Beltrami is a master of “dark” music who has lent his unique voice to many thrillers and horror movies. His scores seamlessly weave together traditional orchestral and experimental electronic textures. One must listen to Beltrami’s scores for “The Minus Man” (1999) and “I Am Dina” (2000) to fully appreciate the talent and originality of this young composer. These are scores that break with film-music tradition. In “I Am Dina”, which could be considered an effective avant-garde chamber work, a coldly emotional solo cello and a female voice breathe a soul into the story. In “The Minus Man”, the composer uses a glass harmonica and strings to provide a desolate emotional quality. The ambience and the surreal nature of this music will give you chills. Marco continued on this same path with his score to “The Crow: Salvation” (2000). Beltrami’s score to “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” (2003) is a pure adrenaline rush. But in the midst of the battle between humans and robots, he weaves a poignant sense of life and human emotion. Film is the perfect vehicle for Beltrami’s music. He has the ability to translate the pulse of a film into the deepest, darkest of human emotions. Let’s talk about your interest in music and how it led to you scoring films. I never intended to score films when I started out. I got a master’s from the Yale School of Music and was mainly interested in doing concert music. I knew very little about film music, but my teacher at the time encouraged me to pursue it because he said that a lot of the stuff I did had a cinematic flair to it. With lack of anything else to do, I came out to California in 1993 to do the USC program that Jerry Goldsmith guided. It was good. I learned about technical stuff and a little bit about the business. The people who came in to talk to the class, like Chris Young and Bruce Broughton, I found to be very inspiring, and the more I learned about film music, the more I liked it. I started hearing some film-music things that I thought were great musical achievements, regardless of the field they were in. I thought it could be something worthwhile pursuing. After the USC program, I did an internship with Chris Young, getting him coffee or something and xeroxing his scores. Then I did proofing stuff for Pete Anthony. Then, it came time to put together my own music and get things together. I did a short movie called “The Bicyclist”, which was funded by Sony. It was a good little movie, and Sony provided the orchestra. It turned out to be a great little demo. After that, I did some TV stuff: a series called “Land’s End” and some “Red Shoe Diaries” and some TV movies-of-the-week. Then, in 1996, I landed “Scream”. How much of an influence has past film music, such as that written by Bernard Herrmann or Christopher Young, had on your style? I’m a huge fan of Bernard Herrmann. His stuff is so visceral, and it even works without the film. He had a very big impact on me. Chris Young had a big impact on me, too. There were scores he was working on at the time I interned with him, such as “Dream Lover”, and things that he was doing with the orchestra that used it in a non-orchestral sense or, rather, in a nontraditional sense, which I found to be really interesting. I was definitely influenced by that. But I was really influenced as much or more by concert music stuff. I was really unfamiliar with the whole film medium. In fact, I never really saw movies as a kid. I certainly never saw a horror movie. I didn’t like the thought of going to a movie and getting scared. I remember seeing part of one when I was little and walking out because I couldn’t take it. But it turns out that twentieth-century musical styles easily lend themselves to horror movies, and you can afford to be a little bit over the top and take liberties and just have a lot of fun with horror movies. Nino Rota was a huge influence on me. His was music that didn’t take itself too seriously. He obviously had fun writing a lot of the stuff. It was innovative. It used different ideas. It took from the past. It took from things that were happening currently. He used everything available, and that’s what really appealed to me. That’s what I view as film music. I just sort of grasp everything that’s available and sort of steal ideas when I can from anywhere I can find them. Your experiences and influences are orchestra-related, yet your music often seems to have a metallic or synthetic texture to it. It’s funny, because when I went to get the job for “Scream” – which was not a huge-budget movie at the time (in fact, it was a low-budget movie) – I didn’t have any orchestral music on my reel. So, after I asked a few questions about the movie, I put together this demo that had absolutely nothing orchestral or even remotely orchestral-sounding on it. I used the palette of sounds I had: Instead of having violins and woodwinds and stuff, I had non-orchestral sounds, which I put together and gave to them. They liked it. That’s what they responded to. So they called me in on a Friday and asked me to score the opening Drew Barrymore scene, which is a thirteen-minute cue, and bring it to them on Monday. So when I finally got hired, I had to continue the score in that same vein, which was basically an orchestral and electronic mix. It was the nature of the job and what they were looking for. I didn’t have a studio when I came out here. I had to borrow other people’s studios. Even on “Scream” I didn’t have a studio. As I started working on it, I bought some equipment. Now, one of the things I enjoy a lot is creating sounds. We spend a lot of time working on them: For “Terminator 3”, we spent about three weeks just taking acoustical sounds and manipulating them and working with them and coming up with a palette of non-orchestral sounds that would work organically with the orchestral stuff. How comfortable are you coming to the table with your own thoughts now, versus when you first started doing film scores? A lot more comfortable. I think that as much as this process is about writing music, it’s also about social skills and figuring out what it is that somebody is looking for. It’s such an abstract business that you have to be able to read into what a director says to you and figure out what the director means, which is a skill that I was not terribly adept at when I started. But the more you do it, the more you figure it out. Even when a director says that this is exactly what we want, and they play you a temp score, you know that that’s not really what they want, it just happens to work with the picture in some way. So you have to be a sort of detective, finding what the clues are and what really is needed. That’s something I feel I have really grown at. Now, when I see a picture, I have my own ideas about it, and I can then talk to them and find out specific things they want. And when I come to the table now, I can present my ideas and defend them, which I may have had trouble doing in the past. Brad Fidel wrote great scores for the first two “Terminator” films. I’m curious why they changed composers. The first two scores, which were synth scores, worked. I also think Brad wrote a very strong theme for it. On this movie, what they were trying to do was different. Jonathan was not trying to redo “T2”. He was trying to do something new. In its scope, this movie was a little bit bigger than the other two movies. It really needed an orchestral score, and perhaps not a copy of the first two scores. I did do an arrangement of Brad Fidel’s “T2” theme for orchestra, though. It’s at the end of the movie. So there is an homage paid to Brad’s score, but the feeling was that if we just did an update of the music from “T2”, it would bring the viewers back to “T2”-land, and that’s not what this movie was about. Jonathan had heard my music because the editor had temped a lot of it in from other scores that I had done. In fact, it was about seventy percent temped with my music. So Jonathan asked, “What is this stuff?” And the editor said, “It’s this guy Beltrami.” So I met with Jonathan, and he said, “I just wanted you to know that I liked your music a lot, but, being politically honest, you’re probably not going to get the job because it’s a big movie, and that’s the way it goes. But I just wanted to let you know we are temping with your music.” But, over the next month or so, he was able to sell the producers and everybody on the idea that I would be the guy to do this. That’s how that worked out. Would you like to move your music away from its predominantly dark character? Yeah, my music definitely has a dark character to it. I don’t know that I am really interested in doing romantic comedies. Being like a wallpaper thing is not interesting to me. I’ve always said that I like to have fun with what I do, even though it may be dark. Not everything I do necessarily has to be dark. I still want to explore a lot of things. My interests are varied. I have sketches for things. I have sketches for non-film projects. In the next year or two, I will be working on some non-film projects as well. I certainly don’t want to just be typecast. Nobody does. Which scores of yours are you most fond of? One of my favorites is “Mimic”. Even though it’s a dark sci-fi/horror movie, I think the score was able to reach a very human element. I think “T3” is a really good score. I think “The Minus Man” was kind of cool. I did it all with prepared piano, viola, and percussion. It’s a fun score. I like them all for different reasons. There are different things I did in different scores that I like. I like “The Crow” for certain reasons. “Dracula 2000” has this Middle-Eastern part that I really like. I think your music in “Joy Ride” works so well for the movie. With the score before that, “The Watcher”, I really started to experiment with creating sounds that were integral to the movie. I spent a tremendous amount of time creating a palette of sounds that would define the score. That’s something I continued in “Joy Ride”. “The Watcher” seems to mark the point at which your music evolved in a more experimental way. That’s one of the most intense scores I’ve done, but I had to search a little for my inspiration there. It seems to work really well for temps.