Garbo (1985)

The documentary film about the life of Greta Garbo was a unique collaboration between Swedish TV2 and MGM. It was a two hour long film with a lot of extracts from films that Greta Garbo made throughout her career.

I was hired along with Anders Blomqvist to make the full soundtrack (music and sound) for the whole film. It was the largest project I had ever engaged in and production time (as always) was very tight. Anders and I literally lived in the studio for almost two month, taking turns at sleeping and working. Since most of the films were silent movies we had to ”invent” new music and sound for everything.

At this point of time we had no access to computers. Everything had to be played ”by hand” and recorded on to a 16 track tape recorder. The tape recorder also had to be synchronized with a video machine. They didn´t always get along very well... To score the music we rented a Emulator III sampler (state of the art at the time) that could play one instrument at the time witch had to be loaded into its memory at painfully slow rates. Yes, those were the hard old days... but we loved it!

directed by Dan Säll

The opening theme from ”Garbo”