The Movie Song Guru

One morning, while making tea in the kitchen of her parents’ apartment in the small Czech town of Valasske Mezirici, Marketa Irglova’s ears perked up. Her friend and soon-to-be costar Glen Hansard had begun plucking his guitar and repeating an opening verse: “I don’t know you, but I want you / All the more for that.” As the water boiled, Irglova liked what she heard. “I was like, ‘What’s that?’” she remembers. “He said, ‘Oh, it’s just an idea, do you like it? Let’s work on it.’”

At the time, Hansard had been attempting to build out a soundtrack for director John Carney’s micro-budgeted musical drama Once, about an Irish busker and a Czech musician who meet in Dublin and begin a platonic romance. But when it came to writing a song for what would eventually become the movie’s pivotal scene—a duet at a music shop—Hansard struggled to flesh anything out from the musical scraps he’d been strumming. Once their tea was ready, he and Irglova migrated to the piano, where magic happened: “At one point, I broke into this chorus,” Hansard says, “but she sang this harmony, which just made the hair on the back of my head stand up.”

Later that night, the pair played “Falling Slowly” for Irglova’s parents before sending it to Carney. “Sometimes the mark of a good song is when you kind of feel a little bit embarrassed playing it to people because you’re not sure if it’s any good,” Hansard says. But “Falling Slowly” was more than good: Hansard and Irglova’s chemistry had already been obvious to Carney after he’d seen them perform together in Ireland, but he truly realized what he had after hearing the demo, which, he says, came to him “fully finished.” Having rejected a couple of Hansard’s earlier attempts, the director felt this one had finally captured the essence of the movie’s collaborative spirit. “They came up with this wonderful and incredibly catchy, gentle song,” Carney says. “It was so innocent, and the lyrics weren’t too esoteric—they were kind of broad in a way that everybody felt they could own that song.”

With Carney’s encouragement, the duo unlocked the rest of the soundtrack together, keeping a similar acoustic vibe and blending real-life experiences into their eventual on-screen performances. When Once debuted in 2007, the lo-fi musical surprised audiences and critics, earning $20.9 million at the global box office over a 33-week run. At its core, though, was “Falling Slowly,” whose catchy indie-rock flavor perfectly accented Hansard and Irglova’s intimate moments together. A year later, it won the Oscar for Best Original Song. “He likes bringing something authentic into his movies,” Irglova says. “John was really making something original, following his own vision, and we were contributing to it in our own way.”

Making any movie is a risk. But making one whose emotional stakes center on a fictional song? That’s even riskier. Writing a great made-up hit is hard work—it must be compelling on its own, faithful to its characters, and believable within the story’s context. There are only a handful of great examples in pop culture—from “That Thing You Do” to “School of Rock” to “Shallow”—and Carney might be the only director to consistently churn them out. Since Once became a mini folk phenomenon, landing on Broadway and catapulting its stars’ music careers, the Dublin-born director has made a handful of what he calls “stealth musicals” (Begin Again, Sing Street) filled with soulful, original earworms that have collected numerous awards, enlivened his stories and characters, and been endlessly listenable outside their cinematic identities.

Carney’s skills are on display again in his latest musical parable, Flora and Son, which drops this week on Apple TV+. Buoyed by two distinct but no less catchy songs, it follows Flora (Eve Hewson), a single, working-class mother who connects with her hip-hop-inspired son, Max (Orén Kinlan), by taking up virtual guitar lessons with a failed songwriter named Jack (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Like all of Carney’s films, Flora and Son preaches music’s universal connective language and celebrates the artistic process. Mostly, though, it reaffirms his status as a fictional song guru—a designation he wouldn’t have without his trusted collaborators and his own reliable and flexible songwriting philosophy.

“The easy critique against John Carney is that he makes the same movie over and over,” Hansard says. “But the truth is, whether he had had success with Once or not, all of his films would have been about music. He’s not a filmmaker who makes music films. He’s a musician who makes movies.”

Before writing a fictional song, Carney has to have a good story, an order of operations he learned from Guys and Dolls, which he calls “the best musical of all time.” Unlike older Broadway musicals that strung together loose stories around a handful of established and purchased show tunes, the 1950 comedy, which features Frank Loesser’s 14 original songs, “never feels jukeboxy” and “actually works very well with a thin plot,” Carney says. “The characters are as funny and as rich and as brilliantly written as any drama film.”

This same philosophy proved effective for Once. In 2005, Carney wrote a one-page outline about a struggling street musician who meets a woman on Dublin’s Grafton Street—it ends with him gifting her a piano. Looking for some busking anecdotes to fill out his script, Carney reached out to Hansard, an old bandmate from the Frames whom he’d met 20 years earlier, and pitched him the story. “My favorite aspect of my friendship with John is he is a great storyteller,” Hansard says. “When he pitches you a story, he will sit down with you, he’ll set the scene, he’ll take you on a ride, and you’ll see the whole film in your mind.”

After Hansard agreed to compose a few songs, Carney cast Cillian Murphy and secured a shoestring budget, but he still needed his female lead. It wasn’t long before Hansard introduced Carney to the 16-year-old Irglova—the other half of Hansard’s new musical duo the Swell Season—as a possibility to play opposite Murphy and contribute to the music. In what functioned as a semi-audition, Hansard organized a small gig for them in Ireland that convinced Carney she could play the part. “There was something about the chemistry between me and Glen that he thought, That’s what I’m trying to capture in this movie,” Irglova says.

After Hansard sent Carney their afternoon success, “Falling Slowly,” he remembers the director calling it the linchpin for the movie, allowing Hansard and Irglova to become more attuned to the story’s evolution and emotional center. Using Alanis Morissette’s “Thank U” (a reference Carney had chosen) as a sonic guide, the duo began presenting him with more of their work—including “Lies,” “Gold,” and “Leave”—so that he could discern each song’s flavor and write dialogue around them. “We looked at the areas, and occasionally I would kind of know, ‘I’d like to put a song here and sort of build a scene a little bit around that,’” Carney says. The results of their shared sensibilities, he adds, “fit the drama quite well.”

When Murphy eventually dropped out due to another commitment, Hansard became the logical option to replace him. Despite the pair’s amateur acting chops, Carney felt their musical synergy and inherent talent exemplified the story he’d written and that his digital camera would enhance their authenticity. “We were drawing a lot on our own experiences during the music-writing process,” Irglova says. As Hansard describes it, “When you’ve got an opportunity to write a song for someone that isn’t you, you can be even more personal, you can be even more honest, because it’s not you that’s singing,” he says. “Oftentimes what stops us in our creativity is the fact that we have to own the work and sing it and play it.”

Though each of them also worked on songs individually—Irglova wrote “If You Want Me” and “The Hill” by herself—oftentimes Hansard’s guitar licks turned into brainstorming sessions. “He’d usually ask, ‘What do you think of this chord or lyrics?’” Irglova says. “In a way, just playing an idea to him would make him hear it differently, and then he might even answer his own sort of question.” Sometimes, like on the track “When Your Mind’s Made Up,” Irglova would contribute just a harmony that inspired the next movement. “He’s very dynamic and earthy, and I bring this ethereal, feminine energy to it,” she says, “which is why we work so well together.”

Understandably, the best parts of Once come during the interplay between its two protagonists—when ideas spark between them at a piano, on the sidewalk, or in a recording studio. The story often mimics the pair’s own process. In the music shop scene when Hansard and Irglova learn to play “Falling Slowly” for the first time, for example, Carney wanted a near-perfect re-creation of their original writing session inside Irglova’s parents’ house. “He said, ‘I want you to play the song exactly like you played it to Mar the first time, and I want her to chime in at exactly the same time,’” Hansard remembers. “Just do what happened, and we get to watch it play out.”

Looking back, Carney says, Once’s success—starting at Sundance and extending into award season—was a perfect product of its time. In the midst of a reality television and documentary boom, Carney’s slim-budgeted goal to “make myself invisible from the process” and “extricate any sense of the conventional tropes or techniques of cinema” blurred the lines of art and reality. Like The Blair Witch Project’s grainy found footage (which the internet built its own conspiracies around), Carney’s cinema verité style—observing his duo play the entirety of their unmixed songs—delivered an acoustic shock to the musical genre. It seemed as though Hansard and Irglova were spontaneously writing songs directly in front of the camera. “I didn’t want anyone to think, I just sat through a musical. It was really uncool at the time to sing to each other,” Carney says. “That was a very organic experience, and I’ve sort of followed that template into other movies.”

In the preamble to Carney’s 2013 follow-up, Begin Again, Dan (Mark Ruffalo), a recently fired label executive, drunkenly stumbles into a bar and hears potential. Onstage at an open mic night, Gretta (Keira Knightley), heartbroken over a recent breakup with her pop star boyfriend, Dave (Adam Levine), has begun delicately singing and strumming an original song. Though the belligerent crowd soon loses interest, Dan becomes transfixed and puts together a symphony inside his head. He starts layering drums and piano, then bass and orchestral elements, into a cohesive harmony, elevating her melancholy melody into a five-piece ensemble. Suddenly, he’s discovered an imaginary hit song.

The oddly magical scene resembles Carney’s evolutionary writing process, the way he latches on to a song’s humble beginnings—a chord progression, a lyric, a kernel of a melody—and builds up its various stages toward a fully mixed finished product. “That’s the stuff John is passionate about,” says Hansard, who also contributed a song to Begin Again. He and Irglova both remember that Carney’s expressed to them the joy of slowing down his car to observe roadwork: “Five guys standing around a hole, digging or connecting pipes,” Irglova says, because he “just loves watching people work.” The same applies to capturing music. “You get to see behind the curtain,” Hansard says. “You get to see the process.”

In some ways, that creative journey takes place within “Lost Stars,” the Oscar-nominated song at the heart of Begin Again that’s meant to be a reflection of its characters’ competing sensibilities. The song begins as an innocent acoustic track that Gretta writes as a Christmas present and then morphs into an upbeat dance anthem that Dave covers, before culminating during the movie’s climax as an indie-pop combination that ultimately decides the fate of their relationship. The objective, in one sense, was to “write the best song for Adam Levine to be playing,” Carney says.

To pull off the three-dimensional feat, Carney enlisted New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, who connected with the script and, alongside cowriters Danielle Brisebois, Nick Lashley, and Nick Southwood, dug into Gretta’s somber outlook. “The goal was for each lyric and sentiment to be a story and a thought unto itself, but also to the greater mystery of life, which is that we are all just coming and going in this life. We are just a lost star. We are a spark on the horizon,” Alexander told The Hollywood Reporter. “The song was probably the saddest song that I’ve ever written in my life, to the point where I had to morph the melodies and the chords to try to make it uplifting.”

By showing the song’s progression—from a stripped-down version that channels steady tenderness and pain into Levine’s version, which offers dynamism and a more mainstream sound—Carney slowly built up the viewer’s allegiance to the final iteration. Like observing the back-and-forth collaboration in Once, watching a song’s origin story, then seeing the rough edges smooth out into a pristine finished track, sparks an emotional connection. “It’s amazing to capture the creation, the birth of something,” Irglova says. “You’re not in control of it. I think that’s why John likes to portray this.”

But how does Carney know when a kernel is worth developing? “It’s kind of trying to find something that’s in the rhythm or vibe of a song that immediately suggests visuals,” he says. That was top of mind as he wrote 2016’s Sing Street, a semi-autobiographical tale about an Irish teenager named Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) who begins a band to impress Raphina (Lucy Boynton), an older girl who lives near his all-boys school. Inspired by the emergence of MTV and the BBC’s Top of the Pops, the group spends its time creating grainy music videos for their several original songs, wearing their rotating ’80s musical influences on their (sometimes literal) sleeves.

Carney solicited Gary Clark to write a demo for the movie, but the director loved it so much he commissioned the longtime Scottish producer to fill out the entire soundtrack. Soon after reading the script, the former Danny Wilson lead singer was passing ideas to Carney, attempting to infuse each song with hints of Conor’s favorite bands and videos to “let the audience know that these kids had been listening to the Cure or Hall and Oates,” Clark says. The lyrics, Carney noted, also had to get more sophisticated and less naive throughout the school year to track the band’s growth. “I really draw from the script as much as I can, but there’s also a fine line because you can be too on the nose with stuff, and it just feels kind of fake: This is what’s happening in the script,” Clark says. “You’ve got to kind of find a side door, something that thematically feels right, but not necessarily what the script is saying.”

The highlight of the soundtrack is “Drive It Like You Stole It,” which might as well be Carney’s own attempt at a music video. Set within Conor’s imagination, the song spins his drab Irish school auditorium into a 1950s American prom fantasy—a dream sequence that channels Back to the Future but swaps Chuck Berry guitar with overpowering synth. Inspired by the throwback visuals, and with Carney’s instructions to incorporate Huey Lewis and Hall and Oates vibes, Clark programmed a “Maneater” beat before quickly figuring out some heavy piano chords. “John just said to me, ‘It’s the one place in the movie where you don’t have to make it sound like the band because it’s in their head,’” Clark says. “That was great—it was a bit carte blanche in a way.”

Working from his home studio in Scotland, Clark quickly established the song’s repetitive synth backdrop and kept the verses and chorus tethered to it, writing and recording everything within a day. “What you really want to do is get from zero to 100 as fast as possible,” he says. “There’s an area where you start second-guessing yourself.” Though Clark tends to get into the weeds with lyrics, the song mostly required him to tug on Carney’s musical references to “capture the feeling of that stuff,” he says. As Hansard notes of Carney, “he’s more interested in the broad stroke of the emotional arc of the song as opposed to the details.”

When Carney received the demo, he played it for his 16-year-old niece to gauge her opinion and see whether Clark’s song would have a broad appeal. “I want the audience to feel what I feel, the rush of that,” Clark says. “He got back to me that night and said he was dancing around the kitchen with her.”

At this point in his career, Carney has learned that fictional songs work best with open communication and constant tinkering. Sometimes, that means including actors in the creative process or continuing to send a file back and forth until an idea crystallizes. Ultimately, though, Carney always comes back to whether a melody, a lyric, or a guitar solo could conceivably be sung or played by one of his characters. That’s the defining litmus test. “He likes things to feel real,” Clark says. The songwriting, the performance, and the production have “to feel connected to that, to the characters that he’s written. Would they say this?”

Those questions cropped up throughout Flora and Son, mostly because, unlike in his previous work, the movie’s protagonists weren’t musical wunderkinder, undiscovered talents, or celebrated pop stars. Instead, Flora works as a nanny who picks up a discarded guitar from the dumpster and starts meshing her electronic music tastes with her son’s rap skills. “I didn’t want to make this film about the best song that you could get, which is usually what you’re looking for. I’m a bit done with that,” Carney says. “This was about how you get to a good song plausibly emanating from the characters, and isn’t any better than the characters, and isn’t unrealistic in a way that the audience is going to go, ‘Hang on, I don’t believe that.’”

Flora and her son’s unlikely collaboration culminates with “High Life,” which they perform at a local pub. Reteaming with Carney to write the music, Clark learned quickly that his tight guitar licks and crisp production shouldn’t sound so polished—not for an amateur musician and vocalist. After watching the playback of Hewson’s performance, “John sent [the song] back to me and was like, ‘This is the first time she’s stood in front of an audience playing this song. Her vocal is too confident,’” Clark says. Because the camera hid some of Hewson’s strumming, Clark went back to the studio and recut parts of the song, toning down the volume early on and finding her softer vocal takes as substitutes. “A lot of things happen in the moment, and we have to reflect that in the music as well,” Clark adds. “You’re bouncing backwards and forwards.”

The movie’s sentimental, naive spirit, however, comes through the best in a rooftop scene between Flora and Jack, her teacher. Instead of his typical Zoom guitar lesson, Jack asks Flora over the computer to help him liven up an old song he’d written. After ruminating on the dull and overlong lyrics, she suggests that he cut down the verses; then she adds a stronger chorus and turns the song into a soulful little duet. It’s another signature little moment in Carney’s canon, but it prompted some opposing thoughts. “John’s first instinct was ‘Let’s get the crap song first, and then we’ll fix it,’” Clark says. “I said, ‘That frightens the wits out of me. I think we should go for the good song on the roof, and then let me just reverse engineer it.’”

In reality, the “crap song,” Carney realized, wasn’t necessarily bad. It was just boring. After all, he thought, “the problem with a lot of people that come to us as songwriters is not that they’re rubbish,” he says. “It’s that they don’t know how to be succinct.” As Clark finalized both versions of the song in the studio, Hewson and Gordon-Levitt joined him, staying in their characters’ headspaces to add various lyrical options. But even Gordon-Levitt could tell his character’s original song felt too long. “He was like, ‘I think that needs to be one line shorter, right?’ And I was like, ‘Joe, it’s meant to be boring,’” Clark laughs. “Sometimes, for the film, you’ve got to make something that’s not that good.”

The scene and song work as a nice callback to Once: the pleasure of watching two people form a bond as they hash out melody and harmony. But together, they also serve as a reminder of Carney’s overarching obsession with watching artists work—with capturing the process, committing it to the screen, and imbuing a song with context and a memory that transcends the movie itself. The director can’t get enough of it. “Two people sitting down and talking is one thing,” he says. “Two people sitting down and being creative together is kind of everything.”

Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times.