From the studios of all classical FM in Portland, Oregon, this is The Score, the weekly celebration of symphonic music in the movies. I'm Edmund Stone.
In 2003 he received the Oscar and the Golden Globe for his score to “Frida”. He's won Academy Award nominations for “Michael Collins” and “Interview with the Vampire”. Today on The Score, a conversation with Elliot Goldenthal.
I am happy to welcome American composer of orchestral theater, opera, ballet, and film music, Elliot Goldenthal to The Score. Welcome, Elliot.
Thank you very much.
Elliot, before we get to your many and diverse film compositions, let's talk first about two works you created, one for ballet and the other for the concert hall. First of all, can you tell me a little about your ballet Othello?
It's curiously set in a New Orleans-type of atmosphere at the beginning, like a masked ball, and it takes us through all the machinations of Shakespeare. And it's very difficult to do a ballet narrative because Shakespeare's point of view is many-faceted. Every character has many sides, so to explore that musically it was a big challenge.
Elliot, let's talk now about a very different commission you received from the Pacific Symphony Orchestra in 1993.
Yes, Fire Water Paper was composed at that time, the 20th anniversary of the end of the aggressive war fought in Vietnam. And it was meant to bring all sides together, all sides’ point of view in the same auditorium. Soldiers, former protesters, the North Vietnam, South Vietnamese, and it was a very, very strong piece. Seiji Ozawa toured it and took it to Carnegie Hall, Boston Symphony Hall, and, especially moving, he took it to Kennedy Center, and we had a tribute at the Vietnam Memorial Wall there with all the names.
And Seiji actually knew a fellow that died in Vietnam. He was originally a protestor American that moved to Canada to avoid the war, and he lived with Seiji in Canada. And then he decided to come back to the United States, was drafted, and went to Vietnam and died. And so it was very, very, very emotional for Seiji as well.
You were born in New York, and as I understand, you were always fond of music and theater. In fact, I think you played in a rock band and even staged a ballet at your high school, John Dewey High School in Brooklyn.
Actually, that's correct. The ballet was called Variations on Early Glimpses. I wrote it when I was 16. And I didn't want to forget what my early youth was. So it was devoted to looking back as 16 year old looking back on one's life. Sounds very unusual, but that was the subject matter.
Elliot Goldenthal, you attended the Manhattan School of Music and you studied under John Corigliano and then later privately studied with Aaron Copeland. Was this awe-inspiring to you? Or were these giants of composition, as it were, mentors to you?
Yes, it was daunting to be in the company of these masters, but they taught, especially John taught, the old-fashioned way. You come over to his house every Wednesday and it's not in a classroom environment. It's careful mentoring, I would say.
You work professionally with your longtime partner and Tony-winning theater director Julie Taymor. You have collaborated with her for the films “Titus”, “Frida”, and “Across the Universe”. And in 2010, “The Tempest” with Helen Mirren. How does this work for you?
Well, any long time collaborations, for example, with Julie Taymor and Neil Jordan, which I did five movies with, it saves a lot of time because there's an element of trust that goes into that equation. You can say, I have an idea, I would explore something, for example, writing Shakespeare’s “Tempest” score with electric guitars; and the director is apt to trust you more on that decision than if you're just coming into a new relationship with your collaborator or director. They understand what you're capable of musically.
And when you're working together on a mighty theme and a very in-depth theme, such as “The Tempest”, how do you work around any creative differences? Specifically, do you see a melody in a certain character or a motif in a certain person or situation, and perhaps Julie sees it in a different way?
Yeah, usually what happens in this situation, we put it up on the film and both of us, we can see the superior musical idea playing itself out, or inferior one is rejected. You know, you pretty much can feel it when it's on the screen.
You said the key word there, Elliot Goldenthal, ‘rejected’. How do you feel when that happens to you?
That's part of the collaboration process. You can't get upset about that. If you want to write string quartets, that's fine. And chamber music or personal music, I have that side of me also. But in a collaborative medium, one has to take that as part of the job.
Well, since we're talking about your collaboration with Julie, on another Shakespearean-themed project that you both worked together that she directed and you composed for: “Titus” in 1999, which starred Anthony Hopkins.
Yes, that was a very different type of approach to a score. Her notion in that film was to have it kind of a timelessness in Rome. It feels contemporary, yet ancient at the same time. And that's true of Rome when you go there; you're surrounded by these buildings that are thousands of years old. You see a for tourists, Roman soldiers standing in front of these edifices next to Elvis impersonators and next to Vespers going by and people listening to hip hop. It's quite true to life to see a timelessness in a place like Rome.
Perhaps the number-one box office success of you and your partner Julie Taymor was in fact an Oscar-winning film called “Frida”. You won the Academy Award in 2002 for that. Congratulations. That was a very unusual subject.
It was a story about a woman that overcame a really, really serious accident that left her bedridden and covered in complete body cast, practically, and her sense of isolation and loneliness and how she expressed very personal work in her art, and also made it through by accepting, joy is deeper than sorrow and color is deeper than grays and blacks of one's mood. She really overcame all this self-pity.
In “Frida”, you did win the Academy Award for Best Original Score. You were also nominated along with Julie for the best original song, ‘Burn It Blue’. There was so much singing in the movie, whether it was my music, huapango, which is a type of a Mexican tango that's danced by the two girls in the movie. A very sexy dance. And there's other songs that I didn't compose, but sang by Chavela Vargas, who was actually Frida’s lover in real life. And we thought it was a very, very natural thing to end with song. And ‘Burn It Blue’ is a reference to her saying, burn my bed, burn my body. It's basically useless now. That inspiration came from her own statements about herself.
Elliot, we could say that Frida Kahlo was a larger-than-life person. And I think we could also say in a very different way, so is the character Batman. You scored two Batman films, a very different genre for you: “Batman Forever” and “Batman and Robin”.
Well, that's the opposite experience than composing for Shakespeare because, because although the Batman stories of mythic, the characters are very delineated. They don't have twists and turns and they're not as complicated as Shakespearean characters. So therefore the hero has to sound heroic; the zanies has to sound funny; the villains has to sound villainous and it's very clear what you have to accomplish in those types of movies. But it has to appeal to a wide range of ages because you have children going to those movies, have, still, fans of people in their fifties and sixties and seventies who love those type of movies. So you have to appeal to a huge spectrum of audience and that has its difficulty.
Elliot, you've styled your own career on, and have also said that, the lines between traditional concert music and orchestral film scores have become more blurred, which is the way it should be. I'm thinking now in the context of this quote and your work on “Alien 3”. Could you elaborate on that blurred line, specifically perhaps as it applies to “Alien 3”?
Well, “Alien 3” came out of a period in music that was a time when was many camps in contemporary music. Minimalist, 12 tone, neo-romantic and all those terms. But, actually, the score to “Alien 3” owes a lot to the traditions of John Corigliano, Krzysztof Penderecki of Poland, and the techniques of orchestration and the experimentation I did with electronics combined with orchestral sounds. Could have been performed in a concert hall under a different name, like Symphony No. 1, for example, you know, but it wouldn't sound any different than contemporary music written at the time.
So I think it blurred the lines, but I think the concept of delineating contemporary music into categories is getting less and less pronounced now, and the acceptance of fine music scores is really appreciated. I just had a concert in Krakow, Poland and 4,000 people showed up. That was quite impressive to me, you know? It's not like popular music. A lot of my scores are very difficult to listen to.
Well, you are known for sometimes intense experimentation. You use intelligent nuances and you have a willingness to try unconventional techniques such as “Alien 3” and in “Titus”. You are not a follower, Elliot Goldenthal you are an innovator.
Well, that's for other people to say. I have many conversations with dead composers and live composers when I create.
Let's talk now about your long-time collaboration with director Neil Jordan. You've done a number of movies with him. Let's start with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, who made “Interview with the Vampire” in 1994. Now, when you scored this film, it was before the vampire craze of today. And so this is handling a vampire movie from a very different angle, wasn't it?
Yes, it was very different than vampires today, who are more sexual than they were in those days. They didn't have sex and then they lived for a very long time. In that respect, I followed Anne Rice's characters in chronological terms. So it goes from a vampire that sounds like very medieval playing with viola da gamba and medieval instruments and use of Latin and boys choirs, to going into harpsichords, and following history of music along to a development of the piano and the full romantic symphony orchestra to more avant-garde 20th-century sounds, to even reference to the Rolling Stones song, Symphony for the Devil, played at the end. So it had a chronological hook I can hang my musical hat on.
We're getting quite used to now incorporating rock songs and pop songs into film scores. How do you as a composer determine which period songs will work for a film score and which might be a great idea at the time, but don't work in the final mix?
Well that's not my decision. That's usually the decision by the director. In “Titus” I suggested Julie use ‘Vivere’, an Italian song sung in the 1930s, because we were representing a period that was quite reminiscent of Mussolini's period. So that song worked very good in that context.
Okay so now we go from your work with Neil Jordan in “Interview with a Vampire” to a very different film. Many many layers. I'm referring to “Michael Collins” from 1996, which starred Liam Neeson.
Well, it was an odd choice for Neil Jordan to have chosen me because I'm not Irish, and to give me such a big responsibility to express a culture that is different from mine. However, the script did not have many female characters and, as we know, thinking back in time, recently Bernadette Devlin and other women, strong political women, was very prominent in Ireland. So I wanted the whole beginning of the movie sung with the Irish Gaelic language, with female choruses behind all the Easter Rebellion that was fought by men. So it had in it female presence that I felt the movie, not lacked, but didn't feature.
Elliot, you worked on Michael Collins with the director Neil Jordan and then the next year, in 1997, again with Neil Jordan, you scored the film “The Butcher Boy”. Yes, that's actually my favorite movie I did with Neil. It was a beautiful, beautiful script, and an incredible acting by young teens, like 13- and 14-year-old boys. It's just a magical little film, very intimate performances. I highly recommend it if you haven't seen it.
Elliot, let's come up to date now with the 2009 film “Public Enemies”,which starred Johnny Depp. Now, you spent a year composing this score and working closely with Michael Mann, the director.
Yes, Michael Mann and I did “Heat ”in the mid-’90s, and that worked out very, very well. And this one, I think he wanted more Americana-sounding, more coming from the heartland as opposed to “Heat” was very, very, very experimental and contemporary.
Michael, he takes his time to do a project, and there's many changes in the editing and many changes that I have to accommodate along the way. It's satisfying work, but you have to have a good deal of patience.
Wonderful quote I read about you: “Bring Fellini back from the dead and let me work with him.”
If Fellini was alive, I think I would have loved that collaboration.
And before we let you go, another quote, if I may. You once said, “I think that every film score that I do is the best film score I've ever composed.” So my question to you Elliot Goldenthal is, when you look back after more than 30 years and 35 film and television scores, which ones stand out in your mind now?
“Titus” does, “Interview with the Vampire ”does. On the small scores, “Drugstore Cowboy” does; recently “The Tempest” does. You know, and there are sections of all of my scores that I'm very, very, very proud of, but not always the whole thing.
What do you think a movie score does for the film?
Well, it provides interpretation of the element of time. You can suspend a moment that only takes place for a second. You can make it feel like 10 seconds. For example, a kiss. You can have that moment stay with you. Just a glance of a person, certain look in an actor's eyes that only lasts a half a second. You can make it feel like a minute. And just the opposite – long scenes that seem tedious without music. When you add it, it changes the perspective of time.
Also, if you provide melodies that stick with you, you kind of associate the scenes in your subconscious for the rest of your life with that melodic material.
Some music collectors affectionately refer to you as a ‘thinking man's composer’. Do you take that as a compliment?
Of course I do. Sometimes it's nice to think when you're listening to music, but if you're having a cozy meal with your loved one, maybe it's not a good time to play my music, unless it's “Frida”. Frida you can cuddle up to.
I'll take a word for that, Elliot. Thank you for that. In fact, some of that cuddling up and your wonderful long-term relationship with Julie Taymor, which is 30 years now, you say, “I've spent 30 years being happily unmarried.” Julie's late father referred to you as his son out-law. And actually you say, “I think of us as Ozzie and Harriet.”
laughs I was saying that facetiously. We're hardly that. We're very lucky to be in our profession and meeting amazing people globally.
Elliot Goldenthal, it's been a great thrill to talk to you. Thanks for taking time in New York to spend with us on The Score. We look forward to a lot more of your great scores.
Thank you very much.