Flora And Son songwriter and composer Gary Clark on how he and director John Carney found the high life – audio and film

In Apple Original Movies Flora and sonHer single mother Flora (Eve Hewson) does not know what to do with her rebellious teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan). Encouraged by the police to find Max a hobby, Flora tries to occupy him with a battered acoustic guitar. With the help of an occasional LA musician (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Flora and Max discover the transformative power of music.

In order to build believable chemistry between the film’s leads and illuminate the relationship between mother and son, songwriter and composer Gary Clark first had to forge a relationship with director John Carney, a feat that Clark says has been thirty years in the making. Doing laundry. During Deadline’s Sound & Screen: Film event, Clark reflected on the strangely chance meeting that kicked their now regular collaboration into high gear.

“When John first called me, we had never met and all I saw was [of his] It used to be Once. … He really did it semi-autobiographically [movie] called street singing about his high school band, and so the big theme in this film is that his brother makes a lot of music for him,” Clark said. “And one of the records he did was my band’s first album, which we did in 1987, or something like that. And John had the idea of ​​calling different people who had influenced him as a child, but I was just one of the calls. He asked me to write a song, sent me a letter and I wrote the song, and he loved it and just said, “Are you going to do the whole movie?”

Since the manufacture of Flora and son Clark worked with Carney at Prime Videos Modern love. What makes their creative relationship so productive is the way Carney isn’t afraid to experiment in the studio while filming if something doesn’t feel authentic to his story.

When it came to the film’s climax, “High Life,” for example, Clark said he and Carney hit a roadblock when Hewson expressed concern that Flora couldn’t sing.

“It was one of the hardest [songs] to get Not so much musically, we picked up the musical side pretty quickly and I understood the chorus but Eve hated the verse lyrics. So John came up with the idea of ​​just going to the studio and working it out, which I’d never done before [in this way]. I was terrified, but it was really fun, and that’s how all the fun stuff happened [put in the song.]”

Come back on Monday for the panel video.