Interview: Drummer Antonio Sánchez on Scoring ‘Birdman’
In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
Antonio Sánchez is a composer and drummer best known for his work with jazz guitarist Pat Metheny and his award-winning score of the 2014 Alejandro González Iñárritu film Birdman.
In advance of his live performance of the score with a Birdman screening at Ravinia Festival on June 26, we spoke with Sánchez about how his life changed after Birdman, misconceptions about jazz musicians, his favorite comedies, and more.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
1. What’s the Antonio Sánchez origin story?
I was born and raised in Mexico City. My mother Susana and my grandfather Ignacio were great music fans. But he liked classical music and my mother loved rock ’n’ roll, so I grew up listening to both. My uncle had a girlfriend who had a brother who was a drummer, and one day we went to visit them and I saw a beautiful drum set sitting in their living room and I thought it looked like a spaceship. Just an incredible sight. He started playing, and that was it for me. It was just love at first sight with the drums. I started playing rock around Mexico. I was taking lessons with him. It was all very basic. And then I got myself into the conservatory in Mexico City because I saw the movie Amadeus, which blew me away. I wanted to learn how to play and compose classical music. So I did four and a half years of that.
In the meantime I started discovering jazz and realized how much I had to learn. In 1993, I moved to Boston to go to the Berklee College of Music. I was there for four and a half years, then did a year at New England Conservatory. After that I moved to New York in 1999 and I was very lucky to play with some of my favorite jazz musicians that I used to listen to on records when I was in Mexico. Then in 2012 I got the call to do the score for the movie Birdman by Alejandro González Iñárritu, which opened a bunch of other doors for me. I became a band leader. I started doing my own records and more film scoring. I’m currently doing two TV series right now. So that opened a whole other can of worms for me musically, which is great.
2. Drummers typically aren’t asked to score films, so what was Iñárritu’s pitch to you for providing the drum score for Birdman?
I was a big fan of his to begin with, so if he would have pitched, you know, a clown movie with snakes and a snail, I would have said yes. Whatever he does is very, very interesting. So he pitched it to me as a new project that is going to be a dark comedy, and since comedy and rhythm go hand in hand, it would be great for it to be just a drum-based score. Of course I was blown away that he asked me and then I said yes, and then five seconds after I said yes and we hung up the phone, I was petrified. I had no idea how I was going to do this. I had never even been interested in film scoring. So the fact that it happened and that it happened with an incredibly challenging and amazing and interesting movie was just incredibly lucky for me.
3. How did your life change in the months and years after Birdman was released?
I think my name started circulating in different circles than the usual promoters and clubs in the jazz world. All of a sudden my name was circulating in Hollywood circles, which for me was incredibly strange. When award season happened during that time, I went to a bunch of those award shows because the score got nominated for a few things, and I felt like such a tourist. Like at any moment, somebody was gonna tell me, “Yo, what are you doing here? You don’t belong here. Get out.” So it was a strange experience, but one for the books. I’ve been lucky to keep doing things around scoring, and not only with drums now. I wanted to be able to do scores that were not just “OK, that’s the drum guy,” you know? I’m doing full-blown film scores and TV scores with tons of instruments. So Birdman has been such a blessing. It’s the gift that keeps on giving because I keep doing these live shows 10 years later, and the shows are so much fun for me. I get to be on stage all by myself with my drums, which never, ever happens.
4. When performing the score live to a Birdman screening, how much of your drumming sticks closely to what’s in the movie versus what you improvise?
What we achieved in the movie was basically improvised, because Iñárritu wanted me to react in real time to what I was seeing and hearing. Nowadays, I try to stay truthful to the dramatic effect that was achieved in the movie, but also do a version that would be basically if I would have had the movie with me for 10 years—studying it, doing it live a bunch, having the ability to think about it, learning all the dialogue, all the movements, knowing it inside out. That’s a luxury you never have as a film scorer. So now it’s a lot of fun because I know it so intimately, and I get to really do my own version. I think it’s 10 times better than the original one, because I really, really know what I’m doing now versus back then, when we did everything in a day and a half.
5. Who’s another director you’d say yes to if they asked you to score their film?
Any of the trifecta of the Mexican directors: del Toro, Cuarón, Iñárritu. Anything by Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan. There’s a lot of amazing filmmakers. A lot of times I’m watching their movies and I’m like, “I wouldn’t be able to do a score like that.” But I would be able to do something different. So who knows? I would have never thought Birdman would have happened, so you never know what the future will be.
6. Besides drums, what instrument would you want scoring your everyday life?
Bass for sure. I think drums and bass are just the perfect team, and I love using that in film scores—a lot of drums and then a lot of layers of bass. I think it’s an underutilized instrument. Especially in film scoring, because it’s not very orthodox.
7. What’s a common misconception about jazz musicians?
I think people might tend to think of jazz musicians as snobby, who only like listening to jazz or only like playing jazz. But nowadays jazz is so open and wide. We can be some of the more open-minded musicians, and so well prepared in our instruments. We study so much harmony and composition and theory and technique. There are so many styles now that you have to know, so I think we’re very well versed to do anything that is put in front of us: rock, reggae, classical, Latin, pop, fusion. A lot of really good pop musicians are jazz musicians a lot of times—they do pop or rock because it pays better.
8. We all have an inner critic. In Birdman, Riggan calls his “scary but comforting.” How would you describe yours?
It’s not scary—I don’t think I’m at that point yet. But it can be brutal at times. It can be kind at times. I’m very self-critical, and if it doesn’t pass the smell test, it usually doesn’t make it into an album or a film score or the set list. I’ve been very lucky to have collaborated with some of the most demanding and nitpicking musicians on the planet. Pat Metheny is one of them. He’s such a stickler for detail, and being in that school for over 20 years definitely made me grow a lot and made me realize how much work very established superstars put in all the time. If these people are in their 60s or 70s and still doing it at that level, I have to push myself to try to get to those levels too.
9. Your grandfather Ignacio López Tarso was an actor during what’s considered the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Did he tell you any stories from his time on the stage and screen?
Oh, he had stories. One of my favorite things would be to ask open questions like, “How was it back then when you did this movie?” And then he would just start going. He started very, very, very young, and he was on TV every day when TV was king. And then he was in movies and on stage all the time. He was also president of the actors union, he was a congressman. He had an incredible life. He was very, very famous. For him the stage was church. He would really get mad at actors who forgot lines and had a reputation for being very, very scary.
But I grew up in rehearsals and backstages and dressing rooms and theaters, so that was always attractive to me—to be in a place where you know in a few hours there’s going to be a bunch of people and you’re gonna feel that energy. And you might be absolutely exhausted from traveling if you’re touring and you know you have to play in exactly two hours and you don’t think you can do it because you’re so exhausted. But the time comes and the energy comes from the audience. Some of the best concerts I’ve ever had were when I’ve been exhausted and the audience just really pulls something special out of me.
“I’m very self-critical. If it doesn’t pass the smell test, it doesn’t make it into an album or a film score or the set list.”
10. This month we’re celebrating comedy movies on the site. What movie makes you laugh the most?
I love The 40-Year-Old Virgin. That’s a great movie. A Fish Called Wanda is amazing. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is fantastic. For Mexican comedies, anything with Tin-Tan (a.k.a. Germán Valdés). He was a great comedy actor and singer and dancer. He was a pachuco, with the zoot suit. He was just an hilarious actor, and also very genuine. He didn’t seem like he was acting—he was just kind of being himself. All those movies are like the jewel of Mexican comedy.
11. You mentioned Amadeus. What was it about that movie that spoke to you?
Just the idea of a kid who was a genius and born with all these gifts. Of course his father was a musician and he was groomed from an early age, but somebody that could write operas and symphonies by age 10 to me was fascinating. Also the movie is just a beautiful piece of art. I remember right after that I really wanted to learn classical piano. I’d always loved classical music because my grandfather would play it every afternoon while we were eating. Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Satie, Debussy... all that stuff was in my ear already. I never thought I would be interested in playing it, but every time there was a piano somewhere I would sit down and the keyboard would be very attractive to me. The piano just sounds beautiful no matter what you do to it. It’s almost indestructible. So I was very in love with piano for a long time, and I still use it all the time to compose.
12. What’s the greatest jazz performance you’ve ever seen live?
Tony Williams with his quintet at a little bar in Boston called the Regattabar. That was very special because it was the first time I saw Tony Williams live and I was studying him around that time. So I remember seeing him and thinking this was probably what somebody that was born to do something very specific looks like, because he looked like he was a Jedi master on the drums. Everything seems so effortless and flowing, so that made a huge impression on me.
+1. What’s your question for us?
What’s your favorite film score?
Chad: The one that was most formative for me was probably Back to the Future. Alan Silvestri’s score felt so epic for this relatively small story. It’s just so bombastic and expressive and dynamic throughout the trilogy that it showed me as a budding cinephile what could be accomplished by film music, how it becomes a character in itself, and really can make or break a movie. The movie is brilliant on its own, but then the music just takes it to the next level.