Carter Burwell

Carter Burwell, nominated for multiple Academy Awards as a film composer, moves fluidly across contrasting moods that range from eerie and somber to playful and luminous, shifting without warning between avant-garde experimentation and rustic simplicity. His strongest ties remain to independent cinema, forged through repeated partnerships with directors such as Todd Haynes, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Martin McDonagh, and above all Joel and Ethan Coen, for whom he has supplied music to fourteen of their first fifteen features. His initial screen credit arrived with the Coens’ 1984 debut thriller Blood Simple. He likewise supplied the scores for Spike Jonze’s first feature, Being John Malkovich in 1999, and Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges in 2008. The year 2008 also placed his work in the commercial teen romance Twilight. An Emmy arrived in 2011 for the miniseries Mildred Pierce, after which he rejoined the Twilight series for Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1. His first Oscar nomination recognized the restrained chamber textures he created for Todd Haynes’s 2015 drama Carol. A second nomination followed for the folk-inflected sonorities of McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in 2017. His sixteenth film with Joel Coen, The Tragedy of Macbeth, appeared in 2021, and a third Oscar nomination recognized the childlike instrumental palette—harp, flute, and glockenspiel among them—that defined McDonagh’s 2022 dark fairy tale The Banshees of Inisherin.

Born in New York on November 18, 1954, Burwell studied piano during childhood and later taught himself blues guitar as a teenager. At Harvard he concentrated on architecture and fine arts, never contemplating music professionally; after graduation he spent time in a biology laboratory and then as an animator, performing for enjoyment in punk bands after dark.

A mutual acquaintance introduced him to the Coen brothers when they needed a composer for Blood Simple in 1984. The collaboration proved immediate, leading to his return for their next picture, the 1987 kidnapping comedy Raising Arizona, where he mixed sampled elements with diverse thematic sources. Miller’s Crossing, the Coens’ 1990 gangster film, marked Burwell’s first fully orchestrated score, while 1991’s Barton Fink brought wider notice; for that project he wrote only twenty bars of material, which sound designer Skip Lievsay then processed with effects and redistributed across the picture.

As the 1990s advanced, his schedule grew steadily and began to encompass more mainstream assignments, among them Doc Hollywood in 1991, Wayne’s World 2 in 1993, and Airheads in 1994. Acclaim widened with the 1995 score for Rob Roy, inaugurating the busiest stretch of his career—more than thirty-five films in the ensuing five years. Standouts from that period include Conspiracy Theory in 1997, Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters in 1998, the glam-rock fiction Velvet Goldmine in 1998, Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich in 1999, and David O. Russell’s Gulf War drama Three Kings in 1999. Throughout the decade he also contributed accordion and synthesizer to new-age projects by Gabrielle Roth and David Hykes’ Harmonic Choir.

Demand remained constant through the 2000s, with further work alongside Jonze on Adaptation in 2002, Sidney Lumet’s final film Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in 2007, and his first entry in the Twilight Saga with the 2008 release Twilight. A first Golden Globe nomination arrived for Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are in 2009, alongside six additional Coen brothers films completed during those years.

True Grit, the Coens’ 2010 feature, carried another Burwell score, and he returned to the Twilight series for Breaking Dawn, Pt. 1 in 2011 and Pt. 2 in 2012, both directed by Bill Condon. He again joined McDonagh for Seven Psychopaths in 2012 and Condon for The Fifth Estate in 2013 and Mr. Holmes in 2015. The first Academy Award nomination recognized his music for Todd Haynes’s 2015 romantic drama Carol, drawn from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. He rejoined the Coens for Hail, Caesar! in 2016, a score that combined choral-orchestral writing with original songs co-written with Henry Krieger and Willie Reale. Further Haynes work followed with Wonderstruck in 2017, after which a second Oscar nomination came for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The episodic 2018 release The Ballad of Buster Scruggs marked Burwell’s fifteenth feature-length collaboration with the Coen brothers. In 2019 he scored the animated feature Missing Link and Condon’s crime thriller The Good Liar, his seventh project with that director.

Subsequent assignments included the series The Morning Show and Space Force before he rejoined Joel Coen for The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021. The next year brought Lena Dunham’s historical comedy Catherine Called Birdy, featuring Roomful of Teeth, and another McDonagh partnership on The Banshees of Inisherin. Seeking a fairy-tale atmosphere, that score relied on concise, wistful vignettes scored for harp, glockenspiel, marimba, and bass, among other instruments, earning Burwell his third Oscar nomination.