Daily Inspiration Quote by Maurice Jarre

Regret, delivered with the shrug of someone too seasoned to pretend purity ever existed. Maurice Jarre is talking about craft, but he’s also quietly indicting an era when film music was expected to announce itself - to tell the audience what to feel, and to do it loudly enough to compete with the spectacle on screen. “Some of those soundtracks” is doing diplomatic work: he won Oscars, he wrote themes that became cultural shorthand, and he still chooses the vague plural, a tactful way to admit that success can fossilize into habit.

The phrase “the way I did them” is the tell. Jarre isn’t disowning the films or even the notes; he’s interrogating process. In the mid-to-late 20th century, a composer’s job was often maximalist: broad melodies, lush orchestration, a kind of sonic architecture meant to hold up epic cinema. But as sound design matured and directors grew addicted to silence, texture, and understatement, the old style started to read as instructive, even manipulative. Jarre’s comment acknowledges that shift without pretending he was above it.

There’s also an artist’s late-life clarity here: the recognition that “good” isn’t a fixed property, it’s a negotiation with technology, taste, and power. Composers serve the cut, the studio, the director, the moment. When the moment changes, yesterday’s choices don’t become wrong, but they can become too much - too certain. Jarre’s restraint in phrasing is its own modern lesson: sometimes the smartest critique is the one that refuses to grandstand.