Yahoo News ‘Flora and Son’ Director Explains ‘Bad Chorus’ in Film’s Key Song
After earworm-filled musical dramas “Once,” “Begin Again” and “Sing Street,” “Flora and Son” marks a notable first for writer-director John Carney: it’s the first time he wrote a song for a film that’s designed to underwhelm. “I always thought, what would it be like if you started a song and you just didn’t get the response that you’re supposed to get in a musical?” Carney says about the central song in the AppleTV+ feature starring Eve Hewson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
“Flora and Son” tells the story of Dublin-based Flora (Hewson), a young single mom who is struggling with her life and especially her teenage son, Max (Orén Kinlan). She digs a guitar out of the trash, but Max is not interested — he only wants to make music using Garage Band and his laptop. So Flora decides to learn to play, and finds washed-up songwriter Jeff (Gordon-Levitt) offering guitar lessons online, so she begins learning music as well as a whole lot of other stuff about life, herself and family. The film is packed with original songs, as Flora takes a stab at composing, Max creates on his computer and Jeff plays his stuff, too.
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Carney explains that he and [musician/songwriter/producer Gary Clark] “put a bad chorus” in the film’s pivotal composition “‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You’ and reverse- engineered it to the place that Jeff could play it where she thinks it’s fine, but it didn’t stop time.
“I felt with this, this isn’t just about getting great songs in a movie. This is about getting songs that specifically connect to the characters and their predicaments and where they are musically in their life.”
Since his Oscar-winning breakthrough, “Once,” Carney has steadily built a pedigree as a filmmaker whose ears are as attuned for storytelling as his eyes. His latest project includes dance music and hip-hop in addition to the traditional singer-songwriter rock for which he’s known — a juggling act that initially prompted him to investigate the genres he knew less well before pulling back to avoid giving a 14-year-old a 51-year-old’s musical knowledge. “As a middle-aged white guy, I’m not going to know what’s cool, and whatever I say is cool is going to change next week anyway.”
“I didn’t want it to appear like I was involved in the process,” Carney says. “I wanted it to appear like this weird kid had surfed the internet, his dad was in a band, his mom was having a fling with this guy, and he was a bit of an oddball listening to drill music from this guy around the corner. How might that sound?”
Perhaps ironically, he’s not particularly reverent about the process of creating music, regardless how pivotal it consistently is in his films. “I don’t want to denigrate it, but songwriting isn’t probably one of the very high arts,” Carney says. “It’s rocket science to do it in a way that is like a George Gershwin song, where it’s beautiful melodies that are almost like God wrote them, but I don’t think it takes a genius to see that a lot of modern choruses have the same three chords as the verse, and the top line’s different.”
Yet when time came to merge the disparate musical sensibilities of his main characters for a final number where they all perform a song they crafted together, Carney admits it took a lot of work to get the balance right between genres — and levels of proficiency — that weren’t immediately compatible.
“It was a lot of realizing how could I take all of the limitations of these characters and create something that is plausible to them?” he says. “How simple can we be but write something that feels uplifting? You still want to make something good, but you primarily want to make something that works for the story.”
The resulting tune, “High Life,” will be submitted to the Academy for original song. Though it provides an undeniably infectious soundtrack to the film’s closing credits, Carney hopes that viewers watching in weeks ahead understand his and Clark’s intentions with it. “The criticism I get of that song online is, ‘This song’s not good enough,’” he says. “I’m like, you’ve missed the whole point of the movie if you say that!”
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