Expressive restraint

For the first time in his life, Ernesto “Che” Guevara contemplates the otherworldly beauty of the Amazon jungle -- and likes what he sees.

El Che is still a kid at this point, a restless youngster exploring Latin America on a motorcycle with his best friend. He ventures into the Amazon in a boat, and the music that accompanies his pilgrimage is everything you would expect the soundtrack for a road movie to be: soulful, moody and ethereal.

It’s a busy morning inside Gustavo Santaolalla’s recording studio, where the Argentine musician is putting the finishing touches to his score for “The Motorcycle Diaries” -- the coming movie by “Central Station” director Walter Salles that follows Guevara in the early years before he became a political firebrand.

Now the images on the studio monitor show Guevara -- as portrayed by actor Gael Garcia Bernal -- visiting a village populated by lepers. Santaolalla works the massive soundboard in front of him, and a majestic crescendo of gloomy sounds, exotic and orchestral, fills the room.

“It’s all organic,” says Anibal Kerpel, Santaolalla’s longtime collaborator and producing partner. “There’s no keyboards here.” The scene’s soundscapes are a combination of processed guitars and the weird music that Santaolalla creates by locking himself in the recording booth and blowing on PVC plumbing pipes, the kind of hardware you’re more likely to find on a construction site than in a recording studio.

The scene is over. Santaolalla -- a bearlike 51-year-old man blessed with a disarming smile and irrepressibly ebullient demeanor -- changes programs on his computer and the monitor begins playing a scene from a different movie. It’s “21 Grams,” Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow-up to “Amores Perros.”

An almost unrecognizable Sean Penn is lying on a hospital bed, fighting for his life. The music cue for this scene is equally intense but drastically different in tone.

Where “Motorcycle Diaries” had a tribal feel, combining Andean rootsiness with rock ‘n’ roll pathos, the score for “21 Grams” makes you think of dying and going to blues heaven -- the languid guitar work illustrating the nocturnal emotional landscape of the movie’s wounded souls.

Santaolalla smiles proudly. He is scoring the two most anticipated Latino-themed movies of the year.

Revered as visionary

For the time being, Santaolalla is relatively unknown as far as the American mainstream is concerned. But his status is almost legendary within the field of Latin music, where he is revered as a visionary record producer.

A former rock star in his native Argentina, Santaolalla moved to Los Angeles in the ‘80s. It was here that he formed an artistic partnership with fellow rocker and compatriot Kerpel. The pair soon built a studio in Kerpel’s Echo Park home and began recording some of the most promising bands in the burgeoning genre known as rock en espanol or Latin rock.

Working with quality artists such as Cafe Tacuba, Julieta Venegas and Juanes, Santaolalla established a reputation as a sonic alchemist of sorts -- the Latin equivalent of a Rick Rubin or a Daniel Lanois. Far from merely guiding the recording sessions, he became a producer’s producer -- advising artists on song structure, performing on their albums and consistently generating a luminous mood of sonic purity that is instantly identifiable.

By the late ‘90s, Santaolalla was fielding requests from nearly every major artist in Latin rock. Still, there was a side of him that pined to express itself -- as the founder of ‘70s Argentine supergroup Arco Iris, he had experimented with an intriguing fusion of rock and traditional South American motifs, performing native instruments such as the charango and the ronroco.

When he discovered a tape of instrumental pieces that he had recorded 13 years ago, Santaolalla transferred this material to digital equipment and began working on it in his spare time with Kerpel’s assistance.

The resulting product had a serene, austere quality that attracted the attention of the Nonesuch record label. Titled “Ronroco,” the disc was released in 1998 and enjoyed limited commercial success. But it quickly became a cult item among world music aficionados and artists from various disciplines.

“It’s an album that doesn’t demand your attention. It just embraces you,” says actor Benicio Del Toro, who has been using “Ronroco” as the musical backdrop for the screenwriting sessions of a movie he is putting together. “It moves your feelings without manipulating you. That’s precisely why Gustavo’s music is so good for the cinema.”

Del Toro wasn’t the only industry fan. Director Michael Mann used a track from the album on a crucial scene of his 1999 picture “The Insider.” At first, Santaolalla could not understand how this intimate slice of Latin folk would fit in Mann’s tobacco industry drama.

When he saw the result, however, he was thrilled -- realizing that his music worked particularly well when juxtaposed against moving pictures.

“ ‘Ronroco’ opened me a lot of doors,” he says. “It’s a low-key album, but there’s something about it that seems to touch people.”

“Gustavo’s music is the closest thing to silence,” Del Toro adds. “In fact, it’s just like silence -- but a silence that’s filled with mood and feeling and depth.”

Santaolalla’s defining break as a soundtrack composer came in 1999, when he received a call about scoring the film debut of a television commercial director from Mexico. The film, which had just wrapped shooting, was titled “Amores Perros.”

At the time, the musician was busy scoring another movie (Argentine director Marcelo Pineyro’s “Plata Quemada”) and he initially decided to pass on “Amores Perros.” Then, just before turning down the job, he experienced an epiphany.

“I woke up sweating in the middle of the night,” he recalls. “And I thought, ‘How can you say no to a movie that you haven’t even seen?’ ”

The following morning, he called Inarritu’s people and told them that he’d consider taking on the project if they were willing to come to L.A. to screen the movie for him.

The initial cut of “Amores Perros” was three hours long. Santaolalla and Kerpel sat in silence, watching the movie that would single-handedly bring Mexican cinema back from the dead. Fifteen minutes into it, they looked at each other and decided to work on the picture.

“His work on that film was extraordinary,” Inarritu says. “Working with him was a lot of fun. We had an immediate connection, the kind of creative communion that is not easily found in Hollywood.”

Perhaps it was Santaolalla’s restrained approach to the score that won the director’s heart. The picture’s main theme is a two-note melody brimming with tension and melancholy feelings.

“When you leave a movie theater and you’re not thinking about the score, that means that the composer did his job right,” Santaolalla explains. “If the music takes over, there’s something that didn’t work.”

“I love movies where the music is used sparsely,” Inarritu agrees. “The soundtrack should not be used to reaffirm those things that the movie could not express. The music should dance with the images.”

The score for “21 Grams” follows those parameters. Its sonic palette incorporates guitars, violins, bandoneon (an accordion-like instrument used predominantly in tango) and an unusual device called glass harmonica.

This time, the collaboration between composer and director began during the early stages of the production.

Santaolalla read the script and recorded a few cues before shooting began. Inarritu played one of them on the set while filming a particularly harrowing scene. The cue ended up in the final cut of that scene.

Movie memories

When he talks about his first movie memories, Santaolalla recalls going by himself to the cinema in his native Ciudad Jardin, a typical Argentine barrio in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

“There was this theater called Helios,” he says.

“On Wednesdays, they’d show westerns and swashbuckling spectacles. Even then, I was fascinated with the visual aspect of filmmaking.”

The musician, who calls Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” his favorite movie and Stanley Kubrick and Pedro Almodovar his favorite directors, has just signed with the First Artist Management agency, hoping that his work on “21 Grams” and “Motorcycle Diaries” will lead to other projects.

Following a collaboration with classical outfit Kronos Quartet on an album of Mexican-tinged music (“Nuevo”), he is eager to write a film score using a string quartet. But he finds the prospect of a full-fledged orchestral score daunting.

“I approach all projects with an equal mix of innocence and fear,” he admits.

“The truth is, every time I start working on a new record, my knees start shaking.”

For the moment, however, Santaolalla is enjoying the thrills that come with working in Hollywood. .

When visiting the “21 Grams” set in Memphis this year, he rented the mythical Sun Studios -- the place where Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis recorded historic sessions -- for an evening.

Santaolalla, Kerpel, Inarritu and Del Toro locked themselves in the studio and, with no serious purpose in mind, recorded spoken-word versions of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “Mystery Train.”

Del Toro did the vocals, Inarritu directed him, and Santaolalla/Kerpel produced the session.

“There I was,” Santaolalla says, “in the cradle of rock ‘n’ roll, recording tunes with Anibal, Benicio and Alejandro. I almost died.

“It was definitely one of the highlights of my entire life.”