Alongside his personal work and commissions for theater, Max Richter has worked on a slew of film soundtracks, scoring everything from blockbusters (his work features in Scorsese’s latest, Shutter Island) to cult indies—most notably, Ari Folman’s Golden Globe-winning Waltz with Bashir. “In film compositions, the music becomes a sort of character,” says Richter. “It’s the glue that holds the characters together. It’s magic in a way.” Here, Richter explores that magic via five of his favorite film soundtracks.


Andrei Rublev, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1996
Soundtrack by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

An amazing Russian film based on the life of painter Andrei Rublev that's mostly in silence. The entire film is in black and white, but towards the end it gives way to a sequence of total color, and then music comes in. It's astounding.


2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Soundtrack of existing commercial classical recordings

Simply incredible music: Johann Strauss II’s best-known waltz, “An der schönen blauen Donau” set to a dancing spaceship; choreographed spaceships set to a sequence of atonal freaky music. Once the hero dies, it becomes very 60s with extraordinary music.


Harold and Maude, dir. Hal Ashby, 1971
Music by Cat Stevens

This dark love story between a 19-year-old boy and a woman who’s 79––he’s the conservative and she’s the radical––was made in the 70s, so all the tracks are of the era and very poppy (the entire soundtrack is from Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman). The film ends with Harold picking his banjo to “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out”—fantastic.


Daybreak Express, dir. DA Pennebaker, 1953
Duke Ellington’s track of the same name

DA Pennebaker’s five-minute film is set to a phenomenal Duke Ellington number. It’s euphoric, a beautifully photographed Manhattan summer morning, zooming through the city on a rickety A train traveling from one end of the New York subway to the other at 5am.


The Scent of Green Papaya, dir. Tran Anh Hung, 1993
Music by Tôn-Thât Tiêt

A Vietnamese film set in contemporary Hanoi, with a soundtrack unlike usual film music. It's like very exotic colors, played beautifully on a piano. It's like a perfume that settles over the whole film.