MORODER ON SCORING 'SCARFACE'
WROTE MAIN THEME AFTER READING SCRIPT, PRIOR TO VIEWING ANY SCENES
Earlier this month, I posted a quote from
Giorgio Moroder, taken from an article in Entertainment Weekly, in which he talked a bit about working on
Scarface, including writing the song
She's On Fire (his favorite from that soundtrack). The other day,
Complex's Brendan Frederick posted an interview with Moroder, who was asked about the process oof scoring
Scarface. "When I met with the director
Brian De Palma in New York," Moroder tells Frederick, "he told me about the movie and gave me the script. You had this character at the beginning who is a happy guy who made it to America, but then he gets into all kinds of problems with drugs. I went back to Los Angeles, and I composed a song even before I saw any scenes. And Brian liked the demo I did. I gave it that dark, hammering note—dong, dong, dong—to capture that feel of desperation. Sometimes, if you have the main theme done, then the rest is all relatively easy."
ON KANYE WEST SAMPLING TONY'S THEMEFrederick also asked Moroder whether he was familiar with the music of
Kanye West, who has sampled the
Scarface theme. "What I like about Kanye’s stuff is he always comes out with new sounds that are totally different. When I heard
Mercy about two years ago, I said, 'What a weird song, and what an interesting sound.' The part when he sampled [
Tony’s Theme] was quite clever because he took just those two chords, instead of sampling the whole phrase, which gave it that special sound. He did a good job with that one. And even the last song he did with
Rihanna and
Paul McCartney [
FourFiveSeconds]—he’s inventive. I’m less connected to all his other affairs aside from music—calling himself the god of creativity and all that stuff. But he’s really good."