“Almost like poetry”: The Kate Bush song Greta Gerwig became obsessed with
It’s easy to think that music and film are completely different media, and that never the two shall meet. But imagine watching a movie in complete silence – so much would be lost to the artform, meaning that sonics are perhaps one of the vital elements to bring to the screen. It’s for this reason that filmmakers will likely have a better music taste than most, and you don’t have to look any further than Greta Gerwig to epitomise that idea.
The director’s works have often focused on the stories of female strength, from Ladybird to Barbie to Little Women, and in this vein, there was one song by a powerhouse artist that she became totally obsessed with. After all, there is perhaps no one who channels such eclectic musical vision and innovation as Kate Bush, whom Gerwig came to worship for her mind-bending appeal.
In a 2015 interview, the director gushed over the song ‘Hounds of Love’, taken from Bush’s 1985 album of the same name, and said: “I find her lyrics mysterious and evocative – almost like poetry – and there is a real spaciousness to her music that feels cinematic to me. But specifically with this song, ‘Hounds of Love’, I had really been obsessed with it for a long time.”
Reflecting on the tune’s theatricality, Gerwig explained how it bore relevance to her own work, continuing: “I did a play last summer – it was called The Village Bike – and in the play a women is taken over by irrepressible, destructive lust and there was something about this song that really tapped into that for me.” But on the whole, the filmmaker also felt that Bush’s songbook is permeated with an element that lends itself so easily to the screen.
She added: “I’m a person who lives with very vivid emotions that feel like they often can only be expressed in heightened states of either music or poetry or films or theatre, and I think that she makes the kind of music that feels like she is always at a ten, emotionally. That level of just sheer emotion and excitement, and it taps me into probably the reason why I make art.”
While Bush is no stranger to her music having inspired a litany of other pop and rock stars who have followed in her ethereal wake, the palpable influence it also has on Gerwig in the filmic realm speaks to its transcendental quality across the breadths of creative output in the world, branching across forms to cast her spell in every possible corner of the world.
There’s no denying that for Gerwig, whenever the cameras start rolling, music is still never far from her mind. It is the pace and depth and heartbeat of every movie and, in many ways, her filmmaking would be nothing without it. With the electric current of Bush’s back catalogue spurring Gerwig on to new heights, there’s really no telling where the end point is – because in everything she has ever done, the singer has never known the meaning of a boundary.
