“At the zenith”: the filmmakers Joni Mitchell admires the most
Who can forget that moment in Love Actually when Emma Thompson’s character sobs to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides, Now’, knowing that her relationship is doomed? It’s one of the most indelible scenes from the festive film, but that hardly scrapes the surface of Mitchell’s attachment to cinema.
You can hear Mitchell’s songs in everything from the Meg Ryan rom-com You’ve Got Mail and the Apple biopic Steve Jobs to the 1970s homage Almost Famous and even South Park. Countless movies and TV shows have selected Mitchell’s timeless tracks for their soundtracks, her emotional honesty often making her music perfect for a deeply moving scene. If you hear Mitchell playing in a scene, you should probably strap in.
She was surely most pleased, though, when she had several of her songs featured in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, because he is one of her favourite filmmakers – you can hear ‘Chelsea Morning’ and ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’ in his 1985 movie, although it wasn’t the first time he’d spotlighted the gentle melodies of Mitchell.
A few years earlier, she appeared in his documentary concert film The Last Waltz, performing alongside artists like The Band and Neil Young, and while she later admitted to New York Magazine that, as one of the only women there, “It was like being a girl on a football team,” she still loves Scorsese a lot, as well as his longtime collaborator, editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
“But I think Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker technically are magnificent. She’s the best editor in the world. In terms of editing and constructing a film, they’re at the zenith,” Mitchell revealed. First collaborating on Scorsese’s debut feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Schoonmaker has since edited almost all of the iconic director’s movies. She has won three Oscars for her work on his films – Raging Bull, The Aviator and The Departed – with her editing style significantly grounding these movies in a specific sense of rhythm and tension.
In the same interview, Mitchell explained just how vital cinema is to her artistic process – that act of crafting images that superimpose themselves inside people’s brains and never fully fade, that’s what she is always aiming for with her evocative words.
“My style of songwriting is influenced by cinema. I’m a frustrated filmmaker. A fan once said to me, ‘Girl, you make me see pictures in my head!’ and I took that as a great compliment. That’s exactly my intention,” she revealed.
So, beyond Scorsese and Schoonmaker, Mitchell also cites Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky as favourites – two incredibly lyrical filmmakers who use cinema as a poetic force, turning metaphysical and philosophical ideas into the kind of images that simply never leave you… Think of Tarkovsky’s Mirror, with the fields blowing in the wind and the woman levitating in bed or the kiss in Ivan’s Childhood. Or how about that iconic moment in the Trevi Fountain in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita?
You can see the clear influence of such profound filmmaking in Mitchell’s approach to writing, which is never short of some drama, yet it’s never overblown to the point of Hollywood-esque excessiveness… Rather, her approach taps into that innate desire to capture the human spirit in all of its many emotional states, as these filmmakers similarly do.
