Biopics present a challenge: is it possible to show the life—even in part—of a popular person in a film short of a two-hour runtime? Perhaps the answer is to not to be so literate but lean into the poetics of a person’s life, according to Jay McCarrol, the composer for Tony, the recent film about the youthful days of chef and writer, Anthony Bourdain.
Bourdain’s personality was simultaneously aggressive and delicate; a man whose light and dark were always so present on every adventure. Instead of trying and potentially failing by flattening him, we instead have Tony, directed by Matt Johnson of Nirvanna The Band The Show (and movie) cult notoriety. Tony shows Bourdain, based on several years chronicled in Kitchen Confidential as one summer in Cape Cod, at a turning point in his life that eventually led him to becoming a chef. The film does feel spiritually correct, bearing the imprints of what would make Bourdain so beloved.
McCarrol’s score is a large part of that. It does a lot of lifting in parts where the dialogue or plot cannot. There is even, as McCarrol puts it, a darker inevitability in the somber, minimalist music, mindful of the fact this film depicts an entry point of Bourdain’s journey toward renown while knowing his story has already ended.
McCarrol—while on a break from working on his next project with Johnson, a film about VICE (yours truly’s former workplace)—spoke about all of this and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Sarah MacDonald: After I saw Tony, I wrote in my notes that the score seemed contemplative. I felt remorse there. Then I heard Matt Johnson say in an interview your score showed us Tony’s honest thoughts and reactions because, for most of the movie, he’s lying to people. I wonder if that’s accurate to you and can you tell me how you got there?
Jay McCarrol: You know, something I haven’t talked about before is that yes, I was obviously trying to represent where all of the needle drops in the soundtrack could not really give us a window into [Tony’s] true self. I was trying to put myself where this character was and—no matter how wild of a time he was having—to represent his inner turmoil. That adolescent uncertainty he was going through. He was wrestling with things. He talked about being angry during that time in his life.
There’s this thing I did with it that the film couldn’t really do in dialogue or content. You have to be very delicate when it comes to themes of suicide, and with my score, I think, I was able to put a very dark inevitability in it. I did that consciously. We all watch it knowing that this is the story of a young man and he’s got this huge life ahead of him, but his story has already ended. I wanted the music to have a somber tone with nautical elements added to it. There’s a Tony at sea feeling—a little bit of a sendoff. You know what I mean? Setting sail off into the unknown horizon. Not only is this horizon of his life ahead of him, it’s also the journey even beyond that. I wasn’t shying away from it being intensely deep and dark like that.
The reaction to the announcement of the movie was so big. It’s Anthony Bourdain. How can you contain his life in a biopic? But it was this really beautiful tribute. I wonder—because you’re dealing with a character who was a real person, one with an embedded finality in it—do you think that you’re bringing real Tony to the story? I guess I’m really grappling with it being a character and a real-life person and how you separate those two.
I think what we as filmmakers and artists do in this situation is try to find things that feel true, whether or not they’re factually true. We are trying very hard to respect the man and to acknowledge the truths we know, that we read about, but, like all of the people out there, we are wrestling with this idea of would Tony have liked this? Would he not have liked this?
I think he would have liked it.
The bottom line is nobody can know, and being certain about it is a bit foolish. But I know that if it were me, I’d rather have a film about my life to take liberties and tell it like a poem. That rather than trying to figure out how to be entertaining with the brass tacks of my day-to-day, you can get so much more out of that when you distill things down to their poetic and metaphoric meanings. Matt Johnson has said many times about making biopics or anything like this, where something can be spiritually or factually incorrect, but spiritually correct. That’s the way I like movies to be made.
You’ve said in a few other interviews you went minimal with this score. Can you walk me through your process, the timeline of how you got to that minimal sound, and how you decided on that somber tone?
There were a couple of things I was considering. Where everything else about this film was wild and out of control—having this chaotic party time or angry and loud—I saw an opportunity for me to juxtapose it with the inner truths going on in his head. Juxtaposing that dynamically was one reason. But when I was writing it, I realized this is a theme that is begging to be added on and stacked on with all of this instrumentation. But he’s not yet been adorned with those experiences. The core theme… has weight, but not a lot of density to it yet. Maybe it is dense. You know, this is why it’s tough to put into words—a lot of this is a feeling. But he’s not yet the man that has all the frills of all this instrumentation that’s grand or huge we all know his life is going to accumulate. Right now, it’s just the beginning. It’s understated.
When you’re working with a director to score those moments, how does that conversation go?
The boring answer I’ll say right away is that it’s different every time. Every movie, there’s a different entry point to figure out how you’re going to approach it. In this case, most of what I did without any direction was just trying to find a theme on the piano that I thought was worthy of the man. I’ve always been a big fan and searching around for that was the longest grind because I inherently knew a few things with the instrumentation that I wanted to do. I wanted to keep it low on the piano where it felt sort of solemn and a bit stoic, sad, and dark, but cool and distinguished like him. Something a bit masculine. Then a long-held accordion or harmonium, which evoked the sea element. I knew that the film and the camera were going to be right on Tony the whole time. I needed to find my nucleus of the Tony sound. That would become the North Star. I realized he was wrestling with what type of man he was going to become, and I put that in musical terms—the motif that is him. We return to it every time we go somewhere else in his new experiences. That same motif that’s being augmented towards the light or towards the dark, and so it’s kind of getting darker and a little more dissonant towards getting lighter and a bit happier and everything. That was the easy way to map it out. It made it a lot easier to have Matt say, “Okay, this is where we could use it here” and “Oh, I like it here.” I had already figured out those core pieces of the language and then we were able to discuss it a little more openly.
I’m thinking about something you said in an interview about musical instincts differing when working on a film project. Because it seems to me you’re serving someone else’s vision with the score. What is your own musical instinct and how does that keep when you’re working on a project with multiple people?
I’ve never really considered with Matt or any director that I’m trying to serve their vision. I think that a director’s vision is something they share, and they go, “I’m trying to get here.” So, we’re all trying to align on that light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve had the benefit of working with Matt so much that he’s collaborative and involves me in filmmaking, even in its earliest form. By the time we get to the scoring part, I don’t need to have these big, long conversations about what he wants to do. He and I both know what this should feel like. We’ve got very high standards for ourselves, and if anything, we’re always talking about how we’re not meeting them. You know, every one of our projects, we feel so lucky any time we get a passing grade. When we feel like our imaginations took the possibilities to a really impossible standard to hit. That standard is defined by our tastes and our shorthand. He always delivers some really great ideas of what he wants to do with the film, and that’s the way he talks to me. He’s saying, “Look, this is what I’m trying to do with this film. I want it to feel like this.” He doesn’t talk in music. Most directors don’t talk in music.
When I talked about separating my musical instincts with film instincts, it’s that I know now how good this film can be, and so if I start putting my hands on the keyboard and let my hands do their muscle memory thing, I’m going to start to be a musician. You have to fight the instinct to let music do what music wants to do on its own. Sometimes the music begs to go somewhere and you don’t let it, and that is evocative of something. You’re putting your filmmaker’s hat on and seeing what the effect is. Hopefully, you have a good understanding of what the film is trying to do, moment-to-moment, and in a broad sense, you sort of kill your darlings along the way. But hopefully, you work at it hard enough, long enough, and you can marry the two to get something that sounds really good. And sometimes, following your filmmaking instinct, you don’t even know where this is going musically. You can get happy accidents where you get an idea that you probably wouldn’t have come up with if you were following just your musical instincts.
What do your film composing days look like? How do you select projects and how long are you in the studio?
You have to figure out what the code is [for a film score.] What are the two or three things coming together doing? That’s really difficult to try to figure out, and I do that in a very alone way. I don’t share ideas too early. I need to really work on that and go through a lot of trial-and-error. It takes a long time, and it gets scary because it starts to eat up time. But the good news is that once you find that, it becomes a bit of a downhill sprint.
The reason why I’m selective is because I do enjoy making things too and being a collaborator. Like this VICE movie. I’m an executive producer as well. I’m there with Matt watching every take, weighing in on virtually everything. We have just a few people that are there to rally behind Matt. We’re catching everything that we can together to hit what our collective standards are. It’s really fun when I get to do that. Also, I have no idea what the score for this VICE movie is going to be.
I have a few adjectives for the score of that movie.
By the time it starts to reveal itself, I’m going to get some ideas. I like being right on the ground floor of the filmmaking part because when you come up with something that you know is making the film better, it’s one of know “pat yourself on the back, sleep well tonight” days.