You know, when we talked last year you had just established the Zarathustra music label.
Yes.
I was just wondering how are things going with that label now?
I don't know economically, but I'm very happy with the fact that whatever I actually set out to do, it's exactly what people are going to hear. So it's completely honest; a translation of my music to my audience.
Because we talked about the unreleased scores that many may be interested in and the concert works that you did in the ’80s and so on. But it's probably difficult to get them recorded and released and all that.
Yes, it is. It is. And now I have a label so I can, when I have the time, to get those works out. But as well as I mentioned, it's an accurate representation of the music, not another executive coming in and saying, We like this, we don't like that, can you shorten this, and can you do that, you know?
Because there was – this is a follow-up – there was a question, something that you said in another interview that I heard, about the infamous “Batman and Robin” project, where you prepared, as I understood it, a 50-minute program to be released, but that never happened because of various issues.
That was very sad because the movie wasn't a very good movie. And it had disastrous problems, as opposed to the movie that Joe Schumacher made before that, which is “Batman Forever”, which, for him, it was a very, very successful movie, and also at the box office. And, talking about that, another label called La La Records…
La-La Land Records, yeah.
… is putting out the score of my “Batman Forever”.
A new edition because it's already –
A new edition of, like, two hours of music, and it's going to be wonderful. I worked on it too last week, remastering it, and at least you can hear the complete score.
As I just understood it, founding the record label is a means of staying independent, I mean for you to be independent. Is this also a reason why you work in so many different fields, in theater and opera, or is it to stay sane and have this little independency of the film business, and…?
It gives me another choice because the world of CDs and records is dead. It's like the 19th, 17th century. It's over. However, it gives me yet another choice to put out something that's accurate, like a score, you know? You can read it, you can see it, and that's exactly what I meant. It's not someone else's interpretation of what I had to say musically. So that gives me another choice, as well as going to another producer or another record company that can economically afford to do something like an opera or a ballet, which you have to pay unions and many singers, and it can be quite expensive. But for little projects, it's perfect for me, you know?
I just have to ask a question which I'm sure many people have wondered about, and that is your accident a few years ago, in 2005 when you banged your head against the wall.
Yes.
First of all, do you feel 100% now, or is it…?
No. However, what I had to do with that accident was to... The hard drive was unaffected, but I had to build new software, new canals to get from the hard drive to my mouth.
To connections, yeah.
But nothing was damaged in terms of intelligence or, hopefully, talent.
Has it affected your energy in terms of producing more or less music, or is it…?
No.
So as I understood it, it was just about the speaking. It didn't affect the language itself or the ability to compose music. It was really just mechanical.
Absolutely not. It actually helped my music because it limited my ability to elaborate too much. So it made me more disciplined in terms of how to write. Also, on a negative situation, I don't tell a joke as well as I used to. That works both ways, you know?
You still have the energy to compose and film scores and sponsor music?
Energy! No, no, no. Of course. There’s nothing more difficult than working with Michael Mann and working on “Public Enemies”, which was a very, very difficult job. Because nature is a personality.
I just heard that you're working on “The Transposed Heads”?
“Transposed Heads”, which is a Thomas Mann novella that he wrote in 1947. I just composed ten songs. It's going to be a musical, you know, but a very strange musical.
But I read there was a theatre play in the ’86.
We did a play in the 1980s at Lincoln Center, but we threw it away completely.
So it’s completely new.
Completely, completely new.
Why did you come back to the same...?
Because I love the story. It's a beautiful story. A love triangle with mystical ramifications of one girl and one man with a perfect body and a lot of charisma. And another boy with a philosophical mind and a great, great, great thinker. And she goes back to India and she's given the choice to switch the heads and the bodies. And how the... what's the result? After that, what happens when she has the perfect man, you know?
So it feeds your sense of the grotesque?
It's grotesque. It's grotesque. It's also really beautiful, erotic, and magical realism, and all those adjectives.
You know, when looking at your career, you can see that there are three different film scoring periods, if you will.
You know, the student days, which you talked about, and then the late ’70s and then the late ’80s again. And then you had Grendel and then some more film scores. So you have these kind of periods where you do this or that. Is that... I'm sure that's a conscious thing that you do, to separate yourself from the films in some periods and then come back to it?
I have less energy in composing movies for action movies. I find the actual experience in writing for action movies is very boring for me. I prefer intimate situations.
Is this also the reason why you've never composed a score for comedies?
Did I? Maybe I have.
Comedy for stage, you have probably done that.
No, no, comedies for stage, yes.
But not for film. I don't remember any film comedy.
Comedies…
“Demolition Man”, isn’t that a comedy? [laughs]
That's similar to a comedy… Yeah, yeah, I think so. But, like a romantic comedy, no.
Because it would bore you more.
I don't know. I think the audience expects something more common, more familiar, and I can't provide that. I can, but I won't.
There is an interesting aspect of your compositional technique in which you use lots of clusters of sound, brass clusters and so on. And Bernard Hermann, he once said that it was easier to work with those kinds of small clusters than the big rational melodies. I wonder, is that also your approach to film music, that it's easier with these cluster type sounds than…?
No, I think it depends on the project that you're doing. If you're doing something as intimate like “Frida”, for example, melody is the most important thing. I think in movies like “Alien 3”, for example, the idea of a German word, Klangfarben, it's more important.
Talking about “Frida”, I think it's a good example of an approach that you have that is a combination of an intellectual approach, for example, that you use just a limited amount of instruments that could actually be played around the bed of Frida. And at the same time, it's a very expressionistic music. So is this duality of mind and heart? Or, wow would you describe your approach?
It was less intellectual than it was sensual. If you were a person like Frida who suffered a lot of pain physically because she was in a bus accident and broke her spine and pelvis, and she had to lay in bed for years, you know. I was thinking, you don't want an orchestra laying in bed with you, you know? It's easier to have something like a guitar just with you, next to you, playing beautiful melodies. And so it's a sensuality and it's not intellectual. It's intellectual in the sense that it was a choice. But, as a human being, you feel like it's a better choice to have something that you can take into bed with you.
Also, guitar is a very romantic instrument. It's also associated very much with Mexican music. Not only the standard guitar, but smaller guitars and big guitarron. So It became a very practical way of scoring the movie. Only when Trotsky showed up did I use the orchestra to represent European style.
Can you elaborate a little about your experience with Mexican music? Because you also used it in Juan Darien, I think. And I think you're in a tradition with Copland and Alex North in that way. Corigliano….
Corigliano, no. Actually, Aaron Copland drove his car from New York City to Mexico. I think Mexico and the United States have a very difficult and complicated history. There's a lot of Mexicans living in the United States now because they need work, you know? We embrace them very much because they're good workers. And eventually they're good citizens and good doctors and lawyers, etc.
But we're bordering countries, you know? But the Mexican culture is old, old culture. Ghent only goes back to 900 or 200 A.D. You know, Mexico goes back to 10,000 years of beautiful buildings and cities, and it's a very, very old culture. As an American, we're very drawn to the old, old, old culture. The original American culture, the Mexican culture the Mexican environment involves.
It also applies to the music, the Mexican music.
That's part of European music, Native American music, and Arabian music all mixed.
What's the name of the film in Algeria that you scored? The name escapes me at the moment…
“The Good Thief”.
“The Good Thief”, which combines a lot of the elements from traditional folk music with your more orchestral sound. That seems to be a recurring theme.
Yeah, it was in the south of France, actually.
That's true, yeah.
With Neil Jordan, yeah, yeah, yeah.
With lots of great source music as well, blending with your score.
Yeah, I use a lot of sounds from Algeria and Morocco and North Africa in that movie, but you know, it was only a reaction to the characters in the movie.
I seem to notice this also in “Heat”, where the source cues are combined with your own score in a kind of seamless blend of some sort. You know, Terje Rypdal from my own country, and the Kronos Quartet, and then all the stuff in your music.
Yes, especially that cue, yeah. I actually had a lot of feeling of North African music to that as well. I don't know why, but it just seemed to fit the scene very well. I think it was the feeling of the struggle that the bank robbers had was the same feeling that possibly the Palestinians have for the Intifada or the Jihad feeling of, We have to do this; it doesn't matter who's killed, what's happening. It’s the most important thing which is the goal. And I think that might have affected that score. But that was subconscious.
You studied film directing at NYU, right?
No. I was in the film-directing division, but I was in there to work with other student directors so I can start to understand the language of directors, the language of editors. And so I didn't come off or appear to be a composer that's separate from their art, you know?
Just one final question, and we already talked about it. In terms of what's next, that's always the thing to ask at the end of an interview. We talked about “Transposed Heads”, which is coming, and the “Batman Forever” expansion thing. Is there anything else?
Yeah, there's a song cycle I'm writing for a string orchestra based on seventh- and eighth-century Chinese poetry. Rogan Satt[?] is an American and Indian translator. I love his translation.
What was the name of the...
The poetry? It has various names in Chinese. However, my concept is writing for a string orchestra with just harmonics, and not full string, ordinario type of playing. So the whole orchestra sounds like a memory, like a ghost.
And “Transposed Heads”, do you know where it's...?
I have ten songs composed and it's personal songs. It will be a musical.
But there's no date yet?
No date.
But Julie Taymor is going to...
Yeah, we're working very hard on it. We're going to India in December for five weeks to raise money and to scout locations.
Okay, totally a misconception. I thought it was going to be a stage production again. It's a film.
Film.
Because I was going to ask you if you had any film planned on that, but that is a film. Great, looking forward.
Thank you.