Imagine a misty New York night, days before winter. If you look from a distance at composer Elliot Goldenthal's triplex – the top three floors of a quaint, old building in Manhattan's Flatiron District – it almost looks like something from “Interview with the Vampire”. Castlelike turrets, structures resembling crosses atop them – it could well be a Hollywood set.
But Goldenthal, 40, is far more Gotham than he is Tinseltown. He worries, broods, spews Eastern philosophy, keeps his ego in tow, and pulls no punches. He doesn't just create soundtracks; he respects music. What he writes is quirky, on the edge. Yet it still works on soundtracks that people have flocked to movies to enjoy.
Juan Darien, Goldenthal's moody, eclectic 1988 Obie-winning opera directed by his wife, Julie Taymor, catapulted him to work on film scores, the first of which was a collaboration with Gus Van Sant on “Drugstore Cowboy”. After that came “Alien”, “Interview with the Vampire”, “Cobb” and now “Batman Forever”. While he cautions composers to “know their limitations”, there seems to be no music beyond Goldenthal's mastery. With Taymor he will even do an operatic version of the late John Gardner's pop literary epic, Grendel, about the grouchy, fated monster in the classic Beowulf . “Like Grendel, we're all outside,” contemplates Goldenthal. “It's a theme that presents itself throughout my work. I've read [“Beowulf'”] a thousand times, and it's what attracts me to the book.”
Sitting in a chair on floor number two of the triplex, thin-paned windows permitting a cold draft to wander through wraithlike, Goldenthal talked with The Hollywood Reporter's Harold Goldberg about his work.
How did you get involved with doing the music for “Interview with the Vampire”?
I was doing some prerecords for a movie called “Voices from a Locked Room” about a schizophrenic composer, which is being shot now. While I was doing that, I got a call from Neil Jordan. I told him I was extremely interested, that I just needed the time to do it. He said I had three-and-a-half weeks to compose 85 minutes of music. When I saw the film, it was kind of, “It's an unbelievably impossible thing to do, so I'll do it.” Then they said, ‘By the way, we only have two-and-a-half weeks.’
David Geffen called the previous composer's work “too funereal”. Parts of it were really quite beautiful. I think sometimes a director and a composer can go off onto one road that might not work out for a picture. Though it might seem simpleminded, what I tried to bring to it was a sense of pace: fast music, up tempos for the transitions and humor. I tried to accompany an horrific scene with Lestat with a harpsichord, as if Haydn were in the room. For Louis, it was a yearning orchestral texture. For the girl, it was just a solo piano.
Did you have to cut any corners because of the tight deadline?
No cut corners. Coffee during the day and beer during the night. It ended up being just catnap sleeps here and there.
Did you, shall we say, go batty?
I suppose there were those times. You have to keep in mind that you're blessed when you have an orchestra that's a combination of the New York Philharmonic and the Met. Working with musicians of that caliber gives you something to live up to.
What was the process?
The way it worked was this: If you composed something at 2:00 in the morning to 5:00 in the morning – a three- or four-minute sequence – at 6:00 in the morning they got the music and copied it out. By 9:00 in the morning the conductor conducted it. At 10:30 it was recorded and that's that. On to the next thing. You're really focused, laser-beam style. It's almost like a pitcher going to throw for nine innings. You just can't think about it. You lose that part of the brain that has the ability to worry.
You've worked with some of Hollywood's most creative directors, from Neil Jordan to Gus Van Sant. Which was the most satisfying and energizing experience?
I don't think that I can say. They're wildly different in character. I had a great deal of fun working on “Drugstore Cowboy” because it was only a six-musician thing. It was more of a tinkering in the laboratory with the director sitting next to you. I would challenge him quite often. He used my music for Juan Darien for the temps, and I thought it was way too serious for the movie. I wanted to add a didgeridoo (an ethnic Australian woodwind) and twisted acid rock and machine-age jazz. It took a long time for him to let that sink in, but then he was supportive. And Neil is a whole different situation. His wife had just had a baby the day he chose me to do the picture. I told him to stay in Dublin with the baby, and I played a 60-minute sketch of the music for him. I got along great with Neil. You see, my history in the theater was a lot of collaboration. I feel very comfortable with it.
You recently did the music for Ron Shelton's “Cobb” with Tommy Lee Jones. Are you a baseball fan?
I am. It's something you can think about when everything else is completely troublesome and wrought with worry. You think about baseball, the possible combinations. It's a very Zen thing. When writing the music, I tried to think about worlds in collision. When I think of Cobb as an ideographic image, I think about him colliding with another ball player. Everything in the score, in one way or another, has collision as a metaphor. You have these sunny rags – which I took great pains to compose to try to feel like I was back in 1905 – which collide with this kind of orchestral anarchy.
Tell me about how you'll approach “Batman Forever”.
I think it's easy to confuse myth and fun. It's an easier route to create myth that's very serious and very fun at the same time. I think Joel Schumacher and Tim Burton and Danny Elfman were very theatrical people, and that the Elfman and Burton collaboration was incredible. The challenge for me is not to think about that legacy. It's just another issue of the comic book out on the stands.
What is the Goldenthal style?
I always try to challenge myself. I try to be the rebel. I don't care about convention or other composers or stuff like that. I always try to add something of a sense of irrationality to what I do. All great works of art have that sense of irrationality. The great Indian rug makers would always put an imperfection in their rugs because they said they didn't want to compete with Allah. It's more pleasing to the eye or to the ear to see things in a slightly askew fashion anyway.
Tell me about the kind of technical setup you have, what you use and what you prefer and why?
Depending on the scene, when something is very specific, I love working on a computer and MIDI with Akai and Roland samplers with many, many orchestral sounds and many homemade sounds. I think using a MIDI brings the composer back to where Shostakovich was when he used to accompany films at the piano in Leningrad. It's very precise. I can watch the eyes of an actor and compose exactly to that event and that moment, that millisecond. On the other hand, if I have to write something like a waltz or something that doesn't have to follow pictures, then I prefer working at the piano.
You have a thing about music fighting with sound effects, right?
Listen to the original “Cape Fear”, not the wonderful Scorsese but the original. Robert Mitchum is choking a guy and drowning him at the same time in the bayou or whatever. There are hardly any sound effects. It's entirely music, and the music takes on the bigger burden of creating an abstraction of what that sound effect is. In “Psycho”, a door will slowly open, and a cello will play one note. To hear the door squeak, it's corny. To hear music and sound effects together, they cancel each other out. One gets under your skin and creates a kind of hyper-reality, and the other one drags you down and reduces reality. It's absolutely ludicrous to have music and sound effects at the same time when they're both doing the same job. I have no problems with sound-effects people. It's the directors who get in the room with 80,000 sound-effects tracks and the music, and it sounds so intoxicating to them.
Does the obsession with sound effects have something to do with current technology?
Yes! Because sound sounds better. Because people have these subwoofers and tweeters in their homes. You think that when Schwarzenegger's walking toward you that you have to add Howitzers to each footstep. I kid you not. It's something that's maligning movies.
Media types would call you hot now. What does it take to be hot in Hollywood?
I have to be hot in Hanoi now. I'm composing this 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War oratorio (commissioned by the Pacific Symphony Orchestra). It makes all the responsibilities I've done in the Hollywood arena pale by comparison. It's scary. I don't want to let down the people who lived through the experience of war.
Does that mean it's more important than the film music you've done?
Not at all. I'm a great fan of cinema. I also think that film music in this country has been maligned. In and of itself it's an art form that's quite unique, not designed for concert music, opera, yet it's theatrical. And it's singular. Aaron Copeland told me many times how healthy doing film music was. Healthy because it forces you into an arena that you didn't think of being in or in some cases would be embarrassed to be in. It forces you to figure out ways to solve problems. When you do, you find things about you that you never knew. It's quite exhilarating. There are very few places in the late 20th century world of lack of funding and of interest in symphony orchestras that let composers work out their problems with 90 to 100 musicians.
What are your suggestions for composers who want to do what you do?
Know what your limitations are. I know one of my great weaknesses is that I'm very accommodating as a person. So if I were to conduct my own sessions, I would say, “Oh, I guess you're right,” and I would change it. I never got a job in my entire life by sending a tape away or by asking for a job. I never made a demo of my stuff. I think the key is – and I mean this in a nonreligious sense – if you find the spiritual path of where your music is and don't try to be what you're not, doors will open all over.