Film Composer Carter Burwell Opens Up On Inspirations, Methods

Film scores can be as memorable as the films themselves.

“The Godfather,” “Star Wars,” “Dr. Zhivago,” the iconic James Bond theme—these have become the film scores of our collective cinematic lives. Whether it’s a full orchestra swelling during a romantic scene, or a frantic guitar riff accompanying a heart-thumping car chase, film scores elevate and effect emotional involvement in a film’s narrative.

For the past 30 years, Amagansett film composer Carter Burwell has scored an eclectic range of films: “Blood Simple,” “Barton Fink,” “Conspiracy Theory,” “The Big Lebowski,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Twilight” and “Carol,” to name just a handful, the latter of which earned him an Oscar nomination last year.

“When I was about 12 years old, I bought some film soundtrack albums, one of which was John Barry’s James Bond score. At that tender age, I was seriously considering secret agent as a possible career option,” Mr. Burwell said with a smile. “And if that was the idea, then I knew I would need the right music to go along with the job.”

As a teenager, Mr. Burwell was drawn to the blues, which would have a lasting influence on his approach to creating music. “In high school, I was teaching myself how to play piano. So I listened to artists like Otis Spann—considered one of the greatest blues pianists—and especially Muddy Waters. To this day, if I had to take one artist’s music with me anywhere, it would be Waters’s.”

While attending Harvard University, he became interested in what he described as the “offshoots” of rock ’n’ roll. “I really got into bands where there was an economy of means when creating songs, very much like the blues, where the music is stripped down and, at times, raw. I also became fascinated with instrumental music that experimented with different sounds,” he explained.

The tipping point for his music career came in his senior year at Harvard after he was accepted to architecture school. “I went to see a concert at the Harvard Square Theater,” he recalled. “It was Iggy Pop, and David Bowie was playing piano. Tony and Hunt Sales—comedian Soupy Sales’s sons—supplied the rhythm section, bass and drums, for the band. For me, the experience was so vital and sexy and happening. Whereas, over at the architecture school, the lights were on all night, students working on projects that would never get built.

“So, in that moment, I decided to take a year off, join a band and move to New York City.”

In the late 1970s, Mr. Burwell began gigging at the legendary CBGB on the Lower East Side, where The Police, Ramones and Blondie all got their starts. “The ethos was certainly punk at CBGB’s back then, but the bands I played in—The Same, Thick Pigeon—were more ‘art-punk.’ Our music was brainier and more along the lines of bands like Talking Heads,” Mr. Burwell said. “We were reacting to the over-production and polished sound of music at the time. We wanted to strip things down musically, embracing simplicity, and repetition. That’s the kind of music I was drawn to.”

Unable to find an affordable living and rehearsal space in Manhattan, Mr. Burwell and his bandmates moved into a house in Northport, Long Island. To make ends meet, he got a job on an assembly line in Syosset, and eventually did computer installation at Cold Spring Harbor Lab, which served as a rehearsal space on occasion.

“It is one of the fondest moments of my life, and of Long Island, and I still believe that there is nothing better than taking a year off, playing in a band and keeping your adolescence going for as long as possible,” he said with a broad smile.

In 1984, Mr. Burwell scored his first film, “Blood Simple,” for filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen, a collaboration that would yield a long list of endearing films, and film scores. “Initially, I like to read the script. And if the director knows what he or she wants, music-wise, that’s less interesting for me. I like to have more freedom for exploration. I want to create my own sound and go through my own process,” he said.

Before any final decisions for the film score are made, the director, editor and Mr. Burwell conduct what are called “spotting sessions.”

“We go through the film and point to certain scenes, and decide what kind of music would work, what the music might ‘say’ or sound like,” he explained. “There is no one rule to scoring. Each film is a world onto itself, so I have to figure out what is appropriate and unique. It’s like a puzzle and I have to find the solution.”

Known for being openly ironic when it comes to some of his film scores, Mr. Burwell’s techniques were put to the test working with director Spike Jonze on the film “Being John Malkovich.”

“Spike and I agreed that the real challenge for the score was to make the audience believe that these are real people going into someone else’s brain—in this case, John Malkovich—through a tunnel in an office building,” Mr. Burwell said. “The music in the film is often openly romantic and classical—very warm—whereas what you’re seeing on the screen is fantastical and strange. So, instead of the score treating it as fantasy, it treats it as if these are real people with real feelings going through this real experience.”

In the 2007 release “No Country for Old Men,” also by the Coen brothers, he ran into an unexpected challenge. “Ethan sensed early on that the film wasn’t going to have much use for a traditional score. The whole film is just so quiet, with wind blowing across the plains. When I tried to introduce some music it brought attention to itself,” Mr. Burwell said. “I couldn’t sneak it in. And whenever I did, whether it was a few notes or some percussion, it would immediately remind you that you’re watching a film being manipulated by the score coming out of the cinema’s speakers.

“So, to counter that, I began using non-instrumental sounds, where you really couldn’t tell where the pitch of the wind blowing across the plain left off and my score began, which served as a function of score for the film.”

When it came to scoring “Carol,” a film that portrays the path of two women falling in love and the complications they face in 1950s America, he and director Todd Haynes had to figure out the score for a film that Mr. Burwell described as very “stylized.”

“‘Carol’ is not a melodrama, but aspects of it are melodramatic, so we wanted the music to be noticed, because that was in the style of the film. It’s not a very naturalistic film, so it was a choice to have the music announce itself at certain points throughout the film,” he said.

When asked if he attempts to play puppet-master, manipulating the audience’s emotions through his scores, Mr. Burwell said with an enthusiastic laugh, “That’s right! I’m in charge of the audience’s subconscious mind. It’s a big responsibility.”

Recently, he teamed up with director John Lee Hancock to score this summer’s “The Founder.” The film tells the story of Ray Kroc, a struggling salesman played by Michael Keaton. With Richard and Maurice McDonald in Mr. Kroc’s crosshairs, Kroc goes on to create one of the most recognizable and successful fast food franchises: McDonald’s.

“When I first got the script, I thought, ‘It’s the great American success story. Right?’” Mr. Burwell said. “But it was hard to get a strong music idea from the script. I wanted the score to sound like a small-town marching band with drums, but John didn’t want the score to reveal the perspective of the film, and he didn’t want that much irony to the score either.

“Without giving too much of the film away,” he cautioned, “Keaton gives this beautiful monologue where his character, Kroc, is pitching the idea of franchise to the McDonald brothers, and he speaks about steeples, flags and arches. It was just wonderful. So I created a musical piece just for that scene.”

Reflecting on his process regarding film composition and scoring over the years, Mr. Burwell said, “I approach film scores from the point of intuition and not cognition, very much like the bands I played with in the ’70s. When I write a score for a film, I try to live in that world.

“To a certain extent, some modern film scores are like the accompanied silent films back in the day. The scores were pastiche, and the pianist or organ player in the theater had a book, and they would play music according to what was happening on the screen: the train coming down the tracks, about to run over the heroine. If there was a romantic scene then they would turn to the romantic page and play that. That process still goes on today, where the music or score, in my opinion, is dialed in by a film composer—and that process doesn’t interest me.”

When he’s not in the studio composing, Mr. Burwell is a volunteer firefighter in Amagansett, where he lives with his family. Does he worry about his hands—with which he composes—when responding to an emergency? “Yeah, well the fire department has yet to take out an insurance policy on my hands,” he mused.