It's 1:30 a.m. and two-time Oscar nominee Elliot Goldenthal is in the middle of his normal workday. “I work all night and usually hit the sack around 6 a.m. That way, the world doesn't interfere with what I'm doing,” he says with a laugh.
It was during those late hours that he scored a film destined to be the first of the next generation of filmmaking, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”. “The film may not be the greatest story ever told,” he says, “but it is really knocking on the door of something really wonderful, something that great artists in the future can use as a tool, like fire.”
One thing that can't be synthesized or created solely by a computer is the music for the film. It has to be original, it has to be big, and it has to be good. Goldenthal achieved that with this score.
“All of the film is human work, artists working on every detail,” he explains. “Every movie presents variables and problems for the composer. In a film like this that wants a human reality to it, you have to zero in on the emotional scenes first as a composer.”
Goldenthal captures that emotion and humanity on this Sony Classical soundtrack, nowhere more brilliantly than on ‘The Dream Within’, one of two songs on the album written by Goldenthal and lyricist Richard Rudolph. It's performed by Lara Fabian. As Goldenthal puts it, 'She's got the chops to deliver this song the way it needed to be sung.”