The Last of Us Composer Gustavo Santaolalla on How “Music Is Entwined With the Story”
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The post The Last of Us Composer Gustavo Santaolalla on How “Music Is Entwined With the Story” appeared first on Consequence.
Composer Gustavo Santaolalla says that for years, he’d been waiting for a video game like The Last of Us to change everything. “Video games were always on my radar,” he tells Consequence, not because he’s a gamer — “I’m a terrible player, I don’t know how to play” — but because right around the time Santaolalla was winning his second Oscar (for the score to 2006’s Babel), he was watching his teenage son game.
“I enjoyed watching him play, and I always thought, watching my son, if somebody creates a game that will connect with a gamer on an emotional level, aside from the killing and the fighting, and the combat and the survival, this is going to be a moment that is going to change the history of games,” he says.
After Babel, Santaolalla says he was approached by several gaming companies about working on their projects, but “nothing reverberated with me, I’m very picky [about] what projects I get involved with.” However, when he was approached to compose the score for the first Last of Us game, things were different.
“When I met Neil [Druckmann, writer/director of the original games] and Neil told me the story of The Last of Us, I said, ‘This is it, this is it. This is the game,'” he says. “Not particularly because of the story but the concept, the idea of this emotional connection with a gamer. Then when I learned that people were crying while playing the game and crying almost at the same places, just like in the movies — you really see and can prove that there’s those peaks, those moments where the emotional connection really is made.”
While in the case of The Last of Us, the game came first, followed by the series, Santaolalla thinks that “it could have been also the other way around. It could have been first the series and then the game, because it’s a great story… It’s a story that I think, particularly in the historical moment that the world is living and what we’ve been through and stuff, it touches a lot of people. I know there are a lot of people that are really into the show but probably hate video games. That’s what it is, because the story is what connects.”
Set in the aftermath of a devastating plague, The Last of Us did in fact receive widespread acclaim for its ability to connect with gamers, and Santaolalla went on to compose music for the game’s sequel as well. Now he’s back for the HBO series adaptation, which Druckmann co-created with Craig Mazin, bringing the signature sound he developed for the games to TV.
In fact, that’s a quite literal thing. “The process of adapting, it was more in a way like craftwork than actually a new creation, because the themes were there, and also the sonic fabric,” he says. “The aesthetics of those sounds. It was kind of an expansion, but trying to keep it close to the game, because that’s what’s keeping it close to the story. [Mazin and Druckmann] have said both in interviews that they feel that the music is part of the DNA of The Last of Us. It’s really a character that is totally tied to the story. Without this music, it would have been The Last of Us without Ellie or without Joel, you can’t conceive it. The music is entwined with the story.”
Thus, he says, the process of creating the score for the series was less about writing new themes, and more about bringing what already existed to the series to make each cue work for the on-screen action. “It’s very, extremely rare that every cue that you present will go immediately, ‘Yes, I accept it.’ It’s very rare. So if you multiply that by 185, which are the cues that are in the series, there was a lot of work. But in terms of the themes, we already had that prime matter that you need to build the thing. There are some things that were created new, but really, very few.”
One episode Santaolalla did have to write new music for was Episode 3, “Long, Long Time,” which showcases the sweet love story that emerges between survivors Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). While Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” is used prominently — “when directors or producers fall in love with something, it’s impossible to change it. Impossible,” says Santaolalla — otherwise he got to write music to accompany “all their moments — when they kiss, when Bill gets Frank to bed. All the rest of the episode, which is full of music.”
The Last of Us (HBO)
In revisiting the music he wrote years ago for the original game, Santaolalla says he wasn’t too tempted to revise any of his past work as part of the process. “I like to work with mistakes. I like the use of mistakes. There are some mistakes that are just mistakes, but there are mistakes that actually can be very, very useful and great. So I’ve learned to live with imperfection and to find that it is part of life,” he says. “That actually, it’s part of the beauty of something. For example, when I record all the guitar players, they fight to not get any noise when they move their hands on the neck of the guitar. I use those noises. I love those noises. I actually sometimes even push them in the mix.”
As he continues, “When I look back sometimes, yes, I could find things that was like ‘Oh it was a mistake,’ but it’s like when you look at your kids. I love it. I love The Last of Us the way it is. It’s not that thing, ‘Oh, I should improve it or make it up like that.’ It’s not like that. In each project, I work enough to feel satisfied to say, ‘I know I gave my best to this.’ I think if I wouldn’t have done that, then that, then yes, you could feel ‘Oh man, I could have done this bet.’ But when I deliver something, when I use it, it’s because I feel that this is it.”
In addition to The Last of Us (which was swiftly renewed by HBO for a second season), Santaolalla is working on music for a new documentary by Free Solo directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, about the Tompkins family: “These are people that actually have been going specially to Patagonia and Chile and Argentina, similar places, and they buy land, and they give it back to the people but with conditions that they’re going to preserve the habitat. They’ve been responsible for actually recovering some species that were almost extinct, so it’s a beautiful documentary.” He’s also working on another documentary about Nora Cortiñas, co-founder of Madres de Plaza de Mayo (an organization he works with in Argentina), and collaborating with other artists as well.
Plus, at the age of 71, he’s continuing to explore the sounds that are possible with introducing new instruments into his work, something he’s been doing for years. “I have a weakness for getting close to instruments that I don’t know how to play. I have my basic instruments, which are the guitar and the ronroco, but I love to play instruments I don’t know how to play, because I believe that myself, as an artist, should be able to produce an artistic event with whatever I am confronted with, with whatever object I’m confronted with. In The Last of Us, in the second installment of the game, I introduced the banjo, but again, I’m not a banjo player. So it was my take on the timbre of the instrument that, ‘What can I do with that?'”
He points out that when it comes to music, the English and Spanish languages diverge in an intriguing way. “I always loved the difference that we have in language because in Spanish to play, we say, ‘Tocar’ — the translation will be ‘to touch,’ to touch the instrument,” he says. “Whereas in English, you ‘play’ the instrument and to play has the connotations of play, playfulness. Touch, I mean, it’s great, touch is very lucid too, very physical, but it’s different. So I like that.”
The soundtrack for The Last of Us Season 1 is streaming now. New episodes of the series premiere Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
The Last of Us Composer Gustavo Santaolalla on How “Music Is Entwined With the Story”
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