Interview with Gustavo Santaolalla
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Gustavo Santaolalla
Argentine musician, producer and composer who won Oscars for Brokeback Mountain and Babel and wrote the music for The Last of Us game and series.
Source: Score: The Podcast on YouTube
These answers are taken from Gustavo Santaolalla (The Last of Us) | Full Interview on Score: The Podcast's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with composing music?
I started playing when I was five, and I had formal tuition between five and 10. Unfortunately I never really connected with the academic side of music. I think it was really my teacher's fault, but we always had these terrible fights about it, because I had the skills to play. So I would pretend that I was reading the chart, but I actually was not reading it. Then she would cover part of the chart and say, "Start from here," and I just didn't know where I was. I had to go from the top. So when I was 10, she quit on me. She went to my mom and said, "His ear is stronger than my music. I quit."
That's when I started writing my first little things. I always found an incredible connection between the instrument and the music and the spiritual world.
When did you start writing music?
By the time I was 10 or 11, I started to realize, I think I'm going to be doing something with this when I grow up. My parents were great in the sense that they always supported me with the music and bought me instruments. I had my first electric guitar when I was 12, and at that time in Argentina that was very unusual. We were just middle class.
I started making records at 17. I signed with RCA, and I started as an artist and as a producer, so I was going to high school and I was making records. The band was named Arco Iris, which means rainbow.
What drew you to a career as a composer?
It was a call that I had from a very early age. And then when I was 13, The Beatles came onto the scene, and that was it. I said, this is what I want to do, for sure.
When I have to say what my instruments are, I say guitar, which I started playing when I was five years old, and ronroco. The ronroco is one of my main instruments, as important as the guitar for me. But I always like to talk about the fact that I love to play instruments that I don't know how to play, because they put me in a very particular situation that I love.
What do you enjoy most about composing?
I've been very interested in this last decade in quantum mechanics, that wonderful world of uncertainty, where past, present and future are happening at the same time. I really feel that way many times. When I'm writing music, when I'm performing it, there's that sense of the timeless, of being a kid and being an old guy at the same time.
I've always looked to the front, to go ahead. I try not to stay in a comfort zone and always put myself into a challenging situation. And I always love to work with young talent.
I do stuff out of instinct, which is the way I work, and then afterwards I can articulate what I did. I've been doing this for so many years now that time has allowed me to really be able to articulate it.
What was a great moment for you as a composer?
When Neil Druckmann told me the story of The Last of Us, he also told me that in his plans was to connect with the gamers on a deeper level. I said, this is it. And when we got the confirmation, learning that people were crying playing the game, there's a particular couple of spots where people cry, just like in the movies, it was a confirmation that this connection was happening.
The love, the devotion that the fans of The Last of Us have for the music is different from any connection I have established with prior fans of my music. I get beautiful emails and messages, and I do a lot of meet and greets on tour. On this tour, a guy came especially from Syria, just for one night, to see my show in Paris.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
I put out the record Ronroco after Jaime Torres, who was a master of the charango, an instrument related to the ronroco, pushed me. He was kind of the Ravi Shankar of the charango. I'd been recording pieces with the ronroco for many years just for myself. That album contains 13 years of my life. I don't play like the old guys play. I have my own style. He said, "That doesn't matter. You found the spirit of the instrument. You have to put this out. People have to know this."
So pushed by him, I put the album out, and all these doors started opening. Michael Mann called, and he wanted to use Iguazú in The Insider. Then I started working with Alejandro, and at the end of Amores Perros, when El Chivo walks away into the horizon with his dog, there's the ronroco sounding. And then The Motorcycle Diaries, and then up to The Last of Us. The main theme is ronroco.
What advice do you have for new composers?
In my talks and workshops, I always talk about the importance of experience and the fruits of experience. But I strongly believe in the fruits of inexperience, because inexperience allows you to take roads that experience will immediately deny, because you already know this is the way you do this. Then comes a kid that has no idea and takes this road. That's why I always love to work with young talent.
And I always say that part of my success is not only the things that I've done, but the things that I have said no to. After the two Oscars, I was approached by different companies with some big offers, and I had to say no, because I knew what I wanted to do, and this was more of the same.
To really mature and grow, you can never forget where you started, where you come from. You expand your identity: who are you in your house, in your neighborhood, your city, your country, your continent, and then who are you on the planet.
What has been your greatest accomplishment as a composer?
One of the things that I'm proud of is that I actually put the ronroco on the map, because nobody knew what a ronroco was before. And the other thing is that I was able to transcend the ethnic aspect of the instrument. Sometimes I do pieces that have echoes of music from the Andes, but I also do pieces that have echoes of the Pampas, of Eastern Europe or Africa or Asia or the Arabic world. It's really like a planetary instrument.
In the theme of The Last of Us, I never heard anybody come to me and say, "Hey, that's that instrument from the Andes Mountains." The ronroco there works as a harp or a guitar or any instrument in the orchestra, a clarinet or whatever. It's one more instrument, which I love. That note could be anything, but when it goes there, that's blues, that's America. It could be Arabic too. It could be a flamenco note. That's the beauty of it: it's really from nowhere and from everywhere.
How do you keep communication clear with directors and music supervisors?
The way I work in films is not the way composers usually work. Usually composers come at the very end, when there's a rough cut that was already scored with temp music, and then the composer is chasing the temp, trying to make something that is like that but not really a copy. I've never worked like that. I always like to work from the script, from the story, from my connection with the characters, and from conversations with the director. Brokeback Mountain is the biggest example: 100 percent of the score was written prior to a frame being shot.
With The Last of Us, it had to be like that, because you only see the rendered images at the very end of the road. You are really working on the basis of the story and the characters. I didn't get any guidelines. Neil told me the story, and I just got to work. I never thought that I was writing music for a game. I always felt I was writing music for a great story, a story you could tell with puppets or animation or in theater or in a series.
Of all the scores you have written, which is your favorite?
There are a few albums I did with Arco Iris, but the first one, which I did when I was 18 years old, I think is one of my favorites. I did that on four track. It is like a blueprint of my career. You'll find lots of things there that have to do with the scores and with my songs and with my music in general. It's a pink album, with a triangular symbol on the cover.
When I went back and started reviewing all my stuff, I went back to that pink album, and I found stuff that for me was timeless. There's a song there called Canción de Cuna para Niño Astronauta, which means a lullaby for an astronaut kid. Still today I can't figure out how I wrote that when I was 18 years old. The combination of chords and the whole structure of the piece is so complex. It's really something timeless.
Describe your musical style.
The first time I heard James Schamus, the producer at Focus, talk about Brokeback Mountain, he told me, "Your use of negative space." And I was like, what? He said, "That's the silence." I didn't know all these things. It's a very eloquent silence, because it's a silence full of information. It's not just an absence of sound. It's a silence that sometimes can be louder than a note, and sadder. It creates that longing, that expectation for the next note to happen. It's like jumping into a void.
In Brokeback Mountain, probably nobody knows, but there are elements of tango in that guitar: the use of space, of silence, the melancholy. I come from the south, and I really do think that the Southern Hemisphere has a different vibe than the Northern Hemisphere. The lower you go, the closer you get to Patagonia and Antarctica, the more melancholic it gets.
Iguazú has something deeply human. It has that bittersweetness of existence, that melancholy of existence that we all somehow feel, even when we're feeling joy.
What is the biggest audience your music has reached?
The Last of Us has allowed me to connect with people around the world. Most of the fans didn't know anything that I'd done before, but now they do, and now they know that I sing, they know that I did the movies. I went to Kuwait to do a presentation at a video game conference. And now that it has turned into a TV series, the public has expanded again. It was amazing that the gamers embraced the series. It's always a challenge when something has been so successful in one medium to move it to another. Some other people have said this too: the fact that we kept the music, the themes, the sonic fabric of the game for the series has been instrumental. Neil and Craig were really kind to say that they feel my music is part of the DNA of The Last of Us.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
Iguazú was labeled by the president of the composers society here in Los Angeles one of the most hated pieces by composers, because they use it to temp so many movies, and then composers have to follow that. I don't particularly like it to work that way. But it's a piece that has been appreciated by so many people, and it's very special for me too. It'll fit almost anything.
In The Last of Us, I'm in the game. There's a Gustavo character, an avatar, playing on a corner.
And for The Last of Us, I created two poles. One is the ronroco, and the other one originally was a Fender six-string bass, an instrument from the 60s, an octave lower than a guitar, that was used by The Beatles and by Jack Bruce in Cream. If you want one, you have to order it from the Fender Custom Shop. That instrument gave me the weight and the low end. One side was the feminine side, connected with Ellie, the ronroco, and the other was the male side. In the second game I replaced it with a nylon-string guitar an octave lower. There are guys in Argentina who are the only ones in the world who make those strings.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
Around the beginning of next year is the 25th anniversary of the release of Ronroco, the album, so we're planning a series of events to celebrate. Nonesuch is going to release a vinyl version of the album. And I'm going to put together a concert, because that record was never played live. I might do a combination with another record, called Camino, but it will be a whole concert with that aesthetic, which I've never done before.
I'm also planning to release a signature model of ronroco. I've been working with the luthier for a year, and also signature strings for the instrument. And I'm going to be working on a fragrance, because I'm always very interested in smells. A colleague from Argentina has a company called Fueguia, and he has worked with molecules of an instrument. He did one with Leonard Cohen's guitar.
Gustavo Santaolalla's Full Biography
Argentine musician and leader of the now defunct bands "Arco Iris" and "Soluna", Gustavo Santaolalla was one of the references of his country's national music by the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. During the 70s he relocated to the United States, where he formed the band Wet Picnic, with Aníbal Kerpel, Aaurie Buhne and Robert Brill, with which he developed an intense activity in the city of Los Angeles. In 1982 he returned to Argentina to record a solo work, with a new sound, very influenced by the American pop trends of the time, called "Santaolalla", in which participated Argentine bassist Alfredo Toth (GIT band) and keyboardist Alejandro Lerner. In the music production area, his work was emphasized in "De Ushuaia a La Quiaca" ("From Ushuaia to La Quiaca"), another Argentine mythical musician León Gieco's project, following his same national folk line. Back in Los Angeles, produced records for "Café Tacuba" and "Maldita vecindad" among others, returning once more to Argentina in the middle of the '90 with a second solo work, "GAS" (his name's initials). His works in group production from the USA have turned Santaolalla into a prominent figure in that area, what gave him, besides, the chance to participate in big musical projects for cinema movies with successful results ("Amores perros", "21 Grams", "Diarios de motocicleta", "The Motorcycle Diaries"), crowned with the Oscar award in March, 2006, by the music of the controversial film "Brokeback Mountain" and in 2007 for his friend Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel". This makes him the third composer to win in the Best Original Score two years in a row.