There was great interview today with music supervisor Randall Poster on Fresh Air on NPR.
So let’s talk about another Wes Anderson film you worked on, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which is a wonderful animated film about a family of foxes, and when – who are endangered both on the dysfunctional family level and on the enemy animals out to get them and enemy humans out to get them level. And at the end of the film, you use a great recording called “Let Her Dance” by The Bobby Fuller Four. It’s from the mid ’60s, and that group was most famous for the iconic song “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.”
How did you decide to use this record at the end of the movie?
POSTER: Well, this is one of those sort of special scenarios. That song that I played for Wes probably 10 years ago, and when we played it, we basically, we were listening to it, he said, you know, let’s put this one away, let’s lock it up in the safe. And so we had it and we’d been carrying it all these years and then finally there was the opportunity at the end of the movie to use Bobby Fuller. So Wes and I, we’re always working, and so – and we’re always sharing music and we find something and we sort of tag it and say, OK, this is something that we know we want to use somewhere, some day, and good fortune smiles upon us and we find what we think is the perfect moment. And so that’s how Bobby Fuller’s “Let Her Dance” ended up in “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
GROSS: So I want to play it. And I’ll just like describe the scene. This is the end of the movie. Mr. Fox, played by George Clooney, in a voice by George Clooney, is in the supermarket and all the rest of the family foxes are there too. And so, you know, Mr. Fox is toasting about how they’ve survived and they’re going to survive, and even all the supermarket food that they have to eat now is fake food…
POSTER: Right.
GROSS: …they can make it work. And then they just all break out into this dance in the supermarket. And, of course, it’s all animated. It’s all beautifully animated. And so here is the song they dance to. This is The Bobby Fuller Four.