So, I’m speaking with Oscar-winning composer Elliot Goldenthal. His music will be celebrated at the film music festival in Krakow, Poland, on May 26, but thanks so much; it’s great to be able to chat again.
Hi. Good, good. It would be nice to [unintellible] Auschwitz, I suppose.
How did this concert come to fruition, and were you approached by the folks at the film music festival?
Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. It came – the wonderful folks at the Polish festival when they visited me they attended the festival in Ghent. That was two years ago, and they were speaking about that festival and how excited they are about, you know, film music in general, and they were mentioning – at the time, they were saying they wanted to look produce – present “Interview with the Vampire” because vampires are worldwide, you know, sex stars now, you know? So I said, Yeah, sure, that sounds great. Tell me about your festival. And it sounded wonderful. And then I thought about my mother on my Catholic side of the family. They all came from that city, Krakow, so I said, It’ll be nice route rise to just walk down the same streets that my grandmother and grandfather, you know, experienced, you know, in their travels, you know? In 1906, whatever, you know?
Yeah, yeah. My mom is from Poland too, so that’s her hometown as well, so –
I’m geneologically, you know, a half-Catholic and half-Jewish. The Catholic side comes from Poland, and the Jewish side comes from Romania, and it’ll be nice to have that experience; just to get a sense, you know, what they saw through their eyes, you know? Other than that, I heard that it’s a university town and it’s a quite beautiful city, and they’re doing so much variety of my music. They’re doing “Titus” and “Interview with the Vampire”, “Alien 3”, and “Batman”, and “Frida”, and so it’s a lot of material that they have.
Right. Did you have any part in arranging or orchestrating the performance? Or are you just going as an audience member?
No, it was a lot of work in terms of calling and picking the right cues and making it into a musical, more of a symphonic sense, a musical structural sense; and just, you know, it had a different function in the cinema than it has when people are sitting there sitting in our audience. So there was quite a lot of attention, and it took many months to put this together.
And what was it like, you know, revisiting all your old stuff? Was it kind of retrospective? Did you dwell on it going, ‘Oh wow, look at this’, you know? ‘I should have done this differently’, or was it kind of a...
‘I should have done this differently’ came up most of the time. But, you know, sometimes you go back and you say, ‘Wow, that’s amazing! I wish I could do that now!’ That’s a gesture of a young man’s work, or, you know, someone that has all that exertion of energy at a certain age, and now I would just be a tuckered out that I try to attempt that. And other things, it’s ‘Oh, that’s way too complicated; I can make it simpler; I can do that gesture easily now’, in, you know, less strokes, you know? So it’s a thrilling perspective, when you think about 20 years of your life, and how you would approach the same problem, you know?
So, I mean, what does it – overall, what does it mean to you personally, to have this being presented, you know, to such a large audience?
Well, whether it’s two people are one people, it doesn’t matter to me. The large audiences – it’s just a matter of, do they have a good sound system or not. It’s not important to me. What’s important to me is, that all this work, all this toil that I expended on these pieces – if they’re musically worth hearing again, that I put it into a playable folios, and have it available for future use. As a very young man, very young boy, I realized that composers are – not comparing myself, but folks like Beethoven and Bach – most of their works performed after they’re dead.
Right.
So at one point, I have to get all this stuff out of the closet and put it into playable shape, in a way that I approve, you know? Otherwise someone else is going to do that for me after I’m dead, and, you know, they might pick the most embarrassing examples of my music. So this way I have at least a little control over the legacy of these pieces after, you know, I’m dead and gone. And, you know, I’m not talking woefully, I’m just talking about librarian stuff, you know?
Yeah yeah yeah, of course. It makes sense. And – but, do you plan on releasing this concert specifically as a CD release, maybe later for people who can’t attend, or...?
No, I haven’t thought about that. I know Poland is recording it. However, the fact that I have these scores gives me flexibility of having events in other cities and other venues.
Oh, that would be great. To go on tour, almost, yeah.
You know, it’s one thing to say, Let me play your score to “Interview with the Vampire”. It’s another thing to have all the parts in all of the selections, you know, in order, and playable conditions, even when you factor in some electronic components and, you know, less common devices used in the orchestras, like boys’ chorus and viola da gamba, you know? Old instruments, et cetera et cetera, added on to the spectrum.
Right.
So these things aren’t that simple as it appears. You know, sometimes film scores are do it completed in layered form. Sometimes the orchestra goes down and then sometimes electronics comes on top of it, or vice versa, and all of those sounds has to be combined into one score, where a conductor can see it all on one page, and advise, you know?
And so, and you mentioned that you’re – in the performance they’re going to be doing “Alien 3” and “Batman Forever”, two scores that I love so much.
A little bit of “Batman Forever”; it’s just like a tasting, almost an encore of “Batman Forever”. They’re doing “Alien 3”; they’re doing “Interview with the Vampire”; “Titus”; and”Frida”. That’s the major focus.
Right. And I just I wanted to ask you a little bit, because I hope you don’t mind reflecting on those scores specifically. I’ve done a couple of interviews recently with some composers, and we kind of discussed the topic of, kind of brand scoring; genre scoring, you know? If you say something like Disney or Looney Tunes that people have associated those with a certain type of sound, and both “Alien” and “Batman” are such, you know, huge franchises, and you came in following, you know, two films before them. And did you feel pressured during those films to conform to a type of sound that had been established, or that – did you feel like people expected your scores to sound a certain way?
In the case of “Alien”, no. Absolutely not. I didn’t listen to the first one, first two. I remember being incredibly frightened watching the first film, and it was a gripping film, and it was – I wanted to run out of the theater, and I was just too scary for me, you know? And Goldsmith’s work was, you know, exemplary and really really beautiful. I didn’t listen to it again, you know? Blocked it out of my mind. And David Fincher; that was his first movie, and he was encouraging me to, you know, have a new slate completely. So I was starting from anew, and he gave me ample time. I composed this for – in a period of a over a year.
Wow.
So I had a lot of reflective time, a lot of time to collaborate with David, who I adored working with. And at the end, things went crazy. The Los Angeles riots had set in; he disappeared for some reason, whether it was the studio, whether it was pressure from the riots, or whatever. And Terry Rawlings, who was the editor at the time, changed the film, and it was almost an hour taken out of the film, so, it was just drastically cut.
Yeah, yeah.
And Joe Roth didn’t like a lot of [unintelligible]’s choices, and he kind of took over and it got quite ugly.
I mean, a lot yeah a lot people criticize it, but I really do love the third film, and, you know, is its own it feels it captures such a claustrophobic sense, and your music helps with that. And –
But if you saw the original, which was practically an hour early, but it went faster, because it had more emphasis on the dilemma of a woman showing up in a prison atmosphere in space where all the men pledged their vow of chastity. So all of a sudden, they vow their feeling of chastity – even homosexual chastity – and then, a very very very sexy woman like, you know that actress...
Sigourney Weaver.
Sigourney Weaver shows up and it changes the whole ballgame, you know? And that became the actual drama of the thing, not the monster.
Oh, yeah. No, yeah.
And when the movie was cut, the monster is part – you know, the monsters didn’t get a good enough part, because it wasn’t really part of the story, essentially. He was just represented by the fact that he was the eventual deadline of everyone; he’s going to kill everyone eventually. He’s going be the dragon, but maybe there’s a dragon’s lair among them; you never know whether they can band together and figure out how to get this dragon killed, you know, right? Maybe Sigourney could do it, you know? And then she became pregnant now with the thing, and whatever. It was a very complicated situation.
Yeah, yeah.
In terms of the answer to your question, in terms of Batman, Danny Elfman, who wrote a very very big orchestral piece, you know, Wagnerian styled piece – and I didn’t listen to it. I didn’t pay any attention to it. I enjoyed listening to it when I heard it in the theatre, I enjoyed the the movies, but the new director had a new batmobile, a new Batman, and everything else was changed, so the one thing I retained was the large orchestra. In my taking of how it was different than the Danny Elfmans. I went into jazz, and went into the zany atonal areas, and things with the character Mr. E, you know? And a different way, maybe more freeing, maybe more eclectic than Danny did, without taking anything away from Danny’s perfect work with, you know, the director.
Yeah, it was funny because he just did a Q&A here in Burbank, and somebody asked him with what his most overrated score was, and he said “Batman”. He says he doesn’t think it’s as good as everyone says it was.
Well, it was effective. He should get full credit for that, you know?
It’s amazing, yeah, I love it. It’s great. I mean, it’s such an epitome that, you know, those Tim Burton films, you know? And your score... I grew – I mean, I was growing up at that time when it came out, and I remember seeing “Batman Forever”. I counted 14 times when it came out, so you’re a big part of my childhood.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah... did you hear the new remastered issue?
Oh, yeah, it’s love – it’s amazing, I love it. It was such a surprise when I got it; I was like, ‘Yes!’, you know?
Yeah, I like it a lot, I like it a lot because it closely represents, you know, what I was after.
That’s good, yeah. So I guess to wrap up – last time we spoke, I asked you if you could score any movie ever made, with no disrespect to the original composer, and you answered “Giant” which is a terrific answer. But now I would like to know, is there any kind of film that you haven’t scored yet that that you would like to? I mean, is there eventually – are we gonna see a romantic comedy by Elliot Goldenthal, or an animated film?
I don’t think you’re gonna see a romantic comedy; I think you’re gonna see a sexy love triangle type of movie. A movie musical that I’m working on called “The Transposed Heads”, which takes place in contemporary New York City, with the love triangle involved, involving one Indian woman and one Indian man from the Caribbean, and has no idea about India, or anything else, going back to India, and all of a sudden like an Alice in Wonderland they fall into a rabbit hole, and they’re all of a sudden there in mythic India, like Mughal India, you know? And they have to confront all the spiritual and magical manifestations of an old old culture, and they return back to New York City at the end, and so it has science fiction as well as romantic love triangles involved. So, and it’s a musical, so it’s 18 sung songs; you know, I lived that slightly in “Frida” where I composed like 3-4 songs, but in using the Beatles music, I lived that in 33 songs in “Across the Universe”, but it’s not original; it’s rearranging the Beatles songs. In this one it’ll be completely my songs and it’s not an easy assignment.
Is Julie directing it? Who’s directing it?
Yeah, Julie’s director it, yeah.
I can’t – that sounds fascinating, I can’t wait. But thank you so much for your time, Elliot. It’s been a great pleasure talking to you again.
Good, good, good, good. It’s nice hearing your voice. Again, I can just picture you in, you know, our last meeting together.
Hopefully we get to do it again, it’s – and I always look forward to your scores and your work, and you’ve been such a big part of my musical inspiration as a screenwriter and such, so thank you again for taking the time.
Thank you. And I’m really looking forward to hopping on a plane and going to Krakow.
I can’t wait to see pictures from the event and everything, so good luck to you and Julie, and have a great time.