Composer Elliot Goldenthal recalls “many a drunken, poetic night in Dublin” discussing with director Neil Jordan the music for the movie “Michael Collins”.
The question was, Goldenthal says, “How Irish should it be?”
Jordan directed the movie about the Irish revolutionary and Goldenthal wrote the music.
“Neil was being very courageous to hire somebody named Elliot Goldenthal to do a score about a person some Irish people consider their equivalent of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King or Gandhi,” Goldenthal says.
Originally, he says, Jordan leaned toward an Irish sound.
“Then, he felt he wanted the music to be more dramatic as opposed to Irishy,” the composer says. “There were Celtic themes that were both traditional and invented that sort of informed the score.”
Goldenthal is best known for his film scores, including “A Time To Kill”, “Cobb”, “Interview with a Vampire” and “Batman Forever”. But he also composes classical music and theatre music.
At 42, he thinks of himself as devoted to theatre and concert life and, on the side, finding a challenge in writing music for films.
“I approach a movie completely conceptually,” he says. “If I can find the concept, I'm ahead of the game.
“In ‘Interview with the Vampire’, the concept was vampires live a long time – or are dead a long time. As the movie goes along, it travels through the history of music, from harpsichord to piano to Guns N' Roses' version of the Rolling Stones' “Sympathy for the Devil.' “
About “Batman Forever”, he says, “For me, musically, it was a comic book opera, not to be taken seriously by the pillars of our cultural establishment – just like a comic book isn't.
“Yet I'm contributing to what I believe very strongly in - that comic books are the windows of myth. Many comics have the same message that can be found in the works of Aeschylus. Where else are there dragon slayers and people who fly and people who support and uplift and save the multitudes? These are beautiful things.
“In ‘Batman’, I wanted the music to sound big and mythic and dark. I used a Wagnerian approach to orchestration. I balanced it with a kind of jazzy city pace which is exclusively American.”
Goldenthal is working on the next Batman movie, for summer release. But he has had to postpone composing a trumpet and piano piece for Wynton Marsalis because he has Juan Darien running at Broadway's Vivian Beaumont Theater and he's writing music for a three-act Othello ballet Lar Lubovitch is choreographing for American Ballet Theater.
“Lar comes over every week and we go back and forth,” Goldenthal says. “I'll play him stuff and he'll say it's too long or too short. What is difficult in a work like Othello is that it can only exist if the emotion and jealousy is really out there.”
Juan Darien is about a tiger which turns into a boy. He is given human life through the miracle of a woman's mothering love. After his mother dies, people who fear he's really a tiger burn him at the stake. He writes ‘Juan’ in his blood on the cross at his mother's grave and returns to the jungle as a tiger.
“Horacio Quiroga, who wrote it, was a very important figure in Uruguay. He died in the 1920s,” Goldenthal says. “Gabriel Garcia-Marquez lauded him as the father of magical realism, the Edgar Allan Poe of South America.”