Carter's Notes

Fargo announces itself as a true-crime drama. And yet the perpetrators of the crime are buffoons. If the music plays the humor, it kills the suspense. If it plays the drama, will it kill the humor?

The answer to this question seemed to be to play the drama with exaggerrated seriousness - as melodrama. Bombastic excess on the part of the music seemed to help the comedy.

The scene is Minnesota and North Dakota in a winter whiteout, and the exaggerated cheerfulness of the characters only makes the situation more lonely and hopeless. I wanted to contrast the smallness of their humanity with the endless white landscape by playing them with fragile solo instruments: harp, celesta, and hardanger fiddle. The hardanger - native to Scandinavia - is a fiddle with sympathetic strings that add a shimmering glowing drone to the played notes.

Even before the Coens shot the film I'd started researching Scandinavian folk music in the vague hope that it would be informative, and I found a folk tune that had become a hymn called "The Lost Sheep." Its title was perfect for Bill Macy's character, but its soulful sadness was perfect for the film as a whole, so I expanded on it using a film-noir orchestration. It became the opening music for the film.

Steve Buscemi as Carl Showalter

Frances McDormand as Marge Gunderson