Unsung Auteurs: Stewart Copeland | FilmInk

After shining a light on under-celebrated screenwriters while the writers’ strike raged in the US, we’ll be opening up the Unsung Auteurs column to include all manner of cinema creatives deserving of a little more love, and who have a distinct, near-auteur-style approach to their art. Can a score composer be an auteur? It might require something of a loosening of the term, but a composer can certainly have their own style, which remains firmly in place despite the nature of the film they’re scoring. Many composers do, however, return to films and filmmakers that explore constant themes and ideas. Though certainly not lacking in terms of profile, success and artistic achievement, Stewart Copeland certainly fits the bill as an Unsung Auteur, as he’s never really achieved the appropriate level of praise for his work as a film composer. Though adulation and cheering crowds have been a big part of his career as the always on-point drummer for rock-pop icons The Police, we’re ready to raise our lighter (actually, maybe make that a switched-on mobile phone) and pump our fists for Stewart Copeland, score composer.

Born in 1952 in Virginia USA, Stewart Copeland enjoyed enormous success in the 1980s as the drummer in The Police, a UK pop-rock trio that blended the rhythms of reggae with the ragged energy of punk and the sweet melodies of pop to create a sound unlike anything that had come before them. A literal musical embarrassment of riches, The Police were fronted by charismatic bass player and singer/songwriter Sting, and rode on the extraordinarily fluid and imaginative playing of guitarist Andy Summers, with Stewart Copeland providing an incredible sense of swing and movement from behind his drum kit. Lauded as one of the best pop-rock drummers of the era, Copeland was an integral element of this incredible band.

Copeland’s career took a surprise turn in 1983, three years before The Police broke up. “It was a phone call from Francis Coppola,” Copeland explained to FilmInk in 2006 of his start in the film scoring business. “I had never thought about film scores in any way until I got that call.” The film that Francis Ford Coppola wanted Copeland to score was Rumble Fish, the director’s adaptation of S.E Hinton’s classic Young Adult novel (before the term even existed), and his bold attempt to craft an “art film for teenagers.” The story of troubled brothers Rusty-James (Matt Dillon) and The Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke), Coppola daringly and ingeniously shot the film in sleek, stark black-and-white to mirror the plot-central colour blindness of Rourke’s enigmatic Motorcycle Boy. A stunning cinematic canvas of hallucinogenic imagery, rebellious cool, and stylistic strut, Rumble Fish is a dark-hued masterpiece, and one of the best films of the 1980s.

Utterly central to the film’s brilliance is Stewart Copeland’s incredibly instinctive and expressive score. “Francis Ford Coppola taught me everything I needed to know about film composing,” Copeland told Tidal Magazine in 2023. “He gave me, as he does, a lot of rope to figure it out. He liked the fact that I was doing it all wrong, since I didn’t know how you’re supposed to do it. Nothing I did was cliché, and it was about these kids. So, my non-orchestral score at that time became orchestral as a result of this movie. But at the time, it was just me banging percussion, mallets, guitar, bass and all the instruments that I could play myself. One day he turns around and says, “You know, this is all great. This is amazing. I never heard anything like this. But we need strings. This is all a bit too astringent here. We need some softening up. We need some strings, some emotion.”

The combination of orchestral suites with Copeland’s percussive, rhythmic beats makes for an extraordinary musical backdrop to the flood of powerful, near-surreal images that flicker and charge across the screen. Copeland’s music jumps and stutters, a wonderful cacophony of crashes and clatters that fit together masterfully and create a perfect bedrock for Coppola’s visionary brilliance. For the film, Copeland also collaborated with eccentric Wall Of Voodoo frontman Stan Ridgway on “Don’t Box Me In”, co-writing, playing on and producing the wonderfully evocative theme song. It’s the perfect capper to Copeland’s beat-heavy contribution to Rumble Fish.

Coppola’s encouragement and suggestion of orchestration created an entry point for Copeland into the world of film scoring. Though he was intimidated at first, and a little unsure in how to relate to the players in an orchestra, it soon became second-nature for the one-time drummer in The Police. “So began a decades-long relationship with orchestra,” Copeland told Tidal Magazine in 2023 of his work on Rumble Fish, which still stands as the composer’s most original, compelling and exciting work.

After director Richard Tuggle’s minor 1986 thriller Out Of Bounds with Anthony Michael Hall, Copeland’s next major score came in 1987 with Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, a muted but still tightly rhythmic effort from the neophyte composer, who would work with the director again on 1988’s claustrophobic Talk Radio. While Francis Coppola kept house with a collaborative, creative vibe, “Oliver Stone’s a nitpicker,” Copeland recalled to FilmInk in 2006. “He’d say ‘What does that note mean?’, while Francis’ only comment about the music would be ‘Great.’” Although divergent, Copeland is fond of both men – and directors in general. “As a class of people,” he says, “I find them to be really cool. You don’t get to be a director unless you have a pretty sparky brain. Even bad directors have got something going on.”

Since his breakout work with Francis Coppola and Oliver Stone, Stewart Copeland has lent his rhythmic stylings to all manner of films, lending just the right feel and vibe to comedies (See No Evil, Hear No Evil, The Pallbearer, Good Burger, Made Men, Pecker, Welcome To Woop Woop), urban thrillers (Gridlock’d and Fresh, to which he contributed a particularly effective score), action (Surviving The Game), fantasy (Highlander II: The Quickening), horror (The First Power), adventure (Rapa Nui) and Ken Loach-directed social realism (Raining Stones, Hidden Agenda, Riff-Raff). Copeland’s career decisions, however, are based on feel more than anything else. “Look,” he laughed to FilmInk, “Rapa Nui was a dumb movie, but it looks fucking beautiful. There’s always something.”

Copeland is usually up for any type of film, although he labels himself “a popcorn eating punter,” and instructs keen social realism directors to “save their French noir intellectual bullshit.” The favourite film that he’d scored at the time of FilmInk’s 2006 interview was Peter Berg’s shocking and divisive Very Bad Things, a 1998 black comedy from director Peter Berg about a bachelor party and a dead prostitute, because “it’s the film that I can watch again and again, even after seeing it in the studio a million times.”

If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.