Honorary Patronage of the President of the Republic of Poland Andrzej Duda under the 5th International
Karol Lipiński Violin Festival and Competition

Introduction: Magdalena Wichrowska

We all know that a film devoid of music is as if it was half-done. Music leads and complements the narrative, and sometimes becomes even more important than words and images. By appealing to another sense, it enriches the story in a non-verbal and non-visual way. It exposes the film’s mystery or conceals it. But what makes a film soundtrack memorable for a viewer? How is it fundamental to a motion picture?
Matt Schrader addressed these and other questions in his 2016 film SCORE: A Film Music Documentary. As a child, Schrader fell in love with the television series about Batman, and he was especially enchanted by the music that accompanied it. In 2014, remembering this, he started preparing a documentary about, as he said, ‘little-known musical geniuses, their experiments and ingenuity’. Initially, he intended to talk to three filmmakers, but he found his way to almost sixty people in the film industry: directors, producers, composers, agents and experts, who let him behind the scenes of their own work. Among them were such eminent figures as Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, George Lucas, Thomas Newman, Rachel Portman, John Dabney, Mychael Danna and Danny Elfman. We learn how music was created for such cinema hits as the James Bond series, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or the Pirates of the Caribbean.
Selected interviews with cinema people by Matt Schrader were also published in the volume Score: A Film Music Documentary. The Interviews. Both the film and the book are a message of encouragement that Hans Zimman, together with other personalities of the cinema world, directs to film lovers: ‘Our task is to invite the public to an emotional experience; not so much to tell them what they should feel, but to indicate that it is possible to feel something.’  

** tickets to be collected at the CKK Jordanki's box office