40 Years of ‘The Theme from Rocky’
In conversation with legendary film composer Bill Conti
“Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky)” opens with arguably the most recognizable sixteen bars in cinema history. Brassy trumpets ring out a driving, syncopated fanfare, and the song announces in no uncertain terms the arrival of an exciting, unflinching film about struggle and determination. Along with setting the pace to the most famous training montage of all time, the song was nominated for an Academy Award and reached the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Rocky and “Gonna Fly…”, we spoke with the film’s composer, Bill Conti.
Conti, who knew Rocky director John Avildsen and editor Richard Halsey prior to the film, wasn’t the first composer to consider scoring the low-budget fight movie. “A composer or two turned it down because it was a package deal,” explains Conti, “and that means that the money that the composer would make would be after paying all the musical expenses.” That means it was up to the composer to foot the bill for the studio, the tape, the musicians, copying of the music, “everything, and then you would get what’s left. So it was a $25,000 package deal, and I agreed to do the movie.” With limited resources, Conti and his orchestra were efficient with their time; according to Conti, the recording of the Rocky score was done “in one three-hour session.”
The inspiration for the soundtrack came from a collection of different and disparate sources. “The director and I had never been to a fight, a large fight, and he was showing me pictures of real fights in slow motion, and he had the music of Beethoven behind it, just to have some music behind it, and he was really impressed with the choreography.” Conti says that director John Avildsen considered Rocky a classic story, not just a fight movie, but a fight movie about people. “He wanted to maintain this classic fairy tale feeling about it.” But Conti knew it was crucial to ground the film’s score in something less “fairytale” than Beethoven. “I reminded him that we were in the streets of Philadelphia, I should bring in some of the other elements of the day. Meaning it was supposed to be real time in ’76 and we should have music of the street, along with the classic feel of a timeless fairytale.”
Of other stylistic influences, Conti reveals that he “loved the gladiator movies of the ’50s. We don’t know what gladiators fought to, or what their music was all about, but some film composers, guys like Miklós Rózsa, Alex North, told us what they thought it was—and it was this big, brassy thing. You know, they come out to fight to big old fanfare, and I liked that, and that was all running through my head of course, that’s what music is.”
In “Gonna Fly Now” alone, we can hear the culmination of all these influences. The track starts with the classic “gladiator”-style trumpets, and when the beat hits after the first four bars, it’s surprisingly funky and perfectly Philadelphia, 1976. When the chorus rises, “fairytale” strings pitch to a near-frenzy beneath the trumpets and disco beat, uniting all three spheres of influence. These tonal ideas each shine on their own and jockey for position throughout the rest of the soundtrack, but for “Gonna Fly…” they’re perfectly in synch.
On finding the right mood and music for a moment, Conti explains that “you have to express your emotion, but it’s through the language of the music. The composer guy is only doing what he feels. And it’s not weird and it’s not magical, but I know how to do that. I know how to write the music to make the sounds that tell you what I feel like when I’m afraid, or when I want to go punch someone in the face, or when I’m in love.”
On working with Sylvester Stallone, Conti explains that connecting with the screenwriter of a movie is crucial “because you realize, as the composer, you come in at the end of a project, these people have been on it maybe a year. Maybe he wrote that two years before. He’s been living with it longer than you’ve been living with it. You want to hear from the director, of course, because the director is the dictator trying to coalesce and have one point of view come across on screen, and hopefully he wants to tell the story that the writer wrote.”
Musically, both Avildsen and Stallone “had their input. As I said John was playing me Beethoven, he thought it was classic fairy tale, and he wanted the music to reflect that, and Sly knew it was about this man, who’s a very strong man, and the music should be representative of that, and strong, and evoke all the emotions, and there was not talk of any subtlety, or ‘We don’t want them to think this, or think that…’ no, no, no. We want them to think that he can win the fight. We want them to be pulling for him.
“We had those kind of talks. We didn’t talk music, per se, I mean we can’t talk A-flats and B-flats, but when they both heard the music they liked it, to my good fortune. They didn’t have to, but they did.” And which song, aside from “Gonna Fly Now…”, is Conti a big fan of? “‘The Final Bell,’ where he’s saying ‘Adrian!’ And she’s screaming ‘Rocky!’ I like that, a lot.”
