Director Julie Taymor and composer Elliot Goldenthal gave an inside look at the music of Miramax Films' “Frida”, in a highlight of the first Hollywood Reporter/Billboard Film & TV Music Conference, which began Thursday. They spoke during a discussion called ‘The Composer/Director Relationship’, moderated by Robert J. Dowling, THR's editor-in-chief and publisher. Making the biopic about artist Frida Kahlo presented quite a challenge because of its limited budget, Taymor and Goldenthal agreed. “It was a labor of love for everyone involved,” Taymor said. Unlike the heavily orchestrated scores he has composed in the past, Goldenthal said his music for “Frida” is “more organic and based mostly on guitars.” Because of the intimate nature of the story, “it wasn't appropriate to do a large orchestral score,” Taymor said. It's “the most melodic score he's ever composed,” she added. With the aid of film clips, Taymor and Goldenthal demonstrated how they chose the music for key scenes. “I wanted the score to feel like another character in the movie, like someone you want to wake up with and have a conversation,” Goldenthal said. Another challenge was a pivotal scene in which artist Kahlo is severely injured in a bus crash. Goldenthal said Kahlo could not remember hearing anything during the incident. “So the challenge was to create a soundless sound for that scene,” he said. “Elliot and I were careful not to have a 'colonial takeover' approach to the music,” Taymor said. “We just tried to filter our inspiration through our own lenses and put it out in a fresh way. We wanted the female voice to be a dominant sound in the film.” Goldenthal added: “We didn't put music in gratuitously. We did much research on the music that Frida and [her husband, the artist] Diego Rivera might have heard, and their favorite pieces of music, and we tried to use as much of it as we could.” “Frida,” opening in limited release Oct. 25, stars Salma Hayek as the stricken artist. The “Frida” soundtrack is set to be released Oct. 22 on Universal Classics. Hayek does her own singing in the film and on the soundtrack album. Thursday's conference panels also included a discussion of the music of 20th Century Fox's “Drumline,” led by Fox Music president Robert Kraft. Grammy winner T-Bone Burnett (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”) and Emmy-winning composer Thomas Newman (“Six Feet Under”) are among the speakers as the film and TV music conference concludes today at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel.