Jeanne Moreau - Miles Davis - Louis Malle - Paris - 1958
"I was crazy about jazz, and at that time I listened a lot to Davis, who was at the peak of his creativity.
While I was filming, I never dared to hope that Davis would compose music for me, but in the girl's room, in a corner, we had prominently placed the cover of a Miles Davis album.
Then, by strange coincidence, while I was editing and about to choose the music, Miles Davis arrived in Paris.
He had come alone, without his musicians, to play in a club for about three weeks.
I literally jumped on him.
Boris Vian, whom I knew and who was also a trumpeter, helped me a lot.
He was the director of the jazz music section at Philips, with which, I believe, Davis was under contract for Europe.
He arranged a meeting.
Davis was reluctant because in Paris he was playing with some good musicians, but they were not the ones he usually recorded with.
I managed to convince him.
I showed him the film twice, only twice.
We agreed on the sequences that in our opinion needed a musical background.
Taking advantage of an evening when he wasn’t playing at the club, we rented a recording studio in Paris on the Champs Élysées, and began to work, very slowly, as jazz musicians do.
We started around ten or eleven at night and kept going until eight in the morning: in one night the entire score was recorded, and I think that’s what makes it so unique.
It is one of the very few improvised soundtracks; I believe Davis didn’t have time to prepare anything.
I played the sequences that needed music and he began to rehearse with his musicians.
The music is always present in "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud", but overall it doesn’t last long, not even eighteen minutes, which is little.
What Miles Davis managed to do was exceptional, the film was transformed.
I remember very well what it was like without music, but when we started the final mix and added the music, it immediately seemed to take off.
It wasn’t the usual film music that emphasizes or intensifies the emotion implied in the images or in the rest of the soundtrack.
It was a counterpoint, it was something elegiac... somehow detached.
It created an atmosphere.
I remember the first scene; Davis's trumpet gave it a tone that added another dimension to the opening images.
I am convinced that without Davis’s music the film would not have had such critical and public success."
(Louis Malle)
"The images moved on the screen.
He took the trumpet.
He improvised everything.
A single recording.
In four hours the work was done.
That was Miles..."
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