Although he has only done five Hollywood scores to date (soon to be more), classically-trained New York composer Elliot Goldenthal has already made a mark on film music. After starting with “Pet Sematary” and “Drugstore Cowboy” in 1990, he brought his unconventional orchestral/electronic style to the re-edited Hollywood nightmares “Alien3” and “Demolition Man”. The former score in particular seems to have alienated some (forgive the pun), but is an undeniably different work where atypical electronics mesh seamlessly with complex brass clusters and unusual orchestrations. It climaxes with a beautiful ‘Adagio’ for Ripley falling Christ-like into a furnace, the music triumphant in an otherwise downbeat conclusion to the “Alien” series (at least until the next sequel). Directors, too, seem sick of typical Hollywood schmaltz and are finding Goldenthal’s work noteworthy; his upcoming projects include “Cobb” and – at last report – “Batman III” (“Batman3”?). That should be interesting, to say the least.
Goldenthal is also a veteran of the stage and concert hall, and is by no means giving them up. His upcoming non-film projects include an hour-long concert work commissioned by the Pacific Symphony Orchestra dedicated to healing the wounds of the Vietnam War (to feature chorus as well, and be recorded for Sony Classical). This will premiere in April 1995; Oliver Stone is reportedly uninvolved. Also forthcoming is Grendel, an opera based on the novel, scheduled for 1996.
I spoke with Elliot late one night last December. Despite his well-known tendency to take his work with the utmost seriousness, obligatory car chase or not, he comes across as a very calm and laid-back individual. He even helped me spell some of the names, which I’d otherwise be dead in the water with since his accents were so good. I’d like to thank him for his time and tell him to keep up the cool work.
I was thinking we could start with the 'what is your background' thing.
I was born in New York in 1954. I had two older brothers, both nine years apart, so it was an 18-year span. They were both music fans so I would be exposed to music of many generations at a very young age in New York. I was blessed to see some of the jazz greats at the time, Porters and Davis… just the exposure was very exciting at a young age. Later on I studied and got my masters in composition. I studied with John Corigliano officially and Aaron Copland I was very close to, sort of as an unofficial teacher, and knew him for many years. Just being in New York and being exposed to so many different schools and approaches to music was very formative in how I turned out and my development so far.
You seem to be coming from a classical background rather than a pop/rock one.
Yeah, I do, although I did have a blues band when I was in high school and early college, we toured around the country. I do appreciate a wide range of work, but especially when I’m using the orchestra I like to use the orchestra in exciting, alternative ways in terms of orchestration. When I say ‘exciting’ I don’t intend people to be excited, I’m saying it’s exciting for me because I use a lot of alternative ways of orchestrating stuff, like in “Alien 3”.
You mentioned John Corigliano; many people say that some of these alternative orchestrations are, while not the same as his, done in that kind of style.
Absolutely. I mean, when you study for seven years with someone, one does pick up certain traits. But it’s also that both John and I appreciate the same types of composers: Penderecki, for example, many of the Polish avant-garde composers. Their work is orchestrated in a manner that John and I find ourselves influenced by. However, I do much more experimentation in using electronic instrumentation with the orchestra than John does.
In the “Alien 3” CD booklet, you also give a special thanks to David Shire. Did you also study with him?
No, David let me stay at his house in LA and David and his wife Didi are friends of mine. I have a lot of admiration for David. David did a score called “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and that’s a twelve-tone big band score. That’s something that’s never associated with Mr. Shire, who’s many times thought of as a middle-of-the-road type composer, but that work, if you just listen to it on its own, it’s a very unusual score.
So, you must have been involved with music a long time before starting in film. [duh, Lukas]
Um, yeah, ever since I was an infant I was involved with music in one way or another. I actually did my first films in 1978, 1979, with a German director who did a film called “Black Generation”, which was my score and Richard Hell’s rock music, with Andy Warhol in it. It was a good movie. Hasn’t been seen by many people, but it was a good movie.
I didn’t know that. I checked various reference books, and the earliest score I could find for you was “Pet Sematary”.
Yeah, well, things go back. I even hate to mention other projects, and I won’t mention them, but there were embarrassing feature films I did back in the ’70s when I was a real young kid. But that was not a direct route. It didn’t lead to “Pet Sematary”, which had its good moments, musically it had good moments. I don’t feel embarrassed about it.
So how did you ‘get’ “Pet Sematary” and make the transition to the Hollywood films?
Actually, the same way I got “Pet Sematary” and “Drugstore Cowboy” was a theater piece I did called Juan Darien. It was a tape that a lot of Hollywood directors listened to. My agent, Sam Schwartz, had the tape. He didn’t expect much of it, but many directors listened to it, and they heard an alternative type of a thing that turned them on a lot. To them, it didn’t sound very Hollywoody, and that’s the reason I got both of those movies, because of that tape.
About “Alien 3”, which was the first score I heard of yours and was really blown away: was that one a nightmare as far as the re-editing of the film went?
Yeah, it was a nightmare for me because they were changing things and changing things. I had prepared the score for over a year. I was working very closely with the director, David Fincher, and then when the studio got nervous about things, they started changing things around, and it drove me up the wall because there was so little precious time for things that had to happen. They had to elapse in such a small amount of time and I didn’t know. When I write, I write very closely to the character, I look at the character’s eyes, and sometimes when a character makes a decision, you look deep into their eyes and you see their acting skill, the decision is made to do this or to do that. And then if you fine cut something, that decision in the eye, let’s say, is a couple of frames later, it just completely changes it; it’s a domino effect, musically, and it’s just not right anymore.
Were there many significant alternate takes and different approaches used on “Alien 3” over that year?
They were all tributaries of the same river. They weren’t alternate takes; they were really variations on the same thing. There weren’t many things that were ever thrown out, they were just sort of edited.
I noticed there was a motif for the company men marching in that didn’t appear on the CD. Was that the last of the re-scores or something?
No, it’s just you can only get so much on the CD, it depends on how many minutes they want. I think on that, they wanted 45 minutes. “Demolition Man” was 30 minutes. It’s what the record company can afford, so you have to pick and choose. There’s a lot of stuff in the movie that’s not on the CD. I can come up with another 30 minute CD.
Something I wanted to ask about “Alien 3”, and this might seem a little silly now, but that is the coolest version of the Fox fanfare I have ever heard.
I wish I could get that on some CD.
Is there a reason it wasn’t on the “Alien 3” disc?
Yeah, I think it’s all that legal stuff, you know? They didn’t want to get into that. It was something that I re-orchestrated on the spot, within 15 minutes in the studio. Elliot Lurie, who’s the head of music at Fox, said, “Well, what we want to do is re-record the logo in general so we can get a good digital recording.” And then 10 minutes later, because there was time at the end of the session, he said, “Now, do you want to do it, you know, tailor-made for ‘Alien 3’?,” and I had the idea of sneaking in some of the odd orchestration in a rather funny place.
It just hits the next-to-last note and just crashes, it’s really neat.
Because the obvious place would be [at the last note], but I figured [next to the last note], so the sense of expectation, that it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, is really, I found, unsettling.
As far as the albums go, are those your sequencings (“Alien 3” was not chronological)?
It was my sequencing. As is on “Demolition Man”, I just wanted the sequencing of the record to just be that of what you won’t get bored hearing. If you listen to something that’s slow, you want something fast, if you listen to something minimalist, you want something that’s more harmonically complex for the next thing, so it’s just a sense of me as a listener, if I turn something on, what I would want to hear next. That’s all. But I have problems listening to the “Alien 3” CD; sometimes I feel the opening of it is too severe. Maybe I should have been easier on the audience, I don’t know. It’s really severe.
But you do sort of have to start with the beginning and end with the end.
Well at least I do that, I start with the beginning and end with the end, and in the middle I change the sequence. Same thing with “Demolition Man”.
Did you record end credits, or was it just cut together?
Oh, that was cut together for “Alien 3”, and for “Demolition Man” it was Mr. Sting. I just finished a movie called “Golden Gate” with Matt Dillon and Joan Chen, and that will be out in February. I think they’re going to premiere it at the American Film Festival at Sundance and then it’s going to be nation-wide. That’s a different style of mine; it’s very jazzy, but it also has a lot of Asian influences, since it takes place in San Francisco in Chinatown from the ’50s to the ’70s. So it has an Asian feel and it has a jazz feel.
On “Alien 3”, were you primarily working with David Fincher? Everything I heard about that film, they had 12 different scripts, reshot this and that, and it’s interesting to hear what you started at and what it ended up at.
Well, it didn’t change that radically, because a whole year elapsed from when most of it was shot and when it was completely done and edited. I had no problems working with David Fincher; he was very supportive. The problems I had were with the underlings to Mr. Roth at the time, all the sort of junior executives who often disagreed on what the boss really wanted, so I’d have the age-old struggle between the director and producer.
Were you the first composer on the picture?
Yes. Oh, I don’t know, there might have someone before me with some other director, but I was the first composer with David Fincher, and I was recommended to Mr. Fincher vis-à-vis Tim Zinneman who was the producer, and who also was the producer on “Pet Sematary”.
Okay, “Demolition Man”. Now, how do you write such a cool score for… “Demolition Man”? I mean, it is what it is: Stallone, Snipes… they all start with ‘S’, don’t they? Schwarzenegger…
And Silver. The reason is, the subject matter invited a kind of non-realistic approach. It’s science fiction and it already has a heightened reality, so therefore my music suited that. I mean, there’s no point in my trying to sink to the level of the lowest aspects of action movies, so I just tried to make the action work but do it in a way that you won’t regret in the morning, you know?
I did notice some of your track titles, though, such as 'Obligatory Car Chase'.
Yeah, that was slight editorialism there. The car chase is actually pretty interesting musically, but “Demolition Man”… the script was actually pretty good, and I think the first 15 minutes of the movie is actually pretty good. I hope they make their money, that’s all I can say; it seems as though they are… I don’t think I can watch the movie all the way through though.
I did. Actually, I went partly because I was told it was funny and partly because I wanted to hear your score.
Thank you. I didn’t hear much of my score in the film.
I know, and this is funny: as soon as I heard you were scoring the film, knowing what I did of your work of “Alien 3”, which was a very serious score, I thought, “Uh-oh, it’s either going to be tossed or inaudible.” So, it was inaudible, but that’s all the more reason to buy the CD.
Right. I like the CD. I listen to it, and most of the time when I do a project I can’t listen to it for maybe a year, because there are too many regrets about mixes or this or that, but in this particular case I like the way it sounds.
You used the 'Dies Irae' for the opening of the film, and that was something I didn’t notice until I saw the track title. Was that your idea?
That was my idea from the beginning. I actually wanted to have a full chorus on that, too, but there was no time getting it together. It alludes to the day of anger, day or warning, when the world shall turn to ashes, there’s something about this building on fire, this city on fire. Los Angeles’s third riot – it had that feel to me.
Can I ask about the temp score on “Demolition Man”?
They used a lot of “Alien 3”, and they used a lot of my other stuff. I have a very good music editor, Chris Brooks, and he just pulled out a lot of stuff. I also think he used… I don’t remember. I never heard the temp.
That’s good. I was just wondering how much freedom you had on the picture.
I had complete freedom. Other than the fact that Joel Silver would walk in and say, “This is shit, this is good, this is good, I like this, change this.” But other than that, I wasn’t muzzled. They knew who they were getting when they hired me. They weren’t getting me to sound like Henry Mancini. I respect Henry Mancini; some of his scores are really great, “Touch of Evil” for example. That might have been the first use of a bongo in an American score. But they knew who they were getting. They didn’t give me too much trouble in the hierarchy, the pecking order of what trouble could be in that city.
You did some neat new age stuff in “Demolition Man”.
[laughs] Well, I just thought of it as a joke. Someone asked me, what does the music of the future sound like? And I said, the music of the future sounds like the music of the 1980s, because everybody knows the 1980s were the future. So it was just kind of a tongue-in-cheek play on what the future is supposed to sound like, the 1980s. It’s also easy to do, it’s… numbing.
[laughs] You also had ‘The Final Confrontation’, which is the gag cue title that Danny Elfman always uses for final confrontations.
I didn’t know that. I didn’t write it as a gag, I just did it.
What’s your working process when you work on a film? I understand you sequence it into electronics…
Yes, I do two things. When it’s something like ‘Machine Waltz’ on “Demolition Man”, that’s something I do entirely at the piano with music paper, so I just get the general drama of the thing that it’s going to be, that it’s not really going to hit any cues, it’s just going to drive through it. When it’s something like that, then I work at the piano. When it’s something that’s very ‘cuey’, where you have a lot of action to hit…
Like ‘Museum Dis Duel’.
Yeah, or anything where people are getting smashed over the head with things – then it’s done at the computer. Then I can lock the stuff in. Also, I like working at the computer because I can work very late at night, and I don’t have to pick up a pencil, and I can do like 20 or 30 versions of something, like a love theme, for example, and see how I feel about it the next day. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s really made the whole process, believe it or not, much more intimate, because when the expression in a person’s face is locked into a computer, MIDI-wise, then I can keep going back to that same little glance, exactly, and it almost becomes like accompanying an actor in a room. So, something that may look like it’s more distancing and more technological has become something that’s much more intimate in reality. I don’t care what anybody says, it’s a much more intimate way of doing things that rolling a moviola around and slamming on a piano and writing it down, because this way it’s like part, it’s like working with you.
That’s neat. Often when you hear stories of composers working this way, it’s because they had no time and just needed to pound out something to give to an orchestrator.
Well, there are times when everyone has no time, and if you look closely on the CD you’ll see there’s more than one orchestrator; there are two people where we had three cues to record, let’s say the next day, after things were changed. There are times where you have to write stuff, put it in the computer, and it had to be spit out. By 6 o’clock in the morning it has to be copied and we’re talking 10 o’clock at night, and there’s three cues to be done because things have changed. And you have to get it done! So there’s a necessity sometimes to bring in other orchestrators. Very often, though, after that happens, this is just so the session can happen – you’re talking 100 musicians walking in. Then, when you see the orchestrations, invariably a person like me who’s very fussy about orchestration and has a clear idea about it, I end up changing 50% of it anyway. The gentleman who I’ve used most consistently orchestrating with me is Robert Elhai, who knows every move of mine. He worked on theater with me and through New York, and this and that, so if I blink an eye, he knows exactly I mean ‘second bassoon’. In general I spend a long, long time on orchestration, but every once in a while when you have to have a cue pretty damn quick, you need to call in two or three people to take the stuff down; it happens out of necessity. On any film, they’ll pull the rug out from under you and say, ‘Oh, by the way, remember that scene? Well, they put it back in and you have to get it recorded tomorrow.’ And your whole schedule is backed up and you say, ‘Well, wait a second, that’s five minutes of music; how’s it going to be done?’ So that’s what you gotta do.
How does Matthias Göhl fit into things?
Matthias Göhl and Richard Martinez, both of them. Matthias Göhl has gotten producer credit. Matthias is wonderful when it comes to sort of coordinating the whole matrix of electronics with the orchestra and how it all works technically. He’s really brilliant; he’s Swiss-born, has the mind of a Swiss clock, and we’ve worked very closely together. He’s a wonderful musician, a very talented and delicate musician. Let’s say I compose something for a scene in “Alien 3” – ‘Bait and Chase’, one of those huge chase scenes. And the chase scene is ten minutes of music, and I compose it out. Then they edit it down to seven and a half minutes. I can’t go back and re-compose it; there’s no time. So Matthias is the type of musician who can take that ten minutes and edit it down, let’s say, to seven minutes, and I would find it very close to my original conception. He wouldn’t compose any notes, he’d use what I used, but there’s a situation where I trust this man as opposed to the music editor. That’s the creative aspect; also, there’s the technical aspect of someone who really knows what equipment to use where, how to create variable clicks that work along with the electronics, because very often I have a very elaborate electronic score, to the orchestra has to listen to the clicks created by the electronic score. The problem is, my music has a lot of multiple meters; it’s not just two-quarter or four-quarter. It goes 7/8, 5/8, like ‘The Rite of Spring’. So Matthias, very often, has the responsibility of creating a click that doesn’t confuse the orchestra. And that’s a talent. Now, Richard Martinez is someone I also work with consistently, and what I consider him is a master of sampling. If I say, ‘Look, these are the things I want sampled: I want a piano wire stretched across a room, I want champagne glasses filled up with different types of liquids, I want this, I want that, I want Tibetan bowls,’ he will spend a million hours in his basement, with the patience of a monk, whatever it takes to get these samples perfect. Because I don’t believe too much in just finding stuff that the companies give you. To create samples you have to be very creative and selective about it, prepare your own pianos, get the sound you want, and then with a person like Richard Martinez, he can really get in there and get that best quality stereo sound out of that sample. So these are people who I’ve worked with. I would say, between Richard, Matthias, and Robert Elhai, these are people who I’ve nurtured along and worked with since, I don’t know, for ten years. They know my aesthetic extremely well. They of course have other careers and work with other people, but they know me so well, they know my every move, there’s no time wasted, there’s no bullshit, everybody knows what their role is.
It’s interesting to see how this works together. Do you conduct yourself?
I never conduct. I think it was John Corigliano who told me, two things I shouldn’t do is play my own music or conduct. I surround myself with who I think are the most talented people to pull off my vision, and Jonathan Sheffer is one of them. Steven Mercurio is also a very formidable conductor. I have the technique to conduct; I studied conducting, coincidentally, because of the business, with Anton Coppola, the uncle of Francis Ford, so my technique is fine. It’s just that I’d have to write the piece, then I’d have to study it, study conducting it, and then I’d lose all objectivity, plus I wouldn’t be able to hear it. I’d have to keep running in and out of the booth, because the sound is completely different in the booth than it is when you’re conducting.
Do you do the electronics first and then overlay the orchestral tracks?
Yes.
So you have to be in the booth to get it with the electronics.
Yeah. I do a very elaborate electronic score first, 90% of the time, of which it’s almost 90% orchestrated electronically, including French horns, bassoons, oboes, piccolos, it’s all completely there. As a matter of fact, even if I didn’t orchestrate one note, anybody with a high school diploma in music could take if off what’s there. It’s all there. And the reason I do that is because it helps the producer get a sense of what they’re after. It’s so difficult to talk about music; people get very uptight. They say, “I want it mellow,” or, “I want it lyrical,” or, “I want it dramatic,” but those are just words, you know? Or, “I want it to sound heraldic.” But if I do it electronically they really get a sense of what they’re going to get, what they’re going to buy, and I say that because they’re paying a lot of money to do these things. These scores are expensive.
“Demolition Man”, as we discussed, had a really rotten mix, but I thought "Alien 3" had one of the better ones I’ve heard. Is that something you had to fight for?
Well I disagree. I walked out of “Alien 3” because I couldn’t hear it. I left. It was buried in the theater, and I couldn’t stand it. The only time I ever heard “Demolition Man” was at the premiere, and it sounded a little bit better than “Alien 3”, but it still got me sick. “Drugstore Cowboy”, I didn’t like the mix in that. I didn’t like the mix in “Pet Sematary”. But, I hear that “Golden Gate” is very good. [laughs]
That’s good! Well, there are no guns, they don’t throw each other through buildings and have car chases -
No guns! There’s kissing, though.
But that doesn’t make too much noise. Well, parts of “Alien 3” I thought you could hear, like at the end, and the scene where they burn the bodies of Newt and Hicks. Of course when they’re going to run around and start screaming and all the British guys who sound alike run into each other it’s going to be pretty bad.
But you should have heard how I had it worked out before. David Fincher really wanted me to compose a music score that took on the added burden of sound effects built within the music. So you could have played the whole thing without sound effects – and I’m not insulting the sound effects guys, they did a great job – but if you had played it without the sound effects it would have been scarier. A lot scarier. Just like – and I’m not comparing myself – Bernard Herrmann in the shower scene of “Psycho” is scarier because of the music. If it was one of these present-day directors they would have been persuaded to put all the shower sounds in and have the music in the background, and then they’d fight each other. So instead of having this incredible concept of Bernard Herrmann’s – which was to have this same feeling of a knife going into you and a bird screech, and a scream, all in one – you’d hear the knife go in, and then hear the shower curtain fall, and then hear the water go, and then hear the screams. Hitchcock had a much better idea of how to scare people, and I think Fincher, by that time, when it came down to the mix, was too influenced by the studio to have fought for me.
Incidentally, in that scene in “Psycho”, Hitchcock wanted to leave it unscored, it was Herrmann who went ahead it scored it anyway. So, it was Benny!
Ah. Well, he did it. And it was unadorned by sound effects.
How many players did you have on “Alien 3” and “Demolition Man”?
About the same, about 90.
I wanted to ask about those really neat brass clusters you write. How are those notated?
They’re notated very traditionally, they’re just stacked up. The thing that makes it interesting is the use of mutes, like plunger mutes. You take a really tight cluster, if you have five instruments playing, all semitones together… usually what I like to do is stack up the higher instruments closely semitone wise and then create more space between the lower brass so it has a grounding in the overtone series and is not just a complete cluster. Then I dress it with different types of mutes, very careful indications of how the plunger is open and closed, what period of time it takes to open and close the plunger, things like that. Then I use a lot of extra lower brass instruments, like the contrabrass, trombone and then chimbasso. Brass clusters are really unique, they’re really great for punctuation, lower brass, and they’re underused, I think, in movies.
They’re one of the things I associate with your sound, like in the 'Obligatory Car Chase', it sets you off almost immediately when the drum machine and sequencers come in…
It wasn’t a drum machine, by the way. There was a sequencer, but there was a live player playing all along. There was a sequence, but I played in the sequence myself, at a slower metronome marking, so that when it was sped up it sounded fast, but it was still human, it wasn’t all electronic in terms of being quantized. So it had a human groove to it.
That’s so cool. What are some of the other orchestral tricks you use...?
Oh, I don’t know. I can’t say, because there are millions of them. I don’t think it’s tricks, it’s just how I hear the sounds. It’s just me.
Years later, Lukas Kendall appended a note to the issue's webpage: This was the interview where Elliot Goldenthal asked me call him back at 1AM and when I did, he was totally hammered.