Art & Creativity Quote by Michel Legrand

Legrand makes composing sound less like divine inspiration and more like manufacturing: generate in bulk, inspect ruthlessly, ship only what survives. The numbers are the point. Thirty, forty, fifty melodies isn’t bragging; it’s a confession of process. He’s telling you that the “magic” people hear in a finished theme is built on a landfill of perfectly good ideas. That casual “cast them off” carries a quiet cruelty - the kind required to keep sentiment from getting in the way of craft.

There’s also an unusually modern humility in the handoff to the director. Legrand isn’t surrendering authorship; he’s acknowledging what film music actually is: narrative technology. A melody doesn’t win because it’s beautiful in a vacuum. It wins because it solves a scene’s problem - clarifies an emotion, sets tempo, creates memory without stealing the shot. By asking the director to decide when “only one is needed,” he’s treating the filmmaker as the final audience and the film as the composition’s true instrument.

The subtext is professional pride without romance. Legrand, who moved effortlessly between jazz, chanson, and Hollywood scoring, frames creativity as abundance plus edit. It’s an ethic that fits the industrial pace of cinema: fast deadlines, high stakes, collaboration over ego. The quote demystifies artistry while quietly raising the bar. If you want two great melodies, you may have to write fifty - and be cold enough to throw forty-eight away.