“I believe that music does more for your experience of the movie than we have any inkling [of]. It creates the atmosphere. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that in a novel, the atmosphere is created by narrative, by the narrative voice, and in film, the music is doing that. The voice of the director or the voice of the filmmakers comes out through the music. The music is telling you whether to find this happy, sad, neutral. The music is telling you what to feel. And if it’s out of sync, if it’s telling you, “Oh, this is a big, emotional moment,” and you’re looking at it and saying, “Yeah, I don’t buy this,” then it’s infuriating, and the audience is removed from the experience of the movie.
It’s such a fine-tuning of playing a dramatic moment. So, yeah, the process is just a lot, a lot of back-and-forth. And that’s an ongoing process—”How much do I leave her alone to come up with her own thing?” Because if I’m right in there in every little phase, then it kind of hampers her creativity. That’s the biggest decision for the director in relation to any other creative person: how much freedom do you give them so that they can really make it theirs? And then how much do you trample all over them?”
Patricia Rozema, Nov 8, 1999.