This story about “The Banshees of Inisherin“ composer Carter Burwell first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
To Carter Burwell, it made perfect sense. He’d just finished reading the script to Martin McDonagh’s black comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin,” and his thoughts were pretty clear.
“It’s a script about two guys on a small island off the coast of Ireland during the Irish Civil War,” he said. “And I said to Martin, ‘Is there any reason the music wouldn’t in some way be Irish?”
Well, yeah, there was a reason. “He just hated that idea,” Burwell said, laughing. “It clearly touched a nerve of some sort, so I never brought that up again. But it wasn’t obvious what else it should be, so I waited until I saw some of the footage before I even started thinking about it again.”
Of course, McDonagh didn’t even try to scrub other sounds of Irishness out of his story of a pair of friends, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who have a falling-out that turns unexpectedly gruesome — unexpected, that is, only to people who aren’t familiar with McDonagh’s brutal humor.
Gleeson’s character, Colm, plays fiddle in the local pub and listens to records by Irish tenor John McCormack. “You’re very much in Ireland, but I think Martin wanted the score to take you out of there and make it so that it wasn’t just an Irish story,” Burwell said. “Everything else in the movie steeps you in Irishness: the landscape, the clothes, you name it. but he wanted something to take you a bit away, and that ended up being what I concentrated on.”
McDonagh gave Burwell a few clues. He chose a piece of Bulgarian choral music to open the film, and set a mid-film montage to Indonesian gamelan music. “I love it, but it was a little unusual in this setting,” Burwell said. “But I thought that I could make that piece work if I used some gamelan sounds in my score before that piece comes on. That way it won’t sound like it came out of nowhere.”
Burwell put low gongs and marimbas underneath his melodies to prepare the audience’s ears for the arrival of the Indonesian piece — but then McDonagh asked his composer to write the music for that sequence, too. “It was the right decision,” Burwell said, “but it means that the gamelan still lives on as a ghost inside my orchestration, even thought we got rid of that piece.”
Burwell, whose frequent work with the Coen brothers shows that he’s well attuned to dark humor, also made heavy use of percussion instruments in his score. “I came to those instruments because there’s something very childlike about Colin Farrell’s character, and they’re the kind of instruments you’d find in an elementary school.”
Another characteristic of the score is how understated it is; even when the action gets (quietly) creepy, the music holds back. “If you describe the action to someone who hasn’t seen the film, it might sound extreme,” Burwell said. “At the same time, no one raises their voice. No one ever runs faster than a walk.
“That’s one of the things that’s interesting about it and makes it very much a Martin McDonagh production. This extreme violence and emotional darkness goes on, but within a completely normal context. I don’t know if I ever got up to forte in writing the music. “It’s just about two guys, and the way it’s shot and scored is designed to make it intimate.”
Read more from the Race Begins issue here.
