[music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, and today we're launching the 2023 edition of our annual Oscar series, Big Picture. Over the next few weeks ahead of the Oscars on March 12th, we'll be speaking to the creators whose names don't end up on the poster necessarily, but who are essential to the success of the movies, people like editors, sound engineers, makeup, set designers, and composers like our guest today. Carter Burwell has composed the score for every Martin McDonagh film since 2008's In Bruges, and he's up for an Academy Award this year for another McDonagh movie starring Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell. Here's a bit of his score for The Banshees of Inisherin.

[music]

Alison Stewart: The Banshees of Inisherin about a friendship between two men gone wrong is nominated for nine Total Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Actor for Colin Farrell, Best Supporting Actor for Barry Keoghan and Brendan Gleeson, and Best Supporting Actress for Kerry Condon. This is Burwell's third Oscar nomination following his scores off of another Martin McDonagh film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Todd Haynes' Carol. Carter, so nice to meet you.

Carter Burwell: It's nice to meet you too.

Alison Stewart: This movie takes place in 1923 Ireland, on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, but your score, people heard it, it doesn't sound like classic 1923 Irish music. I read this funny quote early on. Martin McDonagh told you that he hated, this is a quote, "Deedle-doo, old world, Irish film music." First of all-

Carter Burwell: That's correct. That is word-for-word quote. Yes.

Alison Stewart: What did you think when you first heard that? Let's start there.

Carter Burwell: I had read the script and we were just talking about the film before he shot it, and I thought, "Yes, it's about two Irish men on an Irish Island. The Irish Civil War's going." It'd be a little bit Irish, but yes, as you can tell, Martin hated that idea. He wasn't specific about what he did want, but he knew that he didn't want that. I think once I started working on the film after he shot it, it became clear that I think what he was really saying was that he wanted to loosen the connection between the story and the place a little bit.

It's so much shot in that place. The photography is beautiful, sets you on this island, sets the costumes, and just even the way that people walk and ride horse-drawn carriages around, you know you're in a very specific time and place. I think basically Martin thought, "Well, that's enough of that." He really wanted music, I think, to take you out of those specifics and make the whole thing a little more general and a little more like an allegory, honestly, or a fable.

Alison Stewart: When you did first read the script, what jumped out at you?

Carter Burwell: I think probably the same thing that jumps out at anybody who sees the movie, which has to do with this fiddler, played by Brendan Gleeson, who seems unable to get his best friend to leave him alone, and he has to make a threat that he'll cut off his fiddle fingers if his friend doesn't leave him alone. This is very, I guess we could say, McDonagh-esque, but [unintelligible 00:03:51] suddenly go from 5 miles an hour to 150, but that definitely leapt out at me, and then you're suddenly in a slightly different movie, but then at the same time, you feel like you're in a different movie, but then everything actually just keeps rolling along and the dialogue is same as it had been before.

To a surprising extent, the relationships don't change, but yes, the movie makes these leaps in terms of what you might expect. I think whatever you're expecting when you go into this movie, it's not going to be that. You can expect it to be a comedy, but in fact, it's very sad, or you go in expecting it to be a relationship drama, and it's so funny. Then it has these horrific bits too, but it's also got a charming miniature donkey. It's like from a Disney film. It's so many different things, and that's what I loved about it.

Alison Stewart: It is like some of the roads in Ireland [unintelligible 00:04:51] switch back and you go around and then, "Oh my God, I'm going off the edge," and, "Oh, now, it's very pretty and scenic."

Carter Burwell: Then you're back where you began.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Carter Burwell, composer of The Banshees of Inisherin, nominated for best original score. You've cited Brahms and Indonesian music as sources. I'm going to have to ask you about. Let's start with Brahms. Why Brahms?

Carter: Well, Martin actually chose the Brahms [unintelligible 00:05:15] they're songs, they're sad. They appear in the film at these two places where something very sad has happened, but it's interesting, they're very astute choices, I thought, because even though they are Brahms, there's something a bit modern about them. The piano parts are often just the same note again and again and again and again, and shift very unwillingly to a new chord which seems a bit modernist, but also a bit like the characters in the film, but Martin chose those.

I think for these particular, let's just say, very sad moments, you could have played them with score, but the fact that the score is very restrained, I'm just almost painfully restrained a lot of the time. I think that letting a singer singing Brahms take you to these particularly emotional moments maybe was in fitting with the restraint of the score, but then the other one, yes, the Indonesian one, that also came from Martin, but I thought, "Where are we going to put that?" It was a piece that he liked and he wanted to try to find a place for it, but it just sounds so much from a different place.

With the Brahms, you could at least imagine Brendan Gleeson's character listening to it. We see him listening to John McCormick singing some classical songs, but with the Indonesian music, I just thought we would get to the middle of the movie and suddenly we'd be on an island in Indonesian and people would be confused. I actually tried to help with that by inserting some gamelan sounds into the score right from the beginning, and I thought, "Okay, this will help it so that when we get to this Indonesian piece, it'll blend a little."

I liked the gamelan in the score as well, and also some wooden instruments like marimba that I thought would help with that transition.

Then what we finally did, we'd written all the score and we're looking at this gamelan piece, we all disagreed. It still doesn't really make sense, and we've got all these great themes already for all the characters in story elements and sounds. Anyway, basically, I ended up writing the one place that the gamelan was going to go. That Indonesian piece is no longer in the film, but the instruments do live on in what I wrote, like ghosts of that piece.

Alison Stewart: Well, you had to go through that to get to where you needed to be.

Carter Burwell: Well, that's right. Anyone who does creative work is familiar with that journey, and that's true. I know with writers, they'll often be-- they'll call them orphans, little bits of something that are left behind that don't make any obvious sense, but they were left from some earlier version, earlier story elements, and sometimes the illogic of it is beautiful.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to another track called a cue in the score. This is Delivering Milk But No News. What's one thing our audience could listen for in this song?

Carter Burwell: This is actually one of the very first things I wrote and sent to Martin. The version I sent him is very much like what you're hearing, except at the end, there was a cadence at the end, where having shifted between minor and chromatic harmonies, it landed at the end on a major feeling. That came as a surprise. I liked the surprisingness of that, but when Martin heard it, he thought, "Oh, we can't say it's that kind of movie. It isn't that kind of movie. You can't ever actually just conclude on a major chord." I changed the way it ended into something that's more ambiguous, but otherwise, basically, it is the first thing that I wrote for the film, other than that change of the very, very end.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to Delivering Milk But No News from The Banshees of Inisherin.

[music] [music]

Alison Stewart: Delivering Milk But No News from Carter Burwell. He is nominated for best original score for The Banshees of Inisherin. There's a couple of motifs that appear in some of these cues, these tracks, and the one in Delivering Milk No News sent my producer Simon to a piano to plunk it out so that we could hear it. You want to play-- I have here-- let's play it.

[music]

Alison Stewart: How would you describe that motif, Carter?

Carter Burwell: The intention of that motif is to play Colin Farrell's character largely. We're just still getting to know him, which is, there's a certain innocence there, he's like a man-child and that the celeste, the little bell-piano on top of the melody is playing that. Then there's just this rolling rhythm that whenever you see people on this island, they're either walking or in a horse drawn cart. No one ever runs anywhere and there are no machines.

There's a particular rhythm to the way people move, and it's also playing that. It's very deliberate. It doesn't matter if something absolutely horrible is going on or someone's house is on fire, people still move at that speed. There's that, there's also a certain deliberate quality, and then down below, there are the gamelan gongs that I was talking about, which I think they play something like a baseline, but they have these harmonics that are not like Western instruments.

They don't line up with the sounds that are appearing above them. There's something interesting about that. You could say it's a little bit off, there's a mystery there. Why are those instruments there? Why aren't the harmonies simpler? Even here at the beginning of the film, I think it's suggesting that there's going to be something else going on. It's not just going to be a simple spat between two friends.

I think those are the important elements that I would point out. At the very end, the alto flute I think comes in, and you could say that's a little taste of Ireland even though I was told not to do that. There was something about the lower flutes, alto and bass flutes seemed really appropriate to this film. They also have a dark, sad, somber quality.

Alison Stewart: I want to play Siobhán Leaves. Let's take a listen to this.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Something I love about that, the beginning is so restrained and sparse, and it leaves us some room for imagination and then it starts to fill and swell.

Carter Burwell: Thank you. Yes, that's exactly right. In many ways, this is probably the most emotional piece of music in the film, and yet it is still so sparse. That makes it all the more painful because the music isn't telling you how to feel about this. You know what it must mean to these characters. Siobhán is the sister of Colin Farrell's character, Pádraic. She's leaving the island and you get the impression no one has ever left the island, and she's leaving. This has got to be the worst thing that's ever happened to him, although wait three minutes and there'll be another worst thing.

In other films you might have the strings swell like a big-- have the music pulling feeling from the audience or slathering it onto the picture, however you want to look at it. This one really refuses to do anything like that, and often in the most painful moments, it is at its quietest and I think it makes it all the more painful. Ideally, I think that's the way it works. It's not just my magic, it's the way that Martin has written and directed it and what the actors do. It just tugs at you.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Carter Burwell, he's a composer, he is nominated for best original score for The Banshees of Inisherin for the Academy Awards. This is an interesting part of your story. I don't know if people know this. You studied animation and computer technology. The composer thing was a little bit of an accident, a happy accident at this point. It wasn't the plan. What was the original plan?

Carter Burwell: I'm not the kind of person who ever had a plan. To this day I can't tell you what my career plan is, but I've always liked doing different things, so that partly explains it. I went to college to do math. I ended up doing animation, but I also had some computer skills. So then I ended up doing computer animation. I did an independent study at the MIT Media Lab, which is one of the very few places people were doing computers and animation at that time.

While I was doing these other things, I was also playing in bands with friends and playing in New York City. It's through that I was just playing out for fun, I never thought it would be a vocation. Then someone asked, "Oh, would you do music for this film? It's a no budget film, it's filmmakers who have never done anything before, but you might enjoy it. There's no money. Is that interesting to you?" As I always said to anything I hadn't done before, I said, "Yes, of course I'll do it." I met with Joel and Ethan Coen. It was their first film and ended up scoring it.

They kept saying, "Oh, this movie will probably never come out, so don't hold your breath," but eventually it made it to the Toronto Film Festival, New York Film Festival, eventually got some distribution, and then other people started calling. I love film and I love music. It's amazing that somehow that became a profession that you can make a living doing. It is my love of those that certainly contributes to it. I like to write music, but I also definitely think of myself as making a film when I'm doing this. I'm thinking about what I can contribute to the overall experience of the film, but yes, just totally by chance.

Alison Stewart: Do you ever still work in animation just for yourself?

Carter Burwell: No. I have an idea right now of an animated thing I want to do, and I have not done that in, at this point it would be decades. It's not like you can really just whip a piece of animation off in an afternoon. That's the nature of it. It takes a certain obsessive dedication, but I have a little thing in mind which maybe if I do it, I'll give you a call and let you know.

Alison Stewart: Please do, please do. By the way, for folks who want to know, it was Blood simple, was that little Cohen brothers film.

Carter Burwell: That little Cohen brothers film was Blood Simple. That's right.

Alison Stewart: When you're thinking about scoring a film, the score needs to be present and it needs to have an impact, but it needs to be part of a whole. When you're working with a filmmaker, how does one achieve that? How does one achieve having something be a part of a whole, but also not taking away from the other elements? It's a little [crosstalk]

Carter Burwell: No, that's true. That's what I meant when I said I think of myself as being a filmmaker. It's really not about the music although that is another hat that I wear. I want to be proud of the music when it's done, but in the end, I'm the only person who cares about that. Everyone else involved wants the film to work. I think about it in those terms. I think about what is the film missing, for instance, is the first thing that I do. I think, "What can I contribute to it that isn't already there?" If you take Banshees as an example, I came to feel that something music could contribute was make it into more of a fable than something that's maybe really happening so that when things like the fingers are being cut off, you don't concentrate so much on the physicality of that. The film doesn't concentrate on it either, but they are there. There they are.

You think of it more as a fable, and in fables, things like that happen. In fact, while I was working on this, I was reading Cinderella, Grimm's version of Cinderella to my daughter, and the evil stepmother has her daughters cut off parts of their feet to fit into the slipper. I was about halfway through Banshees when I read that. I thought, "Oh, I see. This is what we're doing. We're making a fable." I was already well into it at that point, but then it just made sense to me.

Alison Stewart: Since we're on the subject of digits being cut off, we're going to play the first finger [laughs] What did you want this music to do at this point in the film?

Carter Burwell: At this point, I think everyone assumes that this threat that Brendan Gleeson is going to cut off any of his fingers is just a wild thing that he does as an unpredictable guy. You hear something bang on the door, and Pádraic goes out to see what it is. The whole film changes tone a bit at this point. It becomes a different thing. Yes, their lives go much more off the rails, and there's a darker tone, I think, to this piece of music that's taking you in that direction.

Alison Stewart: Carter Burwell is nominated for an Academy Award for best original score for The Banshees of Inisherin. Thank you for being with us, Carter.

Carter Burwell: Oh, it was my pleasure. Nice talking to you.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on the first finger.

[music]

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.