“Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” may sport the absolute latest in cutting-edge computer graphics. It may feature the world’s first semi-photo-realistic cast. It may be the first entry in what the film makers hope will become a new hybrid medium, halfway between animation and live action. But to Elliot Goldenthal’s sensibilities, the film is simply the latest in a long line of rousing effects-driven yarns, with antecedents in the works of Ray Harryhausen.
“Not comparing myself to anybody, but I like to compare it to the kind of joy that Bernard Herrmann got out of working in films of the cinema fantastique – you know, ‘7th Voyage of Sinbad’, where you had those groundbreaking techniques like the stop-motion animation. All of that wonderful stuff that was just being developed in those movies that were aimed for children. And this movie is also kind of aimed for kids, and the kids who play those [video] games, but at the same time there’s a lot of earnestness in the making of it.”
Yet for all Final Fantasy’s otherworldliness, or more accurately because of it, Goldenthal set the score right in our collective backyard, using familiar musical devices as jumping off points in order to “amplify the humanness” of the project. The score’s main theme, for example, is first stated on the piano, “the most domestic of instruments… often the first instrument children learn to play.” Goldenthal set this instrument against the film’s intergalactic vistas in order to create a sense of connection in the audience – a subconscious emotional link to the fantastical sights. This main theme is developed throughout the score, always changing and evolving as it picks up orchestral dressing along the way, and eventually surfacing as Goldenthal’s pop song, ‘The Dream Within’.
Goldenthal also wrote for that most familiar of sounds, the human voice, in what he deems his most extensively choral score since “Michael Collins”. However, in this case he eschewed expectations by avoiding simple “soprano, alto, tenor, bass” treatment of the choral writing. “It’s more clusters and nebulas of sound,” states the composer, who felt these closely spaced choral harmonies matched the on-screen visuals more effectively.
Goldenthal connoisseurs will also notice an unusual dearth of electronics in his “Final Fantasy” score. “I didn’t want it to be a very electronic sound,” he says, and instead chose to follow in the tradition of scores like Williams’s “Star Wars” with Strauss and Holst style orchestrations – a “brass-oriented score” with a Goldenthal twist. This twist allowed for the inclusion of such non-traditional instruments as the cimbasso (a relative of the bass trombone) and the bass oboe, and the introduction of some unorthodox orchestrational approaches well beyond the vocabularies of the Romantic predecessors. “At one point at the beginning of the album there’s a big fanfare. But what sounds like a tutti or an orchestral thing is 16 French horns in their low registers – there are 16 French horns playing in unison, no trombones or anything until the chords start filling out.”
Re-Orchestrating Reality
This neo-Straussian orchestral writing is tempered throughout the score by a vein of more modern writing inspired by Goldenthal’s fondness for the Polish avant-garde school and his own experimentation in scores like “Alien 3”. “[I felt that if I used] difficult writing throughout this it would wear out the audience’s ears. I felt that I needed to put them on some familiar ground so that when I diverted, when I went away from the familiar, it sounded fresh…We had lots of different muting going on in the brass, and very, very difficult rapid tonguing in the low register of the trombone, faster than they’re used to playing. It was notated in boxes, so it’s semi-improvisational. They’d vary the pitches and tongue as fast as possible but [they’d] try to play different rhythms than their neighbors. I had those kind of things create a lot of freneticism in there when they’re running away from phantoms.
“There are also very strange techniques of bowing the back of the violin, and blowing air through different brass instruments at different rates and times, hitting the sides of the harp with the tuning peg, all kinds of stuff. I could go on and on and on. They’re things that [orchestrator] Bob Elhai and I have been working on for 10 years now… When I have an orchestra in front of me,” he pauses for a second, “I feel compelled to experiment.” But Goldenthal is not simply a man run wild with an orchestra. Every device he uses is intricately thought out and focused. As an example, he describes his compositional process on the Final Fantasy track ‘Toccata and Dreamscapes’, an aggressively pointillistic cue featuring innumerable extended performance techniques. For all its furious sonic effects, however, the cue is drawn from a strictly gathered collection of materials. “I think there are only five or six pitches in that whole sequence. For the whole eight to 10 minutes that you’re listening, you’re only listening to five or six pitches. I worked on a tone row that I thought would give me the verticality and, where I could, make it work horizontally as well. In other words, [I could write] linear [parts] but also chords. I could have the strings playing very, very quick passages, and then I could have the brass interrupt with clusters based on those same pitches that sound much more dissonant. I liked the idea of limiting the palette.”
A Refreshing Portrait
Elliot Goldenthal’s palette will contain a whole different set of hues for his next project, director Julie Taymor’s “Frida Kahlo”. The film on the politically conscious Mexican painter is Taymor and Goldenthal’s follow-up to “Titus” and features an impressive collection of onscreen talent. Salma Hayek portrays Kahlo, Alfred Molina is Diego Rivera, Edward Norton is Nelson Rockefeller, and Geoffrey Rush is Leon Trotsky. “I’ve spent a lot of time down in Mexico where Julie Taymor is directing ‘Frida’,” says the composer. “It’s an incredible cast, and the movie looks really exciting even at this early stage. So that’ll be a whole departure, a whole different Goldenthal.”