Zbigniew Preisner made his name with the scores for the 'Three Colours' films. He tells Will Hodgkinson why he's still in Europe.
When Francis Ford Coppola first screened The Godfather for studio executives he was told that Nino Rota's score was not commercial enough. The Italian composer is a leading light of film music, but executives felt his subtle, evocative score did not reflect the drama as literally as they would like. Coppola was ordered to get a US composer, which he did; the result was awful. Three months later Rota's score was reinstated.
Zbigniew Preisner, who has joined Rota and Ennio Morricone in the elite of European film music, tells this story as an illustration of the problems of working in US film. "In this stupid business the principal problem is money," says the Polish composer, who looks more like an east European contract killer than a creator of delicately harmonious symphonies. "I was invited to make an American film recently where Michelle Pfeiffer would be paid $50 million, Jack Nicholson $50 million and the film director $10 million. Can you imagine how big the budget is? It means that risks cannot be taken. In Europe it's completely different. The Double Life Of Veronique, for example, cost
$3 million, and the film director, not the studio, was my boss."
Preisner is a beacon of European civilisation in the face of a US cultural avalanche. Having established himself after writing the music for almost all of fellow Pole Krzystzof Kieslowski's films, including the Three Colours series, Preisner has since been flooded with work offers from Hollywood. He has chosen to stay loyal to European cinema, most recently providing a score for the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg's It's All About Love, as US films are too annoying to work on.
"When I work with someone like Thomas Vinterberg he trusts me," says Preisner, whose voice rises at even the mention of US film. "To make music for a film is very easy. The question is why should we use music at all. The connection between the film and the music is completely metaphysical, because you never see the music - you only feel it - and in my opinion the best music for a film is total silence. Most American films use a composer like John Williams, when there is music all the time to tell you what to think and how to feel. A bit of danger: some scary horns. A love scene: romantic strings. But Baudelaire was right when he said that the matter for the artist is not to describe what he sees but what he feels."
Given Preisner's background, it isn't surprising that he has no time for Hollywood. Born in Cracow, he grew up in a small Polish village where everybody learnt music by singing in church. "We had no access to Western music," he says. "OK, you heard the Beatles, because they are so innocent, but that was all. We would do our best to get Radio Luxembourg, and apart from that - nothing. But Polish communism was not like it was in Russia. The priest was the most important person in the village, and even the party secretary went to church."
By his late teens Preisner was discovering the Polish underground scene that centred on a cabaret in Cracow called Piwnica Pod Baranami, where a not-yet-ordained Pope John Paul II would give poetry readings and the country's jazz musicians would perform without fear of state intervention. "You could do whatever you wanted down there. We would take an interview with a secretary of state and turn it into music, and when they complained we said we were promoting communism. Can you imagine this in Russia? You would be on a train to Siberia the day after."
Yet Poland was still closed off from the West until 1989, when European communism collapsed like a house of cards. The first Western pop music that Preisner heard that he admired was Pink Floyd. "Before 1989 all you could buy in the shops was vinegar, and the Polish mentality is such that this sudden choice was very hard for people. Pink Floyd were sophisticated and smart enough to provide a metaphor for the situation with their album The Wall. I love albums like Dark Side Of The Moon because it has a melancholy that is very British - very Polish, too."
Preisner admires Morricone and the French film composer Michel Legrand, whose score to Un Homme Et Une Femme remains a classic piece of film music. There are US directors he likes, such as Coppola and Martin Scorsese, but he claims he would rather stay in his flat in Paris than court Hollywood for the sake of money or fame. He hasn't even seen the inside of a cinema since 1999, because he hates multiplexes so much. But as he claims that being a composer is easy - "You just have a piece of paper and you write down the music that is in your head" - it seems likely that Hollywood will entice him over sooner or later.
"There was a famous Polish poet called Zbigniew Herbert. He said that we must always swim against the current, towards the source of the river, because even if you never reach the source you will at least train your muscles. This is what really interests me."
