Toronto International Film Festival 2023: Composer Gary Clark Of FLORA AND SON

Gary Clark is an established musician who has written music for a number of different television shows and movies. After collaborating with John Carney on Sing Street in 2016, he returns for another outing with Flora and Son. Creating musical numbers that fit seamlessly into the film’s touching narrative, Clark does a remarkable job capturing the story’s emotional beats. He spoke with Film Inquiry during this year’s edition of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Wilson Kwong of Film Inquiry: I wanted to start off by asking whether your creative process is different when it comes to writing music in general, versus wring songs for a movie?

Gary Clark: That’s been one of the exciting but daunting things that I’ve had to learn, and that’s writing for somebody else’s character or somebody else’s voice and story. It’s also a gift because you’re not starting with a blank page. You basically already have a beautiful script, beautiful characters, beautiful situation, and then it’s what do these people sound like? What do they need to say? I’m just trying to find the magical song for that particular moment.

And for Flora and Son in particular, just because the music and lyrics play such an important role in the narrative, how early were you involved with the creative process?

Gary Clark: Very early, and I’ve worked with John [Carney] for quite a few years now, so we’ve developed a bit of a tag team. The first thing that we did on Flora and Son, and the first thing that was necessary to do is to walk through the script. We did that actually over Zoom. He was in Dublin and I was in Scotland. We just walked right through the script and talked about the kind of cornerstone songs that are just so essential to this story. There was the rooftop song Meet in the Middle, when they [Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Eve Hewson’s character] finally managed to create something together. The final song in the picture was also very important, and had to include all the little bits of everybody’s DNA, and somehow mashup on the stage. Hopefully we got it, but I know that was a delicate dance process to get there.

Did the songwriting change at all during the filming process when the actors starting getting into their roles?

Gary Clark: You can only plan to a certain degree, and John is actually pretty improvisational as a director on set as well. We were constantly in touch throughout the whole process of shooting and editing. And the big changes that we made on the fly was the addition of a rap to the song High Life. When we watched that back, we felt that the character Max needed to respond to his mom or what couldn’t just be his mom’s version of events. And so John wrote this great very Dublin based rap with a lot of references to Dublin, and I helped with a couple of lines, but it’s really John. They shot that as a pickup because the rap originally wasn’t there.

It’s also interesting because the movie really makes use of communicating through Zoom, which we all got so used to during the pandemic. I’m just wondering if that somehow informed your creative process, since a lot of the music and songwriting on screen happens virtually through a camera.

Gary Clark: It had a massive effect on everybody, as you know. But John and I did two seasons of television together, a show called Modern Love and season one was done pre-pandemic, and we were able to fly all over the place and record artists and write songs and all over the place. When we did season two, it was the height of lockdowns and I had to learn to do a lot of stuff over Zoom, [including] recording sessions. But it affected everybody emotionally in that we all had to learn to communicate in a completely different way. And so I think that’s a big part of John‘s script and his reason for doing that.

In terms of the instrumentation for the film, using the guitar seemed like an obvious choice for the narrative, but were there other instruments that you and John had talked about using instead?

Gary Clark: Well, for the Flora and Jeff’s songs, we knew that they were physically going to be with acoustic guitars because that was based on their guitar lesson, so there was never another way of doing that. The Max songs are far more open. The song High Life at the end was much freer in terms of the sounds you can use because Max has a computer that starts to open up synth sounds or electronic drum sounds. These were things that if you put into the Flora and Jeff songs, they wouldn’t work. They’re much more intimate moments.

Since you also worked with John on Sing Street, how different was this experience compared to that one?

Gary Clark: I was far more involved in Flora and Son than I was in Sing Street. Sing Street was early in our process of working together and we were just learning to work together. It was also based on a band form a school and the way we captured that was by putting a real live band together in a studio in Dublin. And so the songs were written and tweaked in the studio, but it was recorded live and recorded very quickly. For Flora and Son, we had a far broader palette because you have so many different characters who contribute to the film musically. And so that was much wider, and a slightly longer journey to get them to find everybody’s musical voices. You have this pretty broad palette of the rapper kid on the estate. You have Jeff’s LA musical experience, which he shares with Flora. Flora loves her club and dance music, and obviously the ballads of James Blunt and Ed Sheeran until she discovers Joni Mitchell. And you have to feel that in the score as well. And then you’ve got Max’s musical journey from bashing on his laptop to discovering how to make an electronic sound. The palette was so broad, that’s what made it much more complex and fun. It was fun to write for all of those characters.

Film Inquiry would like to thank Gary Clark for taking the time to speak with us!