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Music is excited to announce today's digital release of the soundtrack to The Good Liar, a thriller from New Line Cinema about the secrets people keep and the lies they live. The film stars legendary actors Helen Mirren (Oscar winner, The Queen) and Ian McKellen (two-time Oscar nominee, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Gods and Monsters), together on the big screen for the first time. Directed by Bill Condon and based on the widely acclaimed novel by Nicholas Searle, The Good Liar hits theaters nationwide November 15. The music from the film is composed by Emmy Award winning and two-time Oscar nominated composer Carter Burwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Carol).
Condon, who won an Oscar as screenwriter of Gods and Monsters, glowingly discussed his frequent creative collaborator and what the composer brings to the music of The Good Liar. "Carter is a master of bringing out emotions that may exist under the surface and, if you go back and know what you're looking for, he has a wonderful way of dropping little musical clues throughout. The scoring is the final element that ties all the pieces together."
Burwell further elaborated on the film and its music. "The Good Liar opens with a classic overture, during which the main characters and their musical themes are introduced. The characters meet and we see that, like most people, they are not completely honest with each other. But five minutes into the film you know the level of deceit is much more serious than that."
"As is obvious from its title," the composer continued, "The Good Liar is about untruth, so early on I asked Bill how much lying the music should do. He felt the most important role for the score was to keep drawing us in, weaving its own web to tangle us enjoyably in the misdeeds we're watching. Not so much lying to the audience as making them co-conspirators."
Carter Burwell has composed the music for more than 90 feature films, including Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Rob Roy, Fargo, The Spanish Prisoner, Gods and Monsters,
Velvet Goldmine, Three Kings, Being John Malkovich, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (BAFTA Award nominee for Film Music), Before Night Falls, A Knight's Tale, The Rookie, Adaptation., Intolerable Cruelty, No Country for Old Men, In Bruges, Burn After Reading, Twilight, Where the Wild Things Are (Golden
Globe nominee for Best Original Score), A Serious Man, The
Blind Side, The Kids Are All Right, True Grit, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Parts 1 & 2, Mr. Holmes, Legend, Anomalisa, Hail, Caesar!, The Founder and Goodbye
Christopher Robin.
Burwell wrote the music for 2017's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, starring
Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson and Sam
Rockwell and written and directed by
Martin McDonagh. He received an Oscar nomination and a Golden
Globe Award nomination and won the British Independent Film Award for Best
Music for his work on the film. His other recent films include Wonderstruck, which premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and was Burwell's fourth collaboration with director Todd Haynes; and the Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a six-part Western anthology film for Netflix which marked their 17th project together and premiered in November 2018. His original score for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was named to the 2019 Oscar shortlist. He also wrote the music for the animated feature Missing Link directed by Chris Butler. Among his recent credits, Burwell wrote the music for The Morning Show, starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon,
Billy Crudup and Steve Carell.
Burwell wrote the music for the drama Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and
Rooney Mara and directed by Todd Haynes, which premiered in Cannes and was released in theatres in November 2015. He received his first Oscar nomination for Best Original Score for Carol, as well as nominations for a Golden
Globe and a Critics' Choice Movie Award. He won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's Award for Best
Music Score for Carol and Anomalisa. Burwell previously worked with Haynes on
Velvet Goldmine and the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, starring Kate Winslet, for which he was nominated for two Emmy Awards and won for Outstanding
Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie or Special (Original Dramatic Score).
His theater work includes the chamber opera The Celestial Alphabet Event and the Mabou Mines productions of Mother and Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth by Day.
In 2005 he developed a concert work for text and music titled Theater of the New Ear, presented in New York, London and Los Angeles. The text, by Joel and Ethan Coen and Charlie Kaufman, was performed by a dozen actors, including Meryl Streep, Steve Buscemi, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hope Davis,
Peter Dinklage and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The music was performed by the eight-member Parabola Ensemble, conducted by Burwell.
Burwell's dance compositions include the pieces The Return of Lot's Wife, choreographed by Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig, and RABL, choreographed by
Patrice Regnier. He has performed around the world with his own ensembles as well as others, such as The Harmonic Choir. His writing includes the essay "Music at Six: Scoring the News Then and Now," published in the inaugural issue of Esopus magazine in 2003 and reprinted in Harper's Magazine in 2004, and the essay "No Country for Old Music" in the 2013 Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Burwell has taught and lectured at The Sundance Institute, New York University, Columbia University, and Harvard University. His website is carterburwell.com.
Consummate con man Roy Courtnay (Ian McKellen) has set his sights on his latest mark: the recently widowed Betty McLeish (Helen Mirren), worth millions. And Roy means to take it all. From their very first meeting, Roy begins plying Betty with his tried and true manipulations, and Betty, who seems quite taken with him, is soon going along for the ride. But this time, what should have been a simple swindle escalates into a cat-and-mouse game with the ultimate stakes—revealing more insidious deceptions that will take them both through a minefield of danger, intrigue and betrayal.
Helen Mirren and McKellen star together on screen for the first time, in this smart and suspenseful thriller from New Line Cinema about the secrets people keep and the lies they live. The Good Liar was directed by Bill Condon, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Gods and Monsters, from a screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher (Mr. Holmes), based on the widely acclaimed novel by Nicholas Searle. The main cast also includes Russell Tovey (The History Boys, Quantico) and Jim Carter (Downton Abbey).
The film was produced by Greg Yolen and Bill Condon. Richard Brener,
Andrea Johnston,
Aaron L. Gilbert, Jason Cloth, Anjay Nagpal, Jack
Morrissey and Nick O'Hagan served as executive producers. The creative filmmaking team included director of photography Tobias Schliessler, production designer John Stevenson, editor Virginia Katz, and costume designer Keith Madden. The music was composed by Carter Burwell.
New Line Cinema presents, in association with BRON Creative, a 1000 Eyes Production, a Bill Condon Film, The Good Liar. It is being distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures.
