CARTER BURWELL,

‘THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN’

One of the first things Martin McDonagh said to composer Carter Burwell about his new film “The Banshees of Inisherin”: “I don’t want any Irish film music in this.”

Burwell laughs: “So I had to take that seriously.”

The story is set on a fictitious Irish island and populated with ultra-Irish characters — led by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as two old friends whose relationship is suddenly and inextricably ruptured.

“Everything else is very Irish,” says Burwell — “the accents, the clothes, the situation, the pub. He wasn’t clear with me what he wanted to do, but it’s clear that what he didn’t want it to do was for the music to leave you in Ireland. He wanted it to take you someplace else.”

Burwell focused on Farrell’s character, Pádraic, a farmer characterized by his friend as a dullard. He wrote slow-walking music for celesta, harp, marimba and glockenspiel — which “all seemed to work in terms of basically painting him like a kid, like a man-child. These are all instruments you might find in an elementary school.”

One of the temporary musical tracks McDonagh used was, surprisingly, a piece of Indonesian gamelan music. So Burwell subtly layered in elements of gamelan gongs underneath that high, childlike music. “It made it not quite so cheery,” he says. “There’s something there that doesn’t quite fit, and you can’t really put your finger on what it is. There’s some mystery at the bottom of the tune.”

Just as there’s a mystery on this island, with characters in despair and an old crone who prophesies their deaths, where a simple tiff escalates into self-mutilation and attempted murder. Pádraic starts out seemingly on the innocent end of the moral spectrum — but over time he travels to some pretty dark extremes.

Burwell liked having his music on these bell-like idiophones, because “they’re never going to get sentimental. There’s no such thing as a sad marimba line. So it kind of inoculates you, using those instruments, from worrying about the music getting actually sad itself.”

Yet it’s a deeply sad movie that’s also very funny, a nexus that McDonagh and Burwell seem to have perfected.

“I think it’s safe to say we both see life as endless tragedy that you have to somehow find a punchline for,” Burwell says — with a chuckle.

INSTRUMENTS such as celesta, harp, marimba and glockenspiel were used to paint Pádraic (Colin Farrell, left, with Brendan Gleeson) “like a kid, like a man-child.”