Although you might not be familiar with his name, you most certainly are familiar with his music. In addition to composing the large-scale symphonic work Fire Water Paper, Elliot Goldenthal has scored some of the most successful blockbusters of recent years including “Batman Forever”, “Interview with the Vampire”, “Heat”, “Cobb”, and “Alien 3”. EQ recently caught up with Elliot during a brief respite before the release of “A Time To Kill”, which will feature Goldenthal’s film score. What is the first step that happens when you take the assignment to score a film? Usually I am sent a script, and if it is something that makes me think I can contribute with my own style, then I proceed from there. In the case of an experienced director whose work I know from the past, I’ll say, “That’s great, sign me up.” If it’s a first-time director or a director whose work I didn’t like in the past, then I’ll want to see some footage first before I get involved. Then we get down to the stage where the director will invite me down to the set to pick up the vibe. After that, they will send the first assembly – sort of an editor’s cut – and that is where I really start getting solid ideas. Does it ever happen that you begin composing without having seen any footage? It did in the case of “Batman Forever” because there was a marketing satiation involved for McDonald’s Batman glasses and the Great Adventure Batman ride. There was a great deal of marketing way, way before the film was even completed and they needed a few themes. I composed three or four themes that actually are on the back of the U2 single from the film. We did that in New York before I even saw a thing. Actually, I saw a really early rough trailer, but I didn’t see anything dramatically speaking. When you compose, are you thinking in terms of leitmotivs? It depends upon the nature of the film. I think that leitmotivs are basically overrated. It’s just another technique, but it’s not ‘the one’. We all grew up listening to Peter and the Wolf, and it is very easy to identify characters by leitmotivs, but sometimes I want to score an atmosphere, a state of place, or being, as opposed to a ‘who’. For example, in “Alien 3”, most of the scoring was about where the characters were and what their psychological state was – as opposed to what character was in that place. And often an emotion was shared by several different characters. Let’s say you have one scene with one emotional response and you pit it against three, four, or five characters. It has an interesting interplay between the actors, the characters, and the theme. Or you might have a love scene where you play a theme for two lovers – maybe a married girl and a guy – and it is a beautiful love scene between them. Now if you play that same love theme against the husband and the wife who is cheating on him, the same music takes on a tremendous amount of new meaning. It creates a whole different set of meanings and realities. Sometimes leitmotivs are important, like in the case of “Batman Forever”. That film is comic book-like, and there are clear delineations between who is the villain and who is the hero. So the villain gets villainous music and the hero gets heroic music. Are you writing notation to paper or are you using MIDI? It depends. I find that MIDI is not only an assistance, but is the best possible way to compose for movies. In my early days of doing movies, I would sit at the piano with some manuscript and a movieola. I found it a completely tedious and tiresome process because I could never really catch the right emotion. Now that I use MIDI, it’s very easy to get into the performance of the actor. When you are composing, what exactly are you using? I am running video tape with timecode. But I want to also stress that if there is a theme that I know is going to work – that is not based on an actor but an emotion – then I’d rather go to the piano and work it out there, away from the picture. So it stands on its own as a musical idea. Yes. If there is as grand waltz that I need to write, that has nothing to do with anybody’s expressions. Or, in the end of “A Time To Kill”, there’s a big Americana-like fanfare. I wrote that at the piano with a pencil and paper. So for different reasons I will or won’t use MIDI. Sometimes I compose without a piano or anything, away from everything. When do you find the MIDI gear most useful? When I’m dealing with character and emotion. I also find it tremendously useful for time-cutting like when I have no time to orchestrate and tomorrow the musicians are showing up. If I am careful enough, I can have a sequence that can show any orchestrator what he needs to do. Whereas if it was a single line played on a piano, they wouldn’t know unless I wrote it out. The idea of writing it out and logging it into a sequence can help an orchestrator a great deal. They know which is a string line and which is an oboe solo. In the ’30s, a writer would write a four-stave piano reduction of an orchestration and put little indications like ‘CL’ for clarinet and ‘VLA’ for viola. This is the exact same thing except that it is heard, allowing the orchestrator to write the charts out for the musicians. You get it to the point where an orchestrator will know what the basics are. Then I deal with the orchestrator one-on-one afterwards, and that is where the real creativity takes place for me. I convey the substance of what happens orchestrally. Will any of your MIDI orchestration make its way to the final score? Yes. Quite often there will be a situation where the orchestra needs ‘sweetening’. For example, violin harmonics are very difficult to play chromatically and in a very high register. They might sound thin in some situations, so I prefer to mix them slightly with sampled harmonics to give the sound a bit more backbone. If a huge brass section is playing it might overshadow the bass, so I might go back to my original sequence to fatten up a bass line. In “Alien 3”, I prepared a huge 50- or 60-minute MIDI score before the orchestra actually got there. We ran the MIDI score (which as all invented electronics) simultaneously to the orchestra with a click track. Is that a rare occurrence? It is for me. Most of my music is orchestral and not sequence- or groove-oriented. In the case of “Alien 3”, there were a lot of complex rhythmic and electronic things that were going alongside of the orchestral music. Other movies don’t call for that kind of thing. It’s based on the subject matter. One doesn’t associate “Cobb” or “A Time To Kill” with a weird electronic music type of thing. What kind of sequencing software are you using? I use (MOTU) Performer on my Mac with Roland S700 and S760 samplers, E-mu Protreus, Akai samplers, a (MOTU) MIDI Time Piece, and a Yamaha 02R console. That’s about it. I don’t have many samplers at this point, though it probably would be easier if I had six-pack. I work with the same team of programmers that I have always worked with since the 1980s: Richard Martinez and Matthias Gohl. They know exactly what I need to accomplish a job and they’re constantly searching out new samples. They’ll set me up with a template. A typical template will have an entire orchestra complement: strings, woodwinds, French horns (solo and tutti), and trumpets, trombones, tubas, and percussion. Then we work together on inventing new sounds and new techniques, depending on the nature of the movie. For “Alien 3”, we sampled scissors, me screaming at the highest notes of my voice, stretching piano wire and bowing it with a violin bow, and doing all kinds of things to create different new homemade samples. There’s basically two categories: orchestral music and invented electronic new music. Sort of like music concrète? Exactly, but more manipulated in the sense that if you play these sounds two or three octaves down, it’s basically like slowing the tape down. These are not to be confused with sound effects. Well these are sound effects that end up being used musically. Sound effects are usually used to reproduce a sound that we are used to hearing in the real world. These are sounds that you are not used to hearing. They are creating other levels of reality. So when someone delivers you the concept of “Alien 3”, you now have to create sounds that will be heard in this new environment and will be made by this life form. Or even an atmosphere. When you walk into a room and there is an alien present but you don’t know where it is lurking, I want to have a sense of menace without being over-dramatic. You composed “Interview with the Vampire” in only three weeks. How did you accomplish scoring so quickly? The film was already locked, edited. There wasn’t anything that would be changing in it. Any scene that I scored was done. So you didn’t have to worry about the directors editing a scene and then you’d have to rewrite the cue? Exactly. In a more typical situation there would be three times as much time available but also three times as much headache. How did you feel about working under such a short deadline? I usually prefer it. I’d rather dive in and get absorbed completely. And it reflects the type of schedules I used to deal with in theater, where you have a first impression on a scene and you go for it. As opposed to dwelling and dwelling on it. On “Alien 3”, I had 11 different version of the titles. On “Interview” it was one-and-a-half versions and that was it. So you were able to go in and do what you had to do instead of laboring. It is an interesting parallel to bands that labor too long over a recording. Often, if you think long, you think wrong, unless you are Beethoven. But he knew what he was doing. There is no need to spend so much time composing. Jazz musicians don’t. Mozart certainly didn’t spend too much time. Is there an engineer that you prefer to work with? There are many great ones, but there are two that I work with frequently: Joel Iwataki and Steven McLaughlin, both brilliant engineers. So far I have been lucky in that they have been available to work with me and sometimes I work with both. With a “Batman”-type project, where I am working on a 24-hour schedule, they will work in shifts. My typical schedule is 12 noon ’till six in the morning. What has been the most difficult film score that you have accomplished thus far? “Alien 3” was the most challenging because 90 percent of the movie was a chase. It was like a chase scene that went on for an hour and fifty-five minutes. The quest was in how to maintain the interest level for that period of time. I think that you do it through creating new sonic worlds. What is your most valuable composition tool? My theater background because it is acting and people moving in a space. There are usually no sound effects in theater, so a composer must create the whole world just with the music. And that is sort of the Gold’s Gym of composing! The other thing is that I was such a film buff at an early age. I’d go every week to see the classic films. Loving film and understanding the art form and the other composers that came before is a great tool.