Mark Knopfler (The Princess Bride) The Princess Bride (1987)
Mark Freuder Knopfler was born in 1949 in Glasgow, raised in Newcastle, and rose to international stardom as the lead guitarist, singer, and principal songwriter of Dire Straits — whose 1985 album Brothers in Arms sold more than thirty million copies and was one of the first records released on the new Compact Disc format. By 1987 Knopfler was at the peak of his commercial success and had begun a parallel career as a film composer, scoring Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983), David Hare's Comfort and Joy (1984), and Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing (1985).
The Princess Bride was his second collaboration with Reiner.
A small score for a small budget
Knopfler scored the film as a personal favor at a fee well below his market rate. The score is deliberately small in scale — guitars, light orchestration, recurring motifs assigned to characters (Buttercup's theme, Inigo's ascending three-note figure, the rolling Storybook Love melody) — and runs lightly under most scenes rather than across them. The Storybook Love song over the closing credits, written by Knopfler and performed by Willy DeVille, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. (wikipedia)
The total music budget was reportedly under half a million dollars.
The Dire Straits hat
The folkloric condition Knopfler attached to the score was that Reiner had to put a Dire Straits hat from the Brothers in Arms tour somewhere visible in the film. The hat appears in the grandson's bedroom on a chair near the bed, in the opening shot. (wikipedia)
"The deal was: he would score the movie, and I would put a Dire Straits hat in the kid's room. So in the very first shot, you can see it." — Rob Reiner, Vanity Fair (2012)
What the score does
The choice not to push the music forward is the score's principal achievement. The Fire Swamp scenes do not have horror cues; the duels do not have clashing brass; the climactic Inigo–Rugen confrontation is scored thinly. The score's main statements come at the romantic beats — the staircase kiss in the equilibrium, the "as you wish" reveal in the ravine, the final wave-of-love kiss before the camera pulls back to the bedroom. Knopfler has called the score his most restrained.
Career around and after
The film soundtrack was released by Warner Bros. Records in October 1987. Knopfler returned to Dire Straits for On Every Street (1991), then dissolved the band and continued as a solo artist with eleven studio albums between 1996 and 2024. He continued to score films sporadically — Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), Wag the Dog (1997), Metroland (1997) — but never as his primary work. He maintains a consistent relationship with film: as of the late 2010s he had reportedly turned down more soundtrack work than he had accepted.