Chasing ‘The Big Blue’
The French Cult Film that Failed in America Except When It Didn’t
Do you remember that feeling when you were a kid, maybe around 10 years old, after you’d heard a piece of music for the first time, a piece so unfamiliar and affecting that you were incapable of moving from your flimsy seat in the movie theater, even as your parents and the rest of the audience stood to leave, because your body was frozen, as if in sleep paralysis, but on the inside you were radicalized, turned on, intent on seeing the film again and again, determined to rent the VHS tape from the local video store at Green Oaks Plaza in Arlington, Texas, every weekend if you could, almost wearing out the spindles of your VCR and the patience of everyone in your family, just so you could hear the music over and over?
For me, that moment came in August 1988. Columbia Studios had just released The Big Blue in American theaters. By then, it had already achieved critical acclaim in France and would go on to become one of that country’s highest grossing films in the 1980s. In the United States, however, it pretty much flopped. Reviewers were unsparing. “Such a total disaster that it would have been an act of kindness for all concerned to have never released it,” wrote Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times. Still, the film had its fans. Some loved the plot, about the lives of two competitive no-limits free divers who face off against each other at the World Diving Championships. Others were drawn to the expansive cinematography of the Mediterranean Sea near Greece and the dreamlike underwater scenes. For me, it all came down to the music: a fantastic, exhilarating blend of piano, strings and, most strikingly, the bamboo flute.
It has an earthy sound, the bamboo flute. Some say haunting, not easily forgotten. For the longest time, I thought the instrument in the leitmotif of the film score was a bassoon, or even an oboe, but when I reached out to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to confirm, the head of the bassoon department pointed me to another woodwind — the shakuhachi, an end-blown bamboo flute that came to Japan from China in the eighth century and was later used by Zen Buddhists for meditation.
I asked Cornelius Boots, a shakuhachi master, whether he thought the sound in the film was, in fact, a shakuhachi. He told me:
“Like most appearances of shakuhachi in the 80s and 90s, I am 97 percent certain that this is a keyboard playing a shakuhachi/pan flute/bamboo flute sound. Very adept use of the pitch wheel makes it more authentic feeling, but the lack of any variation in attack or tone, plus the feel of the notes that are both higher and lower than the original range that the sound is based on, indicate this is an effective keyboard flute sound.”
I tried confirming with the film’s composer, Academy Award winner Bill Conti, but couldn’t get a response from his agent. Still, I don’t think it’s a huge leap to assume Conti sampled or synthesized the shakuhachi for The Big Blue since, just a few years earlier, he used the panpipes — another type of bamboo flute — for his score for The Karate Kid.
“In The Karate Kid, we get you from A to B,” Conti said in an interview. “And we do it orchestrally to not date ourselves stylistically…the gentleness of the panpipes and the nastiness of the rhythm section…it all comes together.”
Unlike The Karate Kid, though, you won’t be able to watch the full version of The Big Blue with Conti’s score — at least not without scouring eBay or barely-there video stores that somehow have managed to survive. The only versions of the film distributed today are the original version released in France, Le Grande Bleu, and the longer director’s cut. And both feature a different musical score by French composer Eric Serra. I found this out years later, without warning, like returning to your childhood home to find out it had been bulldozed and replaced with a bland office park.
To be fair, the soundtrack with Serra’s score ranked number one in album sales in France for over six months and sold over one million copies worldwide. Nonetheless, when Jerry Weintraub, the Emmy-winning film producer behind The Karate Kid, bought the distribution rights for The Big Blue for the U.S. market, he asked Conti to rescore it.
Luc Besson, who directed The Big Blue and other notable films such as Leon: The Professional, The Fifth Element and Le Femme Nikita, hasn’t held back his antipathy for the alternative score. In 2017, when a Reddit user asked Besson in an online Q&A if there would ever be a digital release of the The Big Blue with Conti’s score, he replied:
“I hate Bill’s music in the film. Sorry.”
The soundtrack with Conti’s score never made it into stores. “The CD is not available because the film was a flop in the U.S.A. No success, no CD,” Conti said in an interview.
The music wasn’t the only change Weintraub had made. He also swapped out the film’s ending with a somewhat happier climax. Besson said this change, along with the film’s promotion, doomed the film in the U.S.
“Instead of accepting the movie as it was, he tried to make it Rambo Under the Sea. All the wrong people came to see it.”
The bitterness is easy to understand when you imagine growing up, as Besson did, the child of deep-sea divers, for years dreaming of making a movie of a world below the surface, where you felt the most human you’ve ever felt, and then collaborating with your long-time friend to create a score that perfectly manifested the essence of your film, only to have it made unrecognizable by a Hollywood movie producer you trusted with your years-long work.
So maybe I was the “wrong” type of person to see the film. After all, I was ten at the time and also enamored with movies like Girls Just Want to Have Fun and The Goonies. But somehow, even at 10, Besson’s underlying story felt essential, just as much as Conti’s score did. Stripped of either, the film might not have lingered as long in my memory nor have influenced my early teenage years, when music and other art forms gave shape and direction, like nothing else could, to my emotional life.
“Music is a language. It’s an emotional language.” Conti said in a recent interview. “I hope that I have given some of my emotion through music.”
Below are the two versions of the film’s introduction I found on YouTube. Let me know which one you prefer!
American Version with Bill Conti’s Score:
Original Version with Eric Serra’s Score:
