masterclass - Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης

ΟΣΤΗΡΙΚΤΗΣ ΜΕΤΑΚΙΝΗΣΗΣ
M A S T E R C L A S S
49o ΦΕΣΤΙΒΑΛ ΚΙΝΗΜΑΤΟΓΡΑΦΟΥ
ΘΕΣΣΑΛΟΝΙΚΗΣ
49th THESSALONIKI
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
G u stav o S a n ta o lalla
14-23.11.2008
www.filmfestival.gr
ΕΠΙΣΗΜΟΣ ΧΟΡΗΓΟΣ
ΧΟΡΗΓΟΣ ΕΠΙΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΑΣ
ΜΕΓΑΣ ΧΟΡΗΓΟΣ
ΥΠΟΥΡΓΕΙΟ ΜΑΚΕΔΟΝΙΑΣ ΘΡΑΚΗΣ
ΥΠΟΥΡΓΕΙΟ ΑΝΑΠΤΥΞΗΣ
ΧΟΡΗΓΟΣ ΒΡΑΒΕΙΩΝ ΚΟΙΝΟΥ
YΠΟΣΤΗΡΙΚΤΗΣ ΑΕΡΟΜΕΤΑΦΟΡΩΝ
Υ.Π.Α.
ΥΠΟΣΤΗΡΙΚΤΗΣ BUSINESS
ΥΠΟΣΤΗΡΙΚΤΗΣ
ΙΑΤΡΙΚΗΣ ΠΕΡΙΘΑΛΨΗΣ
ΧΟΡΗΓΟΙ ΕΠΙΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΑΣ
49o ΦΕΣΤΙΒΑΛ ΚΙΝΗΜΑΤΟΓΡΑΦΟΥ
ΘΕΣΣΑΛΟΝΙΚΗΣ
49th THESSALONIKI
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
14-23.11.2008
www.filmfestival.gr
MASTERCLASSES
4 9 t h T H E S S A L ON I K I I N T E R N A T I ON A L F I L M F E S T I V A L
Γιώργος Κρασσακόπουλος
Καλημέρα σας. Καλώς ήρθατε σε ένα ακόμα masterclass του 49ου Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου
Θεσσαλονίκης. Σήμερα μαζί μας έχουμε το συνθέτη Gustavo Santaolalla, αλλά θα δώσω το λόγο
στην κυρία Μουζάκη για να μας πει περισσότερα λόγια πριν ξεκινήσουμε τη συζήτηση. Όπως
βλέπετε, θα έχουμε και μια μικρή μουσική έκπληξη, εξαιρετικά ευχάριστη. Σας ευχαριστώ που
ήρθατε.
Δέσποινα Μουζάκη-Διευθύντρια Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης
Καλώς ήρθατε. Σήμερα είμαστε πολύ χαρούμενοι. Έχουμε μαζί μας έναν από τους σημαντικότερους
συνθέτες, μουσικούς και παραγωγούς της πατρίδας του, της Αργεντινής. Έναν από τους βασικούς
υπεύθυνους για το ότι το ταγκό έγινε και πάλι μόδα στην ηλεκτρονική του εκδοχή σε ολόκληρο τον
κόσμο.
Ο Gustavo Santaolalla μπορεί και κάνει επιτυχίες με θαυμαστή ευκολία. Κάνει κλαμπ και
συναυλιακούς χώρους να λικνίζονται ρυθμικά στους μεθυστικούς ήχους των Bajofondo, αλλά
και ντύνει με την εμπνευσμένη, γεμάτη συναίσθημα μουσική του εικόνες μερικών από τις πλέον
αξέχαστες ταινίες των τελευταίων χρόνων. Φιλμ όπως το «Βαβέλ», τα «Ημερολόγια Μοτοσικλέτας»,
τα «21 γραμμάρια», το “Brokeback Mountain” πολύ απλά δεν θα ήταν τα ίδια χωρίς τη μουσική του.
Βραβευμένος δύο φορές με Όσκαρ, τιμημένος με χρυσούς δίσκους σε δεκάδες χώρες, ανάμεσα
στις οποίες και η Ελλάδα, ο Gustavo είναι ένας συνθέτης που πλέον δεν έχει να αποδείξει τίποτα.
Εξακολουθεί, όμως, να δουλεύει με πάθος και θέρμη, έχοντας μόνη ανάγκη να χαρίσει σε μας τη
μουσική που έχει κρυμμένη μέσα του. Ευχαριστώ, Gustavo.
Gustavo Santaolalla
Hola! Hello! I’m sorry I don’t speak Greek; I would love to but we are going to do this in English and
I think we have these for the translation, right? First, of all, thank you so much for being here. I’m
honored that somebody called me to do a masterclass, since I don’t think I can give a class and
certainly I’m not a master. I’m not a traditional or an academic musician. I don’t know how to read
or write music, so my approach to making music is different and is much related to my life, I think.
My life has marked me in the sense of deciding what I wanted to do, which was music and I think
also the way that I do music. So, I would like to start by just telling a little bit about my life and how
I started all this and then probably we are going to go to some questions and then we’ll play some
music, okay?
I come from the provinces of Buenos Aires in Argentina. I come from the city. The place I come from
and grew up in had dirt roads and birds and insects and all those sounds around me. My family was
very musical, in the sense that neither my dad nor my mom played music but they were music lovers and record buyers. They bought a lot of records. I grew up listening to all kinds of music. I think
this was very important at this very early age. I started learning how to play the guitar when I was
five. My grandmother bought me my first guitar and I started taking lessons but I was never very
good at studying or learning music.
I was a very good student at school, a very good one. I wasn’t a nerd but I was a very good student;
but not with music. I think music was so much in me that all the other stuff didn’t seem to make
sense to me. So by the time I was 10 years old, my teacher quit on me. She came to my mom and
said: his ear is stronger than my music. I quit. Because I remember that she used to put these charts
in front on me and I would pretend that I was reading but I just memorized it. So, she would cover
a part of the charts and say, “start from here” and I really didn’t know where I was. So, there was
a point when nothing was working. But precisely, at that time, around age ten, I formed my first
group, which was an Argentinean folk group and I started writing my first little songs.
I have to say that parallel to this, and this is something also very important in terms of who I am,
I was always drawn to the spiritual side of life. I was raised catholic and at that time I was an altar
boy and around 9 or 10 I started feeling a very strong vocation to the point that I was planning to
finish my elementary school and go to a seminary school in order to become a priest. But around
those years, between 10 and 11, when I started writing songs, I had my first big spiritual crisis and
I quit the Catholic Church and continued on my own. And that took me to different paths in my
4 9 ο Φ Ε Σ Τ Ι Β Α Λ Κ Ι Ν Η Μ ΑΤ Ο Γ ΡΑ Φ Ο Υ Θ Ε Σ Σ Α Λ Ο Ν Ι Κ Η Σ MASTERCLASSES
spiritual search.
But for me, music and spirituality go hand in hand. I find that there is a deep connection between
the spiritual side of life and music. So, by the time I was 11 or 12, I got my first electric guitar, which
was very rare at that time in Argentina but my parents were always very supportive of my interest
in music. By the time I was 13, I heard The Beatles and it was over. I knew that’s what I wanted to do
for the rest of my life. It was very clear to me that I wanted to devote my life to music.
So I put together a band. By the time I was 15 -funnily enough because it was years and years after
I went back to that part of music- I did my first paid job, which was the music for a short movie. The
father of a companion of mine at school was doing a short movie and he knew that I was making
music and that I was very young. So, I did the music for that short film. When I turned 16, I got my
first recording deal and I signed with RCA. And that’s when I started my career professionally, not
only as an artist but also as a producer. In those days, there wasn’t such a thing as alternative music
and I don’t think that even the word alternative was used in music. And I was doing alternative
music. I didn’t do the typical music that you heard on the radio. It was something that was a little
more challenging.
So, through lots of mistakes and some hints, I learned my craft as a producer. By the time I was 20, I
was very popular in Argentina with my band -the band was called Arco Iris, which means rainbow.
But by the time I was 18, when I finished high school, my parents, because I was such a good student, thought that music was great but it was going to be more like a hobby in my life and wanted
me to follow a more traditional career. So that became a family conflict for a while and in my search
for a spiritual life I joined a group, which was a kind of a spiritual community in which we studied
comparative religions.
I started to get more into eastern philosophies and I became a kind of a priest. I led an almost monastic life between 18 and 24. I was truly a vegetarian, no alcohol, no drugs, celibate and in all those
years that I was very popular and there were all these girls following our band, I was corrupted, as I
said, after that. But it was very important for me for many reasons to be in that group and I learned
a lot of things that I still carry with me today.
Parallel to that, the political situation in Argentina was getting worse and worse. Since I was born,
until that time, there was probably not one president that would end his term, because there were
always those military coups and by the time I was 20, 21 or 22, it started getting very bad. And that
ended basically with 30,000 people disappearing by the hand of the government and this put me
in a kind of a dangerous situation because they thought that anybody with long hair and a guitar
was a threat to society. So, I was in jail many times probably between the age of 17 and the time I
left Argentina, not for more than 3 days at a time. And because I was famous, I was lucky and I never
got hurt. But they basically made my life miserable; it became really dangerous for me.
I split with this community when I was 24 and I just continued my search by myself. In 1978, I
decided I had to leave Argentina, which was very hard at the time, but in retrospect it was great,
because it really opened my eyes and my mind to a lot of other things. One of the elements that
were always very important to my view of music has been the concept of identity. I had that very
clear from the very beginning, from that folk group and through Arco Iris which was, I believe, the
first band probably in Latin American which mixed Latin American rhythms and instrumentations
with the more known language of rock and jazz and all that stuff.
And I always thought it was very important to reflect who you are and where you come from in
what you do. And that’s a concept that still lives with me today from Bajofondo, the band that I am
a member of, to the movie “Café de los Maestros” that hopefully you are going to see in the next
couple of days, and groups that I worked with, like Café Tacuba, even rock artists like Juanes, who
reflects Colombia in his music, the place that he comes from.
So, that was a very important part of my music. Even when I left in 1978, I never lost contact with
Argentina. As a matter of fact, I did some of my best work in Argentina after I left. That led me to do
an incredible project called De Ushuahia a la Quiaca that recorded rural musicians from the bottom
to the north of Argentina. That opened my mind immensely. I did that in 1984-1985. And I did that
MASTERCLASSES
4 9 t h T H E S S A L ON I K I I N T E R N A T I ON A L F I L M F E S T I V A L
at the hand of a great friend of mine, Leon Gieco. He is a kind of a folk hero in Argentina; a mixture
of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. To me, that opened possibilities of working with other people
because up to that point I had only produced my own records, the records of my group, and Leon’s.
The first artist’s music that I produced apart from my music when I was 20 years old was Leon’s.
So after that trip we did 40 musical events and I really got the sense that I wanted to do that, to take
a back seat and get out of the spotlight and put myself at the service of other artists and see how
I could help bring their music to a new or a better place. And so when I returned to Los Angeles,
which is the place that I moved to in 1978 and is still the place where I live most of the time when
I’m not traveling, I decided to immerse myself in producing other artists.
Right at that time in Mexico, there was a great historic moment taking place. The PRI, which is the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional -what an oxymoron- split and suddenly all this pluralism came
out and all those bands, like Maldita Vecindad, Café Tacuba etc. So, I really got myself deep into
producing and after that I started producing bands in Mexico, Chile, Argentina and I started building a kind of this alternative map of Latin America. I was approached to put together a record label
and this is something I dreamt of as a kid, because I remember being in high school and drawing
the logos of what one day might be my record label.
So we put together a label called Surco -it’s now 10 years old- and the first band that we signed was
called Molotov, it was huge in Latin America and the whole world. We sold more than a million and
a half records with that group. Then one thing led to another, we signed Juanes and we became
really popular alternative producers and got lots of nicknames in the process. The artists that I produced became very big and I became the guru of ‘rock en espaňol and King Midas, and all those
things because I think that the media wants to turn you into a character, a personality instead of a
person. Once you are a character, it’s much easier to crush you.
Nevertheless, I started to get a lot of recognition and Grammies and all these things. Parallel to this,
I always wanted to keep on doing music. Still, I kept producing and putting all my energy to other
artists and learning, because one of the things I really like about working with other artists is the
fact that I learn to do things in a different way. I always said that I love the fruits of experience and
in those days I tended to work with very young musicians and I believe in the fruits of experience
because it gives you the basis to create things.
But I also believe a lot in the fruits of inexperience; because inexperience makes you do things that
you wouldn’t do with experience and that’s something I have also applied in making music for
movies. So, parallel to my work as a producer, I kept on doing records every now and then. Every
three or four years, I would make a record even if I didn’t have the time to promote it or a band
to go out and play it. I said: the alternatives are to either do it but know that you are not going to
promote it or anything, or just don’t do it. I always decided it was better to do it.
And one particular instance is a record called Ronroco and this record has a little story that led us
to the music of movies. I’ve been playing an instrument since childhood called charango. It’s from
Northern Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. I probably got my first charango when I was 13 or 14 and I
played it in my own way. Charango is difficult and in those days, there was no one to teach you how
to play charango but I sort of created my own style of playing it, which is a lot different than that of
the original guys that created that instrument; they have long nails and they play with a really fast
right hand. It was a totally different technique.
For years I was always recording little things here and there just for me and never with the intention of putting it out. Let’s just say it was my personal need to do that. Years go by and I get a call
to produce a compilation of a man called Jaime Torres. Jaime Torres is perhaps the Ravi Shankar of
charango, the master of the instrument. He was born in Argentina from Bolivian parents. So, I met
Jaime and I literally listened to 400 of his recordings to create this compilation of his best work.
In the process, we slowly became friends and I was dying to show Jaime my music but I was very
shy about it. So, one day, finally, I went to him and I told him: I would like you to listen to this. This is
something that some friends of mine do. And he called me the next day and he said: you play here.
I know you play here. This is amazing; it’s great. I said: okay, master, it is amazing, but I play so differ
4 9 ο Φ Ε Σ Τ Ι Β Α Λ Κ Ι Ν Η Μ ΑΤ Ο Γ ΡΑ Φ Ο Υ Θ Ε Σ Σ Α Λ Ο Ν Ι Κ Η Σ MASTERCLASSES
ently from you. And he said: no, there aren’t really any books on how you should play the charango.
And you have captured the spirit of the instrument. You should make a record with this.
So, he really pushed me to make this record, Ronroco, which actually encompasses 13 years of
recording. All those little things that I was recording for me plus some new stuff became Ronroco.
Finally, we put that record out and it started to get some reaction in some alternative radios and
some people and then one day, in the middle of all this, my really heavy schedule in the recording
studio, I get a phone call at my office in Los Angeles saying Michael Mann wants to meet with you.
He wants to use one of your pieces from Ronroco in his movie, “The Insider”.
I knew what “The Insider” was about. It was about Jeffrey Wigand, the guy that blew the whistle on
the tobacco industry and it was a contemporary film; how was he going to use Ronroco there? So, I
met with Michael -he’s now a very good friend- and he showed me the scene. It’s a very important
turning point in the movie with Al Pacino and Russell Crowe and I saw it and it worked beautifully.
I said: there’s something in here. Right at the same time, I got a phone call from a common friend,
a woman that knew both Alejandro Gonzáles Iňárritu and me from my record work. She just said:
you should meet. You are the only guy that can make the music for Alejandro’s movie and she was
telling this to Alejandro as well. I never read the script from “Amores Perros”, and I never saw anything. I just knew it was his first film.
I was so busy at the time but she was insisting. I thought I couldn’t do the movie. I told her: call
Mexico tomorrow and say that I am not able to do this. I am so busy. Let’s face it. I’m up to my ears
with work. What am I going to do? I can’t do this movie. So that was it. I went to sleep and I woke
up in the middle of the night -all sweaty- and I said: how can I say no to something I haven’t read
nor have I seen anything? I can’t say no.
So, I call very early in the morning and say: call them and tell them that if they come to Los Angeles
and show us the movie, we will consider it. Sure enough, Alejandro came with his movie, put the
movie on, went out to smoke -he’s a heavy smoker- and I remember I watched it with my longtime
friend, who is also my engineer, and those ten first minutes of the movie were pretty intense. So I
remember watching that and after ten minutes we looked at each other and said: we’re in. We have
to do this movie. We’ll cancel whatever we have to cancel but we’ll do this movie.
And that was it. And then we made “Amores Perros” and then Alejandro got us to do “21 Grams” and
at the same time he said: this friend of mine, Walter Salles, is making this movie “Motorcycle Diaries”
about Ernesto Guevara -he’s from Argentina. You should meet. It would be great. So, we did and
that’s how we ended up doing “Motorcycle Diaries” and then when we were showing “Motorcycle
Diaries” at Sundance, at the end of the evening, when the movie already got distribution, we went
to a party and another woman started saying: Gustavo should meet with Ang Lee, because he’s
doing this very special western and he has had problems in his previous films with the music. He
should meet with you.
So, he sent me the script, I read it and after one or two months, I was in New York rehearsing for a
record that I was producing, a classical record, and we were going to play that at Carnegie Hall. I
had just finished the rehearsal and I got a phone call: if you want to meet with Ang, he’s now in
his office in New York. I remember I took the subway and I had my Ronroco with me and I walked
in. You know, he’s Chinese so he doesn’t talk that much; so, we said “hi”, he pointed to my case, I
opened it and I started playing for three minutes and that really broke the ice. After that, we started
talking and we talked a little bit about the idea of the film, about the guitar and things that inspire
us.
So we both felt very connected. I have thought about it -the guitar and strings- and he was thinking about the same things. After that meeting I went back to Los Angeles and in 20 days or less
I wrote the whole music and the way I do it is that I just go and record it. And I sent it to them in
less than a month and it was very funny because when he got the music, Ang thought they were
samples of previous things that I had done. And so he went to his producer and said: what a pity
because these will be perfect for the movie. And the producer said: no, no, this is the music for the
movie.
MASTERCLASSES
4 9 t h T H E S S A L ON I K I I N T E R N A T I ON A L F I L M F E S T I V A L
And that is the biggest example of how I like to work. I like to work a lot from the script and from
the conversation with the director and “Brokeback Mountain” is the best example, because the
whole score was done before the movie. And I always point out that it was Ang’s genius to say: okay,
we’re going to put this here and that here. All the music was done before. The only thing I recorded
afterwards was the music with the real strings because I had fake strings in the first recording, but
the themes and the sonic fabric of the score was all done prior to the movie and he actually lived
with that feeling of the music in the shooting of the movie and he played that music to the actors.
This also happened with “21 Grams” and most of the music -not all of it- in “Babel”. In all the movies
that I’ve done, which are not that many and we can talk about that too, there is this process that
has certainly worked for me and for the directors that I have worked with. It’s really collaboration
because the music is a big part of the movie and is much related to it. When I saw the first cut of
“Brokeback Mountain” with the music, I couldn’t believe it. It was perfect.
But I love to work that way more than scoring a particular scene. In other movies, like “21 Grams”
or “Babel” I did some parts after I saw the picture, but most of it, once again, I think the spirit and
the core of some themes was all done prior to that. More than in other movies, I applied in “Babel”
something that I also like to do, which is to play with instruments that I don’t know how to play
-that goes back to the inexperience part I’ve been telling you about.
In the case of “Babel”, it was the oud. I always wanted to have an oud because I love that instrument
but I never had one and didn’t I know how to play it and I know it’s very hard to play it because it
has a very short neck and there are no frets. And I love that element of innocence and danger that
is implied when you’re approaching an instrument that you don’t know how to play. But I believe
that if you have artistry in you, you should be able to make something out of that; and I used that
in “Babel”. That’s something else.
Another thing is that I don’t know how to play keyboards, but I do play keyboards in my scores.
And there are elements like some of the things that I’ve been talking about that relate to the music
that I do in movies. I especially like the use of space and the use of silence. And I think that almost
anyone can play notes but to NOT play notes is harder. And so, I love the use of space and the use
of silence, and I also love textures. I think textures are a very interesting element. I also think that
for movies particularly, that use of silence and that use of space sort of draw the spectator to the
movie and the story.
I don’t much like movies that have wall-to-wall music. I don’t like that approach. I know there are
people that are great at doing it, but for me, after 10 minutes of wall-to-wall music, music becomes
almost irrelevant because there is no space for nothing to happen. I also have the image of the director and the editor editing a bad movie; usually in these cases there is a whole bunch of movies
and few are good. So, they are editing one of the bad ones and they are looking at a scene that is
really not working; so they look at each other saying: let’s put some music. And they make it work
when it’s not working.
In case of the directors -I think- that I’ve been blessed to work with, this is not a problem because
they truly project the drama in what they do and actually that’s another delicate subject with music
and great movies and great dramatic movies. Music can turn something dramatic into something
melodramatic, so it’s very dangerous and you have to be very careful where you put that music in
a movie. So these are some of the concepts that I use when I approach making music for a movie
and I’m ready to continue with you, guys, asking me and talking with me.
George Krassakopoulos
I want to ask a few things before I open this to the public. You spoke about writing the film scores,
most of them, before nothing is even shot from the movie. How do you start working? By reading
the script and getting the feeling? By getting a mental picture in your mind? How do you do it?
Gustavo Santaolalla
It’s not a much-rationalized process, but basically it’s the impressions that I get from the story and
the characters that will sort of lead me to an instrument or something. This is how it works. It’s basically the impressions that I get from the story and the characters.
4 9 ο Φ Ε Σ Τ Ι Β Α Λ Κ Ι Ν Η Μ ΑΤ Ο Γ ΡΑ Φ Ο Υ Θ Ε Σ Σ Α Λ Ο Ν Ι Κ Η Σ MASTERCLASSES
George Krassakopoulos
You also said that the first time Michael Mann asked you to put one of your pieces in his movies you
wondered how it was going to fit in this contemporary story. Do you feel that you have to make
music that matches the tone of the film? For instance, in “Babel”, there were three different stories
set in three different places of the world. Did you have to change your musical style in order to accommodate these storylines?
Gustavo Santaolalla
“Babel” was a challenge because the movie took place in three very different geographic places. So
the challenge was to not make it sound like a National Geographic documentary. The music had to
have world quality but at the same time it had to connect without being specific. And the oud was
very helpful. I play the oud very differently. The oud is played in a very special way -with a pick- and
is usually faster, but I play it with my fingers and it was very slow. I also slide and do other tricks. The
oud is the ancestor of the lute and therefore the ancestor of the guitar.
So, there was really a connection there between the Moroccan story and the Mexican story. And
I also found some resonances that could relate to the koto, the Japanese instrument. So, the oud
became a good friend to play around with. But it wasn’t necessary for me to go and learn the different music of the different cultures; I do love and I listen to a lot of world music, but I think the
challenge there was precisely not to make each place too obvious.
George Krassakopoulos
You said you first paid work was a film score for a short movie. Also, your music was used in “The
Insider”. You also scored another film, called “She Dances Alone”. How did this happen?
Gustavo Santaolalla
That was my first feature film because I had done that short film when I was a kid and then I did
another short film when I was 20. But my first feature film was “She Dances Alone”, which is a really
small movie that unfortunately is not well known; an Austrian director called Robert Dornhelm
directed it and it’s a movie about Nijinsky. It’s a really interesting movie because Kyra Nijinsky, Nijinsky’s real daughter, is in the movie and she’s a woman that had some type of mental problems.
So it’s a movie about a guy that is trying to make a movie about Nijinksi. And Kyra Nijinsky plays
herself there.
It was a wonderful experience and that gave me my first opportunity to deal with such a long
format and I would say that some of the stuff that appears in my later work is already there. In my
first record that I did when I was 18, Arco Iris, you’ll find things that connect to the music that I do
in the movies. But it was funny because I did that movie and then years went by and once again I
was in the movie world.
George Krassakopoulos
So in that movie you worked with the same approach or did you see the movie beforehand?
Gustavo Santaolalla
No, I worked with the same approach. I did most of the stuff from the story and the script and part
of the picture. But there is always older stuff that I’ve done; there’s always a part that comes before
even seeing a frame.
George Krassakopoulos
Apart from adding strings in the “Brokeback Mountain” score, did you change your pieces afterwards a bit or did you keep them as they are?
Gustavo Santaolalla
No, I kept them as they are. What happens sometimes with the scores is that I have to edit, to
shorten or lengthen them. But it’s pretty much the same. For “Brokeback Mountain” most of the
work was what I had done originally and then I just fine-tuned it and edited it.
George Krassakopoulos
In “Brokeback Mountain” there were also songs that you had to write for the movie. How differ
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ent is writing a song for a movie than writing a song that is going to be performed on stage, for
instance?
Gustavo Santaolalla
It’s not that different. Writing songs and writing the score is different. It’s just a different language.
In a score, the fingers somehow are the actors. In a song, you have a singer. But that’s what I did all
my life. I come from writing songs; so that was easy, in a way, for me and it was a great opportunity
to write songs for a movie. I would like to do that more.
George Krassakopoulos
You write scores for movies and at the same time, you still have your career as a musician -you have
Bajofondo. How do you separate the two aspects of your work?
Gustavo Santaolalla
I enjoy doing everything. I love producing other artists. I really enjoy it with other people and other
people’s music. I love doing music for movies. I love Bajofondo because Bajofondo has given me
the opportunity to be back on stage; I had stopped going on stage for 20 years now and when I
went back, I kept wondering: why did I stop? So, now I really enjoy that aspect of being on stage
and playing and being with a group of people, sharing that peculiar energy that comes when you
perform live. I have the record label; I also have a small book publishing company and a vineyard,
making wine.
So I do many things and I’m developing other things. I used to be very obsessed with one project.
When, for example, I was in Arco Iris, my life was just that. And then Soluna, which was a band before I left Argentina and it was the same as was in Los Angeles with Wet Picnic, another band; my
whole life was in that. After a while, I thought that this level of obsession with something wasn’t
really working for me. It really started working against the project itself. And that’s when I started
doing two or three things at the same time.
And I will never finish one thing and move to the next. I will do a little bit of this, a little bit of that
and go do the other one and when I come back to the first one, I come back fresh and usually with
some new ideas. It’s very different from what I was doing. Now, when I do a book and then I do
a movie or a record, it’s always things that I bring from that kind of round trip and the thing that
happens now is that from two or three things, I’ve moved to four or five things and I love them all.
If you asked me to pick one, I can’t do it. I like to do them all.
George Krassakopoulos
So, you like working a lot. You’re a workaholic.
Gustavo Santaolalla
Yes, I work a lot.
George Krassakopoulos
And could you speak a little bit about “Café de los Maestros” and tango. I think you said in the past
that you didn’t really appreciate tango when you started.
Gustavo Santaolalla
It’s not that I didn’t appreciate it. I grew up in Argentina and tango is part of the sonic landscape.
My dad used to sing tango every morning while he was shaving and you heard it on the radio and
everywhere. At first, I thought it was music for grown-ups and I was listening to the Beatles. But I
always felt very attracted to the music and I always had tremendous respect for it. One of the things
that had always grabbed my attention was how such a fashionable music could be so sophisticated at the same time, so musically sophisticated and yet so popular.
But it was always something that was waiting for me. In that process of finding out my identity, I
had always been more involved with folk music, Argentinean folk music and Latin American folk
music and I would find a big connection between the ethnic folk music and rock, that primal element that both kinds of music have; I found a connection. At the same time, it was something that
was waiting for me. I always knew it was something that at some point in my life I was going to tap
into.
4 9 ο Φ Ε Σ Τ Ι Β Α Λ Κ Ι Ν Η Μ ΑΤ Ο Γ ΡΑ Φ Ο Υ Θ Ε Σ Σ Α Λ Ο Ν Ι Κ Η Σ MASTERCLASSES
And the same way that I did that project, De Ushuahia a la Quiaca, which was looking for the
real folk musicians and that happened after I was mixing folk music with rock and all that, I also
drew a parallel with what was happening at the time with musicians, Eric Clapton, and people
who wanted to meet with John Lee Hooker; they wanted to meet the people that their music was
based on. The same thing was with De Ushuahia a la Quiaca and I would like to make this connection between De Ushuahia a la Quiaca and “Café de los Maestros” because “Café de los Maestros” is
often compared to “Buena Vista Social Club”, which I love, but since we have the opportunity, I like
to point out some differences.
First of all, I’m a big fan of Ry Cooder and Buena Vista but I have to say that when we did De Ushuahia a la Quiaca it was a very similar concept to Buena Vista; it’s just that nobody knew about it.
It was 15 years before Buena Vista but instead of going to Havana we went to Atamiski and other
places where the music originated. We looked for the masters. It wasn’t Compay Segundo, it was
other artists and we also had somebody that worked as a bridge. One of the things that happen in
Buena Vista is that you have Ry as a nexus; Compay Segundo existed way before that, but nobody
knew about him.
So, it was very similar in concept but at the time people thought that we were crazy. We’re talking
about ’84 or ’85. People didn’t have these concepts so clear then. So, they actually cut our project
and we never got to do Buenos Aires; we never got to do the tango. So, that was like waiting all
these years. So, finally, when I started with Bajofondo, it was my first approach to this world from
my side because I’m kind of a rock musician and I also like hip-hop and electronic music and all
that.
So, once I got into that, I started really connecting to De Ushuahia a la Quiaca and wanted to know
more about this and precisely because I’m not an academic, I can’t get a book and read charts and
find out about those things. The best way to do it was to be close to the masters and that’s how the
idea was born. Let’s try to get all these people together. It was very hard, because there are more
than 30 of the big masters plus a whole bunch of people that have been playing tango for decades
and to actually congregate all of them was actually a work of love, and we really wanted to make
that happen. And what started as a series of records became a book, a concert and ultimately became the movie.
I also want to mention a couple of differences between “Café de los Maestros” and “Buena Vista
Social Club”, which I think are good to point out. I’m not a gringo. I am not Bono or Ry Cooder that
goes to Argentina to make a tango record. I am from there. I grew up with that. It’s in my genetic
map. So, that’s different. I don’t play in the record. I love what Ry plays in “Buena Vista Social Club”
with the slide guitar, which is not part of their music, but it’s great to have it in the movie. In “Café
de los Maestros” I tried to preserve it as a pure thing, as it was. I only sing in one song because Lagrima Rios asked me to do second voice.
And also, sonically, they are very different records. Buena Vista is a more ambient type of record,
beautiful, and “Café de los Maestros” is a more in-your-face type of sound. These are some of the differences and, you know, the easy thing is to say that this is like the Buena Vista tango club. Anyhow,
the comparisons, like I always say, if they are good for marketing purposes, then they’re welcome,
because we want people to see the movie. But it is also good if you have the opportunity to mark
the differences.
George Krassakopoulos
So, at this point, you can ask questions. We have one there.
Από το κοινό
Καλημέρα. Θα ήθελα να τον καλωσορίσω και να πω ότι χαίρομαι πάρα πολύ όχι μόνο γιατί ακούω
τη μουσική του συνέχεια κι επειδή μαζεύω soundtracks μετά μανίας, αλλά και επειδή τυχαίνει να
διδάσκω η ίδια αργεντίνικο tango. Έχω βρεθεί στην Αργεντινή και η ερώτησή μου θα πάει στο tango περισσότερο. Είπατε κάποια στιγμή ότι το να παίζεις τις νότες είναι εύκολο, αλλά το να παίζεις τις
παύσεις είναι πιο δύσκολο. Σε αυτό συμφωνώ πάρα πολύ γιατί τυχαίνει κι εγώ πάρα πολλές φορές
να λέω ότι το να χορεύεις τις παύσεις στο tango είναι αυτό που έχει το νόημα, όχι τη μουσική που
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ακούγεται. Θα ήθελα να μου απαντήσει σε δύο πράγματα.
Πρώτον, όταν πήγα στην Αργεντινή πριν από τέσσερα χρόνια, για δεύτερη φορά, ανακάλυψα
ότι ελάχιστα παιζόταν ο Piazzola. Πριν από λίγα χρόνια είχε δημιουργηθεί η Nueva Milonga
στο Μπουένος Άιρες, αλλά δύσκολα άκουγα Bajofondo ή Gotan Project ή αυτά τα διαφορετικά
συγκροτήματα -ακόμα και εδώ στην Ελλάδα με δυσκολία το παίζουν στις μιλόνγκες, χώρους
που πάει ο κόσμος να χορέψει tango. Θα ήθελα τη γνώμη του πάνω σε αυτό. Πώς είναι δυνατό
ένας χορός ο οποίος, παρότι είναι στενά συνδεδεμένος με το έθνος της Αργεντινής και έχει μια
αυτοτέλεια (αυτό είναι το εκπληκτικό στη μουσική και στο χορό αυτό) και, παρόλ’ αυτά, ο ίδιος ο
κόσμος που τον εκφράζει φέρεται τόσο ελιτίστικα απέναντί του –είναι όμως ένας λαϊκός χορός, δεν
είναι ελιτίστικος όπως έγινε όταν ήρθε στην Ευρώπη.
Γιώργος Κρασσακόπουλος
Να απαντήσουμε πρώτα σε αυτό.
Gustavo Santaolalla
I’m not sure I got the question. Anyhow, I can elaborate in both themes of what you mentioned,
but I don’t know if I truly understand the question. Regarding Piazzola, one thing that happened
with Astor, who was a genius, was that somehow when he came to the scene it was already controversial, but he really polarized tango. As incredible a genius as he was and his music is, something
happened with Piazzola which meant that everything before him became obsolete and everybody
that tried to make something new always felt that they were doing piazzolisms without being as
good as Piazzola.
What has happened in later years, in the last years that you noticed when you went there, is that
people are going back to the golden era of tango, which in a way is what “Café de los Maestros”
taps into. That’s why people ask: why don’t you have any Piazzola in there? No, because we wanted
to go to the ‘40s and the ‘50s, the pre-Piazzola time, and now in Argentina there is a moment where
there’s great re-evaluation of that period. I think it’s fantastic, because we always go back and Piazzola is always there. It’s fantastic but it’s great to even do new stuff, to go to the avant-garde, to go
back to the roots.
I also think there was a movement that started and is called “tango electronico” which we, Bajofondo, don’t like to be associated with, because we don’t think we do that, especially if you see us
live. It’s more like a rock band now than an electronic one. We have real drums etc. At the beginning, yes, in our first album, it was in that genre which includes from Gotan Project to Narco Tango
and Ultratango and a whole bunch of groups happening at the same time, but not really copying
anybody; when Gotan were being formed we were doing Bajofondo without knowing each other
and our records came out only three months apart.
But now I think there are a lot of new currents that are amazing; you have groups that mix the traditional type of tango with a more punk element added to it. They don’t have electronics or drums
or anything; they play with a typical formation but I see more and more of them now. And if you go
to a milonga, there’s a moment in the milonga that they will play Bajofondo and all the traditional
songs but at a certain point, there is an opening. So I see more open minds and one of the things
that proves that is the acceptance Bajofondo has there and this was one of the big challenges with
Bajofondo -because you can make an exotic thing and sell it in Holland or in Germany but you can’t
do it when you tap into something that is sacred. So I see an opening of the mind in Argentina. I
hope that answers your question.
Από το κοινό
Θέλω να ρωτήσω και κάτι ακόμα. Αν θεωρεί ότι και η δική του μουσική -και πάλι θα το συνδυάσω με
το tango- που έκανε αυτό το ξεπέρασμα, έχει πίσω της μια πολιτική, επαναστατική διάθεση, καθώς
ο χορός βγήκε στους δρόμους και μεταλλάχτηκε με τα όργανα που χρησιμοποίησε.
Gustavo Santaolalla
I don’t particularly see it as political. I think that we are all somehow political when we have strong
attitudes and views in life. But it’s not done with that purpose, but with a more adventurous one.
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We like to try different things and I think in that way if we present our political views we like to try
changes.
Από το κοινό
Όσα είπατε, αγαπητέ Gustavo, για την Λατινική Αμερική και τη σχέση με την Αμερική και τον
υπόλοιπο κόσμο είναι πολύ ενδιαφέροντα γιατί ισχύουν παράλληλα και για την Ελλάδα. Και οι
δυο είμαστε από χώρες του νότου, και οι δυο δεν είμαστε γκρίνγκο και έχει πολύ ενδιαφέρον γιατί
μας είπατε μια ιστορία δημιουργικότητας μέσα από την προσωπική σας ιστορία, που έχει τα ίδια
ορόσημα, τους Beatles, τον Ravi Shankar κλπ.
Επίσης, έχει πολύ μεγάλη αξία η σχέση με το παρελθόν. Πώς, ας πούμε, νέοι άνθρωποι, σήμερα λίγο
πιο μεγάλοι, αντιμετώπισαν τη λαϊκή παράδοση και το tango, εμείς εδώ τα ρεμπέτικα και τη λαϊκή
μουσική. Αυτά είναι πολύ ωραίες παράλληλες ιστορίες που νομίζω όλους εμάς τους ανθρώπους
τους μεσογειακούς, του νότου, νιώθω ότι υπάρχει κάτι πολύ μεγαλύτερο που μας ενώνει και είναι
πολύ χρήσιμα για όλους εμάς. Αυτό ήθελα να πω και αν θέλει ας το σχολιάσει.
Gustavo Santaolalla
I love rembetika and I also think there is a connection -and I’m not saying that because I’m here.
I found a connection between Greece and Argentina and a connection between rembetika and
tango and there is something about how they deal with melancholy and things like that.
From the audience
Buenos dias, Gustavo. I wanted to ask you this. Recently there has been an openness towards film
scoring in the USA and I wanted to ask if there was any rejection you might have had when working
with collaborations, where you had to fight for your music and fight for what you believe or was it
an open way from beginning to end? How do you approach your collaborations, the collaborations
with the film directors and producers in Hollywood?
Gustavo Santaolalla
It’s a good question, because as far as the collaborations themselves are concerned, no, I never had
to fight. And the same thing applies to the records that I did with artists. I would say that from the
starting point there is a common ground, which can sometimes not agree on something, but we
can work it out somehow. But I did experience rejection and a sort of an upsetting mood from the
traditional scoring community. I have to say that because, as a matter of fact, both instances were
when I was nominated for the Oscars and which I won both, unbelievably, I still don’t believe it,
especially the second one -two in a row! What are the chances of that happening?
People tried to disqualify me. They tried to find ways to get me out of the race, like, for instance, in
“Brokeback Mountain”, because I mentioned that I had done the music before, you have a window
of time that you have to do that; so if you did it before that window of time, you aren’t qualified.
But I had my string session in that window and that counted as the union session for the recording,
even if my guitar was recorded before. And so they couldn’t get me out of the race but the second
time too there were people that did that again.
I think it has to do with the fact that I don’t know how to read or write music -and this is a community of people where there are great film composers that I admire and people that do incredible
orchestral scores. Maybe one day I will do one too, but there are a lot of people in that community
that are actually frustrated -frustrated maestros, classical musicians- and they get very upset if
someone who doesn’t know how to read or write music can do music that has three notes and
fewer notes and fewer instruments: how can this guy win?
I experienced that; and one of the things that I am proud of -because by now I have accumulated a
lot of awards, I have 13 Grammies, one Golden Globe, two British Academy awards and two Oscarsis that I always feel that those awards are for your work, since people really don’t know me. So, I
don’t take it personally. I take it for my work because I think it’s the recognition of my work. When I
got the first Oscar for “Brokeback Mountain” I felt great because finally a score -and that wasn’t the
only one- that could be so minimal could be recognized. And when it happened for a second time
with “Babel”, that was the reaffirmation.
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And I think that if I feel proud of something, I believe that anything goes; you can have a 60-piece
orchestra or a guy with a flute, but it has to really serve the movie and help you get emotionally
involved with the story. It’s the same. Why do you need 60? You can have it and it’s great, but you
can also do it with one violin.
From the audience
Do you think that in some way “Frida” recently paved the way for such music? Elliot Goldenthal
went the other way and colored the music more with an identity that was genuine to the movie
and in recent years that opened the way for a new receptiveness of music, to try things differently,
because Hollywood is a domain where big orchestras work and where the producers make very
strong decisions on what way the composer will follow.
Gustavo Santaolalla
Certainly, that is one of the cases. I think there’s more to it. But there’s a thing that I would like to
point out, because in Argentina they love me and they say: this guy won the Oscar for Argentina
and they think that I’m the king of Hollywood. But to be honest, all the films that I’ve been involved
in are not really representative of Hollywood. I’ve done only seven movies and they are not the
typical Hollywood movies. Maybe one day I’ll belong to that circle. I don’t have anything against it.
But truly, up to now, I don’t think I belong to the Hollywood world.
From the audience
One of the films playing in the festival that you haven’t discussed is “Linha de Passe” by Walter Salles,
and Walter told me in Cannes that you’d been working on that music very late in the process, just
before the film played in Cannes and you did a clip which sounds a bit different from some of the
other scores you’ve been talking about. Could you just elaborate on that?
Gustavo Santaolalla
“Linha de Passe” is a particular project, because it’s a small Brazilian film done with mainly non-actors and people that have very little experience, they may have been in vocational theatre but
never did a movie before; Walter co-directed it with Daniela Thomas and Walter wanted it to be a
very Brazilian movie. So he tried different people in Brazil and the music was not working and there
was something missing from the film; I’m trying to quote him here.
So, through the years we have become very good friends and especially now, not only after “Motorcycle Diaries”, but in the process of doing “Café de los Maestros” in which I worked with him for
the script, to put together the story and he saw some other aspects of my creativity. He sent me the
film and said: take a look at the film and if you can send me anything, it would be great.
So I remember watching the film and this time I didn’t score. Obviously, this time I saw the film. But
without doing it to the picture, I started doing music after what I saw, from the impressions that
I got and I sent him this music and it changed his movie. He told me he actually went and reshot
some stuff based on the music and that’s how this collaboration worked out and I think it ended up
being a beautiful small film, a gorgeous one. I love working with him. It’s great.
From the audience
I would like to welcome you. I’m very happy to meet you because I’m trying to learn the charango
right now. I would like to ask you some things. You said you have produced groups from all over
Latin America. Musically and culturally speaking, Greece is quite an island, but Latin America has a
very strong identity that changes very little from place to place. Argentina and Chile are two great
poles of that culture, if we think of Atahualpa Yupanqui etc. How do you feel these small differences
from place to place? Do you think it is facilitating your job or is it more difficult?
Gustavo Santaolalla
No, because I think just because how I work is so intuitive, all those influences come out of me
without rationalizing that much. Do you know what I mean? I’ve listened to all those groups. As
a matter of fact, I always like to point out, for example, that in “Brokeback Mountain”, in my guitar
work, I know there is Atahualpa Yupanqui in there. Nobody will know that probably because it’s a
country thing, but I know that there is an influence of Atahualpa in that. All those things come to
12
me very naturally. I don’t say this is Peruvian or whatever. Do you know what I mean? Everything is
just melted inside.
Alexis Grivas
Going back to a previous question, concerning particular films. Would you mind talking a little bit
about the way you work in the new film that Alejandro Gonzáles Iňárritu is shooting now in Spain
and how you are going to work with the film that Walter Salles is preparing in the States?
Gustavo Santaolalla
Concerning “Biutiful”, the film that Alejandro is shooting right now with Javier Bardem, it’s also a
story that has a kind of a world quality, because it happens in Barcelona but it involves three ethnic groups. It involves Chinese people, Spanish people and African people. The movie is mainly in
Spanish but there are also Chinese and African dialogues.
I’ve been writing or recording music for some time now around the story and the characters, but
one of the things that I did -which I did in “Babel” too, I went to Morocco and recorded some musicians- was that I went to Barcelona and recorded some Chinese musicians and some African musicians and some gypsies. And I had the opportunity to record something that is incredible, which is
a group of evangelical gypsies, like gypsy gospel -gitano gospel- and it was unbelievable.
So, I collected these things, all those elements; I went to the places where the film was shot -I love
doing that because I also get smells and textures and things that will affect me. So, the film is that
now. It’s in the writing, like I usually do, out of the script; but in this case, I go to the location where
the film takes place and also interact with and record musicians that have to do with the groups
that are part of the movie. And somehow all of that is going to end up in the music. Don’t ask me
how, I haven’t figured it out yet, but that’s how I’ll do it.
In the case of “On the Road”, it’s a project that is very interesting and challenging. It’s very challenging
making the film. When you make a film from such an iconic book it’s always a big challenge, because
this book is a part of the collectiveness of the USA and around the world, but especially the USA. In
the case of this story, it’s very challenging for the music as well, because the beat generation is a very
musical generation and they were very influenced by a particular type of music, which was jazz, and a
particular type of jazz, which was bebop, and especially a particular musician, Charlie Parker.
So all those things have to be considered by me in how I’m going to approach the music. One of the
things that I decided I’m not going to do -and who knows? Maybe that’ll change- is that I’m not going to use the saxophone because I think that will be too obvious, but I will use the verbiage aspect
of the poets and bebop because the music was as verboragic as they were. All those elements will
come to play but I wouldn’t like to do just that, a jazz group playing music exactly from that era, I
would like to evoke with gestures that remind us of the beat poets. So, that’s what I’m working on.
George Krassakopoulos
In order to leave some time for the music, we can only take one more question and it is going to
be from the gentleman there.
Από το κοινό
Όταν αναλαμβάνετε να γράψετε μουσική για κάποια ταινία, κάποιες σκέψεις, κάποιες ιδέες τις
μοιράζεστε με μέλη των Bajofondo;
Gustavo Santaolalla
Not up to this moment, but I do have an idea and I would love to do a score for a movie with Bajofondo. I think we have to find the right movie. But I always thought of music in general in very visual
terms and I think Bajofondo’s music is very visual. Yes, I would love to do a score with Bajofondo
but, no, whenever I do a score I haven’t had the opportunity to share it with the other members of
Bajofondo. Not yet.
George Krassakopoulos
So, thank you very much for all the talking. Now, you’ll play some music.
Gustavo Santaolalla
Thank you.