Five weeks ago, the makers of “Interview with a Vampire” decided that the movie’s score, which had been composed by George Fenton, was, in the words of David Geffen, one of the producers, “too funereal.” Geffen and Neil Jordan, the director of the film (it will open November 11), decided that they wanted something “more adventurous,” so they scrapped Fenton’s music and turned to Elliot Goldenthal, who has provided the scores for such films as “Alien3“ and “Drugstore Cowboy.” Goldenthal, who is forty, studied with John Corigliano and Aaron Copland, and has collaborated on several music-theatre works with his wife, the director Julie Taymor. Lately, his name has been as likely to turn up in the credits of a Warner Bros. picture as Max Steiner’s was during the studio’s golden era. Besides “Interview,” Goldenthal has inherited Danny Elfman’s old job of writing music for the “Batman” movies, the next installment of which, “Batman Forever,” is currently shooting in Los Angeles. And Goldenthal’s score for the Christmas release “Cobb,” starring Tommy Lee Jones, helps sustain that film’s dark look at the life of a baseball legend.
“While I composed ‘Cobb’ I was at times thinking of Richard Strauss’s ‘Four Last Songs,’ “ Goldenthal said last week. He was working through the night in a studio at the Manhattan Center-the building where, as it happens, Strauss’s “Elektra” had its American premiere, in 1910. For “Interview,” Goldenthal wanted his music to parallel the span of time-two centuries-that the movie traverses. In one scene, the mood may be Monteverdian. In another, a viola da gamba sets the pace. And in a third-for a scene in which the vampire (Tom Cruise) warbles a well-known melody from “The Marriage of Figaro”-a single violin suffices. The story, Golden thal says, required him to evoke emotions ranging “from the horrific to the romantic.”
The score’s passionate ingenuity will probably please Anne Rice, the author of the 1976 novel on which the movie is based. (Her ecstatic “open letter” praising the film was based on a viewing of the version with Fenton’s original music.) But the novelist is going to have at least one quibble with the soundtrack, even though it has nothing to do with Goldenthal’s work. At the end of “Interview,” moviegoers will hear a new Guns N’ Roses recording of “Sympathy for the Devil.” Rice, characteristically, would have preferred “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”