Rob The Mob (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

New York–based director Raymond De Felitta and English composer Stephen Endelman share a friendship and creative trust that's rooted in their collaboration on the 2000 Sundance winner Two Family House. The director, a jazz pianist himself, notes that Endelman “scored the most emotional scene in Rob the Mob first, and it changed the entire vibe of the movie, just took it to another level.” That inspired an unusual filmmaking experiment: De Felitta bringing in the composer “as soon as we started editing, so he could start writing and we could find the sound together.” Working against the backdrop of a mob gone to seed, Endelman’s spare cues are often the film’s wistful soul. The composer credits De Felitta with the idea for the score’s opening gambit/recurring theme, a bona fide “60s/Italianate pop song.” The director says that crafting that dizzy Franco-American pop melodrama was a puzzle: “How do you write an Italian pop song to be translated into English, given that I don’t speak Italian? It had to sound a little stilted, so I wrote ‘Love and a Gun.’”