Saturday Night at the Movies

by Jenny Nelson

  Both directors and composer used True Grit (2010), the revisionist western adaptation of the 1968 book by Charles Portis, as an example of tackling the music early on in the film-making process. As Burwell explains, ‘There had already been a film of True Grit, so the question was: “What are we going to do that distinguishes our film from that? What’s going to be different from it?” Joel and Ethan had already made films that featured authentic country music (see O Brother, Where Art Thou?) and they didn’t really want to do a western score or a faux western score’ – or, in Joel’s words, ‘We didn’t want twangy guitars or Ennio Morricone.’

  The story of Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old farm girl who hires Deputy US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges, to track down the outlaw who killed her father, True Grit required a certain kind of music to set it apart from the 1969 original (with John Wayne as Cogburn), which, as Burwell acknowledges, ‘had a wonderful Elmer Bernstein score’, so the composer turned to the main character for inspiration. ‘I had read the book, I had read the screenplay, and we got together just before they left to shoot. I said that my thought was that the book is narrated by the girl and her voice is present on every page, and you’re constantly hearing references to the Bible, church, sin, judgement, and her church background sort of explains why she does what she does, but that’s not so present in the movie. So I thought that one thing that would help was if the music emphasised this church background, and if we worked from hymns for the score in some way, whether it was sung or played orchestrally or on a different instrument – and Ethan said he’d been thinking about the same thing!’ From Ethan’s point of view, ‘That’s why Carter’s great. He always knows it’s about the characters and that’s where I’m going mentally first to think about the score.’

  While the brothers were shooting the film, the composer was trawling through nineteenth-century hymnals and collecting Protestant hymns, such as ‘The Glory-Land Way’ and ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’, to reorchestrate or reference in the final score. One highlight is ‘The Wicked Flee’, a simple piano tune based on the hymn ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’, which is elevated by soaring strings in the final thirty seconds. The same infectious refrain, used as Mattie Ross’s theme, features in other cues like ‘Ride to Death’ and ‘River Crossing’. Due to the presence of pre-composed hymns, Burwell’s score was deemed ineligible for the Academy Award for Best Original Score, but True Grit received ten nominations in total, including Best Director, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. It went home empty-handed, but remains the Coen Brothers’ highest-grossing film to date.

  Burwell is keen to point out that working with the Coens can be very different from working with other directors, which can be a big advantage when it comes to the score: ‘It doesn’t really get concrete until they show me some footage. With Joel and Ethan, unlike most directors, they’re happy to show me a rough scene put together. Because we know each other so well, and because they write and produce and direct and edit their films, we all have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be. There isn’t really any uncertainty, there aren’t any other personalities that are going to suddenly appear and change the film. If we’re talking about what we think it’s going to be, that’s what it’s going to be.

  ‘What I’ve just said might seem obvious to some people but in fact film isn’t typically done that way. Probably most feature films involve a lot of unpredictable input from producers and executives, and they test the films in front of audiences and those tests can result in changes, so it’s not necessarily true that once you’ve read the script or even once you’ve seen the first rough cut that you actually know what the film in the end is going to be – but with Joel and Ethan, typically you do.’

  Returning to the start of their partnership and careers, the Coens followed Blood Simple with Raising Arizona (1987), a kidnapping comedy which was by all accounts a conscious decision to create something lighter and with more sympathetic characters – although a violent and unpredictable streak remains in this tale of Hi and Ed, a childless couple who steal a baby. Burwell tried out new sounds and styles, and the main title, ‘Way Out There’, is a gloriously bonkers musical journey, starting ominously before introducing a frenetic banjo, wistful whistling, and finally some spritely yodelling – all in under two minutes. Burwell’s detailed website provides information and composer’s notes about his scores, and it states that the music for Raising Arizona was largely ‘improvised using household objects – vacuum cleaner hoses, hubcaps, peanut butter jars’.

  Displaying a tendency to leap across form and genre – it’s quite common for the Coens’ films to alternate between light-hearted and darker tones – their next project was the neo-noir gangster film Miller’s Crossing (1990). This was their third collaboration and the composer’s first orchestral score: ‘No one other than the Coen Brothers would’ve hired me to do an orchestral score knowing that I knew nothing about orchestral music!’ It was certainly a leap from the banjo, but the large orchestra allowed for a more traditional sound to fit the Prohibition-era setting. Burwell based most of the score around Irish folk ballads to complement the story of double-crossing Irish mobsters and the stirring end titles, based on ‘Lament for Limerick’, provide a beautiful contrast to his earlier scores. By this stage, the composer had proved his versatility and appetite for new styles, instruments and performers, which has only continued throughout their partnership.

  Their sixth collaboration, Fargo (1996), was the brothers’ breakout film. A critical and commercial success, it won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress, for Frances McDormand, from a total of seven nominations, including Best Picture. Fargo premiered at the 1996 Cannes film festival and Joel won the Prix de la mise en scène, the Best Director Award – a solo winner despite the fact the brothers work as a pair, because up until The Ladykillers (2004), Joel was credited as director and Ethan as producer. Fargo’s enduring popularity is evident in the Emmy Award-winning television series of the same name, set in the same fictional universe and executive produced by the Coen Brothers.

  The dark comedy crime thriller following a pregnant police chief investigating roadside homicides opens with this perfectly pitched text: ‘This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.’ As you read this on the screen, you hear the gentle harp of ‘Fargo, North Dakota’, which leads you from the black background to a white wall of snow, gradually building until you can make out a car driving towards you. It’s a simple scene of a car towing a trailer, but in Burwell’s hands, complete with dramatic drums and crescendos, the tone is austere and spellbinding.

  Burwell chose this, along with Blood Simple, as his favourite Coen Brothers’ score: ‘I’m certainly very proud of Fargo for a variety of reasons. Both the score and the film are very good and very individual. They’re not really like anything else. I’m also proud because I think that was one of the first scores I orchestrated myself, and conducted, so it was a big step for me.’ He based the main musical motif on a Norwegian folk song called ‘The Lost Sheep’, and used a traditional Scandinavian instrument, the Hardanger fiddle, to add fragility and ‘a shimmering glowing drone to the played notes’. There is sadness and depth throughout – the perfect foil to the dark humour – and the elegant melancholy of ‘Safe Keeping’ could easily play bedfellow to Burwell’s later Academy Award-nominated score for Carol.

  Joel recalls Fargo as an example of the composer creating something exceptional with minimal direction: ‘We didn’t quite know what we wanted and Carter came up with some sketches and then we said, “No, you know, what we really think is going to work is something that’s a lot bigger and operatic and orchestral.” And he went away and did that beautiful score for Fargo, just essentially . . . on that information. Melodically, he was inspired by some Scandinavian folk thi
ng but that was him taking that cue and going off and doing something totally different with it.’

  Ethan and Joel Coen at the Academy Awards in 1997, where they won Best Screenplay for Fargo.

  Part of the success of the Fargo score is due to its sombre tone, which enhances the film’s comedic elements. On his website, Burwell refers to the challenge of scoring dramatic music that provides ‘exaggerated seriousness’ to complement or underplay scenes that veer deftly between laughter and surprise or shock in the audience. The Coen Brothers are fond of experimenting with light and shade in their film-making, and Burwell’s scores similarly tease the audience’s expectations: ‘They like to work with a genre, like the western or the film noir, so we’re inevitably working with the tropes of that genre. They do it when they’re film-making and writing, and I’m doing it in the music too. A lot of scores to comedies are just full of parody and winks at different musical genres or different films, and we don’t do much of that, but we are definitely commenting on the traditions of particular genres.’

  The Coens’ most recent comedy, Hail, Caesar! (2016), is set in the Hollywood film industry of the 1950s. A fictional tale about real-life ‘fixer’ Eddie Mannix, played by Josh Brolin, who spends his time keeping his actors on the straight and narrow, it gave the pair the opportunity to recreate films of the era, including a Roman epic and set pieces for synchronised swimmers and singing cowboys. This required a broad musical palette, as Joel explains: ‘It does by necessity have to jump all over the place . . . the question was, how much do you have to link all of those things and how much can you move around and still have it feel as a sort of coherent score for the movie? It was a little bit delicate, but [Burwell] came up with this central theme for the biblical movie that we realised also was going to work in different orchestrations for vastly different parts of the actual movie.’

  The theme is played on solo piano at the start as Eddie Mannix sits in his car on a rainy night, and reappears to rousing effect in the title cue with all the brass you could shake a Ben-Hur-sized stick at. It returns with woodwind and strings as Mannix sets out to find who kidnapped actor Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), with percussive flourishes and a choir providing the finishing touches to ‘In Pursuit of the Future’. According to Ethan, ‘The ambition was to come up with something for Josh’s character that would work . . . for the Roman movie within the movie . . . Actually, our one specific point of reference was Alex North who did the score for Spartacus, kind of like that in terms of feeling, and that was repurposed in a more pompous way for the Roman part of the movie.’

  Some of their earlier comedies relied less on score than on existing songs, with Burwell filling in the gaps, such as The Big Lebowski (1998).* The eclectic soundtrack features Kenny Rogers, Bob Dylan, Henry Mancini and Nina Simone, and Burwell provided some original cues including the techno-pop homage ‘Wie Glauben’, a million miles away from his usual sound-world.

  On other occasions, Burwell has had to compose around existing classical music, most notably Beethoven piano sonatas in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The brothers had written the music into the script, and as Ethan explained, ‘That was an interesting discussion because we were thinking . . . “What’s going to sit well with the Beethoven?” and we agreed quickly that Carter was not going to compose some faux Beethoven. Carter came up with something which is totally a different idiom but really just the thing.’ The closing piece, ‘The Trial of Ed Crane’, is aching and delicate, and Ethan seems to find these cues particularly arresting, referring to Burwell’s work on the comedy drama A Serious Man (2009): ‘Just very spare piano, which is really beautiful. I don’t quite know how to connect it in a literal way with the movie but it’s just the thing for that movie.’

  The composer used percussion to connect to the scheming, incompetent characters in the black comedy Burn After Reading (2008), most notably in ‘Earth Zoom (In)’ and ‘Night Running’, which he explains was an early concept: ‘They liked it right away. And the idea that because the characters all imagine themselves to be at the centre of some international intrigue when in fact they’re not, using that as a jumping-off point for the music, that feels logical. But actually finding the right tone for George Clooney and his part of the story, how dark should it be or how musical or how spy-like – that took a little bit of time to figure out.’

  Music is scarce in No Country for Old Men (2007), the Coen Brothers’ award-winning adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, but when it appears during the end credits, you certainly know it’s there. Considered by many to be Joel and Ethan’s masterpiece, this cat-and-mouse thriller set in the desert landscape of west Texas has been described as a ‘neowestern’ and ‘neo-noir’, packed with memorably tense scenes featuring Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, one of the greatest on-screen villains of recent decades. Bardem won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the Coens picked up the Oscar for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture.

  Burwell estimates that there is probably only about thirteen minutes’ worth of score throughout the entire film. You might not even notice any music at all: ‘It is hidden always. Sometimes you hear it disappear but you never hear it appear, and it’s always blended into things like the sounds of tyres on a pavement or the wind, because every time when we would watch it, every time we would be aware that there was music, it would lower the reality level of the film and the stress would go out of it in some way. The silence in the film, the quietness, is the thing that really put you on edge.’

  He still thinks of new ideas for what might have worked for the score even now. ‘Blood Trails’, which played over the end credits, was initially written to feature in the film itself, but the directors were keen to avoid a typical score. They later recalled their initial discussions with Burwell about the film’s musical direction, acknowledging the score as ‘probably one of the strangest assignments Carter’s ever had’. They wanted music for the end credits, but couldn’t give him any kind of brief or context for what they were after. In Joel’s words, ‘It could be anything, and probably nothing will work!’ Somehow Burwell came up with the goods, as Joel described it: ‘It was so smart: he’d listened to the last scene and he took the music out of that ticking clock, which was kind of the beat in the kitchen there, and it was . . . perfect.’

  For his part, the composer saw ‘Blood Trails’ as a good way to segue viewers gently and seamlessly from the film’s silence to a piece of music. ‘It begins in this very minimalist way, with just a shaker. Skip [Lievsay] and I arranged a sound design and a segue into the score, so that the sound of the film ends on a ticking clock and that brings you into the shaker of the end credits, then slowly works through some of the ambient sounds that I used in the film that don’t even sound musical, and then eventually a guitar appears.’

  The success of the Burwell–Coen partnership is due partly to a shared sense of what works and what doesn’t, but Burwell knows from experience that this isn’t always the case: ‘Any collaboration is political. I have my ideas of what the music will be, which is not always going to be the same as the director. Hopefully we see the big picture the same way, and disagree about some of the smaller things. Some directors will just say, “No, that’s not going to work, do something different.” Joel and Ethan will usually give me a lot of rope with which to hang myself.’ He points out that he knows the Coens well enough to be able to sense from their tone of voice whether or not they feel he’s on the right track. For their part, the Coens point to Burwell’s versatility as a huge asset. According to Ethan, ‘Carter will do almost anything. Musically he’s a real chameleon, as you have to be if you’re scoring movies’ – especially Coen Brothers movies.

  Burwell describes their working relationship as ‘really not like work at all because each of the three of us is simply trying to make the best movie from our point of view’. He says neither he nor the Coens focus on thinking about how the film might be received by an audience or the studio or anyone e
lse, which not only makes the process easier but enables them to be bolder in what they set out to do: ‘It means you can take more chances because I don’t have to worry that someone’s going to come back and say, “What in the world are you thinking?” As long as the three of us see the logic of it, and see that this is the best way to go, then the job is done.’

  When asked for his advice to aspiring film composers, Burwell places communication at the heart of collaborative success: ‘Every director is different, so you just have to be sensitive to that, as a composer. I like to always have some concept behind the score, if only for myself, and I’m usually prepared to verbalise that so when I play it . . . I can explain it, which isn’t always easy to do with music.’ Ultimately though, for him, it’s the score you write that matters: ‘You have to watch the film with the music and feel that it’s doing the right thing, it’s making the film better, it’s saying something that isn’t otherwise there, creating a richer experience . . . No amount of reason or concept is going to be more important than that.’

  Collaboration History

  (All films directed, written, produced and edited by Joel and Ethan Coen)

  Blood Simple (1984)

  Raising Arizona (1987)

  Miller’s Crossing (1990)

  Barton Fink (1991)

  The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), co-written with Sam Raimi

  Fargo (1996)

  The Big Lebowski (1998)

  O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

  The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

  Intolerable Cruelty (2003), co-written with Matthew Stone and Robert Ramsay

  The Ladykillers (2004)

  No Country for Old Men (2007)

  Burn After Reading (2008)

  A Serious Man (2009)