Take an Active Interest in These Secrets About American Beauty

Thomas Newman‘s Oscar-nominated score was so him—bright and pleasing to the ear and yet somehow fraught with tension—but it was also inspired by German composer Carl Orff’s Gassenhauer from the 1920s. (Newman, meanwhile, has 15 Oscar nominations for his scores (for films such as The Shawshank Redemption, Finding Nemo and Skyfall in addition to American Beauty) and no wins, a record he shares with the late Alex North.)

“I remember driving around L.A. for the first time in my car, listening to this music over and over,” Mendes recalled in 2019 on WNYC’s The Open Ears Project, “trying to get myself in the headspace to make a movie about American suburbia—and I’d never spent any time in American suburbia myself. It was completely alien.”

The native of Reading, England, added with a laugh, “And here was this piece of European classical music that somehow spoke to a different world and a different environment, and I found it genuinely inspiring.”

Music “defies language in so many ways,” Mendes continued. “It’s one of its joys, that it takes words and direct meaning, narrative out of the equation. It’s also the fastest way to generate emotion. Sometimes you don’t deserve the emotion it generates. Sometimes it’s the quickest way to dissipate emotion.”

And listening to Gassenhauer, he added, “I feel strangely nostalgic for a time before I made any films. It was a new discovery.”