Nick Harmer of Death Cab for Cutie picks 5 movies to pair with ‘I Built You A Tower’
In Pairings, artists and creators pick the movies that complement their latest work.
Nick Harmer is the bassist of the Grammy-nominated rock band Death Cab for Cutie, best known for their albums Transatlanticism, Plans, and Narrow Stairs. Their new album I Built You A Tower is out now wherever you get your music!
We asked Nick to pick a few movies that pair well with I Built You A Tower. Here’s what he said about them.
Past Lives
This one took the breath out of me when I saw it. I love the kind of “what could have been, what maybe could still be.” I love how there’s that will-they-won’t-they, and I like that they just don’t. There’s a real power in that, and it gets into some thematic similarities in some of the songs on this record. Certainly around the song “I Built You a Tower” where you’re kind of building up these stories and narratives and fantasies you can have about other people as they come into your life. Some of that is real and some of that is imagined, and there’s just so much rich territory in imagination when it starts to connect with some romance. The movie captured a real bittersweet thing about life for me, and I know for a lot of people who’ve seen it.
Contact
This film heavily meditates on human connection, whether we’re connecting to an alien intelligence in the universe or ourselves. I love that they start the film with this lovey-dovey romance with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, and you’re like, “Is this gonna just be a cheesy love story?” and then it turns into some really deep, good sci-fi. There’s meditations around God and spirituality versus science, and there’s even tinges of fanaticism and what that does. It’s such a fascinating film emotionally about the need to connect with each other. There are lines that Ben wrote like “I’m not sure which is worse / If God laughs or he doesn’t / And I’m not sure which is worse / If it was love or it wasn’t.” There are some really interesting questions around spirituality that run through a lot of the songs on this record, and our catalog as well. I’ve come back to it a few times in my life, and each time I watch it I think it should be held up right alongside Interstellar as far as powerful films about science and love.
Synecdoche, New York
It’s really easy when you think of our band and emotional music and exploring relationships to immediately think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so I didn’t want to go to that one immediately. But I really love Charlie Kaufman and how he explores a lot of that territory in Synecdoche, New York, which is a wild film. It’s big and small and all over the place. I love how polarizing it can be when you’re talking about it, with people who love it and people who hate it. In this story they’re literally building the set that is New York, and you’re building these things where the line starts to blur between realism and imagination and lots of different things that happen throughout the movie. Ben has spoken about a lot of the themes in this record, about what happens when you experience heavy emotions in your life and you tend to build these containers to try to keep them compartmentalized. But as you grow older, you realize how hard that is to keep those containers from cracking and breaking open and spilling into each other. Old feelings and old traumas and old emotions impact new ones, and there’s this futility in trying to continue to build towers in your life to keep things isolated.
Pig
This is a great film, and very overlooked this late-era resurgence of Nicolas Cage. He is just on fire. I love all the things he’s doing these days. When I first saw the poster, I thought it was just an extension of Mandy or like a horror film. I completely misjudged what it was about, and so when I finally had an evening to myself and I put it on, I was not prepared for the melancholy and sadness and what a beautiful meditation on companionship that movie is. You have this thing around revenge, but it really becomes about acceptance and moving on, and there’s a lot of that unpacking that happens in our albums as well. On this record, “Full of Stars” and “How Heavenly A State” come to mind. There are some really powerful explorations in Ben’s lyrics of companionship and loving and losing and time moving on. Pig does a fantastic job of that in a way that just leveled me emotionally.
The Straight Story
This is one of my all-time favorite films from David Lynch, which is his G-rated Disney film about an old man who rides his lawnmower to go visit his estranged brother. It’s such a beautiful film. There’s a journey he goes on. And as you look backwards and unpack your role in relationships and how they’ve fallen apart, and you’ve taken ownership and responsibility for that. There’s a lot of that self-reflection in I Built You A Tower, with meditations on “Where am I at? What’s my responsibility in all of these things?” The Straight Story is very beautiful in that way, and continues to stand out for me. I go to the mat for that one in David Lynch’s filmography.