It’s ‘The Francie Brady Show’: Elliot Goldenthal on ‘The Butcher Boy’
A bright, percolating melody seems to carry Francie Brady down the street of his impoverished Irish town before melting into mordant blues, spunky jazz riffs, and echoey evocations of classical music. In fact, music is about all ten-year-old Francie has to fall back on – that and his own uncompromising grit, which helps him survive a suicidal mother, a drunken father, hateful neighbors, a lecherous priest, and his own outbursts of startling violence.
This 1998 black comedy, based on the novel by Patrick McCabe, lacked easily lovable characters, as it basked in the unreality of Francie s view of the world and his place in it. The music of “The Butcher Boy” revels in this same exuberance and unwillingness to compromise one's identity or fantastical vision of life. Since the score consistently depicts Francie's point of view, the most horrific aspects of the story are told through a filter of naive optimism that is nonetheless as unstable as Francie's own sanity. Like in a fever dream, music comes into and out of consciousness in a jumble of conflicting melodies, melting from Dion & the Belmonts to ‘Mack the Knife’, ‘Ave Maria,’ and Frank Sinatra's ‘Where Are You’, which accompanies a mesmerizing Apocalyptic vision of nuclear destruction.
At the center is Goldenthal's original score, played by a combination of keyboards, accordion, hammer dulcimer, dobro, saxophone, trumpet, and drums, that together succeed at sounding just a little bit off – and, like Francie, entirely winning.
You had worked with director Neil Jordan twice previously. How was this project different for you?
By the time we got up to Butcher Boy we had done two big movies – “Interview with the Vampire” and “Michael Collins”. “For Butcher Boy”, I told him it needed a much quirkier, almost homemade-sounding approach to it. There are some comparisons to the approach to scoring “Drugstore Cowboy”, which is a very early score of mine, but the material is not unrelated, where you have action, you have segments of magical realism, semifantasy sequences, and then you have a running narration. So I was revisiting that “Drugstore Cowboy” way of composing which was much more iconoclastic.
For example, in “Drugstore Cowboy” there was a scene of just people sitting around a room and talking about drugs. It was a very dull conversation and a very dull scene. And Gus Van Sant originally had some pop song (which is always a director's first choice in films like this). I love pop music, don't get me wrong, but we're talking about film scoring. So we had a pop song and the scene was even duller. So I said, "Why don't we try a choir of didgeridoos, and then introduce a sort of low pulse to these didgeridoos?" And he thought I was nuts – totally ‘Why did I hire this guy?’ kind of thing. Until you saw the scene. Then you felt like you’re part of some primeval rejoicing of these drugs which are going to take you for a ride. That's an example of taking something that seemed not only radical but almost Dadaistic at the outset without knowing that there's a method to a specific madness to make a scene work. And “Butcher Boy” was the same way.
I got the feeling that Neil came to me because [on our previous films] I had brought him into areas that were unexpected, and that he liked being taken there. And for him it was, "Don't even listen to the temp music. Don't even think about it."
For “Butcher Boy” it must have been hard knowing what point of view the music should take, for the central character is a very hard character to take on board – he's fun but also troubled, violent – and on top of that is his own narration as an older, wiser version of himself telling his life story. Yet the music does get into the head of the character in a fascinating way.
That was the revelation. I'd started the film two or three times. And Neil said, “No, you can't do this movie, I don't think you're getting it, you don't know it.” Not until I woke up one morning and said, “Well, if Francie Brady wrote this score, what would it be?”
He was the star of his own life, as if life were “The Francie Brady Show”.
This is “The Francie Brady Show”, and this is his theme. And once I did that, things came along pretty easily. Relatively easily! But there were two or three starts where I wasn't getting anywhere. I was scoring it as if I were the composer, as opposed to if Francie Brady were the composer! In this particular film, that character had that much of a pull.
I really had to go into the world of nonreality that the boy was living in. I had to even deconstruct the Beethoven ‘Für Elise’ – I called it ‘Pig Für Elise’ – taking that and grinding it down until it morphed into klezmer music, and then into this strange Chicago, 1960s free jazz, until it finally left a vestige of Apache drums playing.
That sort of stream-of-consciousness scoring, switching from one style to another within a cue – was it written that way or did you experiment in the studio, mixing one musical piece into another?
No, it was written out. It had to be performed at Abbey Road with an orchestra. Even the chamber things were all written out because you've got to get musicians to play it.
Beethoven entered the picture because a neighbor was practicing ‘Für Elise’. So as long as music entered Francie's consciousness it became allowable, even if it seemed anachronistic?
There was nothing anachronistic in a sense that it was the artists – Patrick McCabe and Neil, myself, and the performers – looking back and having an opinion about a time, in the same way that Shakespeare might look back to the Roman or Greek periods. There are anachronisms in Shakespeare but it's not ‘anachronistic’ because it's him looking back, and so it's a valid recording of an opinion of a person displaced by a few hundred years – in our case with “Butcher Boy”, displaced by forty years.
Apart from getting inside Francie s head, how did the film’s setting inspire you?
This was taking place during the Cuban missile crisis, and there was this scene of a spiffy kitchen with all modern appliances, and this boy goes into a rage and destroys this kitchen, and then he defecates in this woman's living room. And you look at this scene: it's horrific in a sense, it makes you smile for a second, and then you see a TV set with shots of atomic bomb tests and children having to duck-and-cover under their seats at the same time this boy is smearing cake all over the wall, destroying this person's house.
So I took all sorts of sound clichés of that period – really sort of cheeseball sounding Farfisa-type organ, pizzicato strings, cheeseball-bubblegum-sounding backbeat on the drums – and created this hyperpop, super-bubblegum early- 1960s music that had a great joy to it while the boy is destroying this house. And Patrick McCabe said, “My God, this music looks exactly like that kitchen!”
There was also a tune, ‘Butcher Boy’, a sort of old Irish standard, semiboring ballad about a butcher boy and a girl in love with him; that's where Patrick McCabe got the title for the book. And they dredged out the old ballad and had Sinead O'Connor sing it. Fine!
Also there was this super-sentimentality related to how Francie's father felt about how he'd fucked-up his life, his alcoholism, et cetera. I had to write a theme that was really, really that sentimental. It had some notes, some pitches that had some dissonance and elbow to it, but in general it had to have There's nothing for me to do today except get drunk and think about how I messed up type of music.
Your music is notable for the use of dissonance, for unusual sounds that could almost be considered sound effects. That's probably expected in a film like “Alien 3”, but you've also been able to employ them in more ‘normal’ films.
Corigliano's work in “Altered States” was a very, very powerful model for what you can do with an orchestra. And I've taken that opportunity to take that baton and run with it in projects that weren't necessarily about altered states or changes in the psyche. I've worked with alternative-type orchestration even in movies like “Cobb” about a baseball player, whereas I think twenty years ago the use of experimental orchestration in a baseball movie would have been thought of as insane. And even in “Michael Collins”, there was a lot of unusual orchestration. Using Irish pipes played in the manner of John Coltrane with two click tracks going at different tempos, and sort of Penderecki-esque orchestration behind it in an Irish revolutionary movie would have been unheard of. Putting skewed, big band jazz in a Shakespeare movie would have been unheard of. So I think almost like taking my pencil as a musical Trojan horse into certain areas, I've made some inroads – almost unnoticeable!
I think I am drawn toward stuff that's big and mythic, that has the possibility of surrealism involved: “The Butcher Boy”, “Drugstore Cowboy”. “In Dreams” had a special quality. Even “Batman” was mythic, comic-book fun. It wasn't as much fun for me to do “A Time To Kill”, which is a very serious courtroom drama.
Does that present a greater artistic challenge to you, to try to do a courtroom drama in a way that hasn't been done a million times before?
Certain things can't handle that much experimentation, and when I got into it, that was my thought, that I could experiment with a kind of Japanese/Asian approach to this American Southern setting – very minimal pennywhistle and percussion. And I thought I could use this really dissonant orchestral music to display racial violence. But in the end it wasn't a form for me to be really special with. Others can argue, but if you listen to “Batman Forever” that's much more exciting! It had much more of a wild canvas to it.
I’ll Show Thee Wondrous Things, That Highly May Advantage Thee To Hear: Elliot Goldenthal on ‘Titus’
Ritual blood sacrifice, beheadings, dismemberment, rape, murder, and a rather unsavory vengeance in the form of a meat pie containing a mother’s own children – such are the hallowed ingredients of what is perhaps Shakespeare’s least honored play, a tale of revenge and mocking treachery during the waning days of the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, Titus Andronicus proves, in Julie Taymor’s rich film adaptation “Titus”, to be a monumental story of clashing cultures and generational power struggles. Filmed among ruins in Rome and Croatia, the production also features sumptuous sets that speak more of the twentieth century than of the fourth. Costumes run the gamut from Roman-era armor to dinner jackets to punk fashions. And props include microphones, pool tables, and champagne flutes.
“Titus” walks a dangerously fine line – it would be easy for a period film in which Roman troops drive motorcycles and tanks and where a young prince plays video games, to be viewed as over-the-top. But the film keeps its balance throughout – its anachronisms enrich rather that detract – partly because of the support given by Elliot Goldenthal’s music. His score sways from heart-stopping, percussive military airs to hyperactive dance music and electronica. And while it is keyed into the stark, often surreal visuals, the music’s bold and sometimes jocular sound reinforces the humanity of the tale – thereby unscoring its timelessness.
I was impressed by the boldness of mixing different, seemingly anachronistic designs in the film, and how the music was able to match these juxtapositions without being jarring.
There was one surviving print that was contemporary to Shakespeare of a performance of Titus Andronicus, and the print showed the costume design in Shakespeare’s time; it had people in togas and Elizabethan garb, so even in its inception the costumes were both contemporary and ancient. So I think there is that built-in quality of telling an old story in a new time. In that respect, Julie Taymor is a twenty-first-century director telling a story written by a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century guy talking about a vague area of Roman history somewhere around A.D. 300 or 400, and with references to Christianity, that has a ‘no-timeness’. And one can’t have anachronisms in no-timeness. But in solving problems, like how do you dramatize two people (Saturninus and Bassianus) electioneering, how do you make that interesting for an audience? By having them in cars going through Roman streets!
All this stuff might seem unusual until you actually go to Rome, where you see people in front of ancient Roman temples with boom boxes, people dressed up like ancient Etruscans taking snapshots of tourists, people with rings through their tongues and green hair, guys that look like they’re out of “La Dolce Vita”, Lamborghinis from the 1950s, edifices built by Mussolini, you see everything. And then you see supermodern fashions that might resemble the toga more than they resemble a suit and a tie. There’s no anachronism; that’s exactly what Rome is!
The film originated from Taymor’s New York stage production in 1995 for which you composed the music. Was much of that music retained for the movie?
Well, about thirty seconds of music from the stage production got into the film. The stage production was done with electronic tape and two trumpets, and it was very effective. There were transition scenes, but I did have underscoring for entire scenes as well. It was very soft, backstage, electronic stuff.
The advantage of working on the stage production was that I memorized the play before I did the movie, so it helped in terms of a deeper understanding of the web of plot that Shakespeare wrote.
Shakespeare is really difficult to compose for because you never really have a clear-cut, good/evil/funny guy like you do in “Batman” for example. I mean Bruce Wayne/Batman lives a double life but they’re both basically heroic guys. Everybody is archetypal and very mythic, almost Wagnerian.
But in Shakespeare it’s not that simple. Who’s the villain in Titus Andronicus? Is it the guy that started out as a General Schwarzkopf-type who then baked people into pies? Is it the slave Aaron whose past we don’t know – who knows what was done to him? – that’s living in a world of treachery; why doesn’t he just participate in that treachery and be the most treacherous, if he’s going to be stomped on anyway? Is Tamora, the Goth Queen, evil after pleading for her son’s life and calling out, “Cruel irreligious piety!” Is she evil? Who do you root for?
For the film, particularly because there were these blatant juxtapositions of style and fashion, were you forced to be more literal in terms of what music does dramatically? Or were you able to ignore the visuals and write more inside the characters’ heads, as it were, evoking their state of mind?
The literature of Shakespeare, again, is such that there are so many meanings in one scene. So you look for certain constants in the structure of the drama. In one case, there seemed to be times when different characters find themselves in a similar position: the Goth Queen, Titus, and Aaron (the three major characters) beg for their children’s lives to be saved. So you say, what if I write a theme, say, a ‘compassion theme’ or ‘pity theme’ and repeat that – would it work? So I wrote this one theme away from the film at the piano. I thought of it as a two-part partita – there are two people involved, one that’s begging, one that can give reprieve – so it’s in two-part counterpoint. And indeed it did work; it worked for Tamora, it worked for Titus, it worked for Aaron – and it worked for Lavinia. It worked every time those characters were begging for their lives or pleading for their children.
Was this one theme orchestrated differently depending upon the character?
Very little difference, basically string orchestration.
Then there were generational differences, and I felt that for the older generation (Titus, Tamora, Aaron) the music tended to be a little more orchestral; for Saturninus and Bassianus, the younger electoral candidates, I thought they were more in a jazz age – certainly because they used jazzy automobiles and Mussolini s governmental palace, and you had these dance sequences for which music had to be pre-composed (Julie wanted people to be swing dancing). It seems like the sophisticated thing to do if you were a sort of jazzy Roman king! And clearly Tamora’s children were more in the age of punk rock. So the art direction and costumes were key in designing that.
In shifting from one musical style to another, did you maintain a melodic consistency?
Yes, for sure. It always helps to hang your hat on a theme. I think I do in every film – even in “Batman”. You have one theme and you manipulate it. It could be a heroic kind of thing or a campy dance sequence.
I liked how the saxophone was introduced when the newspaper flutters into the shot announcing Caesar’s death – one seeming anachronism heralds another.
If you noticed, that melody was picked up from the English horns. There is an eight-note theme that the English horn did in the previous scene and then the saxophone picks up the exact notes.
I wanted the whole beginning of the film to feel like it was going to be an ancient period (even though you’re seeing all these tanks and stuff). I wanted this chorus, which is, by the way, singing material cut, which was the original speech of Titus’s entrance (“Romans, make way: the good Andronicus. Patron of virtue, Rome’s best champion”). I had that translated into Latin and sung, so it is still Shakespeare! So we wanted this chorus and percussion, and then it got dark [in the tombs] and there are Tibetan bowls and still voices in Latin singing from Ovid.
Then for the first time the camera comes up and the whole screen is filled with light. Everything is bright, it’s a sunny day, there’s a child out there, there’s a newspaper: “Caesar’s Dead.” And I wanted the audience to smile! If the audience smiled or even chuckled a bit, they would get what Titus Andronicus is all about, which is the juxtaposition between horror and comedy. And I thought that a saxophone would make people smile.
It made me smile!
Good! And then having Saturninus and Bassianus electioneering with this cool jazz. Otherwise, having to swallow the pill of exposition can be very, very tedious, you know?
Again, there was one theme in the beginning that’s slightly warmer, when Titus is with his daughter and he says, “Lavinia, live.” Funny, in the beginning of the movie he says, “Lavinia, live,” and in the end he says “Die, die, Lavinia!”
Now, did you repeat that particular theme when he kills her at the end?
No, I didn’t; I brought back the theme of compassion when the child, Young Lucius, walks into the shop of the woodcarver, the maker of the saints, and he sees all the carved hands and gets a pair of hands to bring to Lavinia. (It’s not in Shakespeare, this is Julie.) I used that theme also when Marcus discovers Lavinia on the pedestal with her hands cut off, and also at the end when the father has compassion for her and performs euthanasia. It was directed in a very tender way; the daughter knew her father was going to do this mercy killing, and it wasn’t a horrific, angry act. And Anthony Hopkins’s performance wasn’t rash; it certainly wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment killing by a madman. So in that way I wanted the music to be noble, reaching for something that had a connotation of compassion.
In Titus’s arrow attack on Saturninus’s court, there was this repeated musical pattern that reminded me of the minimalism of John Adams.
As much as I love John Adams, there was nothing either specific or general I was thinking about [in terms of minimalism]. I was thinking about a repeated figure which to me sounded very martial – that Titus was maybe winning a little bit! – and the musical ideograph of this marcato kind of motif which might have been used by Vivaldi or Mendelssohn has a pointedness, an arrowlike quality to it. And then I subjected it to the Beethoven approach in the sense of using that motif and an inversion of the motif underneath that, just by pitting that inversion together created a very, very tight thing which might seem minimalist but is really being as stingy motivically as you can be.
Portraying madness through music is tricky in “Titus”, because the audience may be led to believe that Titus is mad, as Tamora and the others think him. But he may be simply feigning madness to draw people closer to him so he can kill them. That may not be madness after all.
Yes, but you can also draw the theory that there are certain types of madness that are clarity.
Did you try to portray Titus’s state of mind musically, whether you make an editorial judgment on his madness or not?
There’s a device in the movie that Julie and I like to call ‘Penny Arcade Nightmares’. These are images where the Shakespeare stops and there’s a frozen suggestion of a certain connotation of feelings, like a tableau – they’re sort of fissures or cracks in the character of Titus. You get a sense that his sense of well-being on a day-to-day basis is being completely turned askew. Whether it’s madness or not, that’s still up to the audience. I wanted to keep that up to the audience.
So is madness clarity? I think we were after that, too – not necessarily the music getting more and more dissonant but more and more “extra-real.” For example, when Titus is in the bathtub alone and clearly a little bit ‘out there’, making pictures on pieces of paper with his own blood and planning his retribution, he hears Tamora putting on this play of Rape, Revenge, and Murder. It’s very surreal, but as soon as he looks outside the window and actually sees her, he says, “Why from up and down you look like the dread queen Tamora.” The madness stops – and there’s nothing in the scoring that suggests it.
How did you decide on ‘Vivere’, this jaunty Italian song played under the horrific final banquet scene?
I was thinking about that song since I was a boy almost. I was always terribly fascinated by the ghostly sound of that song; it sounded like people having themselves a real ball during the last moments of fascist Italy, sort of like showing up at a picnic with friends on a perfectly sunny day and hearing a rumble of thunder in the distance. So I was juxtaposing the fascist European era with the apparent gaiety of that song and the irony of the lyrics – something like ‘live and enjoy life’ in the 1930s, which is like the anacrusis to the crucifixion of civilization.
You see, for me a lot of these projects are almost about nonmusical issues. I really, really hate Wagner’s approach to life, but yet I can understand why he was so obsessed with the nonmusical issues of the dramas he was doing.
Shakespeare does things in this play that idiots who think it’s a bad play are way, way off. For example, in every production I’ve ever seen, Titus – in this hideously absurdist scene where the sons’ heads are returned with his severed hand – tells his children to take the heads and he tells his [now handless] daughter to put his hand in her mouth so she can carry it back. And in every production that gets a laugh. You say, What’s going through Shakespeare’s mind? Here’s a guy who’s already written most of his sonnets – he’s not some dumb young idiot writing a play. What did he do this for? Well, it’s genius! Earlier in that scene, Marcus says, “Why are you laughing?” And Titus says, “Because I have no more tears to shed.” He’s laughing at the horror. So to draw the point home, three minutes later Shakespeare makes the audience laugh at the horror, puts you in the position Titus was in a second ago, as he’s constantly putting you in the position of that person that might be capable of creating a horrific act.