“Up Where We Belong,” from An Officer and a Gentleman, may now be a wedding standard, but back in early 1982 it was just a gorgeous tune floating through the mind of Canadian-American singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie.
“I wrote the melody at my piano, just playing music by myself for fun,” Sainte-Marie, 82, tells THR. “It just popped into my head like songs do.”
When composer Jack Nitzsche reached out to her to collaborate on the Officer score, she played him “my melody and hook and the bridge, but there were no words yet.” Director Taylor Hackford then enlisted lyricist Will Jennings, who watched a rough cut of the film. By the final scene — when Richard Gere’s naval officer scoops up Debra Winger’s factory worker — he’d formulated a ballad about love soaring to where “eagles cry on a mountain high.”…