The 5: Directors With the Best Mixtape

You love film.  You love music.  And there are few things greater than a film with really great music.  And then there are the directors who take it up a notch further, making unexpected musical choices to contrast or intensify the mood on the screen.  Their ability to match song and visual is so acute, that you re-think the song entirely, and irrevocably lock it in with the film forever.  These 5 directors can do that consistently, and their soundtracks inevitably become your favorite playlists (yeah, we’ll always call them mixtapes).

• Quentin Tarantino. The man who brought us K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the 70s in his first film Reservoir Dogs, has blended music with movies as well as anyone. Little Green Bag, and Stuck in Middle, jumped out of the theater at us and blew us away. And we thought we had QT pegged after hearing the near perfect soundtracks to Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. He was a 70’s soul and funk man, right?  But then the Kill Bills came along and changed all that.  KB Vol. 1 and 2 showed us just how eclectic Mr Tarantino could be.  The music in those films were revelations that raised the ante.  So when Inglorious Basterds came out, we probably shouldn’t have been slack jawed when he started mixing David Bowie into WW2 scenes, but we were.  Next winter his new film Django Unchained comes out and we are just as excited to hear the soundtrack as we are to see the film.
• Martin Scorsese. Is there a better musical opening to any movie than Mean streets and Be my Baby? Scorsese loves the Sixties:  Whiter Shade of Pale, Layla, Like a Rolling Stone, Gimme Shelter, and he  goes back to the sixties well time and time again, (and we don’t mind it one bit). The Rolling Stones are a favorite band of Marty’s and he fits them in his films as often and as perfectly as Woody Allen will squeeze in New Orleans jazz into his movies. When Scorsese is not making features he also makes some of the best Rock Documentaries out there.  He’s chronicalled the Stones, Dylan, and George Harrison, and let’s not forget he gave us the greatest concert film of all time:  The Last Waltz starring the Band.
• Wes Anderson. Wes makes quirky movies so of course he has quirky soundtracks.   And by quirky we mean we love them.  The music he selects sets such a tone for his movies it’s hard to believe that the music came before the films.  Love, Nico, and Elliot Smith all seem to have written their songs for a Wes Anderson film that would be shot decades later. In The Life Aquatic having Seu Jorge cover Bowie songs in his native Portuguese helps makes the film feel like a parallel Universe.  And practically every musical moment in The Royal Tenenbaums feels like it was written just to be there, making the movie and the music completely inseparable.
• Cameron Crowe. Cameron Crowe loves music. He started writing about music for Rolling Stone at 15 years old and his love for music shines through every film.  He once told us “it all starts with the music” and it shows.  He’s given us so many iconic scenes with the perfect musical accompaniment like In your Eyes in Say Anything, My Fathers Gun in Elizabethtown and of course Tiny Dancer in Almost Famous. Can you hear any of those songs without thinking of the films?  Cameron Crowe doesn’t just have a great sountrack to his movies.  He has a soundtrack to life.
• Paul Thomas Anderson. Boogie Nights was pretty much wall to wall 70’s bubblegum pop.  Magnolia was almost exclusively a Graduate-style one performer soundtrack with Aimee Mann.  There will be Blood featured an original orchestral score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. There is no PT-Anderson-type-soundtrack and yet every one of them is uniquely interesting and each proves to be a perfect companion for the film they’re paired with.

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Send us your favorite songs in films by these 5 directors, or if you disagree with our 5, send us your own.