Soundtracking or wherever pods are cast.
• 21:08
  And finally, after you finished listening today, you can stream some of the films we have featured on the show in the MUBI film collection titled "Featured on the MUBI Podcast." As always, you will find all the links you need to this stuff in the show notes of this episode.
• 21:22
  Speaking of which, back to it.
• 21:29
  In February 1986, the teen moviePretty in Pink debuted in my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• 21:36
  The movie is directed by Howard Deutch, but it was known even then as belonging to the pantheon of teen flicks that had emerged from the mind of its writer and co-executive producer, John Hughes.
• 21:46
  I remember the night well.
• 21:46
  Standing in line in the cold, surrounded by older kids with asymmetrical haircuts and layers of oversize New Wave fashion.
• 21:55
  Trench coats, fingerless gloves, goth eyeliner, clove cigarettes.
• 22:00
  And then inside...
• 22:06
  a little cheer that went up when the title song by the Psychedelic Furs blasted over, the opening credits.
• 22:13
  Felt like it was part of something really cool.
• 22:16
  Tarquin Gotch knows where I'm coming from.
• 22:18
  Why do the John Hughes films resonate so well with teenagers, both back in the day and still today?
• 22:28
  I think it has to do with seeing your life up on the screen.
• 22:33
  It's a huge validation.
• 22:35
  It's akin to, you know, finding online that your tribe is out there, that you're not alone, whether you're a foot fetishist or a footballer, you know, it really validates you.
• 22:50
  And my earliest memory of that was since I'm very, very old, I was a bit of a hippie.
• 22:57
  And when I first saw Easy Rider and, you know, Dennis Hopper on his motorbikes smoking dope, I was like, "Yes!"There are other potheads out there.
• 23:10
  "This is marvelous!"Get your motor runningHead out on the highway Tarquin obviously didn't grow up as a Gen-X New Wave kid.
• 23:20
  But he went on to help soundtrack a lot of Gen Xers lives.
• 23:23
  In the eighties after a long stint as an A&R man and manager, repping UK alternative pop acts like the English Beat and Echo and the Bunnymen. He ended up serving as John Hughes's go to music supervisor, contributing a little bit to Pretty In Pink but really coming on line with a movie Hughes wrote and directed called Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
• 23:44
  It of course, tells the story of the ultra confident titular teenager who fakes an illness to stay home from school and spends the day changing the life of his way more neurotic buddy Cameron.
• 23:54
  There's lots of debates about whether, is John Hughes Cameron?
• 23:56
  Or the Ferris character?
• 24:01
  And a lot of people vote for Cameron because he's the outsider.
• 24:06
  And he was a bit of an outsider in high school, but he was also very funny, very good looking, and he married the high school cheerleader.
• 24:16
  I mean, he got the girl.
• 24:18
  - He was no Cameron.
• 24:18
  - It's interesting because definitely I feel like the audience for those movies, I mean, I'm speaking personally as someone who was in those audiences, probably self-identified as being a bit of outsiders.
• 24:30
  Like more New Wave punk kids who were like a very niche thing to be at the time.
• 24:36
  That's right.
• 24:36
  I mean, what you can't get that you got on those opening nights when you went see Pretty in Pink and, and Ferris was just how out there the music was.
• 24:47
  You know John bought groups like Simple Minds and the Psychedelic Furs and Suzanne Vega and Yellow from left field.
• 24:56
  He brought them into the center and he did it through these films.
• 25:00
  Prior to that, if you'd been making a film about the suburbs of Chicago and what the kids were listening to in high school, it would not have been the groups I'd just listed.
• 25:11
  No. It'd be like, maybe Van Halen.
• 25:13
  - Rush, probably.
• 25:13
  - Correct.
• 25:15
  - Correct. Boston.
• 25:15
  - Yeah.
• 25:17
  - AC/DC maybe?
• 25:17
  - Ooh, a bit early for them, but yes, yes.
• 25:21
  Even AC/DC, God bless them.
• 25:23
  I managed Brian Johnson from AC/DC.
• 25:26
  Well, let me ask you, where did his tastes come from?
• 25:30
  Because those are fairly left field tastes for a guy who married the high school cheerleader.
• 25:33
  Yes, they are.
• 25:34
  But in high school you had to sort of mark out your tribe.
• 25:39
  And I think his tribe was the music tribe.
• 25:44
  You know, it started when he realized that the import Beatles albums had different tracks on them to the American Beatles albums.
• 25:54
  And he would walk around with his import Beatles album, and that was his sort of badge.
• 25:59
  He moved high school a lot, so he had to, you know, establish himself in a difficult social situation.
• 26:08
  I think it's why his films are so sensitive on that issue.
• 26:12
  And he did it by comedy, by being funny and by having sort of left field music tastes.
• 26:20
  Interesting, so you come along and you have a direct link to all of these bands that he's interested in.
• 26:27
  Yes! You know, today, if you want an instrumental or the demo of a given track, you just go to Spotify and you'll find it.
• 26:35
  Back then, that was not the case, and only someone like myself who had been an A&R man, was a manager, had access to the acts, could get you an instrumental mix, could get you the 12 inch mix.
• 26:49
  John, unbeknownst to me, was looking for someone to fulfill that role.
• 26:55
  He I think he'd had his eye on the Psychedelic Furs' manager, and bad luck for him, I got the job.
• 27:04
  Let's go to Ferris.
• 27:06
  So tell me what the beginning of your relationship with that movie.
• 27:10
  Well, he sends me a script.
• 27:12
  He tells me what he's looking for, and we start this sort of dialog by cassette.
• 27:18
  Us sending him music cassettes and him sending us video cassettes with the scenes with no music in them.
• 27:29
  And then we would just try music against picture in London.
• 27:33
  Can I ask one thing, though?
• 27:35
  This is something that I think about a lot, particularly with filmmakers like him who are such music heads.
• 27:40
  It seems to me that like one of the joys of becoming a filmmaker, if you're a music head, is that now you get to bring all the music that you love to a wider audience through a movie.
• 27:51
  So why is he having, why is he farming that out? Like you would think- He's not.
• 27:54
  - ...that he would want to be the guy- that was coming up with everything.
• 27:56
  - He was.
• 27:58
  He was the guy coming up with everything.
• 28:00
  He would give me the parameters.
• 28:01
  He would say, you know, "For the museum scene,"I need something to be melancholic, slightly melancholic.
• 28:09
  "It mustn't be too fast.
• 28:11
  "I want to go slow here." And you start to send him things that fit those parameters.
• 28:17
  Give me an example.
• 28:18
  Well, let's use that scene, actually.
• 28:20
  First of all, describe for the two people in the audience that don't know that scene and like watch it on YouTube once a year just to get a good cry.
• 28:30
  Describe the scene.
• 28:31
  Well, in the middle of the sort of comedy, a teen comedy, really, he has the characters go to the Chicago Museum of Art and look at paintings and there's no dialog.
• 28:45
  It's all done in a montage.
• 28:47
  And during that montage, Cameron stares at a painting by Seurat, the French painting of a day off.
• 28:56
  And in the middle of the painting is a mother with a child.
• 29:00
  And the paintings that Cameron looks at in that scene are all mainly mums with kids, because what Cameron's missing is a mother.
• 29:11
  It's what he doesn't have is a mother who loves him.
• 29:14
  And the song that we ended up using is the instrumental version ofPlease, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want, written by The Smiths but recorded by the Dream Academy.
• 29:34
  The melancholic, plaintive cry that you get from Please, Please, PleaseLet Me Get What I Want just summed up what Cameron was thinking as he looked at those painting.
• 29:46
  Now why use the instrumental track by the Dream Academy rather than using the original by the Smiths?
• 29:52
  We'd use the original, well, John had used the original with Howie Deutch in Pretty in Pink, so he didn't want to use The Smiths again.
• 30:01
  And we tried the vocal version.
• 30:01
  But it distracted you.
• 30:06
  You know what's so lovely is you're looking at some of the greatest art in the world.
• 30:11
  And, you know, just having the music play gave you time to think.
• 30:22
  The Dream Academy Smiths covers sits on one end of Ferris Bueller's emotional spectrum, though the complete other side has to be a tune by a Euro dance duo pretty much unknown in the U.S.
• 30:32
  - before this movie, called Yello.
• 30:32
  - Dieter and Boris were these marvelous pair of Swiss-Germans.
• 30:40
  And Dieter is immensely wealthy and in our minds he lived in a castle next to a lake.
• 30:49
  And Boris, who's his sort of techno guy, the technician, the engineer in our minds, was chained up in the dungeon.
• 30:58
  Never allowed to see daylight and would just produce these immaculately sounding tracks.
• 31:04
  Because one of the things that made Yello stand out was the production was so good.
• 31:09
  Tell me how it ended up in the film.
• 31:11
  So we had to preview the picture.
• 31:13
  And when we first previewed the picture, we thought it was brilliant and it didn't go well.
• 31:18
  And John went away and re-edited the film.
• 31:23
  Changing the music in the museum scene really helped, but we also put Yello in for the reveal of the Ferrari.
• 31:33
  The 1961 Ferrari 250 GT, California.
• 31:41
  Less than 100 were made.
• 31:44
  My head of post-production, Bill Brown, remembers you know, the crew on the soundstage couldn't stop laughing.
• 31:51
  They just loved it.
• 31:53
  And from then on, he remembers the picture's editor, walking up and down the hallway saying,"Oh yeah!" as they mimic the song, all through post, it became this sort of thing.
• 32:03
  Oh yeah! No... The crew loved it so much it actually got repurposed at the end of the movie for a scene that runs under the credits.
• 32:13
  And at the high school, principal Mr Rooney, scarred and disheveled after a day of chasing Ferris all over town, trudges down the street and then endures the indignity of getting a lift home on the school bus.
• 32:24
  Hey, Mr Rooney, what's going on?
• 32:28
  Oh yeah! Did you get in a fight?
• 32:34
  Rooney getting on the bus had come much earlier in the film, and that was sitting on the cutting room floor, as it were.
• 32:42
  And the editor, Paul Hirsch, very cleverly thought, well, why don't we use that?
• 32:46
  And we suggested Yello be the music for that.
• 32:50
  And bingo, you had a fantastic end to the film.
• 32:53
  Oh man, I totally had forgotten that it was used twice.
• 32:56
  And it's so brilliant because it's used in two totally different ways.
• 32:59
  One, to describe this incredibly sexy thing.
• 33:02
  - Yes!- The object of desire.
• 33:04
  And then the second to illustrate the downfall and the pedestrian, now pedestrian life of this ruined man.
• 33:11
  Ruined man! I mean, as much as Ferris is a myth of success, Rooney goes from a sort of total control to complete humiliation on the bus.
• 33:23
  And maybe it's the song's malleability.
• 33:26
  The fact that he can instantly scream super sexy or super ridiculous that's made it one of the most widely deployed needle drops ever.
• 33:34
  It shows up in movies, trailers and TV ads to this day.
• 33:37
  And by the way, another classic Ferris scene in which our hero lip syncs on a parade float to the Beatles' Twist and Shout that also had an immediate effect on the culture.
• 33:46
  Twist and Shout went back in the charts.
• 33:49
  It's the only Beatles song that was a hit twice.
• 33:51
  - Really?
• 33:51
  - Oh yeah.
• 33:53
  So it went back in the Billboard charts in America. Yello were having success, but no soundtrack album.
• 34:05
  Now, for reasons that are beyond the understanding of even Tarquin himself,Ferris Bueller's Day Off didn't get a soundtrack release for decades.
• 34:13
  An official CD version didn't come out until 2016.
• 34:17
  So to quickly tell you the story of a movie soundtrack that did hit it big, I want to turn to one last person.
• 34:24
  - You met her earlier...
• 34:24
  - Hi, my name is Margaret Yen.
• 34:27
  I'm a music supervisor and a music executive.
• 34:31
  I'm also starting to produce music documentaries.
• 34:34
  But in 1996, Margaret was just a giant music fan,catching live gigs at L.A. nightclubs and thinking about maybe trying to be an A&R person.
• 34:42
  I did not think I was going to be a music supervisor, did not see a movie and say,"Oh, I that's what I want to do." Just a friend of a friend was leaving a job with a music supervisor named Peter Afterman, and they needed a young person who liked music and could be an assistant.
• 34:59
  And I fell into it completely randomly.
• 35:02
  What movie was that? Your first movie?
• 35:04
  Oh, Stealing Beauty.I'm so tired of playingPlaying with this bow and arrow It was Liv Tyler and Bernardo Bertolucci,and we had a big Capital Records soundtrack album. I thought it was going to be the biggest thing in the world.
• 35:24
  We had Portishead...
• 35:26
  Give me a reason to love you- And just all this cool nineties music.
• 35:29
  - And what happened?
• 35:33
  And then, it was my first experience of just, oh...
• 35:38
  Sometimes things don't catch fire.
• 35:41
  And the movie, no one really saw the movie.
• 35:45
  No one really bought the soundtrack album, but it's something I'm very proud of.
• 35:49
  Margaret had caught the bug.
• 35:50
  She ended up teaming up with Afterman and supervising the music for a bunch of movies, including some for an indie director named Jason Reitman.
• 35:59
  We did Thank You for Smoking, which was a really fun soundtrack.
• 36:03
  That was all, you know, old country smoking songs.
• 36:07
  They were fun.
• 36:08
  And then, yeah, he had this amazing script.
• 36:13
  It was called Juno, written by Diablo Cody, the story of a sweet, yet tough, supremely centered teen girl who finds herself pregnant and opts to give the baby up for adoption.
• 36:24
  Then we were like, this is, like I felt it the moment I read it.
• 36:28
  And I at the end, I teared up.
• 36:31
  And when you actually tear up from a script, it's pretty powerful because it's not really like that emotional of a medium.
• 36:39
  They're brought to life with actors, but I just fell in love with it right away.
• 36:44
  For the lead role, Reitman cast Elliot Page.
• 36:47
  And then it was actually Elliot Page who had the idea for The Moldy Peaches.
• 36:57
  The Moldy Peaches, a lo-fi duo, Kimya Dawson and Adam Green singing wry lyrics pretty off key over the simplest imaginable guitar.
• 37:07
  You're a part time lover and full time friendThe monkey on your back is the latest trendI don't see what anyone can see in anyone else At first blush, it doesn't seem like this would fit in a movie about a grungy foul-mouthed teen, but...
• 37:24
  At the time it felt kind of cool and edgy.
• 37:26
  It didn't feel that innocent.
• 37:28
  It was sort of subversive to just consider this music, even.
• 37:33
  Because we're coming out of such highly produced music.
• 37:37
  And I think that that's why people responded to, it was like, oh, you can strip it down and that is cool.
• 37:42
  Jen, Reitman and Afterman leaned into the quiet, homemade vibe.
• 37:47
  Juno soundtrack spotlighted this Moldy Peaches tune called Anyone Else But You, plus a bunch of Kimya Dawson's instrumentals.
• 37:54
  And it all felt right.
• 37:56
  But you... And anyway, the stakes were not high.
• 38:01
  Just like with Stealing Beauty I thought that was going to be huge.
• 38:06
  With Juno, I just thought it was going to be small.
• 38:08
  Little indie movie. You know there were super low expectations for the soundtrack.
• 38:12
  A lot of labels even passed on putting out the soundtrack.
• 38:16
  - Really?
• 38:16
  - Yeah.
• 38:17
  There were no big artists and it was just a compilation.
• 38:20
  And then, yeah, the movie comes out and then it just somehow gets people's attention and then the music kind of took over as well because it just was a new type of score.
• 38:31
  And what happens to the soundtrack, like how big did it get?
• 38:34
  It went platinum.
• 38:38
  Yeah it's, it's crazy.
• 38:41
  I mean that's CDs, that's not streaming.
• 38:45
  Those are people buying CDs.
• 38:47
  Yeah, this is the kind of movie for which the word sleeper was coined.
• 38:51
  Juno cost 7 million bucks to make it earn 20 times that.
• 38:56
  And that summer, every mix CD anyone made me had a Moldy Peaches tune on it.
• 39:00
  - Plus...
• 39:00
  - I think it was one of the first years that compilations were up for a Grammy.
• 39:06
  It was the first award of the day at the Grammys.
• 39:10
  We almost missed it because, you know, it starts like 12 and then you have to get down there and, you know, park and get into a room and sit there.
• 39:19
  And literally, I ran in, my husband and I sat down and then they said, like"Best compilation..." And it was Juno.
• 39:27
  And I watched the replay and all I did was say, "This is so crazy." But now here is the part I love, and it's why I really wanted to end this episode with this story.
• 39:41
  You're listening to Margaret Yen's band formed with her husband.
• 39:45
  They're called Fleshpot.
• 39:46
  It's a tune they recorded back in the oughties called Light of Love. And get the light of love And Light of Love is so Moldy Peaches.
• 39:59
  I mean, that was literally recorded with just one of those cassette players just in a bedroom.
• 40:11
  So you're playing this kind of like Juno style music and then that soundtrack helps make this style popular.
• 40:19
  Yes. And that's why I was so excited about it.
• 40:22
  I was so thrilled because it finally felt like my world and my taste was meshing with, sort of, culture.
• 40:31
  I think there's a moment, you know, when young people are kind of,"This is cool, this is cool,"this is cool." but it hasn't made the mainstream culture.
• 40:39
  And I was so happy because it was music that I loved and that I wanted to even make.
• 40:45
  A lot of the movies we've covered this season worked the same way.
• 40:50
  Kubrick's 2001 got even psych loving hippies to dig classical for a minute.
• 40:54
  After Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle, the whole world rocked around the clock.
• 40:59
  The right music, the right movie can help you find your tribe.
• 41:04
  Don't you love it when the tribe is like everyone?
• 41:18
  And that's the MUBI Podcast for this season.
• 41:21
  It's been great having you along for the last six episodes.
• 41:24
  If you haven't, do go back and listen to the rest.
• 41:26
  We cover everything from reggae to canto pop.
• 41:28
  Next season is going to be coming a lot sooner than usual, actually.
• 41:32
  I'm traveling next week to the Cannes Film Festival and I'll be bringing back interviews with some pretty impressive filmmakers there.
• 41:39
  Seriously, follow us so you don't miss it.
• 41:41
  Meanwhile, this episode was hosted, written and cut by me Rico Gagliano.
• 41:45
  Jackson Musker is our booking producer.
• 41:47
  Ciara McEniff is our producer.
• 41:49
  Stephen Colon mastered and engineered Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick.
• 41:54
  Thanks this time to Kevin Lee, Dallas Taylor and also Tarquin Gotch, he just put out a mammoth box set of John Hughes film music called Life Moves Pretty Fast.
• 42:02
  You'll get it and turn the nostalgia dial on your stereo to 11.
• 42:06
  Special thanks this week to Karina Lesser and the entire Lesser clan.
• 42:10
  This season would have been impossible without them.
• 42:12
  The series is executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea, Shia Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca.
• 42:18
  If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, won't you?
• 42:22
  And no we're not your standard movie chat show.
• 42:25
  Also, if you've got questions, comments, or you want to suggest topics that you want us to take on in future seasons, email us at podcast@MUBI.com New ideas you don't want stolen, please.
• 42:36
  And of course, to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast, just head over to MUBI.com to start watching.
• 42:44
  Thanks for listening, be safe.
• 42:44
  Now go watch some movies.
• 42:59
  You're still here?
• 43:03
  It's over.
• 43:06
  Go home.
• 43:11
  Go, go.