Words matter. These are the best Carter Burwell Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I like the fact that New York looks a bit backwards, toward the Old World, rather than resolutely forwards.
I write music to please myself. Hopefully the director’s enjoying it too.
The jarring change going from an urban environment to an extremely remote natural environment is extremely inspiring. It’s constantly stimulating, it’s like a slap in the face.
Death is always around the corner, but often our society gives it inordinate help.
I prefer a life in which we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
I don’t generally find myself listening to the music of a film unless there’s something awfully wrong with it.
John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks.
A carefree quality is a whole aspect of life that I will never understand. I don’t think I have ever been carefree and can’t see the pleasure of it.
Hopefully each film can be given a musical voice of its own, which is not to say that the instrumentation is always unique, but that the relationship between the sound and the image is unique.
I almost never try to make the audience comfortable. I wouldn’t want that if I were in the audience.
Any film which views the darker side of life, which is death with a sense of humor, is very much to my taste.
There is not much irony when people are being happy on screen.
In mainstream romantic comedies, I’m usually tearing my hair out. It’s just a devastatingly difficult genre for me.
I would like to do a science fiction film some day. Star Wars seems really to have destroyed the genre, which at one time offered great musical opportunities.
Performing written music, even when I’ve written it, is not very interesting to me.
I just love the sheer mess of New York.
Los Angeles is an industry town, and it has great facilities and personnel. The disadvantage is that everyone there seems to talk about the same subject matter.
On Being John Malkovich and the cinema of the absurd, I do enjoy it. I wish there were more like it. The very fact that there can’t be more like it is one of the reasons it’s admirable.
Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.
Connection is what one is after in probably most media, but certainly in film, which is an immersive medium.
New Yorkers may think they’re on some cutting edge, but that’s not especially true. It is, however, the most exciting heterogeneous mess of a town I’ve ever seen.
How does my music connect to an audience? That is just a complete mystery to me.
I think I’ve only done one horror movie, Psycho III. That was a walk in the park compared to a romantic comedy.
I think being a little nuts is helpful.
Big Sur is at the end of the continent. It attracts really crazy people.
The flow of Guiness into the studio was inspirational as well as nutritive.
I’m one of those people who is actually inspired by a deadline. I might not sleep for many days on end, it may not be good for my health, but it definitely helps.
When the systems we expect to help us actually hurt us, we have tragedy.
All my music is very simple in that melody is usually clearly stated.
If someone suddenly lost their director the day before shooting and wanted me to step in, I’d be willing to. But I’d do brain surgery the same way. I’m always up for something new.
I have always loved Scottish music – all sorts of Celtic, Gaelic music.
Even if I went off to some other career, I hope I would still be doing Coen films.
I don’t personally see my work as being dark. What interests me is a balance between light and dark.
