James Mercer Quotes

I love to listen to lots of different genres of music, but mostly movie soundtracks and music theater.

I grew up on film scores and scores from films.

I love to just go to the movies, watch movies, listen to the scores and all that 'cause that's, like, the next step for me.

Something I grew up with is John Williams, of course, with 'Indiana Jones' and 'Star Wars.'

I'd love to do film and soundtracks, and you couldn't do much better than James Bond.

I think 'pop' can be a bit of a dirty word. People are very cool in Australia. They don't like to admit that they like pop. There are people who listen to Triple J and cool stuff like that, but commercial radio is massive, and if you look at the sales of the pop songs every week, people love pop music.

One of the most interesting things, at least for me, are the soundtracks for 'The Social Network' and 'Drive.' Basically, it's what I did in 'American Gigolo.' I could have done the music for those movies blindfolded. And one of them won an Oscar, and the other is this massive soundtrack.

Our music over the years has been very cinematic. It's surprising we never really got into film soundtracks.

Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores.

I've featured in some soundtracks in the past, and I would love to do more. I love great soundtracks to movies. Quentin Tarantino always picks amazing soundtracks, so I would like to do something for him or write a song for him.

I like soundtracks and I like film.

Well lately I have listening to a lot of movie soundtracks.

The films I grew up loving, and the art that I love, is not generally the kind of postmodern ironic winking stuff. What lasts is the stuff in which the artists are totally in league with the subject.

Being in love is not cool!

I love beautiful black-and-white movies - anything Bette Davis, especially 'Now', 'Voyager', 'Casablanca', 'Mildred Pierce'; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and 'Paper Moon' by Peter Bogdanovich.

I actually write film music because I'm classically trained on the piano so as well as songwriting I also write actual film music that could be used for movies like war movies and love movies.

I love Adele. Natasha Bedingfield is cool, those sort of people.

I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.

Courtney Love is really cool and funny. I would like to meet Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz. I think I could play their daughters.

I've done a lot of movies that don't have any music in them, and I've always sort of had a kind of wary attitude about music because it can be so manipulative, and also because with pop music, I feel like everybody kind of has their own relationship to songs.

My first super-worn-out tapes were Michael Jackson's 'Bad' and the soundtrack to 'Dirty Dancing.' The soundtrack to 'Dirty Dancing' is actually really phenomenal.

I guess being French, I love Hollywood. I love Hollywood movies. Joseph Mankiewicz's 'All About Eve.' 'Mildred Pierce.'

I do listen to music. Movie scores, exclusively, because it's all about mood and nonspecificity. I love the way modern movie scoring is all about nonspecificity. You know, if I shuffled the tracks from 'Inception,' I challenge you to tell me which is which.

I think, a lot of times, people just want to be cool, and to be in love is not cool. But I think it's the coolest. I think love is the coolest thing that there is.

I think that purists may regard the '80s and Jerry Goldsmith being the quintessential example of film scoring, but that was also a very prominent type during a time when soundtracks were purely songs, and there was very little score.