Carter Burwell first began working with Joel and Ethen Coen on their film Blood Simple and has gone on to score a number of feature films, including True Grit, Adaptation, Barton Fink, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Before Night Falls, Being John Malkovich, Burn After Reading, Conspiracy Theory, Fargo, Gods and Monsters, Howl, The Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty, The Kids Are All Right, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Miller’s Crossing, Rob Roy, The Spanish Prisoner, Three Kings, Twilight, and Where the Wild Things Are, while teaching and continuing to compose dance, theater, and other work.
After graduating from Harvard, Carter Burwell became Chief Computer Scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, James Watson’s biology lab in Long Island before studying computer animation at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). He eventually became Director of Digital Sound research at NYIT, and was working in this regard when he was asked by Joel and Ethan Coen to write the music to their film Blood Simple.
He has since scored a number of feature films, including Adaptation, Barton Fink, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Before Night Falls, Being John Malkovich, Burn After Reading, Conspiracy Theory, Fargo, Gods and Monsters, Howl, The Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty, The Kids Are All Right, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Miller’s Crossing, Rob Roy, The Spanish Prisoner, Three Kings, Twilight, and Where the Wild Things Are, while teaching and continuing to compose dance (The Return of Lot’s Wife), theater (Cara Lucia, Theater of the New Ear), and other work.
