Robert Lev­on Been on scor­ing The Card Counter

Robert Lev­on Been met direc­tor Paul Schrad­er through his late father, Michael Been, co-founder and lead singer of Amer­i­can rock band The Call, who was cast in Mar­tin Scorsese’s Schrad­er-script­ed 1988 film, Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ. A young Lev­on Been joined his father on loca­tion in Moroc­co dur­ing filming.

He would lat­er work with Schrad­er him­self when his father was approached to sound­track 1992’s Light Sleep­er after plans to work with Bob Dylan fell through. At just 16, Lev­on Been was giv­en a chance to con­tribute to his father’s songs, gain­ing first-hand expe­ri­ence of Schrader’s metic­u­lous ear for detail.

Fast-for­ward to 2020 and a chance call from Schrad­er led to the pair join­ing forces again. What ini­tial­ly start­ed out as a one-song project evolved into mul­ti­ple tracks, as well as con­tri­bu­tions to The Card Counter’s instru­men­tal score and sound design. The end result is two dis­tinct albums: a stand­alone sound­track and an LP of Lev­on Been’s own songs, devel­oped from ideas which formed the basis of much of the score.

LWLies: What are your mem­o­ries from the set of The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ?

Lev­on Been: That was my sum­mer break in fifth grade. The last place in the world any kid wants to go for their sum­mer break is Moroc­co when Dis­ney World is right around the cor­ner. My father had been cast as John the Apos­tle, so going into it, I can’t imag­ine how much that must have been weigh­ing on his shoul­ders, espe­cial­ly with all the leg­ends that were there. And to me, none of them were leg­ends. They were just peo­ple. It was a case of fig­ur­ing out who was fun and who was tak­ing it all way too seri­ous­ly, like Har­vey Kei­t­el and Scors­ese – some­times – and Willem Dafoe, who was under­stand­ably under a lot of pressure.

The fun ones were David Bowie and Har­ry Dean Stan­ton. To me, the rank of cool was who would try and help me find a decent piz­za. I stayed real­ly close with Har­ry and my father and him even did some shows togeth­er. Bowie was a lot of fun, but he was also one of the more con­ser­v­a­tive ones. He’d often be like, ​‘This is not the right envi­ron­ment for a child. You should prob­a­bly be in bed by now.’ He was always kind of moth­er­ly: ​‘We’ll have fun, but you’ve got to eat your peas and car­rots.’ It’s strange look­ing back, because at the time he was one of the more nor­mal ones. He was shy but he would play and have fun. He was just cool.

What did it mean for Schrad­er to con­tact you after all this time? Did it come out of the blue?

It couldn’t have been more blue. Covid derailed every­thing, so there was no plan for tour­ing or work on the hori­zon. I was try­ing to keep myself busy with oth­er stuff and then Paul called. I think the last time I’d heard from him, I was 16. He was just say­ing, ​‘I’m look­ing for the last song for this film. Would you be into writ­ing an orig­i­nal piece for this last scene?’ My first reac­tion was, ​‘Well, I’m kind of a film snob and I don’t want to fol­low First Reformed.’ He sent me the film and it had a temp score that was inter­est­ing in that it was very with­hold­ing. For the first 20 min­utes I was like, ​‘Oh god, how am I going to tell him that I don’t like this and I don’t want to do it?’

What changed your mind?

The film shift­ed gears, and then it shift­ed gears again in anoth­er 20 min­utes. I was like, ​‘I think I get the feel. You want to dive into the deep end and you’re the same crazy moth­er­fuck­er I still remem­ber.’ Then I start­ed writ­ing, but I also know how intense­ly crit­i­cal he is. I was send­ing things through and he’s famous for not giv­ing com­pli­ments – he’s always like, ​‘Some­thing like that…’

Your father’s work on Light Sleep­er had an influ­ence on the film. Was that some­thing that Paul com­mu­ni­cat­ed to you?

He didn’t want to repeat him­self, which was a big relief to me, but there are a lot of things that are inter­wo­ven with Light Sleep­er and I wouldn’t even know how to watch the film with­out hav­ing this ref­er­ence. Willem Dafoe’s char­ac­ter in Light Sleep­er is very self actu­alised. His sub­con­scious is awake and he’s self-actu­al­is­ing from the begin­ning of the film. And this was very much like our guy [Oscar Isaac’s char­ac­ter]: he isn’t there yet. He’s as suf­fo­cat­ed as the rooms that he’s wrap­ping and because of this trau­ma he’s very cut off and sti­fled. It’s almost like the music is a char­ac­ter in that it’s com­ing alive; I was just throw­ing in some lines that aren’t real­ly a song and are just kind of wak­ing up, the way the sub­con­scious starts wak­ing to cre­ate this arc. By the end it’s a full song, it’s a full melody, it’s even a duet. It evolved from repeat­ing a Light Sleep­er mech­a­nism that they used a lot for that film. But I didn’t want to have to mea­sure up to my father’s work and Schrader’s body of work.

It sounds like there was kind of like quite a lot at stake for you going into it.

It was strange because I told Paul, real­ly just off the cuff, ​‘You real­ly broke Michael’. He real­ly broke my father when he was work­ing on that film. It took him a day, and he came back and was like, ​‘Oh, I had no idea that that was his expe­ri­ence’. It was the oppo­site of Paul’s impres­sion. I was like, ​‘When you would leave and turn the cor­ner, I would watch my father just col­lapse, you know?’ Like, ​‘No, do it again from the start. Rewrite every­thing to this pre­cise sur­gi­cal degree.’ But he want­ed to. He want­ed to be bro­ken. Every­one kind of wants to be pushed to the lim­it and I was in the same boat. Break every bone in my body so it can heal stronger than it was before. And that’s what Paul did.

How full on was the whole process in terms of Paul pro­vid­ing feedback?

One of the things that I thought was pret­ty unique was that nei­ther of us can real­ly com­mu­ni­cate well. I thought that would be a prob­lem until I realised that if it’s not hap­pen­ing, then there’s no rea­son to talk and con­cep­tu­alise and bull­shit about it. The more he would hate some­thing, the more I’d be like, ​‘Oh, that’s fuck­ing great. Cool. So that harp and this kind of jazz, qua­si-dark off­beat thing? You fuck­ing hate that.’ It was bru­tal, but it would just be like, ​‘Alright, I’m going to go back to the draw­ing board.’ You just know what you fuck­ing hate and you know what it can’t be so much clear­er than the heav­en­ly thing that it will end up acci­den­tal­ly becom­ing. So that’s cool. I like that about him.

How did the sound­track start to take shape?

The first wrapped footage was the World Series of Pok­er. That scared the liv­ing shit out of me because it was like, ​‘Alright, come in and when Oscar lifts his chin up, that’s where you hear the first song of the film.’ I was like, ​‘Real­ly?’ And Paul was like, ​‘Yeah, and then there’s this voiceover – duck and weave around that and then right when it comes to the end of that, then they fade out and it’s gone.’ It’s a minute long and he didn’t give me any oth­er instruc­tion than that.

How did you tack­le it?

I just kept think­ing, ​‘How can I expand this guy’s sto­ry in anoth­er way?’ There was a lot of voiceover where I was like, ​‘If I’m singing lyrics, it’s gonna wash out your dia­logue.’ And Paul’s like, ​‘Oh, fuck it. It’s just some shit I wrote. It doesn’t mat­ter.’ With Paul, you get to dri­ve the car for about a minute and 20 sec­onds and then you get back in the back­seat. I just tried to open up the sto­ry more, and I was shocked that I was even able to do that. Because the oth­er thing with Paul is he doesn’t actu­al­ly think you’ll fuck­ing be able to do this shit. He loves ask­ing for Mars because he knows he’ll prob­a­bly get the moon if he asked for Mars. And he always does. He nev­er asks for the moon. He’s always like, ​‘Why don’t you try Plu­to and get back to me?’

You man­aged that, but you felt like you had unfin­ished busi­ness as far as the songs went, right?

The thing that was gnaw­ing at me the most was I was real­ly hap­py that I made Paul realise this vision. He admit­ted it was insane­ly ambi­tious – that was good – but as a song­writer that’s where I put all my focus. My engine was revving hot and I couldn’t stop, so I went back­wards a cou­ple of months to where I was writ­ing those songs and imag­ined what a last verse would be, what a bridge and an out­ro would be. That was my own way of putting all that ener­gy to some good use, rather than what­ev­er the hell else I was going to do with it.

I knew I was shoot­ing myself in the foot twice, because every­one will think that these were just songs that were cher­ry-picked and then short­ened down, because that’s the easy way to equate it. Even though I got the pat on the back from Don Schrad­er, I wasn’t done in my own head. And then because I couldn’t promise that I would fin­ish all these fuck­ing things in this win­dow before release, it got split up into two records. I was like, ​‘I want to fin­ish this song and that song,’ and they’re like, ​‘Yeah, we’re just gonna put out the instru­men­tal ver­sion.’ That allowed me the free­dom to at least fail.

Could a project like this hap­pen for you again someday?

All I know for cer­tain is it’ll nev­er hap­pen again in that way. There were so many things that thread­ed through mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tions. Even though the first time I watched it, I wasn’t sure I want­ed to do it, more would get revealed. Paul was real­ly doing a lot of intri­cate thread­ing between this and Light Sleep­er and my father’s work, because he’s also a very sen­ti­men­tal soul. Know­ing that – how he brought his heart and this his­to­ry into it – I didn’t real­ly feel like I had a choice but to help him see that through, because he was wear­ing his heart on his sleeve, as he always does. So yeah, if I do oth­er rock albums as scores… as hell­ish as it was, there will nev­er be a pain that sweet again, you know?

The Card Counter is released 5 Novem­ber. The Orig­i­nal Motion Pic­ture Score and Orig­i­nal Songs from the Motion Pic­ture albums are both avail­able now.