ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 5: DITO MONTIEL

Posted by Timothy E. RAW

November 11, 2009

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Former hardcore punk-rocker and Versace model, Dito Montiel is the writer/director behind the adaptation of his memoir, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, released in 2006 and staring Robert Downey Jr. That same year, he released the self-titled album Dito Montiel, before directing the 2009 studio picture Fighting starring Channing Tatum and Terrence Howard.

Timothy E. RAW: Are you much of a soundtrack fan, particularly scores? Is that something you listen to outside of shooting?

Dito Montiel: I’m obsessive about it! I was a musician at first, always played in bands, and then I was a music supervisor. So, I used to pick music for things, and I love composers! I’m obsessive about people like Ennio Morriconne and Terrance Blanchard. They’re the top two by a long stretch, and then you go onto the list of other incredible guys…

dito montiel

RAW: Last year when I interviewed Rosario Dawson, I asked her about watching a film you’ve worked on for such a long time, then finally seeing it with all the music and sound effects laid in, so its interesting you bring up Terrance Blanchard—I mean, 25^th Hour…

Montiel: Incredible soundtrack! It’s fucking unbelievable, one of the best. I know all the tracks: Naturelle, Playground, it’s beautiful.

RAW: I don’t know why he doesn’t compose more often. I don’t think he’s knocked anything quite out of the park like that one since.

Montiel: I love Spike Lee, and his relationship with Terrance Blanchard obviously is a pretty good one, and what Terrance Blanchard did with 25^th Hour to me is where the real communion happens between director and composer. Frickin’ beautiful!

RAW: I’ve talked to a lot of directors and writers who are also unabashed fans of scores, and when it comes to writing, it seems a lot of directors and writers don’t listen to scores during the writing process because they want to be emotionally naked—they’re afraid of, as Marc Foster put it, “floating off into the ideas from other films” and scores. Are you someone who listens to scores during the writing process?

Montiel: I don’t really listen to music when I write. I don’t know why. Once we get into the editing room, we don’t ever NOT listen to music. My editor is obsessed with it; he was a music editor. I think a lot of the best editors were music editors that ended up becoming picture editors, and he’ll basically never cut a scene without music, ever. I know that there could be a danger to that, but certainly not with him, or at least me, with how I feel. I just like the way it makes things flow. I love it. And then you end up taking it out of the movie a lot, but I like cutting with music because its fun, and I want to have fun in the editing room.

Fighting writer/director Dito Montiel and star Terrence Howard

RAW: Your films are interesting because they walk this precarious line between score and source music. Your films are jam packed with songs. Would you like to talk about the composer you work with, and how you achieve that balance?

Montiel: The composer who did both my films is a guy named Jonathan Elias, and also a guy named Dave Whitman—they work together. Jonathan’s been doing it for a long time. He’s done a whole variety of things, a lot of commercials.

RAW: Didn’t he do some horror movies?

Montiel: Yeah, like Leprechaun 3 (laughs), Children of the Corn… Interesting things a way back. He’s a friend, and I worked for him before I was doing movies, picking music and stuff. When we were doing A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, it was such an emotional film that I was trying not to push that too much. Music can save you and it can kill you, so it’s a really minimal score that he did, but it really moved me. I can’t imagine those scenes without it anymore. With this movie (Fighting), it was whatever’s appropriate, and that’s all that matters. When I used to pick music, mainly for commercials and small films that no one will ever see (laughs), and I’d put something that I thought was right, they’d say “Sorry, but I don’t like Bon Jovi”, and I’d say “Neither do I, I fuckin’ hate it, but it works for your scene!” I don’t ever pick anything because I like it. I start off thinking “Oh man, I want to use Black Flag or the Bad Brains!”, but I end up putting in something I hate. It’s whatever works. It’s a process. I work really close to my editor, so I always bring him up, but we get obsessed about one thing: whatever’s best. I don’t care what it is—whatever’s best! We’ll try everything. I’ll write things into the script! “Here’s where Black Flag’s “Nervous Breakdown” has gotta play, it’s gonna make so much sense”, and of course we end up using “Lewy, Lewy, Lewy” by some guy from the sixties. Whatever’s right, and that’s the rule with everything: cutting, acting, music, whatever. When we finished making Saints, at the time, Ridley Scott who was going to be a producer on the film, I was even asking people, “Can you say he directed it so that people will go?” It’s not a humble thing, it’s just that I want so bad for people to see these things and experience it.

RAW: Do you go through the temp track process in terms of score? Did the processes differ at all between the two films? I mean, one’s an indie, one’s a studio film…

Montiel: Yeah, they’re certainly a bit different. To me, there’s no music till the first day of editing, and from then on, nothing but music. Day one, Jake, the editor, puts in things… a lot of Terrance Blanchard. There’s something about how he touches on emotion without jamming it down your throat; that’s my appreciation of him. Jake will start cutting with music, and we’ll switch a track or two and we’ll experiment. We try not to grow too attached to the things we pick, but we certainly do. Being a director is like being a horribly spoiled six-year old rich kid, where you say “I want fuckin’ Elton John to play at my party!” There’s a scene in Saints with Guy Adam — he’s walking out of a bathroom holding a radio and I had Elton John on it – well first there was someone else I don’t remember… (hums tune) Whoever that guy was I had to have it and then for some reason that guy was asking for an insane amount of money. We fought to the death with all these people, but then I ended up putting Cat Stevens, which at the time was insane because he’d become Yusuf Islam and kinda disappeared off the world. After Harold and Maude you didn’t really see his songs being used except when Cameron Crowe did for Almost Famous. It had to be that song and luckily, even though we were a small independent film with no budget, we had Sting as a producer. He called Islam directly and (the song) “Trouble” ends up being in our movie. There really always is an alternative, you just don’t want to believe in it until you have to go there.

Fighting talk with Dito Montiel

RAW: How did Sting end up being involved with A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints?

Montiel: I had met Robert Downy a couple of times through the composer Jonathan Elias ‘cause they do music together. They’ve been friends for a long time. Robert was doing a record at the time that Jonathan was producing. My book had just come out, we were talking about a film adaptation and he mentioned that Trudie Styler, a producer (and Sting’s wife) was a friend of his and that he’d bring her down as she might be interested. She had just done Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, she’s done a lot of great films, she did Moon this year. She’s really always worked with first-time directors, though I wasn’t even a first-time director, I wasn’t even imaging doing it, I’d done nothing. Usually “first-time directors” have done independent stuff, got a reel or something like that. I’d done nothing.

RAW: So did you get the gig because of your book?

Montiel: Robert brought Trudie Styler down and she said she really liked it and thought that it could be an interesting film and that they were gonna have someone write it and make the script. I said, “Let me have a shot”, not having a clue what I was talking about. I thought INT. in a script meant “introducing” and EXT. was exit. Not “interior” and “exterior”! Music was my world, I’d never been in this business at all. Trudie had the guys who wrote Sexy Beast to write it. I was thinking “Oh, no! Can I get a chance?” At the time she didn’t know me and was just trying to appease me, y’know; “We’ll see theirs first and if we don’t like it then you’ll get a shot”. Well of course you’ll like it, they’re really good! They were on vacation for a couple of weeks, so I started writing furiously, sent it over and she liked it enough to develop it with me.

RAW: You learnt how to write scripts in a matter of weeks, something that normally takes years, never mind correct formatting and all that, but as a first script, I’m guessing it would have had a lot of shortcomings?

Montiel: Oh my God, yeah! The original script I sent out is nothing like the film that we made. How it looks and reads, in just about every way. What I did, I actually bought a script called The United States of Leland, ‘cause I knew Trudie like it. So I sat it down next to me with Mircosoft Word, hitting the spacebar repeatedly to try and copy exactly how it looked. “Okay, so I put a person’s name here, and here’s where they talk” and so on. I was convinced that INT. was “introducing”, wondering why the fuck are they introducing the Whitehouse or whatever the location was?! Finally someone told me that it meant interior! I really just mimicked that script and put my own words in it. Luckily, as crazy as that all sounds Trudie went with it. You have preconceived notions of famous people and I didn’t know any before I made a movie. I knew Robert a little… but Trudie, she turns out to be a pretty darn interesting person. She looks at this obscene script that I’d written — one-hundred and fifty pages in a week and a half – just mad rambling, I’d put everything wrong! As much as I’d tried to mimic, as you can imagine, there were so many shortcomings. I for some reason thought that there had to be “acts” in a script. I had heard the rumor.

RAW: You’re talking about three act structure?

Montiel: But I thought it was five! I actually put it in the script, it said “Act One”. Around fifteen pages I put in act two. I remember, Robert Downy, when he read the script he thought I had done that to be sort of funny. I remember him laughing and saying “Only you would put five acts!” I laughed along having no idea why it was funny. Now I realize the ridiculousness of it all. The compliment I pay to Trudie – and Robert as well – as weird as it is, they looked at it and saw something in there that moved them enough to say, “Okay we know this is ridiculous and this is off, but there’s something in there. Let’s take a chance.” If you have the privilege that most people don’t as an independent guy — as I was — trying to make enough money to pay the friggin’ electric bill so they don’t shut your lights off… Luckily they took a shot on really the most obscene script, I can’t tell you how crazy it was. In the end, the film is a lot different than that original crazy scipt, which we still have and is kinda funny. But the heart is still the same. It’s just like the book which has nothing to do with the film but the heart is still the same. The editor, Jake learnt to edit as we were doing Saints, he had never edited before. If your heart’s in the right place and you have some skills, it’ll work. You have to trust it. I know it sounds really fucking corny and zen meditation crap or whatever. Butr something about that is true. I have to believe that. Music is the epitimy of that.

RAW: You mentioned Terence Blanchard before. Would Jonathan be offended if you went in a different musical direction for your next film?

Montiel: I’d love to work with Terrance Blanchard. But it works really well with Jonathan Elias. I think he’s a great composer and we have a first hand and that’s big in movies. It goes back before Saints. I made a record with him. In 1991, 1992. That’s how we met each other, I was in a band. He’s also the first guy I ever saw putting music to something moving. The shark was moving, he played it to me without sound and then he put some intense Jaws type thing on top, I was like, “Oh shit, this is what they do!” It just fucking blew my mind. Ever since then it’s been a love affair with music for film. Ennio Morriconne, Once Upon A Time In America, probably to me is the greatest soundtrack ever in my opinion. Cinema Paradiso is also up there and of course, The Mission. Morriconne is just unbelievable.

RAW: I also really like two more recent films he scored, The Legend of 1900 and Malena. Both films by the director of Cinema Paradiso.

Montiel: Oh, really! Then I should definitely see them. I’ll have to check those out.

RAW: Just before we began the interview, you were telling me about your love for hardcore bands like Black Flag. Is it just hardcore specifically or are you into all kinds of heavy music?

Montiel: When I was a kid it was the early eighties and I was big into hardcore in New York City. The Bad Brains used to play all the time at a place called the A-7 club. I just grew up on it. I loved it. I used to play in a bunch of hardcore bands when I was a kid (Major Conflict and Gutterboy). I mean I love all music. There’s a whole lot I don’t like but not a genre that I don’t like.

To read the other interviews in the series, go to one of these pages:

Soundtrack Geek Goes To The Ischia Global Film & Music Fest!
ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 1: MARC FORSTER
ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 2: PAUL HAGGIS
ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 3: BILLE AUGUST
ISCHIA GLOBAL FILM & MUSIC FEST INTERVIEW # 4: STEVEN ZAILLIAN