From Larry Clarke’s Kids to Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic effort The Phoenician Scheme, via Martin Scorsese, Sofia Coppola and Todd Haynes, over the last three decades Randall Poster has imposed himself as cinema’s go-to man for all things music. If there’s a secret on how to turn a soundtrack into a timeless treasure in its own right, Randall knows it. We spoke to him to understand what Hollywood most listened to man drops his needle on and why.

In the world of film, music isn’t just a background element: it’s a narrative force, a mood-setter, the hook that brings memories back to the surface. Few understand this better than Randall Poster, the man Hollywood listens to. 

One of the most influential music supervisors in contemporary cinema, Poster has spent three decades crafting unforgettable sonic landscapes for directors who treat sound as a vital storytelling tool. From the dreamy and symmetrical poetry of Wes Anderson’s meticulously scored worlds to the raw energy of Martin Scorsese’s soundtracks, Poster’s touch is equally distinctive and invisible, guiding emotion without ever overshadowing the image.

The first single young Randall bought, The Guess Who’s “Laughing”, one may argue, shaped his sonic identity to come, with its bubblegum pop-infused, jingle-jungle picks that make his curated scores instant classics. But dare you to label him as nostalgic. Poster is a generational bridge, instilling new life and meanings into songs. He’s the one to be grateful to if The Kinks’ “Strangers” or Françoise Hardy’s “Le temps de l’amour” brush shoulders with hyperpop in late millennials and Gen Z’s playlists. He’s the one who rescued The Creation and The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band from being mere fetishes for Discogs dads. Perhaps, his debut in the film industry working on Larry Clark’s cult Kids may explain this time-defying vision, able to constantly establish a dialogue between heritage and present culture.

With an instinct for the perfect track and a deep respect for the power of music in films, many scenes he’s touched have turned into cultural landmarks. But, as he stresses, it’s never a one man job, but a coral effort, with himself at the service of the film.

As every needle drop in Poster’s career is a musical secret and treasure to be passed down, we interviewed him on the occasion of his latest effort, once again next to Wes Anderson, in The Phoenician Scheme.

The Phoenician Scheme’s score, features original music by Alexander Desplat as well as a curated selection of classical tracks sourced by Randall Poster.

Lorenzo Ottone: you began working as a music supervisor more than 30 years ago. How did this passion for the dialogue between music and cinema sparked? Was there an epiphany of sorts?

Randall Poster: No, it really wasn’t much of an epiphany. I’d always been crazy for movies and crazy for music, and kind of grew up or came of age in a golden era for both. In the pre-digital days we would go to five movies in a week. I grew up in New York City, where there was so much music happening. You know, being a 16-year-old in 1978 New York everything was happening and was so alive.

LO: The golden age of Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, right? 

RP: Exactly. So you could go to a disco on a Friday night and you could go to CBGB’s or the Mud Club on Saturday. There was a lot of art rock, too. And there were girls there, which always was a big drive [laughs].

LO: What was the first record that you remember buying back then? 

RP: The first record was “Laughing” by the Guess Who, which I managed to get into Antoio Campos’ Christine. The first album was Every Picture Tells a Story by Rod Stewart. “Maggie May” still is my favourite guitar solo, and I havent put it in a movie yet.

LO: How did you get to put music into movies?

RP: I was at university, studying English literature, and had no real plan for postgraduate life. I wrote a script with a friend of mine from school about the college radio station and the creeping corporatisation of the music world. We decided that we wanted to try to make this movie independently. And then we did. That was really where I got down to it and discovered how to put the music together for the film. 

The film is called A Matter of Degrees. And it was all songs. There was no score. Seemingly, I had some facility for it and found it really exciting to bring in all these rock bands that I loved to participate. I decided that what I really wanted to do was work with great film directors. And that if I made music, my bellwether, my area of expertise, that that would be the point of contact. And thankfully, or miraculously, it worked out that way. 

LO: And that seemed to work magnificently so far…

RP: I’d say so. I started making movies with my peers who just kept making movies. The Phoenician Scheme is the 12th movie that I’ve done with Wes, and Richard Linklater and I have done almost as many. Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes and I have been working together from the beginning. My good fortune is that I fell in with my contemporaries who wanted to make movies, to be producers and directors.

LO: Is your generation quite nostalgic? You mentioned with great fondness about growing up in this golden age of music and cinema, and that made me think of how the aesthetic of directors you often work with can be quite retro-mainiac.

RP: No, I don’t, I don’t think so. I’ve always been keen to place songs or pieces of music that I have an affinity for, or that I think are worthy of presentation, but I don’t think it’s nostalgic. I often work in period films. For instance, The Phoenician Scheme is set in the 1950s. A lot of films that I’ve done with Scorsese have been period pieces as well: 1920s, 1930s…I’ve probably lived in every decade, but to me, the challenge is not to use music nostalgically, it’s to use music to bring those periods to life. I’m thinking about The Irishman. You bring back these tracks: some of them are well-known, some others are pretty unknown to the mainstream audience, and you make them live again, you make them contemporary again. 

Randall Poster, photograph by Brigitte Lacombe.

LO: It’s fascinating how many of the tracks you use then are appropriated by new generations, who find new meanings in them.

RP: Take I’m Not There by Todd Haynes. When [Bob] Dylan goes electric, you don’t get the shock people witnessed when first seeing it, right? So, how do you put a little bit of that shock back into it? It’s not about nostalgia, but how you renew discovery. We brought in a little bit more electricity and a little bit more dissonance, to make it feel a little bit more dangerous. 

LO: What is the ideal scenario, then?

RP: Generally I get most excited when I hear something that’s, say, in a period [movie] that feels novel, or that is undiscovered, and I can renew it either by introducing it on its own or by virtue of putting it in context. 

LO: Has it ever happened that if you empathise too much with a song, it takes the focus away from the film? It feels like a matter of balance.

RP: The notion of nostalgia can be a challenge for the audience, because it can invite associations that can take over the movie itself. It distracts people from the story because they’re thinking about something else. For instance, I always feel The Beatles are so filled with associations that it’s very hard to deliver their music in a novel way.

LO: I am thinking about Scorsese, who you’ve worked with. In Mean Streets, which reminds me of your approach to scoring, he dared to use music by The Rolling Stones and still delivered it with meanings anew. 

RP: That’s the benefit of working with great filmmakers, because they can recontextualise something and give it a novel feel. Sometimes, when a song is very expensive [to license], I would always be like, well, that’s great, because that just means that it won’t be used, or that fewer people are going to use it. And when that eventually happens, that’s movie magic.

If it’s an acclaimed director, I feel like it’s not pretentious of them using a big act. But sometimes, you have younger filmmakers  who take a scene and put, let’s just say, the Rolling Stones in it, and they’re like, ‘Isn’t that great?!’ Unfortunately, I’m the one who has to deliver this message and tell them that the movie can’t carry it. It can’t carry the legacy, the weight of that song. If a movie’s not good enough to carry the weight of a masterpiece, it can be overwhelmed by the music. 

LO: It may feel like your job is to make playlists, but you spend quite some time on set too. Does everything always work according to plan?

RP: When I was working on The Wolf of Wall Street, there was a sequence taking place at a wedding. We had Sharon Jones – rest in peace – and The Dap Kings as the wedding band, with whom we recorded half a dozen songs, including “Goldfinger”, which was featured in the score.

All of a sudden I got called to the camera and told, ‘well, Leo [Di Caprio] wants to dance to “Baby Got Back” [by Sir Mix-A-Lot]’. We hadn’t recorded it, but I had Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings there, so it’s one of those things where it’s like, okay, let’s play it.

When you watch the movie, all of a sudden, there’s “Baby Got Back”, and he’s doing that crazy dance, and then it goes into Bo Diddley’s “You Pretty Thing”. One goes like, ‘Where did that come from?’ It’s so logically incongruous, but creatively It works. From the 1960s, all of a sudden, it just feels alive. 

LO: The way you use music often defies time. I am thinking about Priscilla by Sofia Coppola, and how you have The Ramones’ version of “Bay I Love You”, which of course hadn’t been recorded yet when Elvis and Priscilla were newly wed.

RP: I would give Sofia a lot of credit for that. I think that throughout all of her movie emotions are more important than logic, in a certain way. She has incredible instincts for that, and you need the confidence too. Say, with The Ramones in that film it’s about indicating that you’re not going to be conventional, it’s about the charge you’re getting from it. That comes with the commitment the filmmaker has to their own vision and their own sense of what tools to use to best render their story.

LO: Speaking of confidence, do you still have insecurities when you put together a soundtrack or you’ve now mastered the art?

RP:  I think everybody who’s had an enduring career will tell you that they still have a lot of doubts at times. I think that keeps you thinking, and questioning the rules. You may say, well, here’s a rule: Polka dots and stripes don’t go together. Right? 

LO: Unless you’re in a psychedelic band in 1967…

RP: And then all of a sudden some kid walks into the office and he’s wearing polka dots and stripes and off you go: things change. So, I try not to have too many rules. I really enjoy working with younger filmmakers, so I’m not walking into a room and setting barriers and boundaries. I’m open to exploring. If I think something doesn’t work, I’m going to tell you. And that’s not because there’s an edict that says it doesn’t work, it just does or doesn’t work, you can feel it. I like the idea of helping someone shape a new language and vision from someone younger, instead of playing the same schemes you’ve done before.

Larry Clark’s cult opus Kids marked Randall Poster’s debut in cinema. Kids, photo from the set. Credits Gunars Elmuts.

LO: In these terms, your work has been pivotal in putting younger generations in touch with older, even forgotten music. Do you ever realise this?

RP: A few weekends ago, I was invited to an art house cinema in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A lovely little town, where the community bought the theatre that was going to be closed and saved it. I showed three double bills: each time I paired a movie that inspired me along with a movie I worked on. So, I showed Sofia [Coppola’s] Somewhere with The Grand Budapest Hotel, American Graffiti with School of Rock, and Mean Streets with The Wolf of Wall Street. People were asking me a lot of questions about Wes, and Rushmore came up a lot. For a younger audience, that was really an important milestone, it had a revelatory component. 

So, you realise that you’re aware of all of the musical precedents that brought us, let’s say, to the British invasion but for the younger generations is not necessarily like that. It’s exciting that for many people movies can be a gateway of musical exploration. Certainly, there was a rediscovery of acts like Cat Stevens, or Françoise Hardy.

LO: Do you still research much or, at this point, your head is a massive storage of musical notions?

RP: I still work very hard to educate myself. If you asked me the exact year this or that song came out, I probably couldn’t tell you. I’m not like that. Take The Grand Budapest Hotel, we researched every Middle European composer, all sorts of different folk music. And that to me, that’s really a lot of fun, it’s like doing schoolwork. You have to really approach it with that kind of academic diligence.

LO: Your approach to scoring is surprisingly playlistable. Needless to say, it has roots in the analog world – made of songs religiously ripped from vinyl onto cassettes assembled for friends or lovers – but nonetheless it feels very contemporary in the way we now consume music on platforms. 

RP: Going back to Rushmore. It’s interesting because it came out before streaming services were established, so it wasn’t as easy to access all those songs. Now you can just very quickly make your way through playlists that are created or defined. When, at times, somebody’s saying the music in a certain show was great, I go look it up and I can tell straight away that they’re curating through Spotify. They’re just kind of finding music by virtue of the algorithm. I don’t wanna be too judgmental about that, but it’s just sort of a different approach. 

LO: I guess you could say it’s like buying something from a fast fashion retailer instead of getting it tailor-made. What truly makes the difference?

RP: It’s about the time spent thinking about things. Nonetheless, the digital revolution made it possible for me to do as many movies as I’ve done. It used to be all about sending VHS back and forth. I used to travel to Los Angeles to work on a project literally bringing a suitcase filled with CDs. Now, within thirty minutes, you can send them fifteen or as many choices as you want. 

LO: Is there anything you miss about that, though?

RP: I still maintain my discipline, but there’s less patience than ever before. When I first started out you’d have to transfer something to magnetic tape, and then they’d have to cut it by hand. You’d show a director three choices on a scene, and they’d say, ‘let me think about it. I’m gonna go for a walk.’ I wish this was still like that.  It’s like being at a buffet, now.

LO: Do you have a cinematic mind when listening to music? Do you associate songs to certain scenes straight away?

RP: There are songs that I save for a long time for the right movie. Famously, but most notably, Wes and I had The Bobby Fuller Four “Let Her Dance”, which we had been holding onto for ten years and we used for Fantastic Mr. Fox. And we have some more.

Il caso Mattei by Piero Piccioni shaped the soundtrack for Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme.

LO: One of these is Piero Piccioni’s score for Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair), I heard. Did it influence in some ways your latest effort with Wes, The Phoenician Scheme?

RP: I would say Il caso Mattei was, again, something I think we’ve tried in multiple movies. Wes had that score in his mind, and then it got to the point where the film music evolved when Wes had more of a vision of it by virtue of the fact that he was making the movie. Nonetheless, it served as a template, it was sort of an inspiration. It definitely was a North Star as far as getting a sense of what the score should be like.

Since Wes started making animated movies, with Fantastic Mr. Fox, he took up making animatics for all of his movies, which helps for everybody to know what to build, and all that. Il caso Mattei was in the animatic. Stravinsky is a major voice in the film, so once that happened, we needed to enhance those moments. And that’s why ultimately it didn’t end up in the movie.

LO: What inspires you about Italian soundtracks?

RP: What was really interesting about a lot of the Italian soundtracks is the mix of strings and electric guitars, bringing some of the rock and roll instrumentation into movie scores. A lot of these Italian composers incorporated that sound. We had a great time recording the score and Seu Jorge’s David Bowie songs for The Life Aquatic at Forum Studios [and former Orthophonic Studios] in Rome. It was inspiring to be in the studio, seeing all the instruments still there. I think that there’s still room for that approach to scoring to evolve. I love those pictures of Egyptian bands with classical-looking orchestras alongside three dudes with Stratocasters. I’d like to create something that captures that essential combination, and work on a score arranged with that kind of instrumentation.

LO: Perhaps it’s a new venture for you and CAM Sugar…

RP: CAM used to be a real pain to source, and since Sugar bought it has made it much easier for me. I love it!

LO: Those records would chart, they would sit right next to pop singles, sometimes even taking over the film they were recorded for in terms of popularity. Original soundtracks now seem to be way less popular than those put together with sourced music. How do you explain this?

RP: When there still were LPs and CDs, people would go and buy them and labels would profit from that. Soundtracks used to be a driving promotional tool for films. There was a time when record labels had a big voice in the editing room, because it was profitable – but that was never my thing anyway. Now, the scores are uploaded on streaming platforms and the composers get paid directly. So, the soundtrack label gets next to nothing. It’s what they call ‘the death of the soundtrack album’. 

LO: Do you still consume music physically, though? You must have an impressive collection at this point in your life.

RP: I do, but I was never a collector. I just had my records, which I took to college, I then took to San Francisco, and moved around with me. Twenty years ago, we moved into a house and I kept them in the garage, but I didn’t realise it was flooded. I lost my record collection and the memories that came with it. 

LO: A sad but tragically common story…

RP: I decided this wouldn’t overwhelm me since I had most of the music on CD anyway. But I did an interview with Terry Gross on NPR Fresh Air and was asked if there was anything that I’d love to have back on vinyl. That was Neil Young’s On the Beach with the floral inner sleeve. You know what? I got 12 copies from listeners!

LO: Is there anything on your wishlist that CAM Sugar readers may have for you?

RP: No, I’m good (laughs)

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme with a soundtrack curated by Randall Poster, featuring original music by Alexandre Desplat, is now out in theatres.

Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998) has been a pivotal soundtrack in the career of Randall Poster.

Opening image: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Wes Anderson, frame from the film.