Saturday Night at the Movies E-Book

Jenny Nelson

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 380

Beschreibung

Discover the remarkable stories behind some of the most popular film music of all timeFrom Jurassic Park to ­The Lord of the Rings, Vertigo to Titanic, a powerful score can make a movie truly extraordinary. The alchemy between composer and director creates pure cinematic magic, with songs and melodies that are instantly recognisable and eternally memorable. So what is their secret?Saturday Night at the Movies goes behind the scenes to reveal twelve remarkable partnerships, and how they have created the music that has moved millions. Discover how these collaborations began and what makes them so effective: the dynamic personalities, the creative chemistry, the flashes of genius. ­The best scores come from sound and image working together to bring the director's vision to life, but many scores also stand alone as towering achievements of composition that have shaped the face of modern music.Featuring such luminaries as Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer, and James Horner and James Cameron, Saturday Night at the Movies explores the creation of film favourites such as Back to the Future, Fargo, Edward Scissorhands and many, many more.Includes:J.J. Abrams & Michael GiacchinoKenneth Branagh & Patrick DoyleTim Burton & Danny ElfmanJames Cameron & James Horner­The Coen Brothers & Carter BurwellAlfred Hitchcock & Bernard HerrmannPeter Jackson & Howard ShoreDavid Lean & Maurice JarreSam Mendes & ­Thomas NewmanChristopher Nolan & Hans ZimmerSteven Spielberg & John WilliamsRobert Zemeckis & Alan Silvestri

Leseprobe

SATURDAY

NIGHT

AT THE

MOVIES

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Carter Burwell and the Coen Brothers

CHAPTER 2

Patrick Doyle and Kenneth Branagh

CHAPTER 3

Danny Elfman and Tim Burton

CHAPTER 4

Michael Giacchino and J.J. Abrams

CHAPTER 5

Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock

CHAPTER 6

James Horner and James Cameron

CHAPTER 7

Maurice Jarre and David Lean

CHAPTER 8

Thomas Newman and Sam Mendes

CHAPTER 9

Howard Shore and Peter Jackson

CHAPTER 10

Alan Silvestri and Robert Zemeckis

CHAPTER 11

John Williams and Steven Spielberg

CHAPTER 12

Hans Zimmer and Christopher Nolan

Notes

About Classic FM

Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION

Picture the scene: you’re in the cinema, the lights go down and you settle in, ready to be entertained, moved or challenged. A few hours to escape from everyday life and be transported to another world. The music you hear forms as much of the experience as what you see on the screen. It can take many forms – subtle and creeping or bombastic and brash – but when successful, the score is an inextricable part of the film. This book explores how some of the world’s best-loved composers and directors work together to bring a film to life by fusing sound and vision.

What is the secret to successful creative collaboration? Friendship, a shared goal, being in the right place and time – or another special ingredient that’s less easy to define?

Film directors often surround themselves with a core team of people they work with regularly, but there’s something unique about the partnership they have with a composer. Together, the two have the potential to create a seamless dynamic between what’s heard and what’s seen on the screen, enhancing the audience’s experience by building their emotional connection to the story.

Saturday Night at the Movies, Classic FM’s weekly film music programme, first explored this subject in 2014 when it was hosted by the composer Howard Goodall, and it’s one that current presenter Andrew Collins has returned to over the years. The collaboration between John Williams and Steven Spielberg is perhaps the most influential and impressive in cinema history: nearly thirty films together in over forty years. With an array of instantly recognisable themes ranging from ominous (Jaws), to heartbreaking (Schindler’s List) and triumphant (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Williams has the power to get to the heart of the story. Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock form another iconic ‘power couple’ thanks to their combined contribution to the art of suspense, most notably with masterpieces like Vertigo and Psycho. Yet after just over a decade of working together, they had an almighty falling-out and their collaboration came to an abrupt end. Creative partnerships don’t always last forever.

As we’ll see, the secret to collaborative success is not as simple as two people getting on. Ego and trust can affect the power balance – but should a film director and composer view each other as equals in the first place? Alan Silvestri describes Robert Zemeckis as ‘the captain of the ship’, which suggests a deference to the vision of the director, but he also compares their long-standing collaboration to a marriage, in which each party respects and supports the other. Generally, it is perceived that the composer (as with all other crew members) should answer to the director, but, as Howard Goodall points out, ‘It’s also true to say that a lot of the directors in this book acknowledge the fact that the music can completely change the mood and the impact of a film. They acknowledge how important the composer’s input can be – that’s not always the case – and how it can lift the film from being quite a good film into something with a huge impact, through brilliant use of music, or a brilliant idea in the orchestration, or a brilliant way of looking at it.’

A great film composer writes music that envelops the audience, immersing them more deeply in the story unfolding on-screen. For a director to be aware of that power is one thing but for them to trust another individual to provide the musical reflection of their vision is another, especially as most successful directors are, by their own admission, control freaks. Are disagreements to be encouraged? Conflict can be a healthy part of collaboration, ensuring each delivers their most effective work, but in intense, high-pressure environments like film sets personalities can clash badly. What’s significant is whether, and how, the director and composer choose to patch things up, from Michael Giacchino and J.J. Abrams getting things out in the open with an ‘honesty pact’ to James Cameron and James Horner allowing themselves breathing space after the production of Aliens before working together a decade later on Titanic, to monumental success. Even Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer, who describe themselves as close as brothers, admit to fighting like cats and dogs, and the director accepts that he pushed the composer to his limits when scoring Dunkirk.

The twelve partnerships featured here are some of the most creative in the business. Some have worked together for years; others have made a significant impact with a select number of films. But they are all responsible for some of the best-loved scores in the world. It hasn’t escaped our attention that this is not the most diverse list, but it does seem that steps are being taken to broaden opportunities for aspiring composers and directors from all backgrounds.

The collaborators in this book all have different ways of working but one universal exercise is the spotting session, when a rough cut of the film has been assembled and the two watch it together, discussing which scenes need music and what sort of music is required. More often than not, the film will have been put together with a temporary, or ‘temp’, score, a compilation of other music to give the composer a steer. This can be helpful to provide an idea of tone or style, but can also be limiting because it does not offer a blank canvas to the composer, and thus risks imitation. In the case of Peter Jackson and Howard Shore, the director used cues (tracks from specific scenes that make up a film score) from the composer’s previous films to temp his initial footage of The Lord of the Rings. On seeing how well the visuals matched the music, Jackson invited Shore to join the team and the composer created a sound world using specific musical themes, known as leitmotifs, to represent the vast array of characters and cultures that inhabit Tolkien’s universe.

Communication between the director and composer is crucial. The director needs to be able to convey their artistic objectives but while they may be fully confident of articulating their vision, it’s not always easy to describe music with words. Goodall is not convinced that it helps if the director is musical: ‘Most composers would say they don’t care either way but they want to have responsibility for the musical choices that take place. I think if they were being undiplomatic they would say a director who really knows what they want from the movie is more important to them than a director who can say, “Can it sound a bit like Vaughan Williams or Shostakovich?” When you have the vocabulary of music, you have a vocabulary that is very full of jargon and specifics, and that doesn’t always translate itself to people who come from other fields. I think it’s probably more helpful for a composer that the director is very sure of the overall effect that they’re trying to go for, and that the composer uses that information to turn it into their response musically.’

Whether or not a director is musically literate, they will of course be well versed in the technicalities of film-making. Goodall believes that ‘one of the reasons that the relationship between composer and director has become a unique one in film history is because of the coming together of two technical worlds that they both are completely immersed in. They’re not the same, but they interlock. There’s no sense that they’re competing with each other but they can make each other better.’ That lack of competition may be important in the highly pressured world of film-making, with its fierce deadlines and equally fierce financial demands. Many composers in this book praise their directors for shielding them from these pressures and giving them the space to create – because it takes time to come up with the perfect theme to elevate a story.

Communication, mutual respect and a shared desire to get to the heart of the story are just some of the key factors that will crop up throughout this celebration of director–composer collaborations. Interviews and behind-the-scenes stories offer an insight into their working methods as well as the wider film-making process, and if reading the book is anything like writing it, prepare to feel the urge to watch or re-watch some of the finest movies ever made, from Lawrence of Arabia to Titanic, Inception to E.T., Skyfall to Back to the Future – perhaps with a keener ear than before. There is a suggested playlist at the end of each chapter and you can find a selection of the music at classicfm.com/snatm – just in case you want to listen along to the film scores as you read!

There are movies and then there are Coen Brothers movies. Joel and Ethan Coen have written, directed, produced and edited seventeen films in over three decades and each one is unique, with characters, settings and plot twists that are unlikely to be found elsewhere at the cinema. This is precisely what defines their work: their films are stand-alone oddities that may be funny or gruesome or unpredictable – often all three at the same time – as they jump between genres and play with cinematic conventions. From cult favourites such as The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona to box-office hits like True Grit and the Academy Award-winning Fargo and No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan – working so closely they have been referred to as the ‘two-headed director’ – make films that can entertain and baffle in equal measure. When accepting the Oscar for Best Director, Joel described their early attempts at filming with a Super 8 camera in the local shopping mall when younger brother Ethan was eleven or twelve, declaring, ‘Honestly, what we do now doesn’t feel that much different from what we were doing then’, before acknowledging their standing within the left field of Hollywood: ‘We’re very thankful to all of you out there for letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox.’

Whether comedy, film noir, western or a gangster movie, composer Carter Burwell has joined them in the sandbox for fifteen films, with T Bone Burnett taking over the music supervisor and producer roles on the folk and country-music soundtracks for O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Inside Llewyn Davis. Since getting his break on their debut feature, Blood Simple, in 1984, Burwell has gone on to score around a hundred films. He received his first Academy Award nomination in 2016 for Todd Haynes’s Carol, and his second followed soon after in 2018 for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri directed by Martin McDonagh.

Describing the composer, Ethan – generally the more upbeat of the two – has said, ‘By Hollywood terms, he’s unbelievably normal and well balanced. It’s almost alarmingly normal.’ Joel, with his more sombre and laconic delivery, agreed: ‘He’s refreshingly not a lunatic.’ Ethan continued, ‘We were talking about musicians and T Bone was talking about a drummer called Bill Maxwell and he said, “Bill is never the problem.” You so much know what he means because everyone else always can be. Carter is never the problem.’

Carter Burwell met the Coen Brothers through another long-standing collaborator, Skip Lievsay, who has served as sound editor on all of their feature films. The brothers were preparing to make their first feature, Blood Simple (1984), a violent and stylish black comedy starring Frances McDormand, who would go on to appear in many more of their films (and who married Joel the year the film came out). According to Joel, ‘Carter at the time was not a practising movie composer, or really a music composer of any sort. He had a musical background but at the time I think he may have been, or had been, working in a science lab in Long Island, which is one of his other interests. But Skip said, “This guy could definitely do this”, and of course, we were all just kids at the time! We met Carter, we went over to a loft that he had, with this big old peeling [piano] and talked about what we were doing, or what we wanted to do, and Carter went off from there.’

Carter Burwell (right) with sound editor Skip Lievsay at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2015, discussing ‘The Sound of the Coens’.

The composer has a slightly different recollection: ‘Years later I asked Joel why they had hired me or what that process had been like . . . He said he had done a lot of interviews with composers and they were looking for someone who knew what they were doing. That would not have been me at the time, I had no experience of film music and no knowledge of it!

‘He said that these are still among the strangest interviews that he’s ever done. They’ve auditioned hundreds of actors over the years but he felt that the composers were the oddest bunch, so I guess apparently out of that odd bunch I count as being normal! . . . Joel and Ethan and I see each other as having the same sensibilities, coming from a similar view of cinema and humour, so in that sense we see each other as normal. We simply have similar tastes and we’ll see the same awful story and laugh at it, and that’s important in their films to be able to do that.’

With simple piano motifs and electronic effects, the score for Blood Simple could be described as ‘minimal’, although Ethan is quick to clarify ‘minimal by choice and by necessity ’cos there wasn’t any money!’ It remains one of Burwell’s favourite scores, ‘partly because I didn’t know what I was doing, so I just ignored the entire film-making process and wrote some little pieces of music that I liked. I can’t really do that any more because I’m now expected to be a film composer, but with Blood Simple I didn’t know how it was supposed to work, and Joel and Ethan didn’t really know how it was supposed to work, so there’s a certain innocence that comes with that that you can’t really recapture.’

The Coens’ roster of long-time collaborators includes cinematographers Barry Sonnenfeld and Roger Deakins, set decorator Nancy Haigh, production designer Dennis Gassner, co-editor Tricia Cooke, storyboard artist J. Todd Anderson, costume designer Mary Zophres, and Peter Kurland, who has worked in the production sound department of all of their films. With their ‘hands-on’ approach to film-making, it’s no surprise that the brothers stick to working with people they trust, and over the decades they have built up a select group of actors who have made regular appearances in their films, such as John Turturro, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi.

Burwell, meanwhile, has formed regular partnerships with other directors. He has worked with Bill Condon on six films, including Mr Holmes and Gods and Monsters, and with Spike Jonze, Todd Haynes and Martin McDonagh on three. You could argue that the quirky style of In Bruges by McDonagh or Jonze’s Being John Malkovich isn’t a million miles away from Coen Brothers’ fare, but Burwell has proved he can also turn his talents to mainstream blockbusters, scoring three of the five films in the teen vampire-romance franchise Twilight.

The Burwell–Coen partnership is the only trio collaboration within this book, and Carter notes the effect of an additional person on the dynamic: ‘It does balance out the ego a little bit, the fact that there are two of them. They generally present themselves almost as being one mind, but that’s easily overstated because in fact they’re very individual people and I’ve seen the two of them disagree about the music in the films, about the role of it or what it should be doing, so it’s not exactly true that they always come from one place. But by the time I’m involved, they’ve written the film together, and they generally have a clear understanding and agreement of what they’re trying to make.’

On the balance of egos between composer and director, Burwell is typically down to earth: ‘Well, I know that I’m not the best composer in the world, so it’s not that difficult for me! But I certainly know film composers who have egos, so it is possible to have an ego and still be a successful film composer. For myself, I really feel I’m still learning all the time . . . and taking that point of view brings a certain humility with it.’

The Burwell–Coen relationship seems pretty secure but, even with a hit rate of fifteen out of seventeen films, they still approach collaboration on a film-by-film basis. As Joel points out, ‘There’s a sort of distinction that has to be made between most of the movies. Almost every one of the movies that we’ve made, we’ve made with Carter. The exceptions are that we’ve made a number of movies that have minimal score or no score, and are essentially driven by source music or performed music in the movie itself. With those movies we often have at least a partial idea of what the music is going to be because it’s drawn from either popular music or folk music. With the stuff with Carter, it’s a little different. Sometimes we know in a general feeling kind of way and sometimes we don’t.’

The composer describes the general pattern of the scoring process: ‘It always starts with a script. They’ll give me a script sometimes well in advance of their shooting – it could be more than a year before they shoot – but if they have good reason to believe it’s actually going to get shot, they’ll give me a script so if nothing else we can at least talk about budgets because it helps them formulate one if we decide it’s four players, or it’s eighty players. But we’ll also throw around ideas about what the music is going to do . . . most of the time, there’s no expectation that we’re really going to figure it out at the script stage, but other times the problem of the music is a big one and is something we really do throw around early on.’

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 thing 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 else, 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)

True Grit (2010)

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Suggested Playlist

Raising Arizona, Way Out There (Main Title)

Miller’s Crossing, End Titles

Fargo, Fargo, North Dakota

Fargo, Safe Keeping

The Big Lebowski, Wie Glauben

The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Trial of Ed Crane

Intolerable Cruelty, Intolerable Mambo

No Country for Old Men, Blood Trails

Burn After Reading, Night Running

A Serious Man, A Serious Man

A Serious Man, The Roof

True Grit, The Wicked Flee

True Grit, Ride to Death

Hail, Caesar!, 5 a.m.

Hail, Caesar!, Hail, Caesar!

* The 1998 tale of mistaken identity, bowling and, yes, kidnap again, was not a commercial success but has since garnered such a wide fanbase that there’s an annual festival in its honour and a religion, Dudeism, based on the philosophy and lifestyle of the lead character, Jeffrey Lebowski.

Spanning Shakespeare and superheroes, Patrick Doyle and Kenneth Branagh have worked together on twelve films, from Henry V in 1989 to Murder on the Orient Express in 2017. While adaptations of the Bard’s works might seem to dominate the list, the variety of musical styles and film genres covered – the romantic Cinderella (2015), the unsettling Sleuth (2007) and the action-packed Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) – remind us that this is a versatile partnership, as well as a successful one.

Their success can be attributed to talent, of course, but also to a firm and loyal friendship that has strengthened over the decades. As Doyle has said, ‘We get on terribly well. He’s a very funny person, very witty. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and has a great instinct for music and drama. He allows me to have lots of artistic leeway but the whole experience is hugely enjoyable. We have an instinctive rapport, there’s a symbiosis there which either you have with a director or you don’t.’

Their collaboration stands apart from others in this book because the director may actually be better known to many for his acting work on stage and screen. Branagh’s directing skills are just a part of his varied career and he is the first person to have received Academy Award nominations in five different categories: Best Director (Henry V), Best Actor (Henry V), Best Live Action Short Film (Swan Song), Best Adapted Screenplay (Hamlet) and Best Supporting Actor (My Week with Marilyn). Meanwhile, Doyle has had cameo roles in seven of Branagh’s films, so both have experience in front of the camera as well as behind the scenes.

The director has an eye and an ear for a good story, which Doyle acknowledges: ‘I’ve been very fortunate that his choices have been very astute, very classy.’ Still, as he explains, ‘every film’s difficult . . . You’ve got to deliver the best work you possibly can, and it has to be of a very high standard. I put my heart and soul into it. But there’s no special dispensation for a pal.’

Belfast-born Kenneth Branagh attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and, at twenty-three years old, was the youngest ever actor to play Henry V in a Royal Shakespeare Company production. He co-founded the Renaissance Theatre Company with David Parfitt in 1987, and their third production, after Romeo and Juliet and a one-man show with John Sessions called Life of Napoleon, was a staging of Twelfth Night at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, featuring an original score by the actor, composer and musician Patrick Doyle.

Doyle, from South Lanarkshire, had studied piano and singing at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and after meeting Kenneth and joining the team for Twelfth Night, they hit the road: ‘We did a national tour with Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi and Geraldine McEwan directing. Three plays: As You Like It, Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing. I was employed as a musical director. I played small parts in it, but really my job was as composer and music director. As it was a rep company, the fact I could do a bit of acting was all to the good! At the end of that tour, the Renaissance Film Company was then established, and I went on to do Henry V.’

The tour not only established long-lasting partnerships between Branagh and the other actors – he directed Dench and Jacobi as recently as 2017 in Murder on the Orient Express – but also laid the foundations for a solid working relationship between him and Doyle. ‘He certainly became aware of my musical facility for melody,’ recalled the composer. ‘The fact that I could work fast also really appealed to him. So that helped to cement our relationship.’ Doyle has spoken in interviews about the significance he places on the narrative and characters within the films he scores, and his early career as an actor may have influenced this approach. He watches film rushes with an acute eye, looking to ascertain whether music is required to elevate a scene or an actor’s portrayal. The composer’s preparation involves spending some time with the cast, which is vital for Branagh: ‘He knows that performances are so key to me, that he wants to get a sense of who they are and how they speak about their characters.’

Henry V, their first feature film collaboration, was also Doyle’s first movie and he had a small role as Court, a soldier in Henry’s army. He is the first to start singing the film’s stand-out piece of music, ‘Non Nobis, Domine’, during a long, sweeping shot as the camera follows Branagh carrying the body of Robin, played by a young Christian Bale, through the battlefield. It’s a significant moment in the film and for Doyle’s career as a composer: he won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Film Theme.

The composer has cited Henry V as an example of how Branagh briefs him and communicates his creative objectives at the start of a project, recalling how the song came into being, nearly thirty years ago, as they sat in the dressing room of the Palace Theatre in Manchester: ‘He described this shot in detail, and that the music should build and build. His reference was – and this may seem odd – the Paul McCartney Frog Song [‘We All Stand Together’] . . . I thought of ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ from Cabaret, that’s the way I saw it in my head, with that kind of growth in a musical track. So I went into the foyer of the theatre, and I wrote the tune. It took five minutes! I immediately wrote another tune because I thought, “That came out too quickly”, but . . . usually your first idea’s the strongest one. I went back to him after lunch and played it to him and he says, “The first one, that’s it, definitely.” And this piece has been my calling card for the rest of my film career!’

Branagh’s Henry V