Arts & Ideas Folgen

Australian director Baz Luhrmann shot to fame in 1992 with Strictly Ballroom and was nominated in 2003 for seven Tony awards for his Broadway production of La Boheme. He's best known however for his bright and brash films Romeo and Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and The Great Gatsby which was released earlier this year. On all three he has worked with Glasgow based composer Craig Armstrong who studied with Cornelius Cardew and began his career as in-house composer at the city's Tron Theatre. Baz and Craig explain to Tom Service how their creative relationship works and reflect on the role of music in Baz's films.

Carter Burwell is famed for scoring the films of the iconic Coen Brothers, from 1984's Blood Simple to Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men; they have one of the longest standing collaborations in the industry. Burwell was born in New York City where in the 1980s he played in a number of punk bands and worked at the New York Institute of Technology where he was first approached by the Coens. He talks to Tom Service about how he goes about approaching each score, for the Coen Brothers as well as other regular collaborators Bill Condon (The Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn, Gods and Monsters), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), and Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths).

As part of the BBC's Sound of Cinema season, Tom Service talks to ten-time Academy Award nominee James Horner. Horner was born in Los Angeles but spent his early years in London and studied at the Royal College of Music before returning to California to pursue a doctorate in composition. Having initially intended composing concert music he fell into the film industry more or less by accident. His award winning collaboration with James Cameron has spanned three decades, from Aliens in 1986 to the biggest selling soundtrack of all time Titanic, and most recently 2009's Avatar, and he has also regularly worked with Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13), and Mel Gibson (Braveheart, Apocalypto).