I made a fantastic discovery yesterday: I finally found the score to the US theatrical version of Luc Besson's movie The Big Blue. I saw The Big Blue in theaters on Cape Cod when I was 13 and was fascinated and impressed by the movie. Years later I found the VHS tape of the movie for sale while in college in Colorado and I bought it and watched it a lot during my college years. Somewhere around 95 I was on Xmas break and was up in San Francisco visiting Cella with some friends because we were going to see Primus play there on New Year's Eve, and while we were acting all touristy during the day we went into Amoeba Records in Berkley and I found the soundtrack to The Big Blue and I bought it immediately because I was such a fan of the music in that movie. Well, to my displeasure it was not the music I was looking for, as I would later discover that in the French release of the movie (titled Le Grand Bleu) Luc Besson had used his since-frequent composer Eric Serra to score the movie, but when it came over to the US they trimmed down the length of the movie, gave it a "happier" ending (which is far worse) and gave it a new score from composer Bill Conti.
At the time I'd never seen the French release, so I didn't know any of this, but instead just listened to the Eric Serra score on the CD I'd bought. Years later when the DVD finally came out it was the French release with the extended version and far, far superior ending. The only issue I had with it was that it was with the original Eric Serra score and not the Bill Conti score, which was apparently not available anywhere except on the VHS tape (which I no longer had). Well naturally I've long wanted that Bill Conti score, but I'd kinda written it off. Then the other day I saw a 2001 documentary on a couple free divers who were leaders in the sport and which had narration by Jacques Mayol (who apparently killed himself 6 years ago), and naturally that made me think again of The Big Blue. This prompted me to search around and see if there was anything out there about the original Bill Conti score, and that's when I found the whole thing, ready for download from this website here. Naturally I downloaded it right away and have been listening to it rather non-stop ever since and it is every bit as beautiful as I remember it.