Long time Coen brothers composer, Carter Burwell, was in attendance at the Nashville Film Festival this week for two reasons. The first was to pick up their annual Mike Curb Career Achievement Award For Film Music award and also to take part in a special event – “One on One with Carter Burwell”. During said event the subject of his work on the forthcoming Coen brothers’ adaptation of the Charles Portis novel, True Grit, came up, on which he had this to say;

“We don’t always see eye to eye.” Burwell noted when discussing his 14th collaboration with Joel and Ethan Coen. But when it came to the conception of the True Grit score “We both had the same idea at the same time: Protestant hymns.” The composer went on to explain that the lead character, Mattie Ross (to be played by Hailee Steinfeld) was so convinced of her own righteousness that they all thought Protestant hymns would be a fine way to play with her misplaced rectitude … He’s currently looking for appropriate hymn recordings but griped that “they all sound too sweet.”

Burwell was quick to point out that this is only the current concept and could very well change entirely. Indeed he said that he liked the idea of a call and response feel to the theme, a solo instrument echoing back since Mattie is marching off alone, determined into dangerous territory to find her father’s killer and recruiting others to join her. He spoke a little about his past work with the Coen brothers and cited Miller’s Crossing as his best ever work experience due to the fact that he got to spend three months creating the score rather than the usual three to six weeks. He was asked which was his favourite Coen score and he said; “I like Fargo but I don’t really have favorites.”

You can see some photos from the event here. Parts taken from original post on Film Experience Blog.

Over at Carter Burwell’s site you can listen to and download two short samples from two of the tracks from A Serious Man’s soundtrack. The first is called The Canal and the second, A Serious Man. He also had this to say about the process of creating the movie’s score;

“The milieu of this film is a Jewish community in the Midwestern United States in the 1960s. Every attempt to incorporate these elements (Judaism, the Midwest, the 60s) into the score was unsuccessful. I ended up using a polyrhythmic harp phrase repeating endlessly against various harmonic variations, but could only throw up my hands when I played it for Joel and Ethan – I liked it but I couldn’t say why.

Something about the relentlessness of this theme seemed right for the helplessness of Larry Gopnik against the unwinding of his life. And when music pointedly ignores the apparent proceedings of a film it implies that there’s something else going on. Something that may be more important than what you see.

The first piece of music written for the film was actually the piece that bridges the the black space between the opening story of the Dybuk and the 1960s Hebrew school of Gopnik’s son. The Coens needed some music against which to edit this transition, which begins in the Old World of the shtetl and travels through an undefined darkness to end in a boy’s ear canal, into which is placed a portable radio earpiece playing Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”

In this space I placed wind, cowbells, drums, and then electric guitar and bass. When recording this piece, we used the same models of bass and guitar that the Airplace had used. Still, to be honest, it was difficult to reduce our overall sound quality to that of the original recording. We did our best.”

Enjoy.

Long time Coen brothers composer, Cater Burwell has been nominated for two prestigious World Soundtrack Academy Awards for his rousing work on Burn After Reading. The awards have been running and have been held in Ghent annally since 2001 and comprise of three main categories; Film Composer of the Year, Best Original Score of the Year and Best Original Song Written Directly for a Film. Burwell is up for a gong in the first two categories. Below is the complete list of nominees;

FILM COMPOSER OF THE YEAR

o CARTER BURWELL (Burn After Reading, Twilight)
o ALEXANDRE DESPLAT (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Coco Avant Chanel, Largo Winch, Cheri)
o DANNY ELFMAN (Milk, Taking Woodstock, Notorious)
o MICHAEL GIACCHINO (Star Trek, Up, Land of the Lost)
o HANS ZIMMER (Frost/Nixon, Angels & Demons, The Dark Knight)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE OF THE YEAR

o BURN AFTER READING by Carter Burwell
o THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON by Alexandre Desplat
o FROST/NIXON by Hans Zimmer
o THE INTERNATIONAL by Reinhold Heil, Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek
o SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE by A.R. Rahman

BEST ORIGINAL SONG WRITTEN DIRECTLY FOR A FILM

o “GRAN TORINO” from ‘Gran Torino’
Music & Lyrics by Jamie Cullum, Clint Eastwood, Kyle Eastwood and Michael Stevens
Performed by Jamie Cullum & Don Runner

o “JAI HO” from ‘Slumdog Millionaire’
Music by : A.R. Rahman
Lyrics by Gulzar and Tanvi Shah
Performed by A.R. Rahman, Sukhvinder Singh, Tanvi Shah, Mahalaksmi Iyver, Vijay Prakash
Published by KM Musiq ltd

o “O SAYA” from Slumdog Millionaire’
Music & Lyrics by A.R. Rahman and Mathangi Arulpragasam
Performed by M.I.A. & A.R. Rahman
Published by KM Musiq ltd

o “RUN & HIDE” from ‘Je l’aimais’
Music & lyrics by Anna Chalon
Performed by Anna chalon

o “THE WRESTLER” from ‘The Wrestler’
Music & lyrics by Bruce Springsteen
Performed by Bruce Springsteen
Published by Bruce Springsteen

Winners will be announced on October 17th at the closing of the Ghent International Film Festival. The very best of luck to him!

Oscar dodger and long-time Coen movie composer, Carter Burwell, has been awarded a career achievement award by his peers at the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers at the 24th Film and Television Music Awards gala, held at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night. He’s has worked on every single Coen brothers’ movie from Blood Simple (which was his debut) to the forthcoming A Serious Man.

So that’s nice for him, now all he needs is some worthy recognition from the Academy…

I have popped links to Carter Burwell’s site, up many times in the past and here’s another. Burwell has launched what he’s calling Radio Burwell on the site which continually cycles through lots of his amazing movie music including a lot of Coen brothers stuff (including parts from Sawbones). Check it out here.

Also while on the site, I was delighted to learn that Burwell is scoring Spike Jonze’s forthcoming Where The Wild Things Are, an adaptation of one of my favourite childhood books, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. You can watch the spectacular looking trailer here (although it has no music by Burwell but rather the track, Wake Up, by the most excellent Arcade Fire). Cannot wait!

Thanks to long time YKFK reader Joe for letting me know.

Variety has a brief interview with long-time Coen collaborator, composor Carter Burwell in which he discusses the ideas behind the music score for Burn After Reading.

Thanks to Bunnie (again!) for the tip off.

Carter Burwell has once again produced the goods for a Coen brothers movie. He started his collaboration with the Coens with their debut Blood Simple and has worked on every one of their movies since. His score for Burn After Reading is available to buy now on Lakeshore Records on old fashioned CD from stores and also from iTunes and Amazon Digital. Also available on iTunes is an album called Gym Music from Burn After Reading which would appear to be Chad’s workout music.

Filmfocus.com (the website for Focus Features) has an interview with Burwell where he discusses his approach to working with the Coens and his score for their latest movie. Here’s a pertinent quote;

Since the characters [in Burn After Reading] thought they were in a spy movie, Carter Burwell thought the composer should be equally deluded. “I liked the idea that the composer is as deluded as the characters so that his soundtrack fits the movie the characters think they are in, rather than the actual film we are watching.”

His long relationship with the Coens, however, gives his collaborations with them a special quality. Their relationship “makes it easy for a couple of reasons,” explains Burwell. “There is a lot of trust on both sides. They know I’ll finish and get my job done, and they’ll give me the time to try out different things. And I don’t worry that they’ll overreact if I play them something radical. When you are talking about [the relationship between] music and cinema, there isn’t a completely perfect, established language, but ours is as good as it’s going to get. Another big difference when [working with the Coens] is that we don’t worry about the opinions of other people. It’s rare that we sit around and think, what will the producer or the audience think of this? We are mostly trying to make a movie that we think is good and that will entertain us. And then, of course, we hope that other people will think it’s good too.”

Carter Burwell, long time Coen composor, has updated the Burn After Reading section of his site and included two tracks from the score for free download. The tracks are called “Earth Zoom In” and “How Is This Possible?”, go check them out here. God bless him.

In his synopsis of the movie he intriguingly refers to the movie as a “sex comedy of errors” and he has included an image with the file name “BAR_title_card” and, along with one of the tracks being called “Earth Zoom In” I’m guessing this is how the movie starts…

Enjoy- and thanks for sharing Mr. Burwell!

My copy of Empire (July 2008) arrived today and the first article in it (after the reader’s letter page) is a four-pager on the Coen’s next movie, Burn After Reading. It confirmed the UK release date of October 17th and also contains five new images which I will scan in and post on YKFK in the next few days. Here is the text from said article lovingly transcribed by yours truly…

“After the (relative) seriousness of No Country For Old Men, it seems the Coens are back to more traditional turf for their next. It’s a thriller that’s kind of a comedy (or the other way around) born of one of their own brainstorming sessions (and not a famous novel), where the characters go by such typically syllable-torturing Coen-esque monikers as Harry Pfarrer, Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer.

“It’s in the vein of Fargo and Lebowski,” delights Eric Fellner from Working Title, completing his sixth film with the brothers. “Somebody comes across something they shouldn’t, they completely misinterpret what they’ve got, and because they are fairly stupid, everything spirals horribly out of control. Mayhem and dead bodies ensue.”

More precisely, it is a spy caper about boozy CIA operative Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich), so incensed at being fired he writes some inflammatory memoirs, the disc of which he accidentally leaves in a gym. It is discovered by less-than-intellectual instructor Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), who attempts to blackmail Ozzie, while his boss Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) meets smooth-talking Harry Pfarrer (George Clooneey) via online dating. He’s the CIA lug assigned to clear the whole matter up, who also ends up sleeping with Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton), estranged wife of Ozzie.

“I’m a guy that goes around killing people,” says Clooney, who would happily play a corpse for the Coens. “It looks really fun. This will be my third idiot – the Coens call it my trilogy of idiots.”

Shooting with typical zest (taking only 50 days) between No Country’s debut in Cannes 2007 and its rapturous US release last autumn, the New York boys stuck fairly close to home: Brooklyn Heights and Washington, DC are the main locations. And despite regular cinematographer Roger Deakins missing his first gig since Barton Fink (due to prior commitments) – Emmanuel Lubezki (Children Of Men) replaces him - the production ran as smoothly as ever.

“They are so brilliant, Joel and Ethan, they just know what they want,” continues Fellner. “Most of the techs and craftsmen have all worked with Joel and Ethan many times. There is never a panic on set. You are never running out of time.”

However, the film, which will open this year’s Venice Film Festival (it wasn’t ready for Cannes 2008), finds its makers at something of a crossroads. Does the Oscar victory and box-office success of No Country For Old Men (a best ever $160 million worldwide) mean they are now a mainstream act and no longer the clever-cloging wiseacres only deciphearable by their army of delirious fans?

“That is the issue – how do you sell the Coens?” agrees Fellner. “Our experience at Working Title is that the point where we’re made mistakes is when we’ve not sold the film to the real audience. You have to start with the real audience and then go bolder. With some of their recent films made with studios (Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were both studio-based films not produced by Working Title) , that could be where they went wrong: looking for too big an audience. This is quite mainstream, but not too mainstream.”

The Coens have been very busy of late. They will soon start another comedy, A Serious Man (also with Working Title), which Ethan has claimed will be ever-so slightly autobiographical: “It’s about a family of four in the Midwest, in 1967, and one of the kids is about to be Bar Mitzvahed. Horrible things happen…” After which they will get going on an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a couldn’t-be-more-Coens noir pastiche set in a reimagined Jewish state in Alaska. Meanwhile, Ethan has also found time to write a trilogy of short plays currenlty being staged together off-Broadway under the title Almost An Evening, produced with the help of Coens’ regular composor, Carter Burwell. The plays, one of which involves two opposing versions of God having a scrap, are helpfully described as Camus-meets-Kafka-meets-the Marx Brothers. Definitely not too mainstream.”

So there you have it. I found this article to put my mind at ease about their two next projects, both of which I’m looking forward to temendously, especially The Yiddish Policemen’s Union which, like the article says, is perfectly suited to the Coen brothers. If you haven’t read the book yet, I cannot recommend it enough.

The New York Times is carrying an interesting article about the sound design of No Country For Old Men. Sound Editor Skip Lievsay, a Coen stalwart since Blood Simple is quoted along with Composor Carter Burwell and, of course, Joel and Ethan. You can read it by following the link.

Thanks to William for the link.