A piano melody that brings you close to tears. A suspense-inducing crescendo that has you at the edge of your seat. An experience-enhancing soundtrack is key to any great movie—something the film music producers at Varèse Sarabande Records know well. In celebration of its 40-year anniversary, the prolific record label is putting out a retrospective of film music from the last four decades, since the release of their first soundtrack in 1978.
The company is behind soundtracks such as A Little Princess, Back to the Future, Part III, Driving Miss Daisy, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, Whiplash, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and How to Train Your Dragon, as well as the composers of said works—Patrick Doyle, Alan Silvestri, Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, Don Davis, Justin Hurwitz, Carter Burwell, and John Powell, respectively.
We sat down with one of these composers, Carter Burwell—the mind behind most Coen brothers movies, including Oscar-nominated scores for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri as well as soundtracks for films such as Todd Haynes’ Carol—to find out what goes into the making of a movie score.
The first movie soundtrack Burwell fell in love with was that of the James Bond film Goldfinger. “I thought I was going to grow up to be a spy,” he tells Spotify. But he didn’t—he became a composer. But more than that, he became a filmmaker.
“I feel that I have two jobs, and my number one job is to make a great film. The number two job is to also make good music, make interesting music. What I’m paid for is job number one, but for my own pride and satisfaction, I try to also achieve job number two.”
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