03. Nina Simone “My Baby Just Cares For Me” & Andy Williams “Happy Heart” from “Shallow Grave”
Boyle is a big fan of serendipitous luck and this applies to many of his music choices, especially in his debut feature “Shallow Grave,” a kind of what-would-you-do update on Hitchcock-ian tropes that introduced art house audiences to a young actor named Ewan McGregor. “The best songs are the ones that drop in your lap, they sorta find you,” Boyle explained. “When you go out looking for songs and material — which is what happens with a lot of movies these days, they go out ‘seeking’ a soundtrack — whereas if you let them find you, it sounds naïve, but they sort of just emerge in the film.” For the end of “Shallow Grave,” Boyle says they didn’t know what piece of music to use for the end credits. Serendipitously on one of the last nights of filming, Boyle and his producers jumped into a Glasgow black cab and on the radio was playing Andy Williams’ “Happy Heart” that he would end up closing out the film with. “My dad used to play that song, he loved Andy Williams and crooners,” and he knew the instant he heard it, “that’s the end of the film. When they fall in your lap like that, you mustn’t turn them away.”
“That song is incredibly ironic because she thinks she’s got the money, and she thinks she’s used these guys cause they’ve fallen in love with her,” he said of the grand Andy Williams tune and the way it fits in with the backstabbing that goes on between three young London twenty-somethings whose flatmate ends up dead, alone, and with a pile of cash (that they all unscrupulously divvy amongst themselves). “So when he sings, ‘And it’s all because you’re near me, my love …Let me love you night and day In your arms I want to stay, oh my love,’ it’s meant to be deeply ironic.”
The use of another old classic, the Nina Simone song “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” is included over a montage that shows how each one of the flatmates is spending their share of the money and how their relationships and motives might be altered by the process. It’s a great, economical little sequence and the use of “My Baby Just Cares For Me” over a montage of people only caring about themselves adds to the movie’s darkly humorous, deeply ironic edge. There was a reason that when “Shallow Grave” burst onto the scene, people took notice.
04. Muse “Hysteria” from “Millions”
Danny Boyle loves using British pop bands, this much is true. It’s a streak of nationalist pride that would reach its zenith with Boyle’s staging of last summer’s Olympics Opening Ceremonies. So it’s kind of shocking that it took him so long to utilize a song from Muse, the kind of arena-ready counterpart to the far artier and more critically accepted Radiohead. In his underrated holiday family film “Millions,” the band’s “Hysteria” was tapped to score (of course) a heist sequence. It serves as a lively digression to the otherwise placid film and adds a much needed sense of time and place, since the movie takes place during a fictional monetary switchover from the pound to the Euro (which still hasn’t happened yet). Boyle might not be the best filmmaker to utilize the band (that distinction goes to French filmmaker Alexandre Aja and his impeccable placement of “Newborn” in “High Tension”), but it’s still damn good. When we recently asked Boyle why he hasn’t done a musical yet, he sighed and lamented the fact that “Millions” should have been a musical and suggested that should anyone want to mount a musical stage adaptation of one of his films, it should be “Millions.”