Carter Bur­well on writ­ing the sound­track to the Coen broth­ers’ career

Carter Bur­well has been respon­si­ble for carv­ing the son­ic archi­tec­ture of some pret­ty notable films over the last 30 years. Despite reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tions with direc­tors such as Spike Jonze, the Amer­i­can com­pos­er is most syn­ony­mous the Coen broth­ers, for whom he has scored near­ly every film since their 1984 debut, Blood Sim­ple. To cel­e­brate the release of the Coens’ lat­est, Hail, Cae­sar!, Bur­well talks us through some of the scores he has writ­ten for the broth­ers since his rela­tion­ship with them began, almost by acci­dent, back in 1983.

“I nev­er planned to make a liv­ing as a musi­cian, it was always an avo­ca­tion, so I always had day jobs of one sort or anoth­er. I met Skip Lievsay – he did sound effects for films – and he asked me if I would be inter­est­ed in doing some music for a film and it turned out it was the Coen broth­ers’ first film. I vis­it­ed them in the edit­ing room and they showed me a reel of the movie – they didn’t have a whole film yet. I don’t think they knew what they want­ed, I don’t remem­ber get­ting any sort of guidance.

“I went away and sent some­thing back to Joel and Ethan. I didn’t hear any­thing from them for months, I think the investors prob­a­bly want­ed them to hire some­one who actu­al­ly knew some­thing about film scor­ing, so they chat­ted to a lot of com­posers but even­tu­al­ly they called me. At that point I was in Man­ches­ter work­ing on a record with a friend [Thick Pigeon] on Fac­to­ry Records and they said, ​‘When you’re ready let’s record Blood Simple.’

“We built a score based on the pre­vi­ous themes I had cre­at­ed. I did a lot of stuff on piano and I was exper­i­ment­ing with reel-to-reel tape a lot, too. So I came back to them with a mix of all the things that inter­est­ed me at that time, in 1983. I wasn’t try­ing to imi­tate a film score at all, I was just doing stuff that I liked and think­ing how it might relate to that film. None of us knew, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, how to syn­chro­nise music to film, so I would make and edit music timed to a stop­watch, know­ing how long a cer­tain scene was. Look­ing back, I real­ly feel there’s a cer­tain beau­ty to that naivety.”

“The strangest part was that Joel and Ethan came to me and said they want­ed an orches­tral score – they knew per­fect­ly well that I had no expe­ri­ence writ­ing orches­tral music or any expe­ri­ence in clas­si­cal music at all. So it was amaz­ing – it still is amaz­ing – to me that they want­ed me to do it. Maybe it was out of loy­al­ty, I don’t know. My wife thinks it’s because they don’t like meet­ing new peo­ple! So while they were shoot­ing I was study­ing orches­tral music, just try­ing to get some ground­ing in orchestration.

“I remem­ber watch­ing a rough edit and with­out any music to it the film is real­ly cold and bru­tal. Gabriel Byrne is con­stant­ly get­ting beat­en up and hit in the head, and you can’t always fig­ure out why he’s doing what he’s doing. So I sug­gest­ed try­ing to do some­thing warmer with the music, to sug­gest that Gabriel Byrne’s char­ac­ter actu­al­ly has some love for Albert Finney’s char­ac­ter and that any betray­al is moti­vat­ed by love. They didn’t seem to like that idea. So I asked if they want­ed some­thing with a lit­tle more mys­tery, that was hard­er or cold­er and then they just said, ​‘How about neutral?’

“As a com­pos­er you are usu­al­ly one of the last peo­ple hired; Joel and Ethan had lived with the film for years at this point, so to have some­one come in and say, ​‘I’ve got a new idea that’s prob­a­bly going to change the film in some fun­da­men­tal way,’ … it’s hard as a film­mak­er to be open to sug­ges­tions like that. That said, when I actu­al­ly played them my idea they got it imme­di­ate­ly, but I’ve now appre­ci­at­ed since then that it’s dif­fi­cult for film­mak­ers to bring their film to a com­pos­er and keep an open mind about what they might do.”

“I remem­ber when they just had a script, Joel say­ing he didn’t think this film was going to need a score. The way he saw it was that sound effects would basi­cal­ly play the role of a score. With it being set in a hotel, he already had some idea of the sorts of sounds that would be made if you opened the door, the creak­ing and croak­ing sounds of the build­ing, this mos­qui­to that’s in the film – he felt that all of these sounds might be all that the film needs.

“Bar­ton Fink presents him­self as this very suc­cess­ful play­wright and a man of the world, fight­ing for the com­mon man, but in actu­al fact he knows very lit­tle about the real world. That was my take on it, and I thought if I had this child-like piano, played high up, that would illus­trate this inno­cent aspect of his char­ac­ter. Once I played it for Joel and Ethan they got the idea right away.

“With this film we includ­ed Skip [Lievsay] because we knew the role of sound design was going to fig­ure so promi­nent­ly. Skip also had to direct me to tell me where there was going to be a sound of the mos­qui­to, for exam­ple, so I would match music to that. We divid­ed the film up into its son­ic spec­trum of score and sound effects. It worked out real­ly well, I think, but it’s rare that the com­pos­er and sound design­er will sit down togeth­er and work.”

“Joel and Ethan didn’t know what the music should be but they did know what they didn’t want it to be, and that was comedic. There is com­e­dy in the movie but they want­ed to be sure that the vio­lence was always believ­able. In the open­ing cred­its it is called ​‘a true crime sto­ry’ and they want­ed peo­ple to believe this was a real story.

“The goons in the film, Steve Busce­mi and Peter Stormare’s char­ac­ters, are the ones doing the killing but they’re also idiots, they’re buf­foons. So that was a chal­lenge and in the end I decid­ed the best approach was for the music to not only take the crime aspect seri­ous­ly but take it too seri­ous­ly – so seri­ous­ly that it’s almost ridicu­lous. I stud­ied a lot of film noir scores and for the goon char­ac­ters I was already some­what famil­iar with Scan­di­na­vian folk music; all the char­ac­ters have Scan­di­na­vian names and the land­scape itself is cov­ered in snow, so I thought maybe some Scan­di­na­vian instru­ments – there’s a real­ly good instru­ment called a hardan­ger fid­dle – would work.

“I found this folk tune called ​‘Lost Sheep’, played on fid­dle, and I end­ed up devel­op­ing that into the main theme. It’s a hybrid of a Scan­di­na­vian folk tune and film noir instru­men­ta­tion. When they were first putting the TV series togeth­er some­body reached out but my sched­ule wouldn’t allow me to work on it so I said I wasn’t real­ly inter­est­ed, but if they want­ed to use any music from the film that was fine by me. I saw the pilot and because the music was kind of like the music I wrote for the movie, but at the same time dif­fer­ent, I found it a bit unsettling.”

“In Joel and Ethan’s films that fea­ture of lot of songs, they are usu­al­ly ref­er­enced in the script. The actu­al songs might change if they can’t get them or what­ev­er, but they felt that the music Jeff Lebows­ki lis­tens to is very illus­tra­tive of his char­ac­ter. So it was very impor­tant to have Cre­dence Clear­wa­ter Revival songs and Bob Dylan tunes. Those songs were writ­ten into the script, so I knew there was going to be a lot of them and that my work was going to be tying things together.

“Any­thing I wrote, I also want­ed it to sound like a song so you were nev­er aware of a film score. It’s hard to say why but I guess with a film score you have a piece of music that is com­ing through the speak­ers, but it’s not com­ing from any­where, nobody has turned on the radio or is play­ing an instru­ment. With The Big Lebows­ki I didn’t want to have a film score well up from the speak­ers – every­thing I wrote for the film has a source for it. For Jon Polito’s char­ac­ter, who is a pri­vate detec­tive, I wrote a score for music to be com­ing out of his car radio, and there was a Ger­man tech­no-pop band who I wrote music for. Every­thing was designed to be pre­sent­ed as a song.”

“This was an inter­est­ing one. From the moment they hired me – before they had shot the film – Ethan was dubi­ous that music could work in the pic­ture at all and Joel felt there was a very dra­mat­ic need for music in the film. So we were all a bit unsure about what the music would be or if there even would be music. So when I start­ed work on it, every time a musi­cal instru­ment entered this world, it seemed to reduce the lev­el of ten­sion in the film – and this film is all about tension.

“I tried all these dif­fer­ent sounds, even one that didn’t sound like instru­ments, but it would deflate the bal­loon a lit­tle. I was nev­er able to find a musi­cal instru­ment that didn’t make things worse, so in the end my solu­tion was to use sounds that don’t have a begin­ning or end, things like a Tibetan singing bowl.

’There’s a scene where Javier Bardem’s char­ac­ter is threat­en­ing a cashier in a gas sta­tion – I tuned into the same fre­quen­cy of the elec­tri­cal hum of that room, to inten­si­fy the sense of threat as the scene goes on. You nev­er notice there’s any music because it’s snuck in. The only place in the entire film where there is any­thing you would recog­nise as music is a piece I did for the end cred­its. I think the music in this film was about play­ing the land­scape; there’s some­thing about the land­scape that has result­ed in a lot of vio­lence and cru­el­ty in this part of the country.”

“There are a lot of films with­in this film: there’s a Roman epic, a west­ern, a melo­dra­ma, a tap dance num­ber, all these dif­fer­ent films that are being made that you see lit­tle bits of. I knew I had to write music for all these films, but they aren’t fin­ished films so real­is­ti­cal­ly there wouldn’t be music writ­ten for them yet.

“Scor­ing all these dif­fer­ent films involved a lot of research. I looked at scores for Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis, which Mik­lós Rózsa had com­posed – he’s known as the father of film noir music but he also did these grand Roman spec­ta­cles too, so it was real­ly inter­est­ing to study his work. He was mak­ing up his own idea of what music sound­ed like two thou­sand years ago, invent­ing what music around the time of Christ would have sound­ed like.

“The biggest chal­lenge was tying it all togeth­er to make sure it sounds like you’re watch­ing one film. My approach was to have some recur­ring melody that appears in dif­fer­ent guis­es in the dif­fer­ent films, to cre­ate a thread that would run through the film even though this melody would be played in many dif­fer­ent ways across the dif­fer­ent sub-plots of the film.”

Hail, Cae­sar! is in cin­e­mas 4 March.