“I’ve been through a lot,” composer Gustavo Santaolalla tells NME over Zoom. It’s something of an understatement: if there’s a musical award going, you can bet the Argentinian 72-year-old already has one sitting in his trophy cabinet. He’s won two Academy Awards for his scores – the first for Brokeback Mountain, the second for Babel – and his work on The Motorcycle Diaries took home a BAFTA in 2004.
Yet it’s his masterpiece score for The Last Of Us, PlayStation’s flagship post-apocalyptic game series and subsequent HBO TV series, that brings us together today. We caught up with the musician before his performance at London’s Game Music Festival, where Santaolalla played his Latin American, folk-infused Americana score to a sold-out Royal Festival Hall. Afterward, he held a masterclass where he discussed his approach to composing. “I don’t like the word ‘teaching’,” he tells us. “It’s more like sharing experiences and ways to approach creating. Life, in general, is so connected to creating.”
Santaolalla’s can draw upon more experiences than most. He tells us of his first journey to the United States in the ‘60s, which took 36 hours as their ramshackle four-seater plane had to constantly land for refuels. When they finally arrived, Santaolalla – who was 10 at the time – still remembers the shock of seeing the States’ then-segregated bathrooms.
“These life experiences have converged into what I do,” he says, and points to his upbringing under Argentina’s brutal military junta. “Coming from a country in which 30,000 people disappeared at the hands of the government, I was in jail many times since I was 16 – for nothing! I didn’t belong to a political party, or do any drugs. I just had long hair and played electric guitar.”
None of this diminished the musician’s creative streak or artistic integrity, and throughout his storied career, Santaolalla has turned down as many projects as he’s agreed to. He gravitates to “boutique projects” and things he can relate to, and admits that after his string of Oscars wins, he turned down several projects offering “incredible” amounts of money because the connection wasn’t there. When it came to The Last Of Us – which creative director Neil Druckmann personally approached him to soundtrack – Santaolalla was drawn to the game’s emotional story about fatherhood and humanity.
To soundtrack this tale, Santaolalla played a mix of ronroco (a South American stringed instrument), banjo and guitar, resulting in a folksy, incredibly intimate score. The composer says he took a minimalist approach and wanted to include noises of “humanity” that many sound engineers try to edit out. In many of the game’s songs, for example, you can hear the soft brushing of his fingers across nylon strings as he changes chords.
The composer describes this as trying to capture “primitiveness”. “It really adds up,” he explains. “It creates a tension and texture that make [music] more human, and I’m looking for that, you know? The right note, hidden as a wrong note.”
Santaolalla places great value in this “eloquent silence,” and, laughing, describes his approach with an unusual analogy. He recently started watching parkour videos on YouTube, and while mobility issues mean he can’t take to the rooftops himself, compares the process – running up, leaping into thin air, and landing – to preparing “the note you choose to jump from, and then the note you’re going to land on”.
While on stage at Game Music Festival, it’s this thoughtfulness – in tandem with his legendary finger-picking skills and ferocious singing voice – that lead to a series of standing ovations for Santaolalla. During every song, the audience sits in spellbound silence. His performance of ‘A Love That Will Never Grow Old’ – a ballad he co-wrote for Brokeback Mountain – is dedicated to Bill and Frank, the couple (played by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett) at the heart of a tender love story in HBO’s The Last Of Us TV series. When the last note rings out, there are few dry eyes left in the house.
Rather than conduct the festival’s Philharmonia Orchestra, Santaolalla is ingrained in it, flitting between instruments near the front of the stage. “I’ve been told by several people that sometimes my scores feel like another character in a movie,” he explains, “and I think it’s because of the presence of the artist. It’s one thing to hear a song [covered] – it can be great – but another thing when you hear it by the person who wrote it.”
As our conversation wraps up, we return to The Last Of Us. Would he score another game in the series because of his existing relationship, or would he need to learn more about its story and characters before making a decision? “[A bit of] both,” says Santaolalla. “I have a sense of the universe of The Last Of Us. Lots of times when I’m writing – I’m constantly composing and writing – sometimes I do something, and think it could belong to the world of The Last Of Us, so I put it aside.”
“Just like what happened with Bill, some stories can be developed,” he adds, pointing to the fact that Bill’s limited role in the game was expanded massively in the TV show. “It’s always important to know that – and any new thing will probably [offer] great input to provide new material, definitely.”
There’s no news on whether developer Naughty Dog will return to The Last Of Us, though earlier in the year, Druckmann suggested the studio has “one more chapter” left to tell. We’ll have to wait and see if that pans out – but if you asked the rapturous audience of Game Music Festival who they’d choose to score the theoretical threequel, there would only be one composer worthy of taking up the ronroco once more.
If you enjoyed this, check out our second Game Music Festival interview with Baldur’s Gate 3 composer Borislav Slavov.