Shark Quest : Gods and Devils
The following account is transcribed from a future meeting between Quentin Tarantino and an unnamed band in preparation for an upcoming film project.
“Okay man, I’m gonna lay out the plot for you and throw in what I want for music at different times. So, be sharp man, `cause I talk fast. Okay, first off, this movie could take place years and years ago, or possibly even way into the future. The audience isn’t really supposed to be able to tell. Except that everybody’s going to be wearing clothes from the seventies. Alright? So, anyway, this movie is like a cross between Point Break, Rashomon and The Wild Bunch. It starts out in a jail cell, kinda like The Usual Suspects, and each character in jail is brought into an interrogation room and gives their version of the story. It’s the cop’s job to figure out what the real story is. I’m thinking of either Robert Forster or Dennis Farina as the cop. All of the criminals tell a story about how they got caught, about what they did and how they got there in that cell. There should be a theme for the bad guys, kind of like a mix between the music that the RZA and Robert Rodriguez did for Kill Bill. Martial arts mixed with mariachi, okay?
“I’m bringing back David Carradine to play a kind of rogue hero. He’s going to be this guy who is part loner cowboy, part martial arts master, part samurai, and part surfer. He’s like Bill except for the surfer part. Got it? His theme music should be a combination of music from like The Endless Summer but with some Russian instruments and a little hint of spaghetti western. Okay, so he wants to bust a crime ring, these guys who are just like him except they’re thieves who pull heists all the time. So, he could fit right in with them and stuff, undercover, you know? He makes his way into the group by way of an initiation where he has to kill somebody really bloody, it might be a cop that he kills, I’m not sure yet. But this part of the story is told the same by everybody. But his story starts a little further back than what the criminals remember, so we’ll have like a prologue where we see that the criminals killed his wife. Yeah, that’s it. The bad guys pulled a heist a long time ago. It was like their first job and they were kind of nervous. Somehow, one of the guys gets twitchy and kills David Carradine’s wife in front of him with a samurai sword. This music should be a little more tragic, but still with hints of maybe The Ventures and maybe some of Pink Floyd’s early darker stuff, really edgy and trippy, you know? Kind of like that band Shark Quest. Have you heard of them? Great.
“Now, David Carradine’s mission in life is to get revenge on these guys. As time passes, the band of criminals gets better at what they do. But so does Carradine man, right? He does kind of like a Batman thing. He goes to Russia to learn endurance in the Siberian villages. He goes to Mexico to learn pistolero combat and guerilla tactics. He goes to Hawaii to learn balance and inner peace and also learns how to surf. He goes to Japan to learn samurai sword fighting. You see what I mean man, he’s like the Bruce Wayne Lee! But he’s a cowboy and stuff too. Anyway, so I need the music to be able to fit all of those locales, all of those styles, but to be in one long song so that if flows, because it’s not going to be separate scenes, it’s going to be like a long montage, okay? Because this all has to fit into a prologue that should only be about ten minutes at the most. So, did you guys ever see that documentary Monster Road? It’s a documentary about a guy who makes claymation films, but it has this great soundtrack that is totally the sound I’m looking for. Who did that soundtrack, Dave? Shark Quest, right.
“So, throughout the movie there’s lots of fights and buildups to the final confrontation between Carradine and the bad guys. And that’s how the different viewpoints come in. Each guy who tells the story gets up to a certain point and then just stops by saying `Then I don’t remember anything after that.’ But what really happens is, we see in the last story, which is actually told by the cop, because we find out that he really knows everything already and he fills in the blanks for the missing pieces of everyone’s stories. It turns out that all of these guys were killed by Carradine, picked off one by one, and if you really pay attention you will notice that guys go missing from story to story. You might think that he’s turning them in to the cops one by one because now they’re in this jail cell, but instead the big reveal is that they’re dead, man. Okay? They’re just dead. Wiped out by Carradine and the cell is actually like a weigh station between Earth and Hell. Because that’s where these guys are goin’, man. So remember, I want music that’s like all these different soundtrack genres thrown together, but it flows naturally. It could be for a western but set in old style Russian peasant houses. It could be a martial arts movie, but with the guys fighting on surfboards in the ocean. It’s like that Shark Quest album, Gods and Devils….you know what? Fuck it, you guys are fired, I’m just going to use that album.”
“Um, Mr. Tarantino? We are Shark Quest.”
“Oh cool man! You just saved me a phone call!”
Similar Albums:
The Six Parts Seven – Everywhere and Right Here
Kill Bill, Part Two soundtrack
Ratatat – Ratatat