What is your musical background?
I kind of realized at an early age that I could compose or that I could string notes together to create some sort of logic, some sort of story. It just seemed that it was – without sounding dramatic – that it was kind of my destiny to do. Also, If you think about early youth and stuff, I worked a lot of hard jobs and this and that, and this seems to be the easiest thing to make money, to make a living, to pay the rent, and to move people, and to make people happy, and to make people cry. And I said, Wow, if you put all those things together, this is the job for me. My mother was a seamstress, my father was a house painter, and those were very hard jobs. Composing is a hard job, but comparison to everything else, to make a long story short, I took the lazy way out. Of course that's humorous, but it basically is my destiny.
So what inspired you to write film and television music?
I've never written for television actually. Maybe HBO once.
Yeah, I've got you listed here as doing “Roswell” for television.
Yeah, maybe. I think it was a television movie. But I don't know about TV. I don't know how that operates, where you have to compose on a weekly basis if it's a dramatic show or if it's a sitcom or something like that. I don't know about it. But I've always loved the cinema. I've always loved going to see unusual movies and listening to how music in a collaborative form works within the whole structure of film.
So what is the first thing you do when you begin to write a score?
Well, the first thing you do is see it as an emotional reaction, have a sense of awe about it, or something. Something has to move you. And then, as an enthusiast, see what was in your fantasy head about what the music should be. Or as a doctor or somebody who's to help the film, see what's missing and what could really benefit, how the film could benefit from certain fixes. Let's say if the film is too slow, to write music that has a certain pulse that makes the heart race; the film is too fast, to sort of slow it down… you know, that kind of thing. It's like horse whispering, but a composer does it into a movie.
I see. So now I don't know if you've run into this, but is it hard as a composer not to be pressured into writing a score that's similar to a temp track?
That is a difficult thing. A temp track has its positives and negatives. Mainly negatives, because if you write something that's similar to the temp track and it makes everybody happy, then you haven't really gone down the road. You haven't gone down a creative process of discovering it for yourself, making ten mistakes and finding the one road that's the right road. And if you fail at writing music to the temp track, then it's negative because the director had something set in mind. The worst, worst thing is when the editor cut the picture to the temp track, to the music that was temped. So that leaves the composer completely out of the loop.
The benefits are directors and composers – you can't really talk about music. You have to do it. But if you can't do it, if you can't really show it, let's say, to a preview audience or something, then you have to temp it with something. At least it's a dialogue between the director and the composer as to which way, what ideas the composer might have and what ideas the director has. And that's about it.
Now, have you ever run up against the idea of having your own music temped beforehand?
Mm-hmm. It was in “Titus”. It was my big idea to temp with my own music. The problem is, Julie Taymor, the director, took all of the best of Goldenthal, so to speak, of all the things I ever got lucky on and temped it. And then you say, How do I top myself? How do I do that again? How do I live that again? But it was very difficult. I’m not saying I topped myself, but I was able to achieve it. But it was very hard.
Okay. So what are the considerations that go into writing a main title theme?
Well, it depends on the genre. If it's something like a Batman movie, you have to have something that feels heroic, that feels mythic. If it's something like a movie like “Drugstore Cowboy” or “Butcher Boy” or something, you want it very, very sort of surrealistic, so to speak. Something like “Alien 3”, you want it completely mysterious and kind of evocative of entering into a strange place. So there's no one formula. It depends on the subject matter on the whole.
Now I first heard your work in “Alien 3”. How did you become involved in that project?
David Fincher, it was his first movie, and he wanted a ‘non-Hollywood sounding’ composer. He heard my music. I don't know where, but he heard some of my theater work and some of my classical concert stuff, I mean, orchestral music. And then we had a meeting in London, and then we got together and he got real excited about what he heard. We proceeded from there.
So now when composing music for a sequel such as “Alien 3” or “Batman Forever”, do you consider the music that came before it or did you just go into it fresh?
I went into it fresh. “Alien 3”, there was no consideration about the earlier music. And “Batman”, there was a consideration in terms of the title's music. And I said, you pull the person on the street what the title's music is to Batman and he'll go [hums Neal Hefti theme]. So I said, let's take a vote. I'll write something and then you listen to the other ones and you see which one you want. And the creative team voted that they proceed with what I was doing, which was new. It was fresh. It was a new Batman. It was a new director. There was a new Batmobile. There was a new Robin. So it might as well be a new theme. And this is in “Batman Forever”.
So how do you come up with cue names? You have some of the best ones here on “Batman Forever”. ‘Batterdammerung’ and ‘Fledermausmarschmusik’.
[laughs] Because I was making fun of the neo-Wagnerian feel to Batman. And it's just poking fun at Wagner. That's all that was all about.
You are listed on “Alien 3” as an orchestrator as well. So what is the job of the orchestrator?
Well, mainly, obviously, it's firstly choosing the instrumentation and creating an orchestral language for the movie. Quite often, you have to work with other orchestrators. So if you're a composer orchestrator, you have to, whether it's a main other orchestrator or whether it's other orchestrators because there's no time to do the whole thing yourself, you have to be careful that you, as yourself as your own orchestrator, plus everyone else, is on the right track, and choosing the specific orchestration, the instrumentation, that you want to express the idea. And it goes very specific. I can't go into it too much in this interview because it would take forever. But you have to say, yes, I want the trombones to play this particular part, or, I want the violas and I want it on this specific string, and with the brass I want this specific mute, or I want it on this specific valve, or I want it to do this or that. It goes into a tremendous amount of detail to create the colors that you specifically need.
OK, switching to more of your recent work: “Titus” has one of the best openings I've ever seen in a film, with the soldiers and the marching in there. What came first, the visual style or the music came first?
The music came first. Actually came a bit before the film. There was something that we did, “Titus”, in the theater. And in the theater it had a similar opening, although it wasn't as extended. And then I redid the opening. And then Julie went out to... Actually, she went to Croatia to film that sequence. And she had the Croatian police force rehearse it with a choreographer to music which was blasting over, you know, like, rock and roll speakers in the sample theater. So they rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed to music that already existed. So then when they filmed it, they filmed it to that track and then we redid the track to match what was on the screen.
Now, “Titus” has a very unique visual style. Did you take any special considerations when composing the music for “Titus”?
Well, yes. And I actually go into it a little bit on the liner notes on the album. It’s that, when one goes to Rome, you see objects that are man-made, 2,000, 3,000 years old, still standing next to some guy with a boombox listening to Elvis. I mean, the sense of time is completely obliterated. Or the sense of time is completely expanded to where you could have these contrasts of styles that butt up against each other that conflict. And that was the one thing I wanted to do in “Titus”, was to create a beautiful old building, a beautiful old aedifice, and at the same time do things that were... completely, let's say, temporally absurd.
So, now switching to “Final Fantasy”, it's one of my favorite scores of yours, and in fact one of my favorite scores of all time, almost.
Thank you. There's only a few of you, there’s, like, eight of you that think that way.
Pardon me?
There's probably eight of you on the whole planet, or three of you on the whole planet that think that.
[laughs] Well, how did you first become aware of that project?
Oh, it was suggested to me by my agent, and then I met the… and said, well, You know, the bad news is that you'll have to compose this… you'll have to meet the folks who are producing the film in Hawaii. So I said, yeah, someone has to do it, so I guess I'll go down there. So I went down and found that the Japanese folks, mainly the director, Sakaguchi-san, who is the mystic mainspring behind the “Final Fantasy” game, the director was there, and we got along very, very well.
Quite lovely folks, and we ended up… just by the force of the personality and the congeniality, we got along very well. And I said, look, this is an experiment. There have been times in music history, like in the short history of cinema, like for example, Bernard Herrmann did “Voyage to the Center”… I mean, those are “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad”, things like that, that weren't the greatest movies in the world, but were attempts at expanding the meaning of cinema and the techniques in cinema. So I felt that it was in that tradition, and I had a great time.
The London Symphony Orchestra played brilliant, with ten sessions over there in England. So I was very, very happy.
Now in the composer commentary on the “Final Fantasy” DVD, you mentioned some unusual instruments, such as the shakuhachi and the glass harmonica.
Well, I used the glass harmonica a great deal, and it's sort of like one of the instruments I use in many scores. I love its ethereal sound. You know, when you play champagne glasses, you know, with a dry finger and a wet glass, that kind of sound. It was an instrument that Benjamin Franklin invented and that actually Mozart once wrote a little serenade for. He called it the glass armonica with an A. And it's sort of bowls that are attached together, concentrically going from small to large, and there's water in a little box, so to speak, and the bowls turn round and round as you press the pedal with your foot. And you play it as these bowls go round and round, large bowls to the smaller ones to create higher or lower frequencies. And it's really ethereal and beautiful in its sound.
The shakuhachi is a very traditional Japanese flute that's usually played with sort of an overblowing kind of sound. It's haunting, it's beautiful, and sometimes very, very agonizing in its effect. It's really beautiful.
So how do you find players for these various instruments?
Oh yeah, there's so much interest. Maybe there's not that many glass harmonica players around, but the ones that are there, are very devoted. You can ferret them out. The shakuhachi player, there are certainly tens of thousands of those. If you have an interest, there are people that climb out of the woodwork, believe me.
Okay, now you mentioned that “Final Fantasy” was an experiment. Now did you approach scoring “Final Fantasy” any differently than you would have any of your other scores?
Yeah, because it was totally computerized humans. I approached it in a way that was – where I wanted to tackle or figure out how to do the love scenes first, the romantic scenes, so that the humanness of the movie was amplified, as opposed to trying to work out all the fantasy bits, all the space battles and the creatures and all of that. That to me is in the realm of action music, and it didn't take that much of a different departure. But I really needed to nail down, make sure that the emotional scenes were working.
So now for the song, ‘The Dream Within’, what came first, the music or the lyrics?
Oh, the music came first, because it's a theme that appears in those romantic sections, that slowly evolve out of those romantic sections. So it's in the body of the movie, it's not just a song that's tacked on at the end.
How closely did you work with Richard Rudolph on the lyrics for, or did he just write them separately?
Well, we worked pretty closely. He was involved in the capacity as a music supervisor in the movie, and he was very, very, very close to the whole project and everything involved in it in a hands-on way. So it was a very intimate process.
How would a score you write today differ from one you wrote ten years ago?
I could see better then, so I didn't have to wear glasses to write. That's the only difference. [laughs] I don't think there's any difference really. The projects come along and they are the dictators. They dictate what you need to do. Remember, you're writing for something that exists, and it's not your existence that's dictating it. I don't see any difference really at this point, no.
Now, I have always felt that film music will be the classical music of tomorrow. How do you think film music will be regarded in about 50 to 100 years from now?
I think it will take a lot more time, but I think it will be regarded in the same way that any art is regarded. That is, probably about 85% of it is terrible, as is in any art. And that 15%, as is in any art, will rise to the top as something spectacular. There will be bursts of brilliance when brilliant composers come along, and the Mozarts and the film composer arenas will emerge. And the lines, I think, will be broken down between those who write for film and theater and the concert stage.
It's such a young art, it's only 100 years old practically. And consider the fact that, can you imagine the first 100 years of opera, or the first 100 years of... it's an emerging language. And the possibilities are going to get really, really interesting over the next 100 years.
I have you listed down here as doing a movie called “Frida”, coming up in 2002, and something called “The Good Thief”, coming up in 2003. What else does the future hold for you?
Well, the future holds an opera called Grendel, written by John Gardner, which is a Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view. My ballet Othello will be in the U.S. in Great Performances. I don't know if they get it in Canada and Europe, but I think they do, which is public broadcasting, and that was recorded by the San Francisco Ballet Company, which just toured Paris and came to New York. And the ballet will be also next summer in New York in the Metropolitan Opera House.
There's also a possibility of a Broadway production of Pinocchio, but that's a long shot. But we'll see.
“The Good Thief” is a Neil Jordan project, which is with Nick Nolte, and it's a very European movie. It's a retelling of a French movie by a director Melville called “Bob the Gambler”, and “Frida” is about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the two great Mexican painters. It's Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo, and that's with the director Julie Taymor, and that's myself. It's a very different score for me because it's all beautiful melodies. Everything is just melodies, melodies, melodies, as opposed to, let's say, motivic development of the score.
Well, thank you very much for taking your time today. I really appreciate this. This has been a thrill for me because I've been following your work since 1992 with “Alien 3”. When I first heard those first few notes of “Alien 3”, I knew I was onto something different.
Well, thank you, thank you. That's nice to hear.