The greatest score in cinema history, according to Jack Black: “My taste runs toward the creepy”
While he’s as well-known for his musical proclivities as his onscreen antics, Jack Black isn’t someone you’d necessarily associate with having a keen interest in a sweeping orchestral score.
After all, he’s been a rocker since his earlier days, with guitar-slinging, tub-thumbing, and microphone-wielding having always been his genre of choice, although he did once refer to Ronnie James Dio as the Luciano Pavarotti of heavy metal vocalists, as odd as that comparison may seem.
That’s not to say he isn’t allowed to appreciate more classical music, and it’s never a nice thing to judge a book by its cover and assume that just because Black is a rock and metal obsessive who leads a double life as the frontman of a rock band, he can’t appreciate a swelling arrangement or two.
When it comes to film scores, there are some that simply can’t be left out of the discussion when it comes to the greatest of all time. More than a few of them hail from John Williams, with Star Wars his most recognisable, even if you don’t think that it’s his best, which is a fair argument when there are so many to choose from.
Ennio Morricone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Bernard Hermann’s Psycho, Nino Rota’s The Godfather, Max Steiner’s Gone with the Wind, Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire, and Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven are also among the usual suspects, but Black looked toward a lesser-sung score.
“I do appreciate music for film scores; my taste runs more toward the creepy scores,” he offered. “I like the music in Eyes Wide Shut.” Jocelyn Pook made her feature-length debut as a composer on Stanley Kubrick’s swansong, but like many of the auteur’s other pictures, there was a liberal sprinkling of pre-existing pieces.
While Black didn’t make it clear whether he was referring specifically to Pook’s original compositions, the use of Shostakovich, Mozart, and György Ligeti, among others, or a combination of the two, Eyes Wide Shut isn’t a title that comes up all that often whenever the conversation turns toward the most memorable, iconic, or entrancing soundscapes in cinema history.
That one came out on top of the pile, but Black revealed that he has a soft spot for the filmmaker’s work in general, which shouldn’t be a surprise when The Shining is one of his all-time favourite movies. “All the Kubrick scores,” he added. “Yeah, I can appreciate the other ones, too,” just not as much as Eyes Wide Shut.
Maybe not the answer you would have expected from Black, and you’d be forgiven for assuming he’d opt for something like AC/DC’s score for Stephen King’s atrocious Maximum Overdrive based entirely on his personal tastes, but Eyes Wide Shut takes the orchestral cake.
