Cliff Eidelman’s scores are noted for their ability to capture a film’s emotional essence, for telling its story as if it emanated from within his own soul. He seems to possess a passionate sense that provides him with the ability to see beyond the picture, beyond what flickers in front of his eyes. This is certainly evident in the enchanting music he wrote for “Untamed Heart” (1993) and “One True Thing” (1998). And his score for “A Simple Twist of Fate” (1994) masterfully expresses each character’s inner feelings with music that peers deeply into their lives and souls, offering an emotional vision that only music can provide. Not all of Eidelman’s scores, however, set out to focus tightly on such intimate emotional details. He is a multi-talented composer adept at writing highly expressive music for all film genres, a versatility that is clearly shown by his epic score for “Christopher Columbus: The Discovery” (1992) and his moody orchestral sci-fi music for “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” (1999). How much of an impact did growing up in L.A. have on you and your relationship to film music? As a kid, I saw a lot of films. Film music itself probably had a bigger impact than what I was aware of. However, it wasn’t a real conscious impact until I saw “Star Wars” in 1977. That was the first time I was consciously aware of the effects of film music. I was amazed by the score, and I was old enough to appreciate a great film score. What is your musical training? My first exposure to playing was on the violin. Soon after that, I became more interested in forming a rock band, so I took guitar lessons. I had a friend who was a drummer and another friend who was a keyboard player and we formed a band. For years after that, I wrote original music. We played in a lot of rock-‘n’-roll clubs, including The Troubador, Gazzari’s, The Roxy, and other Hollywood clubs. After high school, I went to the Guitar Institute of Technology for a year to study jazz guitar, because a wanted to become a more fluent guitar player and a more well-rounded musician altogether. This was a really intense trade school where you played guitar ten hours a day with other people and in different ensembles, leaning jazz and other styles. After graduating there, I went to Santa Monica College. Right about that time, I started listening to a lot of classical music. I studied scores for the first time by Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky… and I started losing a little bit of interest in my band, because my band couldn’t produce what I was trying to write. With four players you can’t really produce the full orchestration that interested me at that time. I started writing a ballet while I was attending Santa Monica College. I finished it and had it performed. I started writing a three-movement piece for orchestra the following year. While at Santa Monica College, I studied under Donald Richardson, who was sort of my mentor. After two years at Santa Monica College, I transferred to the University of Southern California and studied composition, orchestration, and conducting for a few more years. At the end, I received my first film score commission. That’s how I started working in the film industry. What are your musical influences? Probably a lot of things that I’m not even aware of, because there are so many composers I like. It’s hard not to have influences from everywhere. Every composer strives to develop a unique “sound”. Where did yours stem from? I’ve always been very conscious of following my own soul for my own voice. When I listen back to the early pieces I wrote when I was in college, I can hear whom I was interested in at that time. As I grew older, I became more aware of just playing from my heart, developing my own expression. Having said that, no matter how much a person tries to make their own music authentically them, listening to other people’s music, there’s always going to be influences. However, it’s very important to me to sound like me and not sound like everybody else. “Star Trek VI” is the score that seems to have landed you a firm place as a leading composer in Hollywood. How did you get to work on such an elite project? First, I had heard through my agent that this film was open and that people were submitting music. I put together music from my earlier scores, like “Magdalene”, which was my first film score, and “Triumph of the Spirit” and other pieces, and my agent sent the tape to the director. It’s my understanding that both Nick Meyer and his editor Ron Roose, whom he is very close with, had the same tape. I guess they were both listening to everyone’s music and then talking with each other. It turns out that after they had listened to everybody’s tapes, they both had independently decided on my tape. That was the major reason why I was able to get a meeting ultimately. Was Jerry Goldsmith a part of this at the time? No. My understanding is that I was able to walk in the door in the first place because this movie was being made for a price, and they were not going to pay the fee that composers like Jerry were commanding. They needed to find somebody willing to do it for a lot less money. That opened the door for people like me to give it a shot. After I met with Nick Meyer, I went home and, based on the description of the film’s opening, I wrote what I thought would be an opening piece of music for it and I recorded it at home. I called him the next day and I told him that I thought I had the opening or main title. He was just about to take off on a trip somewhere, so I asked if I could just run in and show it to him fast. He said, “Yes, come on in.” I went to Paramount, sat down with him, put the tape on, and we started listening. I think he related to that piece or understood it. But he said that he was thinking about adapting Holst’s The Planets as the score for “Star Trek VI”. I was pretty familiar with “The Planets” from studying it in college, so I asked if I could adapt it for him. He gave me a script. I took the script home and I did a spotting session on it, kind of figuring out where all the music would start and top, and sent it to Nick. He went through my script and sent back his changes or his ideas about where I spotted it. So you can see that there was a lot of relationship going on, a lot of back-and-forth creative work happening between us without me being hired, Shortly after that, I did get the word that I was hired. But, at that point, I thought I was going to be adapting The Planets. As it turns out, I think that the licensing of The Planets became too expensive. Once I started realizing that they may not be able to afford the license to The Planets, I started developing material on my own. I had the producer, Ralph Winter, and Nick come over to my apartment and listen to what I was doing. As I played the scenes with my original music, the producer turned to Nick and asked him, “Why are we trying to license The Planets when we have this?” That was the end of The Planets. Why didn’t it lead to future “Star Trek” movies for you? That was the last feature with the original cast and that team. When the new generation of movies came along, it was a completely different group with completely different producers, different teams altogether. And they had their own ideas about whom they wanted to hire. That’s pretty much how that works. I think that the new people who came in were familiar with Jerry Goldsmith, maybe had worked with him before on earlier stuff, so they went to Jerry. I think that, if Nick Meyer or the same group of producers I worked with had gone on to do another “Star Trek”, I would have had a much better shot of doing the next film. Relationships are very important. It is who people know and who they’ve worked with and all of that. This led to another epic score, “Christopher Columbus”. This powerful period was brilliantly written with emotionally rousing themes that illustrated struggle and victory. What was your approach to this project and what were your influences in the music? I actually watched the film over and over, and I already had the scenes in my head, so for a lot of it, I just turned off the film and amplified the scenes in my mind. I imagined larger sets and larger battles and just bigger everything. I amplified everything that they had on the screen into a more epic style. I felt like this was a chance for me to write a big, epic swashbuckling adventure with a whole range of battles and triumphs. I knew I wanted to use choral elements and full symphony orchestra, and I had five or six weeks to do it. I was pretty much alone, too, because everyone was in a different part of the world: The director was in England, the producers were in France, and the editing was being done somewhere else. It was literally a global thing while I was in Los Angeles writing the score. It was good in a way because I was so much on my own that I was able to write full-on and without any interruption whatsoever. After this, your music takes a turn with “Untamed Heart”. Your touching and emotionally captivating music for this movie can be “heard” in the heart. Its simple, thematic style will continue through the rest of your career. Was it your conscious choice to start working on more intimate projects? Well, I had worked with director Tony Bill on a comedy called “Crazy People” and enjoyed it greatly. I knew he was doing a film called “Untamed Heart”, so I read the script – and halfway through reading it, I was in tears. By the time I got to the end, I just got chills. I was just very moved by the story and by the characters. So I called him up and expressed in deep ways that this was my score – I just had to do this one. He was receptive, but not ready to hire my yet. So I decided to start writing music for it as if he had hired me, figuring, “What the hell, I’ll take the chance.” I wrote pieces to the script, and then invited him over. We started listening to some themes, and after we got through two or three of them, he turned to me and said, “As long as you’ve gone this far, why don’t you just write the rest of the score?” And that was that. I just continued on the path I was on. I love writing chamber music as well as big orchestral music like “Christopher Columbus”. I really love writing intimate music where individual voices in the music represent emotional spines of characters. In the case of “Untamed Heart”, I loved the intimacy of the story and just followed that intimacy into the music. The emotional style of your music captivates me. I try to throw myself into it all the way, and for me it’s very hard to move on until I feel chills when I’m playing music up against the picture. I really do have to feel that sense of emotion in those types of pictures before I can feel comfortable to move on. Are these movies that you are so emotionally tied to ones that you have chosen? Not all the time. A lot of it, probably most of it, is relationship-based, as I mentioned before. Every once in a while, a project on which you don’t know anyone comes along, but you chase after it because you really feel you’ve got to do it. One such film was “One True Thing”. I had never worked with the directors or the producers, but I really chased after it by writing music, trying to win them over that way, and that was how I was able to work on this film. I would love another big epic where I can really use the orchestra. I have been dying to do that for a long time, but those projects haven’t shown themselves to me. So that’s the way it’s happened so far. Yeah, you seem to be pigeonholed as a romantic composer. Yeah, intimate and romantic. They know I’m the person they can talk to if they’re doing a very emotional score. If I have to be pigeonholed, I’m glad it’s in the emotional genre. But I would like to get some big, epic, action-oriented films again. Your next score is “A Simple Twist of Fate”. It is filled with angelic melodies yet with a somber tone. It is hauntingly poetic. What were your intentions in this approach? The director didn’t approach me with any thoughts. He didn’t tell me what he wanted or anything. He had heard one of my intimate scores and hired me to do that. I watched a screening of the film with no take on it whatsoever. They just screened it for just me, alone in a room at Disney. By the time I got to the end of the film, something had dawned on me: the whole idea of fate – the things that happened that brought this little girl to the Steve Martin character’s doorstep, changing his life forever. I don’t know if you remember, but her mother died. That was a bit of fate knocking at his door. The story had this feeling to me that things were happening for a reason; everything was happening without anyone’s personal control; everything was changing everyone’s lives. So I suddenly imagined that the score would have ethereal, other-worldly qualities, where it was as if forces beyond their control were at work. I felt the music should carry those forces through the film while continually making the emotional melodies among the characters, the love between the father and daughter, the bonding that took place. Even though I sort of had this conceptual idea – this ethereal quality – in using voices, I kept the earthbound relationship the key force to the score. It sort of combines the ethereal world with the grounded world and it sort of molds them together. I had to watch the film a couple times to figure out this feeling because the music affects the film in different ways. As you mentioned, there is the interaction of the human and the ethereal. But your score also has a dark edge to it. While viewing the picture, one might feel unsettled. What is the music’s darker edge revealing? There was some mystery going on. There was a dark side to it. The girl’s real mother had overdosed on drugs in the dead of winter. So there was this very dark element that left this poor little girl in the cold in the dark of night, walking into a new life. But it’s almost as if she were walking through a dark cloud to come into light. I felt that, in some way, there was a dark journey she had to take in order for her to come into this new world, this new life, this new family, this new father, and then build from there on the love that they had. When scoring a film, do you go by the emotion of the scene or do you develop themes for the individual characters? Both. I try to start in broad strokes. First I try to develop an overall feeling, like maybe a theme comes out of something in the story. Sometimes a theme comes out as the characters start emerging. Then, the broader strokes somehow start to chip at it and you start to create little sculptures of the characters. That’s the best way I can think of to visualize how multitudes of themes come out of bigger ideas. Do you find it tough to be original when scoring movies that have similar themes, similar stories? No, because every single story is original and has its own voice. No two stories are alike, even if they’re in a similar genre. And the core of what you’re after is always different. I never find myself on the same exact ground that I was on before. I always feel like I’m walking new ground, because you can never just relax on old tricks, which is what always makes the job so hard. Every job is hard because it’s the act of trying to discover something new each time, even within similar veins. Your career seems to have gone through quiet spells, such as in 2000. What do you do during a year when you may have just one score? Well, now that I think about it, there were a few other things going on around 2000. I wrote a concert piece called Wedding in the Night Garden. It’s now had a performance by the L.A. Master Chorale and it’s most likely going to get another performance by them soon. And in 1996, I wrote The Tempest, a concert piece put out by Varese Sarabade. Since 1996, I’ve been writing songs to eventually compile into an album where I sing and play most of it. So I’m diversifying into concert music a bit and songs and things of that nature. But the core of what I’m doing is film music. That’s the foundation of my living. It’s what makes it possible for me to do all these other things. And I would like to be doing more films. I’d love to be doing some bigger films. I’m surprised that you’re not. You put your heart and soul into your work. I feel that you have a finger on the pulse of any project you work on. Well, I appreciate that. I get a lot of e-mails from people who have said that to me, and I always deeply appreciate that because it confirms that people are responding to what I do. But it’s not always that simple. The people making decisions about who does what films are not always the people who are writing me those e-mails and paying close attention to the music itself. There are many factors involved in how a person gets a score. It’s not always as simple as what people from the outside might think. They might think that a composer did such a great job on so-and-so and wonder why he isn’t getting all the movies like that. It’s just not that simple. You can see what it took me just to get “Star Trek”. Hopefully, I’ll get a critically acclaimed film that does well at the box office or meet a few directors whose careers are blooming and I just do a lot of their films. That tends to be what happens to a lot of composers who get big careers. They gain strong relationships with talented directors and they work on a few critically acclaimed films, and that leads to a lot of stuff. It’s a snowball effect.