Last month, American film composer and Academy Award winner Elliot Goldenthal (b. 1954) was in Belgium to compile an album, “Elliot Goldenthal: Music for Film and Television,” with brand-new recordings of film scores he did over the years. At the 51st edition of Film Fest Gent in Belgium (from October 9 to October 20), the highly acclaimed film composer will receive the World Soundtrack Award Lifetime Achievement Award for his tremendous contribution to the art of film music. Music has been Mr. Goldenthal’s lifelong passion. Influenced from an early age by music from all cultures and genres, he studied at the Manhattan School of Music in the 1970s. His principal (and private) teacher in Musical Composition at the Manhattan School of Music where he received his Bachelors and Masters Degrees was John Corigliano (1972 -1979). His tutorledge with Aaron Copland was on an informal basis roughly from 1980-1985 and not under the auspices of an official setting nor a University. These experiences helped shape his unique approach to composition, which often blends classical elements with contemporary, experimental techniques. He first gained recognition in Hollywood during the late 1980s and early 1990s with high-profile film scores showcasing his distinctive style. His breakthrough film was David Fincher’s “Alien³” (1992); his score was a masterful blend of dissonance, orchestral power, and innovative use of electronic elements that reflected the film’s dark and unsettling tone. This score earned Mr. Goldenthal his first of four Academy Award nominations and established him as a leading composer in the industry. One of his most iconic works is the score for Neil Jordan’s “Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles” (1994). It’s a lush, Gothic orchestral work that perfectly captures the film’s brooding atmosphere and the haunting beauty of its vampiric protagonists. He continued to collaborate with Neil Jordan on four more films, including the period piece “Michael Collins” (1996), starring Liam Neeson in one of his best roles, and “The Butcher Boy” (1997), a film that combines magic realism with everyday reality, and is set in the early 1960s in a small town in the west of Ireland. One of Mr. Goldenthal’s most notable achievements and career highlights is “Frida” (2002), which earned him an Academy Award (category Best Original Score). The film was directed by Julie Taymor; so far, he scored seven of her films. With “Frida,” Mr. Goldenthal offers a vibrant and evocative blend of traditional Mexican music with his own orchestral style that reflected the life and work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, portrayed by Salma Hayek. Beyond film, Mr. Goldenthal has also made significant contributions to opera and concert music. His opera “Grendel” was based on John Gardner’s 1971 novel and premiered in 2006 to critical acclaim. The opera’s score is a complex, multifaceted work that combines orchestral music, electronic elements, and vocal experimentation, demonstrating Mr. Goldenthal’s continued commitment to pushing the boundaries of musical expression. To get back to where we took off, his album “Elliot Goldenthal: Music for Film and Television” was recorded only a couple of days ago at Studio 4 Flagey in Brussels, with the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Film Fest Gent’s music director Dirk Brossé—in the presence of the maestro himself. The album includes a selection from his scores for “Alien³,” “Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles” and “Michael Collins”; also themes from Michael Mann’s “Heat” (1995) and “Public Enemies” (2009), and concert suites that have never been recorded before. The WSA album will be released next October but is already available to pre-order at the Film Fest Gent webstore. The following interview with Mr. Goldenthal was conducted after he finished the final recordings at Flagey and when he took the time to reflect on his work and craft as a film composer. Mr. Goldenthal, when you are recording your music like you did this afternoon, what do you need to feel to be sure your score is exactly how you want it to be? I need to feel clarity. I want to make sure that the accuracy of the parts and the musicians’ notes in their parts are correct because the emotions that I discovered in collaboration with a movie are something I might have responded to six months ago, five years ago, or maybe thirty years ago. All of those responses must be reproduced; when something is reproduced, it must be clear and without mistakes. Beyond that, it’s conveying the intentions. Sometimes, the intentions aren’t emotional; sometimes, they are objective or just in question of loud or soft. And sometimes—every once in a while—it has to do with tangable human emotions, like grief and romance. But not all of the time; there are a lot of degrees in between. Life is filled with many things, including objective observation of things. When we look at a beautiful sunset, a tree, a flower, or the ocean, I don’t feel sad or happy; it’s just an observation. A quality of light, a quality of a shadow, so all of that, including the original intention of the interaction between music and image, has to be reflected in the rendering of the conductor who maybe never saw the movie or maybe has no idea of what my emotion is. But on the page, it has to be correct and it has to be clear. You are a very versatile composer and work on various films and film genres, from Shakespeare adaptations to “Alien” and “Batman” films. How do you approach all those different subjects? Film is a collaborative art, so I’m trying to see what the director and the performances of the actors and the actresses are bringing to the final edit. Sometimes the director’s intentions trigger a musical thought; sometimes you see it in a performance or the set design when it’s set in a certain era of time. Sometimes it’s the speed of the editing. All of those factors play a part in what I respond to. I think it’s a very human thing to be able to have a deep religious experience in a church and then go to a carnival, laugh at comedy, or see the horror of the news on television. It’s all in front of us, it’s all being human, and especially Shakespeare had all of those qualities. That’s why he is such an amazing, timeless, and contemporary author of all time – he’s always contemporary because he takes in human truth and human emotions that are mundane and complex, and he expresses it through words. He’s a gift to all of us. So if I understand you correctly, the director is your most important collaborator? And would it be correct to say that, along with the script and the characters, they define your score? I don’t think they define it. They invite me to be a part of that vehicle of communication. I try to tell the story that the collaborators want to tell, and that includes myself. But I’m not the only one. When did you first realize during your formative years that you wanted to write film scores? It was a part of my life. Other composers in the nineteenth century had other things like the theater. [Felix] Mendelssohn, for example, was responding to Shakespeare and a theater experience. [Pyotr Ilyich] Tsjaikovsky resonated in many cases with the dance theater. There wasn’t any film then, but any composer always looks for things where they can contribute to general life because it’s there. It’s a means to express what you do naturally. A cinematographer is always on the set, a set designer is always on the set, but film composers usually aren’t, I suppose? Sometimes I’m given the opportunity to read the script first, and then being invited to the set—and sometimes not. Sometimes I come in two composers down the line if they didn’t work out. With the films I did with Neil Jordan, Julie Taymor, Joel Schumacher, they always invited me to the set and I read the script. When David Fincher was filming “Alien³,” he also invited me to the set. And in many cases, like with “Titus,” I had to compose things before the movie was shot so that the choreographer on the movie could take the music and choreograph his scenes. The opening of “Titus” was scored before it was shot. With “Frida,” the tango scene was rehearsed before the movie was shot. So it had to be composed before it was shot because it had to be rehearsed and choreographed in advance to the movie. Film composers often work at night in their music studio. You too? Yes, sometimes. It can also be hands-on from the very beginning. But I like the idea of working all night long. That’s what I do. In my music studio, I have everything I need: pencils, erasers, a computer, a piano… You just mentioned “Frida,” which earned you an Academy Award. Did your phone explode after the Oscars because everybody wanted to work with you? No, absolutely not. No. I was surprised. I don’t know why… I was not upset but certainly a little surprised. I thought—like you—that a lot of offers could come in, but they didn’t. Before “Frida,” you scored lots of films during the 1990s, and after “Frida,” your film output slowed down considerably… … I guess because I won an Academy Award [laughs]. I don’t know. I had four Academy Award nominations, and with “Frida,” I was lucky to have won. After “Frida,” I composed Grendel, an opera, and for me, operas take time. It took nearly two years to compose, so that kept me very busy in 2003, 2004, and even 2005. What is the difference when you’re writing a film score, compared to an opera or ballet? They’re all very different. They all have different demands. In ballet, you have to think about the endurance of the dancers; if you write a duet or a solo, you have to keep into account that you can’t write a thirty-minute piece. So it has limitations built into that. In opera, it’s the same thing; you have to be careful about the range of taxation of the singers and the orchestration so it doesn’t cover the voice. You have to be careful with the balance between the voice and the orchestra. In musical theater, if you’re writing tunes, they have to be melodies that people can follow—whether you’re [George] Gershwin or Kurt Weill, the melodies must be applicable to the audiences. In classical composition you can be more adventurous, you can even be avant garde. So each type of medium has a different set of problems and a different set of obstacles that you need to understand. Would you consider yourself a film composer, an opera composer, a theater composer…? I’m a composer. I remember composers like [Dmitri] Shostakovich, for example, who wrote about forty film scores, and another film composer, [Erich Wolfgang] Korngold, wrote something like twelve operas, I think. So scoring a film is another way of expressing yourself. Now, sadly, there are less films being made, less venues, less movie theaters since Covid. People don’t attend movies like they used to unless it’s a big blockbuster like Marvel comics or something. There are less complicated subjects being limited to television, and that’s something else; that’s another art that’s also to be respected. Last year, one of the issues that led to the Hollywood strike was the possibility of using artificial intelligence to generate scripts or to replicate actors’ likenesses. Is AI also a concern among film composers? I think artificial intelligence will take work away from composers, but I don’t think it will do very well in melodic situations because a melody is a very difficult thing, even for human beings. Maybe copying other composers’ styles in action movies might be successful as a way of not hiring composers. But the audience might be upset as the score does not have a personality, you know. How can you account for personality – for example, the personality of Bernard Herrmann or Nina Rota? You can’t quantify, you can’t put it in digital numbers, or reduce it to digits. A personality in terms of working with a director or a writer, those things I don’t think AI is capable of doing because it’s way too complex and way too simple at the same time.