by Sam Hutchins

When you are on the road with the same people for so long the petty grievances build up. It’s simply unavoidable. I previously mentioned the difficulties we had agreeing on what music to listen to, and this remained a bone of contention. Darius, Stephane and I each had our own iPod full of music. I’d be willing to bet that of the tens of thousands of songs amongst them there wasn’t a single one that appeared on all three. Our tastes in music were incredibly divergent.

Stephane’s was surprisingly parochial. He liked European club music. Not house, techno or anything awful like that, thank God. More like acid jazz/triphop type of stuff. Not bad, really, I’ll admit I even enjoyed a bit of it. However it was the only genre of music he seemed to have. From speaking to him I knew he liked the Ramones, but there was nary a trace of them on his iPod. His selection seemed to be a slave to fashion, as the stuff he listened to was very much au courant. When he happened upon a southeast asian bhanjee/techno mix on my hard drive he commented that it had been all the rage two summers earlier. I’d bet anything that four years prior his iPod would have been almost exclusively the Gypsy Kings, and that I would have murdered him before going a hundred miles. Enjoyable as the current stuff was, it’s really only appropriate after dark. I don’t need to hear a sax playing over a DJ as we drive through the Midwest at ten in the morning in a cold winter light.

Darius’ taste was all over the map. I have eclectic tastes but his was almost completely random. It took forever to figure out a defining theme of any sort but finally I put it together. Darius chose his library song-by-song. If he liked it, he had it. What he liked, however, was pretty specific. It had to be obscure as hell. Whatever song it was had to be something he could talk about as the very best song the particular artist had ever recorded and tell you why you could never find the song. For instance he had a version of Lee Marvin singing the western classic “Wandering Star”. I happen to love the song and have versions of it recorded by everyone from Bing Crosby to Shane MacGowan. I’d heard the Lee Marvin version in the film but never since, yet there it was on Darius iPod. And it was the only country song he had. Listening to music with him was like having an oenophile order you wine by the glass.

For my own part, my taste was immersive in a wide variety of genres. A very wide variety. Having been a punk early on, for instance, I had everything worth owning by The Clash, Ramones, Dead Kennedy’s, Black Flag, Agnostic Front, GBH, 7 Seconds, Cro-Mags, JFA, The Exploited, etc. I had similarly deep rosters of artists in genres of all types, including but not limited to Reggae (traditional, dancehall and dub), Country (cowboy, outlaw, alt-country), etc. My tendency would be to tailor our soundtrack to wherever we were travelling at the moment but my plans were continually thwarted by my companions. I’d be floating through west Texas on the wings of Chris LeDoux when Stephane would without warning switch to some Portishead.

So thank God for Kar Wai. Once he started travelling with us he took over the music selection. He got a particular kick out of sorting through our respective iPods and playing fairly random songs. He would then usually ask us something about the song. Where we first heard it, what it meant to us, etc. This was a very interesting way of getting better acquainted with us, and I must admit I lifted the technique from him for use in my personal life since. The downside of this was that Kar Wai is prone to drift off into his own mental space. Every time we played this little game he would eventually fade out. A song would end, silence would ensue, and he would be staring off at some point in the middle distance again.

He had drifted away like that once more as we began approaching Memphis. The first few times it happened I had tried to break through with no success. Speaking loudly, grabbing his arm, pulling the car over, nothing seemed to bring him back to us. It was, frankly, a little scary. This time, however, I was more concerned with the music. I’m a serious Johnny Cash fan, to the point that I actually believe he was a holy man or prophet of sorts. Memphis means Elvis to many, Al Green to others, even Stax Records to a few. For me it’s all about Johnny, and I’ll be damned if I was driving into town without hearing his voice. While still driving I reached across and gently took my iPod from his hand. Spinning the dial I pulled up the Bear Records 1954-58 collection and turned up the volume. Kar Wai didn’t flinch and no complaint came from the back seat. We pulled into Memphis accompanied by the Man in Black, as it should be.

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STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF THE SCOUTING LIFE.

Sam Hutchins has been working in film production for twenty years. He started as overnight security on the set of “Working Girl” while attending film school at NYU. Since 1995 he has been a location manager for some of the top names in the business. He’ll be blogging from a unique insider’s perspective on the filmmaking process, as well as speaking to his colleagues in the production community to share their experiences with you.