Daily Inspiration Quote by Mike Figgis

“I want the score to have a really big voice” is a director admitting, without apology, that music isn’t wallpaper. In Mike Figgis’s mouth, “voice” is the tell: the score isn’t there to politely underline feelings already on screen, it’s another character with agency, a presence that can argue with the image, seduce the audience, even betray what the dialogue claims. The adjective “big” signals volume, yes, but more importantly scale and authority. He’s talking about allowing music to take up narrative space that directors often reserve for plot mechanics or performance.

Figgis’s intent sits in the tension between cinema as realism and cinema as orchestration. A “big voice” score can shortcut exposition, intensify ambiguity, and impose rhythm on scenes that might otherwise play flat. It also risks dominating the film, which is precisely the point: he’s choosing a bold, authored emotional architecture over the contemporary tendency toward restrained, “invisible” scoring. The subtext is control. If the score speaks loudly enough, it can unify disparate tones, smooth over structural seams, or push a viewer toward a feeling they didn’t earn rationally.

Context matters: Figgis is a musician as much as a filmmaker, and his work often treats sound as a primary storytelling tool rather than post-production garnish. This line reads like a manifesto against timid scoring: let the music confess, interrupt, and insist. In a medium obsessed with what we see, he’s staking a claim for what makes us believe.