Tod Lippy: You were born in New York, weren’t you?

Carter Burwell: I was born in the city. My parents left for Connecticut within a year after my being born, thinking it wasn’t a good place to raise a child. But I spent my formative months in a carriage being wheeled around Washington Square Park.

When did you first develop an interest in music?

Well, I don’t really remember a first moment; I grew up with music like most children do, and my parents were both interested in it even though they were not really musicians. My mother, when they lived in New York, was interested in the Dixieland jazz scene here, and went to all these clubs. When I was growing up, she had a guitar, and would sing folk songs to me. I remember thinking—even when the guitar was much bigger than I was—that it was an interesting device. But, you know, all devices look interesting when you’re young. I took some piano lessons about the same age as most other people do—I guess I was about ten—and it just was horrible. It pretty much drove me away from the piano until in high school, when someone showed me how to play a blues progression so that the two of us could jam together. That was interesting to me. It turned out that the only thing that does interest me is making things up myself. Playing pre-existing pieces of music, whether they’re mine or anyone else’s, doesn’t interest me very much.

Did you get into rock n’ roll in high school or college?

I hadn’t been especially interested in rock n’ roll during high school; mostly I liked listening to old blues records. This friend of mine who showed me how to play the blues progressions, Steve Kraemer, was multi-instrumentalist—he could play piano or trumpet or harmonica or guitar, but of course he couldn’t play them all at the same time, so he needed to convince his friends to play accompanying instruments. That’s why he showed me how to play piano. We would haunt record stores looking for old blues records from the thirties on. Steve had taught me to disdain rock n’ roll as a poor stepchild to the blues—it was just a bunch of rich, white Brits trying to make money off of Black-American culture.
   But I met other groups of people in college—in particular, some of my friends who were interested in experimental rock, like Brian Eno, and Roxy Music, John Cale. That was interesting to me—it didn’t have that feeling of being derivative; it really felt like a sincere, fresh expression. I liked that; I liked that you couldn’t even tell what it was that was being expressed a lot of the time. So my interest started broadening, and then by the time the punk rock era was happening in the late ’70s, we started getting into that through people like Iggy Pop, who was punk rock, but, again, from a sort of ambiguous background. Of course, it was only two or three chords, but it wasn’t a 1,4,5 progression the way a lot of rock n’ roll was. It became more minimal in some way that interested me. And of course, the energy of it, the sexuality of it, were very striking for me in late adolescence.
   We went to see Iggy Pop on one of his first of many comeback tours at the Harvard Square Theater. It was senior year for me, and Blondie was the opening band. I don’t think their first album had come out yet. A band we’d never heard of, but an amazing performance, of course, and then Iggy, who I’d never seen perform, was quite spectacular. David Bowie was playing piano, and Soupy Sales’s sons, Hunt and Tony Sales, were playing bass and drums. It was extraordinary—there was such a rich combination of energies and interests on that stage.

Did you already know you were going to pursue a career in music at this point?

At the time, I was fully planning on going to architecture school. I’d applied to schools, but there was a recession going on, and all the architects I knew in Cambridge were unemployed. I looked in at the architecture school at Harvard, other places. You’d see people up all night, building models—lots of things that would never be built. And then, on the other hand, you’re looking at the stage, where it’s all happening so spontaneously. These people were making something—who knows what it is, but they were making something—and they were presenting it to the public. And since I wasn’t going to get paid in either discipline, I thought I might as well be not paid for something that was a little more fun and spontaneous. So I decided to take a year off before going to graduate school and do other things.

Did you stay in Cambridge?

I did. I hung around, because my other friends I was playing in a band with still had one more year of college, so I waited for them. During that year, I tried to learn as much as I could about music. We kind of all agreed that this is what we would do. For myself, the easiest way to get into music was through electronic and computer music, because I knew a bit about electronics, and more about computers, so I looked up the electronic music studio at Harvard, which turned out to be run by this extraordinary person named Ivan Tcherepnin, and he came from a long line of composers and conductors. He had this very broad mind about what constituted music, and not all electronic composers are like that. He really invited chance into his work. When things would go wrong, which they often did with these electronic instruments, he tried to make sure that whatever went wrong would work into the piece. He felt that a piece that can’t stand mistakes and meltdowns is the wrong piece.

It sounds very much like John Cage.

Exactly. Yeah, I realize now that Cage must have been a strong influence on him, but at the time I didn’t know Cage’s work. So I went and saw him, explained that I was interested in electronic music. Strictly speaking, only graduate students were allowed into that facility, but for some reason he gave me a key to the studio, and we actually co-taught a class. I had done some film study in college—I’d been an animator, among other things—and he was really interested in music and film, and thought that any contemporary composer should be interested in it, too. He viewed it as a great venue for new sounds, and new structures. So we agreed to teach this class together. I mean, I had no thought that I was going to end up doing music for films; it was just a handy way to get access to the studio, and to interact with a brilliant person. So I spent the year doing that, and then when my friends graduated we all agreed to come to New York and be a band. Most of them eventually matured and moved on to other things, but I never did…

Where did you live when you got here?

Well, when we first got here we really had no money at all. We were living off credit cards. Our first experience of New York was really pretty pathetic, in that we just could not find anything in Manhattan that we could afford to live in or rehearse in, so we ended up on Long Island. The first jobs we got to basically feed ourselves were on an assembly line in Syosset. We were rehearsing in some house in Long Island. And then after a year of that we found a rehearsal space called the Music Building, on 8th Avenue and 38th Street. It’s still used for this, but we were one of the first tenants after its life as a garment-industry building. The space we occupied was filled with bolts of fabric. Our deal with the young guy who had just bought the building was that if we converted it into something like a rehearsal studio, he would give us a break on our rent. So we got a three-year lease there.
   A lot of other interesting people were taking advantage of this, too, because it was one of the few places where a landlord was actually inviting musicians in—in most places, musicians were the opposite of an ideal tenant. Madonna was there when we were there; this gentleman, Steve Bray, who wrote a lot of material with her, and was her percussionist, her drummer, he also played drums with us. It was a real community. Bands would run up and down the stairs to borrow equipment, or musicians from each other.

And you were playing gigs at the time?

Yeah, we were playing at CBGB’s, the Mudd Club—a lot of clubs of the time. It was great. In a way, I can’t really picture how people go through their twenties without that. Most of the bands we were in were co-educational, with women as well as men, and yet there was this bonding element particularly amongst the guys. I don’t know what else to compare it to, except warfare or something. To spend so much time with each other—it was really an extended adolescence. I think that people who didn’t ever join a band are the ones who end up at middle age in the woods banging drums and trying to find that part of themselves. We had the good fortune to work it out ourselves in our twenties.

Didn’t you also have a job doing DNA sequencing around this time?

Yeah. Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, my day jobs—with the exception of the assembly-line thing—were always very interesting. I managed to get a job at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, which is a biology lab in Long Island. Just a lovely place—James Watson, who runs the lab, kept it looking like a country club. Tennis courts, and canoes, and there was a bar on the campus. Just a delightful place. They had these seminars during the summer, and making the physical environment so nice was his way of getting the best scientists in the world to come and spend a few weeks there. I was the all-around computer guy at the lab—my title was “systems programmer”—so I was helping people with whatever required computers: DNA sequencing, neurobiology image-processing of mostly brain scans. My main job had to do with cell biology, and analyzing what was called “gene expression,” which means looking at all the proteins in a cell, trying to quantify how proteins come and go as cells change with illnesses like cancer. I mean, I was not a biologist, I was just the computer guy, but again, it was not unlike the situation with Ivan. I’ve been incredibly lucky; people have been irrationally nice to me a lot of times in my life. James Watson treated me as a scientist, and gave me all the perks they had. I was able to live in this Victorian house on the grounds; our band even rehearsed there sometimes. In the neurobiology labs, they have these big rooms called Faraday cages, which are completely covered with conductive metal to keep any kind of radio interference out. When they weren’t doing an experiment in one of the Faraday Cages, we would rehearse in there. They liked that; we were the “lab band.”

How did you first meet the Coen Brothers?

It was from the music scene in New York. A woman who I’d done some recording with, Stanton Miranda, knew a bass player named Skip Lievsay, who was also a sound designer. He was working in film, although I really don’t know how much film he had done at that time. But he was working on Blood Simple. Joel and Ethan were looking for a musician to do their score—obviously for very little money—and Skip called me one day and asked me if it was something I would be interested in. Generally speaking, if someone asks me if I’m interested in something I’ve never done before, I’ll automatically say “yes.” So I went by their editing room and saw a couple of reels of the film.
   At that point, Joel and Ethan were so young—I mean, we were all the same age, in our late 20s—but they looked like they were just out of film school. And the film looked like it was just out of film school, too, although I couldn’t really tell anything about its quality by looking at a rough cut. And I didn’t have a demo reel of anything to give them, because I’d never done this before, so I just said I would go home and work up some sketches on the piano, whatever, and bring them in and play them for them. So I went home, did that, and came back a couple of days later and played them some things, from more traditional thriller-type music to stuff that really wasn’t like that—stuff that was gentler, more lyrical—to other things. At the time I was playing a lot with tape machines, playing things backwards at different speeds, so I included some of those experiments, too.
   I don’t think they cared especially for the bits that sounded more like traditional film music, but they liked the other ones. Although they continued talking to other film composers for months afterwards. I think the people who were backing the film really didn’t want Joel and Ethan, who knew nothing about film music, to hire a composer who knew nothing about film music.

Did the actual composing come easily to you?

It did come easily, partly because no one was really there to create a sense of stress. If you meet Joel and Ethan, you’ll realize that when you’re with them, you don’t feel the pressure of schedule, or millions of dollars, or audience response, bearing down on you at all. We really just sit around and try to entertain ourselves; it’s a very relaxed environment. I think this is what a lot of actors like about them as well—they really give you the comfort to do what you do best; they put a lot of trust in the people they work with.

I recall your saying somewhere that you’ll never be able to repeat the experience of writing that first score again.

There’s a beauty to that naïve first moment, when you give no thought, for instance, to how the music interacts with dialogue, or what happens at the beginning or end of a reel, or how reels change over, or how it’s going to mix together, or what the sound effects will be. I had no knowledge of any of this stuff. None of us knew even how to synchronize the recording of the music to the picture as we were recording it. So what we did was, I would have a stopwatch—which was a very familiar tool for me as an ex-animator—and I’d just say, “Okay, at fifty-three seconds the music should do this, and at a minute and twenty it should sort of do this.” I would sit at the piano—it ended up being mostly a piano score, with some electronics—and I would just try to play it such that it worked out with the stopwatch. In many ways, I look back on it fondly, because the music is more like music, and less like film music. All I knew at that time was how to do song-oriented music, really, so the pieces are more like songs compared to the music that I do now, which is finely crafted—contrived—to fit the dialogue and the moments of the film. We just tried to see where it would go. Even after I finished recording, Joel and Ethan kept changing where they put it, and played around with it quite a lot for the year after. Post-production went on for at least a year after we completed the score.

I was struck by certain points in the score that felt very industrial—almost like Glenn Branca’s stuff. Were you using samples for some of it?

There were samples of a lot of industrial sounds. Sometimes there are tape sounds. I had some recordings, those Alan Lomax field recordings from Parchman Farm prison, which were played backwards very low under one piece so that you hear voices, but they’re totally indecipherable. A lot of things like that.

Were you surprised at how well the film did?

As far as I know we were all surprised it got distributed at all. We were certainly surprised by its reception.

Did it directly lead to other jobs for you?

Well, it caused Tony Perkins to call me about Psycho III, which he was directing. I wouldn’t say that I thought of composing as a career yet, but it did result in my starting to get calls.

There are a number of directors you’ve worked with repeatedly—the Coens, Michael Almereyda, James Foley, Michael Caton-Jones—do you find that communication gets easier with every film?

It is generally easier, because the vocabulary of music is obscure, so someone I’ve worked with before, we’ve established our own vocabulary, which usually clarifies things. For instance, during Raising Arizona, we had this sound that was the result of blowing down the end of a vacuum-cleaner pipe. And of course, it’s time-consuming to say, “Why don’t we try that sound that happens when you blow down the end of a vacuum-cleaner pipe,” so we just called it the “shofar.” And whenever we needed that sound, we’d get out the “shofar.”

Generally speaking, how do you approach scoring a film? Do you read the script first, or see a rough cut?

I usually read the script, but that’s just a way of deciding whether or not to do the film at all. I wait until there’s a rough cut before I start writing music.

Is that something you see on tape?

It varies. Sometimes I’ll see it projected, and sometimes I’ll see it on tape. But it has to be on tape before I start working on it because I need to be able to try different things in my studio against the film, and I use videotape to do that. There are still people around who use a Moviola—I think John Barry does—but I’m a video man.

How often do you first see the rough cut in the presence of the filmmaker?

Well, usually I prefer to see it by myself, because if the first time I’m seeing the film the director or producer is there, then I’m obligated to make some intelligent comments about it as soon as the film stops and the lights come up. That can be a considerable obligation, because often at that point in the process no one outside of the director, producer and editor has ever seen it. They look at me with great expectation, and for that reason alone, it’s certainly more relaxing to just watch it by myself.

How long do you normally have to put a score together?

It varies. It’s usually something between three and six weeks.

Is that ever not enough time?

Well, that’s a difficult question to answer. You know, often one would want more time, but it always has to be enough time—it’s not as though a film can open with only half of the score done.

Do you compose on piano, or do you use a synthesizer?

I usually begin at piano, which lends itself to casual melodic exploration. Besides, it takes a half-hour to turn on all the synths and computers, at which point I’ve either forgotten what it was I wanted to do or I feel obligated now to spend the next several hours working. So I usually begin at the piano and then move to the synthesizers when I’ve got some basic themes.

How far will you go before you start presenting something to a director or producer?

Well, usually I’ll try to have at least one well-developed arrangement of a piece to present. In the old days, of course, people just played piano arrangements, and there are advantages to that, but these days, I think, we all expect to hear synthesized sketches because they give a bit more of a storyboard impression of what the final recording will sound like.

Do you ever present more than one option at this stage?

Usually no, but sometimes I do. If they don’t like the first option I play them, it’s sometimes good to have others in your pocket. But I like to try to control the process more. So either I present them with one option that I think is really good, or present them with one that’s good and another that’s so terrible they won’t use it. But that’s dangerous, because, of course, they might love that second one…

Are music cues decided by both you and the director normally?

There’s a process called the spotting session, where we go through and make those decisions as to where music should sit. Everyone has a voice in that—sometimes I’ll suggest music should be in a place where they hadn’t expected it; sometimes they’ll want it someplace where I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s a conversation, and I try not to have preconceptions about it.

At this point in your career, you’ve done everything from modestly budgeted independent films to big studio projects like General’s Daughter. Can you characterize the difference?

The big-budget films tend to involve more people—there’s a whole layer of corporate hierarchy that doesn’t exist on independent films. I try to ignore those people, but just ignoring them takes a little bit more energy, of course. And the obligation to sell enough tickets to make back the cost of a larger-budget film means that you’re also obligated to take the audience into account more often. Whereas with the independent films, we rarely think that much about the audience. Well, I’ll refine that: I rarely think that much about the audience. I’m sure there’s someone there thinking about it.

With the studio films, do you find you have to answer as much to producers or studio executives as to the director?

I kind of avoid that situation by setting a rule: If producers or executives have anything to say to me, they say it to the director, and then the director says it to me. That way I’m only really answering to one person. But there are generally more people who want to be involved in the process. You find a lot of executives want to say at least one thing to you, because if the film’s a success than they can go around telling everyone, “Oh, I gave Carter a few pointers on this.” And of course, if the film’s a failure, they’ll go around saying, “He didn’t do anything I asked him to do.” But I really try to avoid those conversations as much as possible.

How often do you see a rough cut of a film and say to yourself, “I’ve got to do this.”

Well, happily, it happens at least once a year. I see something that’s unusual, and feels like the right thing for me. That’s one reason why I work as much as I do—recently, people have been showing me interesting films that I really want to work on.

Did Being John Malkovich create that kind of response?

It did. I first read the script, and based on that, was pretty sure it was the right thing for me. I think I asked to see some cut of the film, because I didn’t know Spike Jonze. He had sent me a reel of some of his music videos, but still, some people who’ve been very successful in short formats have difficulty making a feature-length film. And he was nice to send me a very rough cut. I know, for him and for all directors, it must be very nerve-racking to have someone you don’t know well see a work-in-progress like that. So I appreciated that he was that trusting.
   Our conversations were mostly phone-based for the first couple of months. I was still working on The General’s Daughter. Our early conversations were about the general approach he was taking to the film, which I thought was very interesting and provocative: he didn’t accentuate the fantastical elements, but treated them more naturalistically—he really downplayed the fantasy. And the one-liners. The original script was much more jokey; there were a lot more scenes that seemed like they were set-ups with a punchline at the end—a little more like television. But they got rid of a lot of that in the process of making the film.
   I finally met Spike on the set—they were shooting on the “seventh-and-a-half” floor of a building in downtown L.A.— and I took an instant liking to him. He was very honest about what he didn’t know, which is a really nice thing for a first-time director. We agreed that the music should not be fantastical, or over-the-top, but rather just be about the emotions of the characters, and that the whole film would be much more uncomfortable for an audience if all the characters were real and had real feelings—you know, if you really believed John Malkovich was a real person who just happened to have a lot of other people living inside of him. That’s much more disturbing than just having some sort of metaphorical conceit. In a certain way, it’s a little bit like what I did with Fargo—even when comical things are going on, buffoonery, the music always has a straight face; it doesn’t realize there’s anything funny that’s going on. The music believes we’re in a true-crime drama, and takes it completely seriously.
   Even though Spike was behind that idea at first, the first time that he heard real instruments playing the score, he was really taken aback at how much feeling that injects into a scene. This is a common experience I’ve had with directors—the first time they hear the score, they think, “This is just too much feeling. I hadn’t expected this much feeling in my movie.” Joel and Ethan are like that, too. The temperature of their films tends to be cool—warmth doesn’t really enter into the design, usually—so it’s very common for them to react strongly to the orchestration the first time they hear it. That was Spike’s reaction, too, but he eventually got into it.
   Probably more so than with any other contribution to a film, the music really changes it in a way that cannot be anticipated. It’s possible for us to imagine through drawings and language what a set might look like, and through rehearsals to imagine what an actor’s performance might be like, but I’m always seeing a look of surprise—whether pleasant or not—on directors’ faces when they first hear the music. There’s a certain element of ill-ease, because whatever their vision has been up until then, they’ve had control—hopefully with their actors, but certainly in the editing room. They’ve manipulated over months the plastic of the film into the form they want, and now someone comes along and suddenly changes it again with music in a way that they really can’t undo without hiring another composer.

Unless they’re musicians, I guess it’s a language they have no access to, right?

Exactly. They can say, “Shouldn’t that be an E-minor chord there?” but that won’t solve the problem. I’ve met with Michael Mann a couple of times—I’ve never actually worked with him—and he really will look at a scene and say, “What do you think—D-minor?” It could be that he’s joking, but I’ve got a pretty dry sense of humor myself, and I don’t think he is; he likes to get into the details. I think his films are often extraordinary—I really loved The Insider, and would have liked to work on the film—but I’m not sure what it would be like to work with someone who wants so much control.
   By and large, directors are given the music, and the poor folks then pretty much have to accept what it is—or throw it out entirely. It’s pretty hard to change it.

In James Foley’s film Fear, there’s a transitional moment where Mark Wahlberg’s character sneaks into Reese Witherspoon’s family’s house late at night, ending with sex scene between the two of them. I thought your scoring for that segment was perfect, because it started out completely ominous and gradually built into something vaguely erotic—although still with ominous undertones…

Well, I'm glad you got that, because that was the point of that piece of music. I love writing things like that; I love it when the music has to do more than one thing at a time. That also describes the kind of film I try to work on; films that are attempting to do more than one thing. I mean, if you've got a scene in which the only point of it is that people are sad, or things are blowing up, or people are in love, it's not really that interesting to me. I’m amazed that anyone else would find them interesting. It’s the contradiction and the complexity of the emotions we all experience that I think makes life interesting, and I love that level of tension. I think it annoys some of the people in my life that I like to maintain that tension, so that no moment is completely romantic, or completely happy, but we can always remind ourselves that there are other things going on.

It seems that most films are over-scored—I’m so often aware of music trying to amp up certain emotional moments in a heavy-handed way, or to mask certain deficiencies…

I think there’s a misunderstanding that the function of film music is simply to echo, or amplify, what you’re seeing on the screen, so that your experience of that one thing can be as strong and unmistakable as possible, whether that thing is a car crash or two people kissing. And I do look at it differently—I think the function of music is to show you something you don’t see onscreen. So, yeah, a large number of scores done for feature films are coming from a different place than I am. I don’t want to say they’re better or worse.
   Also, there are whole styles of filmmaking which I shy away from that tend to be very loud and abrasive. I guess I’ve done a couple of films at this point which may qualify as “action films”—maybe Three Kings qualifies—but that’s not primarily what people think of me for. Perhaps because even when I do action films, like The Corrupter, the score still doesn’t come out as just a lot of, you know, sampled drums and what-have-you, pushing the pace along.
   To be fair, directors often ask me to do what you described. They see some deficiency—some chemistry is not there between the romantic interests in the film, and they want it pushed. So sometimes I end up writing something that I’m uncomfortable with, because it’s pushing too hard. But I want the director to be happy.

You described your music a while ago as “having a fundamental simplicity to it.” Could you articulate that a little more?

My taste in music—leaving my music aside—has generally been towards music that is simpler. What I mean by that is, I have much more admiration for music that accomplishes a lot with simple means than music that accomplishes a lot with considerable means. I’ve been unpacking things in my new home, looking at my records from when I was in high school, and I’ve been struck at how some aspects of my taste haven’t changed. I love the old records of John Lee Hooker just playing alone, for instance—it’s so simple; you can’t analytically say what it is about that music that is so striking, but somehow it’s very moving, with an utter simplicity of materials. And at the same time I was listening to that, other people were listening to Yes and Queen, which always seemed to me to be taking the backward approach—attempting to ennoble a folk genre by layering on these unnecessary frivolities.
   Like a lot of people, I became much more interested in the state of classical music—“concert music”—when I started to hear what people like Arvo Pärt were doing from the early eighties on, and when those Eastern European composers started moving away from serial music—what academic music had become, especially in this country in the fifties. When other people like Steve Reich or Philip Glass started looking at other traditions in music.
   Of course, also, it could just be that my musical tool-set is so simple as an untrained composer. That may have something to do with it as well.

I guess this isn’t that uncommon in film music in general, but your scores always introduce a very simple, recognizable musical theme, which is then revisited in different ways throughout the film—

That’s very common in film music, and it’s usually traced back to Wagner’s use of motifs in his operas. He would designate them in a very meticulous fashion to not only characters, but also to situations and subject matter, and then would mix and match them over the course of the piece. So that when someone appears on stage, you might hear their motif, and you would be reminded of what that person’s role in the opera might be.
   One of the interesting questions that arises when approaching a score is “What might your motifs be attached to?” Some people have this simplistic view that you attach them to characters all the time, so that whenever you see a particular character, you hear this type of music. While Wagner might have done that, I think if you belabor that point it really does become a comedy, whether you intended it or not. You’ll often see it in films from the thirties and forties—the supposed “Golden Age” of film scoring—where motifs are used in this assiduous fashion, which I think is ridiculous. I think there’s a good portion of the Golden Age that needs to be criticized.

You employ that in a somewhat ironic way in Hudsucker Proxy.

Oh, yeah, we do. And I think it works there because you’re talking about a character who takes himself too seriously, so it’s all right for the music to make fun of that. But that’s a very common tool for film composers. An interesting question right up front in the process of writing is, what might my themes attach to? Will it be something about character? Will it be a story point or a mood? It really can be anything—the semantics of music are wide open.
   In some of my first films I really didn’t give themes much thought. With Blood Simple, for instance—there were a couple of themes in that film whose meaning I really hadn’t thought about that much. Same with Raising Arizona—it was pretty clear that this theme would work here, and that one there, but we really didn’t think about their meaning, or how all the associations a theme accrues during a film might pay off later on. Now I think about those things quite a lot, which I guess makes me a professional film composer. But sometimes you can think too much about them.

Your earlier scores weren’t orchestrated. When you began doing that, did you find you had to pare anything down musically to mitigate the “bigness” of the sound?

No, not really. I don’t think the size of the orchestra has any relation to this question of simplicity. It usually has to do with the film itself, and the characters. In Being John Malkovich, hopefully there’s a certain poignancy from the sheer simplicity of the melody. It’s not a “childlike” melody, but there is an impression of simplicity that colors John Cusack’s character as innocent, even though he’s doing awful things. The music tells us something about why he’s doing these awful things—he’s not doing them because he’s “evil,” he’s doing them because he’s hopelessly unaware and, emotionally, a child.
   But then in other scores, like The Corruptor, you actually need complexity. Some of the themes there are more complex and more veiled, because one of the points of that movie is that no one can really tell what’s going on. So there has to be something about the music that’s a little obfuscating. But I don’t think it’s a function of orchestration, it’s a function of the film.

You use a lot of unusual instruments in your scores. For example, in The Band Played On, during the Robert Gallo press conference, there’s something like a prepared piano that creeps into the music—

I think there actually is prepared piano in that one. There are pizzicato strings, percussion, and the prepared piano.

Its oddness really adds a sense of menace to the scene. Do you think certain instruments carry particular kinds of emotional weight, or is it all about context?

I think it’s context. I don’t think instruments, or their timbre, have particular meaning. But there is a harmonic structure that sounds above a note when an instrument plays it, and sometimes those harmonics—there’s a mathematical relationship expressed there—mean something emotional. For instance, those prepared-piano sounds create an “enharmonic” structure. The nature of enharmonic sounds, like large bells, or prepared piano on the low strings, is that they’re a little “off”—they don’t fit easily into our ears’ understanding of how sounds should sound. So, yes, you could say that those types of instruments do engender a real emotional response that comes just from the mathematics of their overtone structure.
   But generally speaking, it’s entirely about context. You take an instrument that would normally be disturbing, and use it in such a way that it’s insinuating instead, or vice versa.

Do you do a lot of research?

I read a fair amount, so I’ve learned music theory by reading books on the subject, and looking at scores. Research is one of my favorite parts of the job. Prior to working on Rob Roy, for instance, I listened to a lot of Scottish music. Or on Fargo, I thought it would be interesting to listen to a lot of Scandinavian music. Miller’s Crossing was my first orchestral score, and Joel and Ethan knew that I knew nothing about orchestral music so they gave me three months to do it, and I really enjoyed poring through books about orchestration. Although I didn’t orchestrate that—my friend and mentor Sonny Kompanek did—I learned about what you could do with an oboe, or a cello, and looked at lots of scores. The thing about research is that you’re smarter at the end of the job than you were at the beginning. I get this joy from accumulating data, even if I don’t know what it means.
   My discussion of overtones partly comes from the fact that I sang with a group called the Harmonic Choir for a while, and the particular technique of singing we used was manipulating the overtone series—similar to the type of singing you hear in Mongolian folk music, or Tibetan chants. So just to perform that, or even to speak the language of that music, you had to develop some knowledge of how harmonic series work. And in fact, math is one of the things I studied in college, and it became one of my ways of getting into music. I tend to believe that the universe is mathematical—it’s my way of understanding things—so to the extent that music is mathematical, it helps me to understand that, too. Interesting thing about music, of course, it that it’s also emotional, so it’s a fascinating crossroads between number and feeling.
   There’s this unfortunate prejudice that numbers are somehow cold and formal and analytical, and feelings are somehow amorphous and undefinable, and therefore the two cannot meet. But of course, music is this wonderful, and very concrete, example of how wrong that view is. Music is extremely emotional, and utterly defined by numbers. I just love that. It’s one of those tensions that make life worth living.

Do you feel manipulative when you’re writing?

I always feel manipulative. That’s why it took me so long to get my wife to marry me—she was sure that I was doing something musically that was manipulating her. It depends on your definition of “manipulation,” but certainly what everyone does in film is manipulative—it’s a terrible art because you take people and put them in a dark room—sometimes in the middle of a row so they can’t even get away—and turn off all the lights and basically insist that they spend a couple of hours only hearing and seeing what you put in front of them. They’re prisoners. And all we’re doing the entire time is manipulating their perceptions, and through their perceptions, their experience. But of course, one “dark side” of this manipulation is when you discount everything that a person brings to the theater with them—when you just assume everybody is the same. “Oh, we’ll get them to cry by playing solo violin here.” “We’ll scare them by having a loud crashing cymbal here.” It’s not even evil; it’s just sad, because it underestimates the audience so much. By the time most people go to films, they’ve already been alive for a decade or two; they know life is complex, so I think it’s fair to give them credit for that. Even though film is escapist, I don’t think most people go to films to have their understanding of the world contradicted—“No, it’s all fine! Everybody’s happy, and everyone will find love,” or “There are good people and bad people.” I really don’t believe people go to film for that. Obviously, if you convince yourself that that’s true, your job as an executive is much easier—you just find material that fills those preconceptions. But I don’t think that’s the escape people look for.

Do you think certain films would be better off without a score?

Definitely.

Have you ever declined a job for that reason?

Oh, yeah, sure. I can’t remember any specific examples, but I think that’s often true. It’s really too bad that people don’t think that way more often. It’s partly that before someone even shoots a film, they’ve put a line item in the budget for music. Therefore, there is music. When I did the score for Psycho III, there was a line item in there for “orchestra,” and I didn’t want orchestra—I just wanted to do it on synclavier with some percussion and a boys’ choir. But because most films have line items in their budgets for composer and score, most films get a composer and a score without any reflection on their necessity.
   There are a large number of films that work well without scores, and it’s often really too bad that they use them. I’m looking at a film right now that Julian Schnabel just shot, called Before Night Falls, and he hasn’t put temp music into a lot of it yet. That really puts you on the spot as an audience member—you just have no idea how to take what’s going on. Also, the film is about a poet, and his words just carry so much more weight, again, because there’s nothing there leading you one way or the other emotionally. This poet’s particular form of writing has a fair amount of irony in it, so meanings change word by word. Each new word comes and the meaning of all the other words you heard change. So the fact that there’s no music keeps the meaning up in the air—who knows where it’s going to fall? I think a lot of that film will be best without music.

You’ve done several documentaries; do you find there’s a certain ethical responsibility in scoring “real-life” material? I’ve seen certain films where I really felt like the music was working way too hard to color my views of the situation being documented.

That often happens. If you watch documentaries on television, it’s just terrible how much music is used. I guess I can understand it in the so-called “documentary industry”—the Discovery Channel, or whatever—because they don’t want their audiences to be uncomfortable; they don’t want you to even think that much. The goal is to make often-difficult material palatable. By and large, music in documentaries is a mistake.

In your score for The Celluloid Closet, I could only detect several minutes of composed music.

I’m afraid there’s more. I confess. Celluloid was a documentary, but it is, in a way, a narrative film—it’s got a definite point of view, and it’s not attempting to stand back from the subject matter. And its point of view is not at the current time a mainstream point of view, so clearly what we were trying to do with the music was manipulate an audience who didn’t already believe that, yes, gay culture needs to be represented in the mainstream. It’s represented as a heroic journey. I actually wrote the score as a romance—not between any particular people, but I just thought it was the nicest way to approach the subject.

Are there certain scores by other film composers you’d consider to be particularly successful?

Well, there are a lot. When I first got the job on Blood Simple, I thought, “I better listen to some film scores.” Since I never really had. I got out the TV Guide and The Birds was on television, so I set my VCR and recorded it. But I watched it as I was taping, and as each dramatic scene would come to an end, I’d think, “Damn! I didn’t listen to the music!” Then, when the film was over, I rewound the videotape and realized that there was no score. There were some recordings of bird sounds, and some electronically created bird sounds, and that’s it.
   That was such a perfect exposure to film music. I hope everyone can have that kind of experience. So many of the Hitchcock scores are wonderful: I think Psycho is fabulous, but so are Vertigo, North By Northwest—they’re all wonderful. And I love Morricone’s Spaghetti Westerns; I love Nino Rota’s Fellini films. Among my contemporaries, I really like Thomas Newman’s work a lot. He did a film called Flesh and Bone, which not many people have seen, but it’s a wonderful score—a prime example of simplicity.

I noticed in Fear, for instance, that your score seemed to be mixed down in certain parts—

[Burwell laughs.]

A knowing laugh. Do you have any rights as a composer where that kind of stuff is concerned?

No, you don’t have any rights like that. They can do whatever they want with placement of the pieces of music; they can edit them however they want, do whatever they want with the levels. That’s the way it is. A film mix is a battlefield, generally—dialogue people fight with the sound-effects people, who fight with the music people. In the end, nobody’s completely happy, and if you’ve been to those mixes, you can sometimes anticipate what’s going to happen and try to make sure that the music is not too badly bruised. But it’s a battle.

Are you interested in doing traditional composing?

Yes, I am. One of the problems that I have with composing for composing’s sake is that I really need fairly stern deadlines to get me to work, so I’m probably going to need to go and get a commission of some sort with a deadline attached to it before I actually do it. I’m mean, I’m of course composing all the time, whether I’m working on a film or not—I’m always at the piano, always writing. But sitting at the piano and writing is not the same thing as a completed piece of concert music, and the distance between those two I find hard to travel. But even if I wanted to, I’d need to find somebody who was going to stand over me with a buggy whip.

Do you have any inclination to explore other areas of filmmaking?

Well, sometimes I miss the experience of making short films, which I did in and after college. There’s a pleasure in the “auteur” aspect that you certainly don’t get as a film composer. With film composing, there’s no question that what you’re in is, at best, a collaboration. But let’s face it, my interest in filmmaking is not that compelling, or I’d be doing it. Also, I like the solitude of composing—particularly the solitude of composing in New York, where it’s not so easy for people to drop in on me, and not so easy for them to ask me to lunch.

Are there other ways in which living here affects your work?

Well, I guess the advantage of it and disadvantage of it are pretty much the same. Being here keeps me out of the day-to-day workings of Hollywood, which is an advantage because it means I don’t have to pay that much attention to the industry. When I have lunch with someone, it’s not necessarily the subject we’re going to discuss—you know, I’m not usually aware of what the box-office figures are for films, or that sort of thing. The disadvantage is, I can’t easily go and have lunch with someone in the industry if I should want to. And they can’t either, so that gets in the way of my getting work sometimes. But that’s about it. I don’t find that it’s a problem in terms of process, because I can work here or, when my arm is twisted, in Los Angeles. I think it’s more that there are moments when you want to have a face-to-face meeting with a director, and that’s hard to do if they’re there and I’m here.