Gustavo Santaolalla (‘The Last of Us’ composer) explores ‘the melancholy of life’ with his guitar [Exclusive Video Interview]

Sam Eckmann
·4 min read
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Renowned composer Gustavo Santaolalla has been exploring a certain human quality in his music for years. “That melancholy of life,” describes the musician, “It’s the bittersweet aspects of life that can make you smile with a tear.” He has recently paired his signature evocative sound with the first season of HBO’s adaptation of “The Last of Us.” Santaolalla earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Music Composition for excavating the humanity on display within the show’s apocalyptic world. Watch the exclusive video interview above.

Viewers are bound to pick up on the haunting, somber strings which form the heart of Santaolalla’s “The Last of Us” score. There are several instruments at play here, most notably a guitar and a smaller roncoco, but the composer focuses on playing all of them with a string plucking technique. These types of string instruments have sat at the core of Santaolalla’s work for years. He is able to connect their specific sounds, and the emotional connotations of their timbre, to characters in the show’s story. “I connect the low bass and the low classical guitar, an octave down, more with the male side of the story,” he explains. “And I connect the roncoco with the female side of the story. And the electric guitar is kind of in between connecting those two worlds.”

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“It is my instrument,” Santaolalla says of the guitar. Most scores are based around the piano, something he did not grow up with. But his connection to the guitar made him believe that the instrument could lead a score just as well as a piano could. He has forged ahead with a career in guitar-centered music, including his original, Oscar-winning scores for “Brokeback Mountain” and “Babel.” “There’s always that connection with that instrument,” he explains, “which is the first thing that I started playing when I was five years old.”

Santaolalla’s music often strikes a melancholy tone, but he manages to showcase plenty of colors to his tunes in this series. The composer earned his Emmy nomination for the acclaimed episode “Long, Long Time,” which chronicles the 20-year love story of Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). When Santaolalla’s guitar swells during a tender moment between the men in a homemade strawberry patch, the usual somberness of the music instead embodies a sort of sacred joy. “There’s an element always, a spiritual element to the music,” he offers, “something that talks to our spirit, the spirit of humankind.”

SEE Bella Ramsey interview: ‘The Last of Us’

The composer was in a unique position with this series since he had already scored both “The Last of Us” video games. But the prospect of adapting his previous work to a new medium didn’t faze Santaolalla. “I never thought that I was writing the music for a video game,” he reveals, “I always thought that I was writing the music for a story, for a great story. And a great story, you can do it in film, with puppets, in animation, and theater because it’s a great story.” To that end, he loves that series creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have called his score part of “the DNA” of “The Last of Us.” “It’s like it’s a character,” suggests Santaolalla, “the music, the themes, the motifs, the sound, the sonic landscape, all that is part of that universe and that world. And it belongs there.”

This is Santaolalla’s second Emmy nomination, having previously earned a nomination for his main title theme to “Hell on Wheels.” He is a two-time Oscar winner for “Brokeback Mountain” and “Babel.” Those two films also netted him BAFTA Award wins, with an additional BAFTA win for “The Motorcycle Diaries.” His scores for the video games “The Last of Us” and “The Last of Us: Part II” were nominated for the BAFTA Games Award.

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