Today's interview is with “Interview with the Vampire” composer Elliot Goldenthal, who joins Matthew Sweet from his home in New York.
[“Batman Forever’s” ‘Fledermausmarschmusik’]
This isn't just music. This is ‘Fledermausmarschmusik’ music. It's not by Johann Strauss, but it does open with a similar sense of rein-pulling and skirt-gathering that you get at the beginning of Die Fledermaus, his operetta about the champagne-swashed Viennese rake in a bat costume. But then it takes us somewhere else with the bat costume intact: Gotham City, where Val Kilmer wears the pointy ears and where this week's guest on Sound of Cinema is making the music. He's Elliot Goldenthal, a composer who makes Bruce Wayne's dual identity look a bit lazy. He's a pupil of Aaron Copland. He's written music for ballet and opera. He's written for the concert platform. And he's been writing for the screen since 1979 with a movie starring Andy Warhol.
All that glitters is not Goldenthal, but all our playlist is today, which means you'll encounter the vampire Lestat, the director of intelligence of the IRA, and Shakespeare's most violent hero. Let's bring Elliot on, though, with a score that begins with a borrowing from Verdi put in the service of Sylvester Stallone. This is “Demolition Man”.
[“Demolition Man’s” ‘Actions, Gun, Fun’ et al.]
Music from “Demolition Man” by Elliot Goldenthal. And I'm delighted to say he's with us. Welcome to “Sound of Cinema”, Elliot.
Hello, Matthew. Thank you so much.
Now, in interviews, I sense, you often talk yourself down. ‘I'm a dum-dum,’ you've said, and you talk about how you can't drive and that music is the only thing that you can do. So, how did you discover this facility?
Yeah, and now I have my doubts about music also. But it's kind of true. I can't imagine myself doing anything else. But I always feel quite inadequate about anything I do, practically. But music sort of saved me in a lot of ways. Brooklyn, where I came from, was a lower-middle class, working-class area. My father was a painter; he painted ships and houses. And my mother was a seamstress. And that was a good life for them, but I wasn't cut out in that way. So, I kind of disappeared in my old private world of music, and I just loved every moment of it.
You studied under Aaron Copland and under John Corigliano. Can we talk about Copland first?
Yes, yes. Let me preface it by saying my official teacher was John Corigliano. And I studied with him from 1972 to 1977 privately every Wednesday through the Conservatory Manhattan School of Music at the time. And Aaron Copland was a lucky episode in my life that lasted about two years, where I had a girlfriend at the time that was actually working at his house, being all-round assistant to Aaron. So, apparently Aaron needed another assistant to be there with him at breakfast and dinner, cook for him, clean the house, do the laundry. I said, Oh my God, it's too good to be true.
So, some summers in between my Conservatory classes, for months and months I would just sleep at his house and be with him all day, listen to his music, have him review my compositions, go into his basement and looking at these old scores that he wrote in the 1920s when he was a student of Boulanger, early sketches for his first piano concerto. And I would sit there with Aaron playing four-hand compositions just through the day, every day for the months and months in a period of two, three years. And I learned quite a bit, but he didn't function as a classroom teacher, but John Corigliano did.
I want to play a cue from a score of yours that calls back to Copland. It's for the 1994 movie “Cobb”, which is a sports biopic starring Tommy Lee Jones. ‘Echo of Appalachian Spring’ in there perhaps.
The nature of the story, the drama, was very Americana, but I wanted that Americana to also collide with something that was very dissonant in the character of Cobb. He was a vicious racist. He was a baseball player that had a mean, mean streak in him. So that collision of the straightback Appalachian, churchgoing attitude against this raucous, bad, bad, no goodnik kind of a character that was Cobb, I wanted to represent it in music. And it gave me a golden opportunity to delve into that Americana world.
‘The Homecoming’, a cue from “Cobb” by Elliot Goldenthal. Elliot, your first film credits are from the late ’70s, and they're Andy Warhol movies produced by Uli Lommel, an old associate of the director Fassbinder. “Cocaine Cowboys”, I was watching this yesterday.
I'm sorry about that.
But the score, the title theme, it begins with something jagged and rather serialist, I think, and a choir, and then we go into very groovy disco bongos. And we've got Andy Warhol and Jack Palance in the cast. And I'm thinking, you know, ‘Bliss, was it in that dawn to be alive.’
It was bliss for me to have spent time with Aaron Copeland and John Corigliano in that period. But the other movie in that period, “Blank Generation” with Richard Hell, that was a slightly more serious movie. And it shows a lyrical side of my composition that, you know, hasn't changed much. So you can hear bits of more of a mature style in that movie, you know, “Blank Generation”.
Let's talk about the orchestra and what you do with it, and get a bit of your score for “Alien 3” going under our conversation. This is a cue called ‘Candles in the Wind’. And I wonder, when you did this for David Fincher, you'd spent a good few years working with small ballet companies, hadn't you? Hadn't you, in theatre companies? Am I right to think that a score like this is, in a way, putting into practice ideas that might have been too expensive to realise in that world where you were working with more modest resources?
Yes. At the time the dance avant-garde scene in New York was very healthy. But it was, as you said, very very small ensembles. But with that project I was free to have my orchestral imagination be more satisfied. Fincher wanted me to compose the whole score electronically, from beginning to end. And when he heard it, he liked the electronics not to mimic an orchestra; to have more of a music concrete style of electronic music. And then Fincher fell in love with the electronic experimentations. I was dipping gongs into water and recording it, and also prepared pianos, and experimenting with alternate percussion and things like that. But he liked it so much, he wanted the orchestra to sound like that. So it was a challenge also to orchestrate the electronics. So the borders were blurred, so you're not sure what is acoustic and what is electronic.
I think that another thing that satisfies you is the religious text, I think. A bit of the Catholic mass. Alien 3 begins with a boy soprano singing ‘Agnus Dei’. Demolition Man has ‘Dies Irae’, and” Interview with the Vampire” has this kind of thing going on as well. Is this your mother's background speaking here?
Well, my mother wasn't very religious; however, when the Catholic holidays floated around, I had to show up in church, but I did love the sound of the Latin. But it was a very specific case in each case. In “Alien 3”, I thought that iconography, the depiction of Ripley the character at the end, having her arms in a cross-like position and falling into the lead, it was a very sacrificial act. And the people on the prison ship was also sacrificed. They were all lambs of God. So ‘Agnus Dei’ was, I thought, very appropriate for the feeling.
And what about “Interview with the Vampire”? Why did you want that musical text, those references in that score?
Well, I did change the Latin text from morte eternum – I guess I'm a heretic because I did change those lines to say, Save me from everlasting life, as opposed to the Catholic text, was, Save me from everlasting death.
Elliot, you've made five movies with Neil Jordan. Can we hear how you met?
For some reason, the previous composer, Fenton, who was doing “Interview with the Vampire” –
George Fenton?
Yes. A very, very good score, very, very wonderful composer. And I think he was involved with something else so he couldn't revisit the score with Neil Jordan, so he had to replace the score. At the time, I was in Martha's Vineyard working on something with my wife, Julie Taymor. And Neil, he said, what are you doing? Are you available? But the bad news, I only had like three weeks, really, in which to compose, which was a challenge. But it has some advantages because the director can't really revisit and change things in that compressed amount of time. It was just go, go and do it, you know, a reel a day practically.
Do you like working like that? Do you prefer all the editing and directorial decisions to have been made before you turn up?
I don't, and I do. I do because my first impressions are usually very good. When I have to rework and rework and rework, I'm not as happy with the results. However, I also like to be in the early, early stages. For example, in “Michael Collins”, when I first read the script and I said, Neil Jordan, The only thing that's missing for me is a strong female presence in the script. Would I mind if I set some of the literature and poetry of the Easter Rising Rebellion in Irish and have it sung by female choruses? He liked that idea a lot. So that's other side of the coin where Neil was generous enough to invite me into the process early, you know?
It's such a rich and complicated score, “Michael Collins”. It's the biopic, we should say, of the IRA Director of Intelligence. There's some radical choices of instrumentation on this score. You know, we get those voices that you mentioned. We get pipes. We get hammered dulcimers. Tell me about the choice of instruments. There's some rare combinations I hear in that score.
Well, it's an odd choice to pick a non-Irish composer anyway. And that is an honor for me to somehow represent one aspect of one culture. But also I realized anything I do is not authentic. And yet I have an advantage of being objective. So I wanted to choose instruments that weren't particularly associated with Ireland, but more familiar with my association with the Irish diaspora. For example, the hammer dulcimer in the hills in Kentucky. I like the color of the hammer dulcimer and the facility it had. It can be very, very – during Boland's death, for example, it could be a very mournful instrument. Not just light and fresh air-sounding, so to speak.
Elliot, sometimes when I'm talking to composers about their relationships with directors, I do find we almost start discussing them as though they are romantic ones. We can't really avoid this with Julie Taymor, can we?
No, but it's a different kind of romance. You have a romance, romance, a love affair with a person, but also you have a separate romance in search of beauty in your work. And I had the luxury of meeting Julie before any ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ took place. It was – we worked together four years in the theater before anything approaching romance occurred. So that's the way I really know how to have a give-and=take with Julie and vice versa. Also, she has a compendium of every failure that I ever did. So she knows.
I hope she doesn't remind you of these too frequently.
Oh, absolutely she does!
You've scored many films for her. Has she ever asked anybody else to score a film of hers?
No, not films. No. Theater, yes, at times. My favorite was “Titus” from Titus Andronicus. We did four or five Shakespeare's in the theater before we actually did “The Tempest”, for example, or “Midsummer” on film. And “Frida” is another world altogether. She was asked to do that by Miramax at the time. And that's another story –
That’s the biopic of Frida Kahlo, the artist.
Yeah, that was an anomaly in my career because I really was asked to write a lot of melodies, a lot of tunes, and I really loved it.
We're going to hear cues from films that you've made with Julie Taymor 20 years apart from “The Glorias”, released in 2020, inspired by a book by Gloria Steinem; and we're going to hear music from “Frida” as well. Now, I've seen footage of you with the star Salma Hayek in, I think, your apartment with Julie Taymor. And Hayek is singing songs by Kahlo's partner Diego Rivera that we hear on the soundtrack. And I think it looks it looks great fun. I think a few people in the room may have had something to drink. I'm not sure. And Hayek is really giving everything. And you're standing behind her waving your arms. It looks like you're having a very good time.
Maybe I was looking for my beer at the time.* Now, it was great fun, but we were down to brass tacks. And Salma is a very, very serious person when it comes to work. And her mother was an opera singer, so we could talk about the operas. We could talk about Mahler and things like that. So she was very, very serious. And it looked like it was more fun than it was. Julie was very, very mindful of the clock and mindful of that she needed to get that scene covered musically.
So that is slightly deceptive, is it, that film?
It's deceptive. However, we had a wonderful time working on that movie.
Now, Elliot, we often ask our guests to choose a classic score of the week, one that means something to them, is important to them. But this might be our opportunity to talk about your teacher, composer of great film scores, too, John Corigliano.
Yeah, my association with John Corigliano was a very enriched charm for me because I met him when I was seven. My brother was nine years older than me, and he was in a high school choir singing John Corigliano’s first piece, Fern Hill. And they were going to the same high school together, and my brother introduced me to this young man, John Corigliano. And he said, you should study with this person. He must have been 18 at the time. And finally, when I went to the conservatory in my twenties, I met him again. It was amazing.
I studied with him for seven years every Wednesday at his house. And the lessons was quite exhaustive and very thorough, sometimes lasting two or three hours. He was a wonderful – is a wonderful – teacher. He will always be my teacher in that sense. And he always told me that cinema is a very healthy thing; you know, don't shun it.
His work has found a space on the screen for really very serious music, music that we should properly think of as avant-garde.
Yes, and one of those films that was very influential to me because I was still a student was “Altered States”. And, in that film, he got to use the orchestra in the tradition of the Polish avant-garde composers – Penderecki, for example – and a kind of freedom. I would say the freedom of the notation and the orchestration led to a very refreshing, almost visceral, pungent way of scoring a movie with bends and French horns, slides and violin, tight harmonies and clusters in the brass and strings that I never heard before in a film score.
Elliot, we're going to play out the program with music from “Titus”, you and Julie Taymor's adaptation of Titus Andronicus, which I know is an important one for you. You said it's a summation of your career as a film composer up to 1999.
Well, it is because Julie's depiction of the movie was set in no time. It could be ancient Rome, fascist Rome, 1990s Rome, all in one. It was very true to life to me. When I spent time in Rome, there I was in front of the great edifices of Rome, even the Colosseum, and seeing Elvis impersonator right in front, and motorcycles. It was an unbroken flow of time that I really loved. I think Julie's work on “Titus” is exemplary in terms of bending time and collapsing time and playing with that malleable aspect of time that I tried to capture in many of my cues.
The whole Latin in the opening scene was actually translationfrom the original Shakespeare opening. It gave me the opportunities to work on avant-garde jazz, electronica, punk rock. It was a dream palette to work on.
How important is film composition to you now? If “Titus” was a sort of summation of what you had done up to the end of the 20th century, is it important to you in the 21st as it was then?
I'm more selective now. You know, I'm going more back to my roots. I wouldn't say roots completely because theater has been just as important to me as cinema – work with my opera Grendel, my ballet Othello. Theater takes up a lot of time, and I enjoyed it. I enjoy being in the room with live actors. It's a very healthy thing, especially in England, where big movie star-types have no problem investing their time between the exit signs of a movie theater.
Well, you're staying live. We're in the world of the pre-recorded sound and the pre-recorded image, and we're going to play out with your score for “Titus”. I'm just going to tell the listener that next week we take our text from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's new score for “Challengers”, and then I'm going to say, Elliot Goldenthal, thanks so much for being our guest on “Sound of Cinema”.
Thank you so much.