I didn’t even write about this one last time! Whoops.
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Around when he was working on Peter Weir’s Green Card, Hans was also doing the music for Ridley Scott’s next movie Thelma & Louise, which got released in the U.S. on the same day as Backdraft did. It was one of the earliest examples of Hans getting to go on a movie set for inspiration, which later had him waxing philosophically about where he now worked. “I remember saying, ‘Wow! It’s the Grand Canyon!’ and there were kids saying, ‘Dad, can we go home?’ We foreigners are good at looking at America, seeing the things you take for granted and presenting them in a new way. To us, [the Grand Canyon] is a magical, magnificent place.”
Ridley would concede that his neo-Western drama about two female friends on a road trip that turns perilous was a “tricky” assignment for a composer, not just because of its tone but also because the film used a lot of songs. It was the first instance in Hollywood where all of Hans’ original ideas were rejected. “I was forever trying to write The Big Tune and I couldn’t make it work. The first stuff I wrote was horrible, really bad. Ridley came in and threw it all out.” Hans had the weekend to correct his approach, and the sister of Nico Golfar, Hans’ music supervisor at the time, encouraged him to write less of a big theme and something more in line with all the country tunes already in the movie. “And I realized you have to do everything that those songs cannot do, [yet] you can’t be too far outside the style. I'd tie the thing together with fragments.”
What he turned around that weekend - generally referred to as the Thunderbird theme owing to what the girls on the run are driving - worked, with Ridley later saying that “fear can be a really good motivator sometimes.” The tune’s power was largely credited to the playing of Pete Haycock, a blues guitarist who Hans was a huge fan of as a teenager (and who he was able to get in touch with courtesy of his relationship with record producer George Martin). “When Ridley said he wanted to make a road movie, I thought I’d phone up Pete. He was an archetype of 1970s rock ‘n roll. I used to slow the records down and learn how to play his solos. I wanted that longing, definitely not sentimental stuff with a bunch of strings.”
Four minutes of the Thunderbird theme ended up on the original soundtrack album, and Ridley liked it so much that he copied it into the opening titles even though Hans hadn’t been asked to write any music there. Much of the rest of Hans’ score played like interstitial music (future Something to Talk About co-composer Graham Preskett played several instruments, though the banjo playing was all Hans at his keyboards), and in 2001 Hans called those bits “really bad country & western” which perhaps explained why the full score didn’t get released on CD until 2011. The thing that wasn’t country/western - and thus was a puzzling omission on the original soundtrack - was the climactic material. Gospel music held immense appeal for the composer at this time, and the end titles sequence (largely written by Mark Mancina’s onetime assistant and future composer for The Outer Limits John Van Tongeren, “a great gospel musician and a great Hammond organ player” per Hans) provided an opportunity to unleash that style in full for the first time in a Hollywood feature.
Thelma & Louise: ***½ - Hans Zimmer; instrumentalists Pete Haycock, Luis Jardim, Graham Preskett, Charlie Morgan & John Van Tongeren; recorded by Jay Rifkin; score wrangler Nico Golfar; End Titles co-written by John Van Tongeren
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As with Rain Man, if you got that aforementioned earlier release (or the 2017 Notefornote reissue) then the new release by La-La Land Records may not be an absolute necessity, though it’s worth pointing out that the main score program sounds great here and does add three minutes to the chase finale (the one part of the score that continued the percussive blasts of Ridley and Hans’ prior collaboration Black Rain). Also as with Rain Man, there’s a demo of the 2000 Ghent concert suite that was arranged by Geoff Zanelli. Kaya Savas’ new interviews with the cast, the filmmakers, and Hans paint an illuminating picture of the film and the challenges of making its music. The alternates here are the edited versions as heard in the film, one of which could only be found from an inferior source; these are again of the “hear it once and move on” variety, though it’s worth pointing out that the album will likely be the first case of having a track called Suck My Dick (Film Version) in your collection.
Anyone else pick this one up?
