In case that doesn't work, here's the interview. I will remove it from these message boards when they get their links fixed. Nothing more frustrating than trying to find something and running into broken links!

Carter Burwell has been keeping busy indeed. In the last three years (and in seemingly rapid succession) he has worked on no less than fifteen films including; High Fidelity, Mystery, Alaska, Three Kings, The General's Daughter, The Hi-Lo Country, Velvet Goldmine, and Gods and Monsters.

Last time we checked in with Carter, Conspiracy Theory capped off a busy 1997 for the composer and he was embarking on the Coen Bros. goofy slacker flick, The Big Lebowski. Now, after debuting to ovations in Cannes, O Brother, Where Art Thou? reteams the composer and brothers and the Bard has also beckoned with a contemporary update of Hamlet. With no signs of slowing down, Carter sheds light on his work for the critically acclaimed Being John Malkovich, his isolated score to What Planet Are You From? on DVD, and his upcoming work on Blair Witch Project 2!

How are you doing?

I'm in the process of building my new studio, which' is stressful.

Is this Sound & Vision? I took a look at the website; is that what it's going to be about?

That's just the name of our domain. I have no idea what I'm going to use that for in the end. Right now it's just an experiment. I've programmed the computer to sample an image from each of eight television stations and average them together and post it there. It's an average of what's on TV, once an hour. There's no particular relationship to the studio; that's a nice studio with 5.1 surround. I'll be able to write and mix there.

I wanted to talk a minute about The Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? It just premiered in Cannes.

The full title is O Brother, Where Art Thou? Based on The Odyssey by Homer. Odysseus is George Clooney, and he escapes from a 1930s chain gang in Mississippi. He's chained together with John Turturro and Tim Nelson, and they go on these adventures loosely based on The Odyssey. For instance John Goodman plays a Bible salesman with an eyepatch, so he's the Cyclops. Holly Hunter plays Penelope. That's the basic situation. It's basically a musical in that it's filled with songs from that time and place. My actual contribution to the movie is miniscule because it's almost entirely work from that period. Some of it is the original recordings, and some of it is rerecordings.

How would you describe your music for the film?

My music, which is less than incidental ' microincidental, really, is where they needed something that followed the drama or action more carefully than a song could do. I wrote some things for those areas. It's largely rhythmical with some string band materials ' guitar and mandolin, upright bass. I'd be amazed if anybody noticed my presence in that film.

You've been busy with Miramax's Hamlet as well.

We looked at the scores that had been done for Hamlet in the past, which are quite a few. Shostakovich did two in fact, and the director liked the idea that his Hamlet would reference previous tellings of the story. In the end I found it easier to do that musically without getting too arch; I ending up not really taking that approach. I worked from the character of Hamlet as performed by Ethan Hawke, which carries a digital camcorder around and watches what's going on around him. Some of his monologues are performed on videotape with his own camera looking at himself. I took the approach that there would be a modern flavor, at least in Hamlet's method of discourse, and tried to include some of that in the music while keeping a broad enough palette that it gets large and dramatic at times, small and intimate at others. It's a combination of electronics, some sample loops, and a very small combination of strings and woodwinds. I think we had about a dozen players.

Your music was featured so prominently in last year's Being John Malkovich. Tell me a little about working with Spike and that score.

It was about a year ago that Spike and I started talking about it. We first talked over the phone, since I was in New York and he was in Los Angeles. He sent me a script and we spoke about different approaches. From the script it seemed you could go any number of ways; the film doesn't adhere to any recognizable genre.

What did you think when you first read the script?

I had several reactions. In some ways I thought it was a little too jokey, and that was significantly reduced during the shooting of the film. The punchlines in the script sometimes diminished the situations by dismissing them as jokes; obviously Spike had the same reaction because the film is much less that way than the original script. You could go way over the top with fantastical instruments, doing some novel orchestrations for it. But the script could also be interpreted in a wacky, frantic style. I chose to underplay that and go for a more natural style after seeing what Spike had finally shot, which was kind of grungy looking. It seemed appropriate to make it more emotional and personal, so that's the direction we wound up taking.

The presentation of the music on the CD is terrific, but there's also a cue where you're talking to the orchestra ' which is different. Was that your decision?

Spike was shooting with his little video camera during a lot of recording, so he ended up with a lot of my talking to the orchestra. The first compilation for the CD actually had a lot more of that, with me talking to the orchestra, but I didn't care for that. I thought it would be a nice thing to do once I'm dead, but until then there's no reason for someone buying the CD to listen to me talking. I would never know to claim what people buy CDs for, though. They left that one bit after I cut some other ones out.

It's like the movie, following that same unique tone.

That's one of the things I love about that film, and the recording sessions were fun. Normally the musicians at a film score session have no idea what it is they're working on, and you put the chart in front of them and they play it. The first day of recording you tell them the general story and characters, but with this film it wouldn't have made sense to tell them the story. It wouldn't help inform their playing because the music is personal and doesn't have anything to do with the strange aspects of the story. I didn't tell them anything about the premise of the film until we were well into recording, and then I would release little bits of information to them. When you would sense the musician's interest was flagging, I'd give them some plot details to keep them intrigued.

What Planet Are You From is coming out on DVD, and the specs indicate there will be an isolated score.

That's very exciting to me, and if that does happen, it's great. They did that with the DVD for The Corruptor, and I think it's wonderful to listen to the score as we intended it to be heard in 5.1 surround sound without a bunch of sound effects and dialogue. For myself and my engineer, it's very exciting. I hope other people enjoy it as well.

So what's coming up for you?

I'm recording in two weeks for a film called Before Night Falls, about a Cuban poet named Grenaldo Arena. It's from his memoirs of the same name. It's difficult to say any more about it; I could tell you the story of his life, but that's not what it's really about. It's more his general outlook on his life, which was interesting in that he was a teenager during the revolution in Cuba and was recognized as an important writer at a young age. As the revolution soured, there was less room for an artist, and he ended up being imprisoned, both for being an outspoken writer and also for being gay. Ultimately he got out of Cuba in 1980 and went to New York, where he died of AIDS ten years later. The facts aren't really the subject, though; it's completely subjective, about context.

What other work has the film's director done in the past?

He did the film Basquiat, his only other feature film.

So this is independent?

Very independent. I don't believe we have a distributor yet.

You continue to write these amazing scores for smaller films and they're finally getting released, such as Gods and Monsters and Being John Malkovich, as opposed to a few years ago when much of your work never came out on CD. Are you seeing a turning of the tide where that's concerned?

I think these releases are entirely financial calculations, and they're always borderline. The big question is how many union musicians played on the score and how many records do they think will sell. The ancillary one is the record company making a guess as to how successful the film will be. No matter how good the score is, it won't sell if the movie isn't a hit. The ones you mentioned had low new use fees due to the small orchestras; large orchestral scores like What Planet Are You From are very hard to get released, as long as they're union sessions. If it had been done overseas or in a non-union town, it would be easy to get released.

Gods and Monsters was a terrific movie but it didn't make tons of money, so it was released on the fact that it was a small orchestra?

Yes, and in every case there's a fair amount of begging and pleading from the composer. In that case we had friendly ears to beg to. It varies enormously, but mostly those ones were released because of the very small orchestra scale. Then that reduces the cost to the record company.

Are there any other projects you're working on?

I may be doing Blair Witch 2, which is' well, it might sound odd, but the script was more interesting than one might think. We'll see, but it looks like that will probably happen. They're thinking about a Halloween release for that. I'm optimistic that there are interesting things that can be done with that.

Was it Howard Shore or Carter Burwell that did High Fidelity? Not that it matters; there wasn't much score to begin with.

But I clearly saw Howard Shore's name on screen in the end credits.

As for OH, BROTHER ..., the poster I saw yesterday doesn't list Burwell as composer at ALL -- rather, someone named T-Bone Burnett. And the IMDb lists Burnett and "songs by Chris King." I find this a little upsetting. It will be the first Coen Bros. movie without Burwell's name on it, from the look. By his own account in the interview above, perhaps he did too little to warrant poster credit -- just as Michael Kamen's contribution to FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS was not cited on that film's posters. Still, I'm a little bit worried.

Link for HIGH FIDELITY:
http://us.imdb.com/Details?0146882