PM Rajiv Gandhi approached his friend Suresh Mullick of the leading ad agency Ogilvy and Mather to make a film on the topic. It was then passed to Kailash Surendranath to direct the film…. He said, ‘We wanted to make a film on the concept of Chariots of Fire. We wanted to catch the spirit of the Olympics. Louiz Banks made that rousing kind of music that lent to it a feel of a military organ. It set up a new trend of music.’
While legendary composer Vangelis synthesised the instrumental sounds on his CS-80 keyboard to give a period film sound, Louiz’s tune had a deeply patriotic feel. The key that proclaimed like a bugle at the onset of the music set the ball rolling. As the torch gets handed down from one sports legend to the other, the music soars up like philharmonic crescendo and grows broader and broader in grandeur. It was purely Western in its feel, but the climactic twist was a sign of pure genius….
It set a new trend of national integration films…. Louiz was given the best National Integration Film Music Award from Advertising Club of Bombay for Spread the Light of Freedom (1988). And it led to another film, Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, that came a year later, the most iconic film ever made on national integration till date.
From ‘Louiz Banks: A Symphony of Love’