I'm Rob Licuria, a senior editor of Gold Derby, here with composer Elliot Goldenthal, acclaimed composer, whose latest work is the original score to Julie Taymor's biopic “The Glorias”, in which Oscar winners Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore play the iconic Gloria Steinem.
Elliot, I just think, you know, this film's fascinating because of the way that Julie decided to tell the story based on her book, on Gloria's book. And I want to go straight to how, you've got to balance a whole bunch of periods and locations and styles in this score, don't you? Like, there's a lot going on that you have to unpack when you're composing for this film.
Well, luckily, there's a constant. The constant is the Greyhound bus. You know, there's a bus kind of out of time where it's no particular time. It's set in no particular time, where you have Gloria from childhood to her teenage period, 35 years old, to a mature Gloria having conversations in this bus that's kind of traveling on a mysterious highway throughout her whole life. And that creates a kind of constant. So instead of trying to set all the periods in that bus, I set a kind of – I set the highway. I composed for the highway mainly. So in that sense, I thought of, ‘What is quintessential Americana highway sound?’ [feed cuts out] amplified guitar playing simple, lonely, sustained chords and sustained melodies and with little accompaniment that really set the kind of quick flash of iconic America, big sky country in my mind. It could be the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, whatever. It had a resonance with me.
It also freed me up for the other periods that I'll travel with... 1930s to the present. So I touch on through my own lenses, of course, the periods reflected in that time period, including the present time. But also, it freed me up in not letting grand themes or sweeping themes. I let the music be very, very kind of internal, internal in the beginning of the movie and let it blossom as the movie took off.
Yeah. You know, I'm really glad you said that because, you know, the bus-out-of-time construct, you know, thematically anchors and connects the formative moments in Steinem's life. And I think it could have made or broken the film, so to speak. I'm just wondering, like, how long it took you to realise that you had to make it really timeless? Like, it's very difficult to pinpoint where we're at on that bus. And I think the music has a lot to do with that.
Well, it can even work if all of us are dead, if it's taking place in 50, 60 years from now. You know, it's timeless, completely timeless. And I don't want to repeat myself, but the sense of the Greyhound bus, it was always in America, kind of subconscious, a vehicle of freedom. The freedom-riders in the 1960s for civil rights, they were associated with the Greyhound bus. If you're not too wealthy, you can afford $15 or $20, whatever, and ride and ride. It has a sense of untethered quality. But for Gloria, and the sense of freedom, the history of civil rights is very important. And for her, women's rights were civil rights, and vice versa. So I think the icon of the Greyhound bus is a very, very important anchor for the whole movie.
Yeah, absolutely. And I love the use of the word untethered.
Conversations, conversations between the Glorias as – going back and forth in time is a very, very beautiful thing, because we often talk to ourselves. You know, quite often, I'm talking to friends I had 20 years ago, or, you know, man friends, girlfriends, associates, classmates. What do you think about that tree? What do you think? Look at the sky. Isn't it horrible what's happening in politics, etc. But I have conversations with myself in different periods of life, you know, throughout my life. I don't think it's an uncommon thing. I think it's universal perception of the world.
Yeah, yeah, I love that. And I think that the untethered nature of that is so interesting in this film. The other really interesting thing is the different genres and cultures and periods, obviously, that you're scoring. Were you excited about scoring the India scenes, for example? Because that's something quite different that I wasn't expecting in the film.
Yes. But every period and every location has extreme challenge for me. I didn't want it to sound like a travelogue. So the music had long string passages that could be in any culture. But even in Indian movies about freedom, about travel, not travelogue travel. But it had slight touches of the Indian flute called a bansuri here and there, just to demark location. But the constant again, the amplified guitar, accompanies a Gloria on the train in the middle of India. So in the introduction to the thematic material in India is accompanied by the guitar, American amplified guitar. It kind of sets an American in India as a very, very simple device. When it cuts back to the highway, and you hear the guitar again, it isn't a jarring.
Yeah. And so what you're saying really is the instrumentation allows you to connect these very disparate parts of the film almost subconsciously; that never really occurred to me before. And it reminds me of this as well, because in a Julie Taymor film, we often see flights of fancy, right? It's something that she does very well. What was the most challenging flight of fancy that you had to score in this film?
I think that was after the racist cab driver scene, when she's running on a treadmill. And she slams a taxi door after having a verbal altercation with a very unpleasant racist driver. And she was having so much tension and turbulence in her life at that time, that Julie had a poetic image, imagery of moving cityscapes and sidewalks and roads and yellow lines in the middle of highways, all kind of in an Escher-like depiction of cinematic poetry. But she's running and running and slightly out of breath. And it seemed like she was on a treadmill. So the music there was super frenetic, very nervous string quartet music accompanied by our friend, the amplified guitar, playing long, long lines of against the agitato, the agitated strings behind it.
But it was something about a string quartet, which is very, very personal. And it can be very, almost like a fingernails, talons grip on the back of your neck, because of the strong individual sound of bowing that that string quartet is capable of the strong down bows and the resin on the bow is very prevalent when it's played in such a marcato manner.
I say this to composers all the time, but I just think strings are so evocative, because they're so organic. And I love it when strings are used to evoke emotion like sadness or melancholy. But I also love it when they are used to invoke tension. And that's exactly what I was hoping that you would you would say because that's what I thought you would have it out of that particular scene. It reminds me of this. You and Julie obviously have a very long, rich history of collaboration professionally. What is it about her creative vision that you most admire?
Her fearlessness. She doesn't look at what's commercial, what the audience will like what; she has these very pure ideas about visual content, having extreme storytelling content. The visuals convey content in a way that a great oil painting might. So dialogue is not important in these scenes of flights of fancy. But in general, it's all encompassing when you ask about her. She's a brilliant director of actors. And that's the first thing that you have to discuss in the whole lexicon. After that, after she has this ensemble, and they understand her vision, and she lets them be them as actors, contributors, then the other magical Julie Taymor [feed drops out]
Okay, are you there? Sorry, dropout. We're fine. Yeah, so I'll just pick up from here. If that's okay. I was going to ask you, you know, the film ends in a really poetic way. The last three words of the film are we are we the people? I'm just wondering, ultimately, what did you take away from what the film is trying to say about where we are culturally and politically right now?
Well, we're at the crossroads. In our nation, it was a struggle from the very beginning from Founding Fathers… whether, who is we? Who is we? That's a strange question. Our women part of ‘we’? Are black folks part of ‘we’? Or, what's a ‘we’? And in the 18th century, you know, they're discussing whether black people were actually ‘we’ and then they were considered three-fourths of a human being. And three-fourths was, you know, conceived by the southern slave owners to make their slaves count of as votes, so they can, you know, just pad the election with three-fourths of human beings. So, you know, I think it's an experiment that is being trying to be refined through the years, our nation in the United States. And to make a more perfect union, it takes extremely amount of attention, coddling, a lot of work, a lot of addressing, and constantly tweaking.
And we have to remind ourselves how delicate the experiment of democracy is. It can go like this; it can just vanish, you know, and it can be turned off and not appear for another 200 years, 300 years or whatever. So this this period where, you know, frankly, I think a lot of people in this country, mainly a certain group of Republicans, frankly don't like democracy. They wanted to put the word ‘democracy’ in the same bin as ‘liberalism’ or ‘socialism’ or something like that. They don't like that word ‘democracy’. So it's only a certain section of the people. But I'm afraid it can catch like a brush fire, you know, and, and all of a sudden you wake up a year-and-a-half later and you find yourself a part of a non-liberal democratic nation. And it's very possible. And I'm kind of scared of it.
Yeah. And when a certain part of the population are educated, maybe, they preyed on by their fears. And I think that's what this film is also trying to say, because a lot of the stuff that Gloria was fighting against was about fear of, you know, equality and, you know, equal opportunity and so forth. But we don't have all day because I would love to talk about this with you all day. But I want to get a little bit more superficial before we go just a little bit more. And that's your impressive awards history. So you have four Oscar nominations. And I remember when you were nominated for “Interview with the Vampire”; this is one of my favourite scores. And I was so happy that a genre score was nominated, especially that one. And you won for “Frida”, another Julie Taymor production, for which you also won the Golden Globe. Can you talk us through your highlight from winning those awards and what it meant to you professionally and personally?
Well, the movies with Neil Jordan, “Interview with the Vampire”, “Michael Collins”, it was an almost unreal situation because there was no studio really backing us up. There was no and all of a sudden I got a call and Hey, you nominated for “Interview with the Vampire” or something like that. And it was something out of a Fellini movie or something like that.
I'm born in Brooklyn here. And I didn't ever equate that much media attention, red carpets, people with cameras and, you know, flocks of people. It was out of something, David Attenborough looking at human beings saying, you know, how curious we are, you know? So it was a strange event. And in the same way, I felt very honoured because I met people from editors from Latvia or, you know, South American countries and Asia and as Africa and things that I was very lucky to befriend or meet people in the gatherings. There's so much emphasis on the stars and everything. But, you know, makers of little documentary movies and editors of world cinema – it's a beautiful thing, if you think about it. It's not only the glitz and the Fellini-esque thing, but it's, you know, it's the camaraderie of the arts and sciences.
Yeah, that's really humbling. It's humbling. Yeah, it's all the, what we call creative arts, that I think are so special. And you've always been now known as Oscar-winner, Elliot Goldenethal. And on that note, we thank you so much for your time today. Good luck this award season and congrats on a really great score for “The Glorias”.