Elliot Goldenthal, it's so great to have you with us. How are you? Pleasure, Tim. It's really great to be here. Well, what we are celebrating is, specifically, we have a brand new album with the Brussels Philharmonic conducted by your good friend and colleague Dirk Brossé, which ties in appropriately with this magnificent award, the Lifetime Achievement Award, which you will receive at the famous Ghent World Soundtrack Award Festival, the 16th of October. What a tremendous thrill. And you are recording this new album literally – just a few weeks ago, weren't you, in Brussels? Yes, it was very intense. A few days, five to seven hours a day, with sectional rehearsals before the body of the evening. I think rehearsal started at eight o'clock in the morning and I don't think we emerged out of that concert hall until eight in the evening. So it was very intense. Whenever you're trying to pick all the cues, I mean, obviously your body of work is so tremendous and it must have been actually hard to narrow it down just to – you got, there's 11 tracks on this new album, which is tremendous. It's released via Silva Screen with the World Soundtrack Awards’ own label. Some of these suites are very lengthy, which is terrific, but there's also – in a sense, it's programmed so well because there's also lots of time to breathe. There's some nice cues, you know, shorter cues from the likes of “Frida” and also “Sphere”. Was this quite carefully discussed with Dirk and your team for this listening experience? It was carefully discussed, but you look back and say, I wish I did this; I wish I didn't do that. But I assure you the rehearsals and the recordings came down to the absolute millisecond, and they have a big clock in the back of the stage and it was clicking, clicking, clicking until the last downbeat. And we finally finished what we set out to do after slashing a lot of work that we originally intended to do. So a lot of the – some of the work is excerpted, but I think the orchestra played magnificently and, you know, the acoustics in the hall there was meant for radio broadcasts and radio broadcasts with a live audience. And the ghosts in there from the 1920s and ’30s and the luminaries that conducted there, Leonard Bernstein and Stravinsky, and it had a great feeling. And I'm very, very, very happy with the recording. Sounds really – it sounds live. It sounds like you're sitting there and listen to the orchestra on a live concert. 100% I agree. It's a lovely rich recording. And, you know, whenever we think of “Batman Forever”, which is this lengthy 21-minute suite, the Gothic suite, the ‘Grand Gothic Suite’, I should say, which I think you devised about 10 years ago. Is that right? Am I right? Because there's been a couple of suites over the years. Yeah. Yes, it was originally going to be a 40 minute suite and I cut it down to 20 minutes. So there's a lot of music there, and I was going to combine “Batman Forever” and “Batman and Robin”. But I narrowed it down, no practical purposes, but I'm very happy with the sequence at this point. Yes, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I'm guessing the 40 minute version must have had the ‘Under the Top’ cue, which is phenomenal. [laughs] Where did you hear that one? Well, you know, I have this always by my side the trusty original score. I mean, the cue’s outstanding. Oh! I see. Actually, the reason I said, Where did you hear that? Because it was Joel Schumacher, the director. He said to me, I don't want anyone leaving the theater saying it was under the top. So I said, I see what you mean, Joel. It definitely isn't. And in a sense poignant, of course, Joel Schumacher is no longer with us, but there is, and I'm sure you know, because, you know, you're very tuned in to the ether out there, there is talk that Warner's are going to do this Joel Schumacher cut of “Batman Forever”. You know, there's kind of a petition and apparently Warner's are interested in presenting it. Do you know much about it or are you kind of under embargo or something? No! [laughs] I don't know. All I can say is Joel had a very, very different take on the whole series, which, it was more of a comic, more of a disposable culture kind of thing. Like, you buy a comic book on Saturday, you throw it away on Monday. And it was in that sense. It's really, really wonderful. I knew an artist that used to create this amazing work on the beach of Coney Island. He was a folk artist and he used to create this amazing things. And the waves just used to take it away, you know, and it had a sort of, like, fragility to it, you know, no matter how beautiful and how worked out it was, you knew on the next tide, it would be gone. And there's something about Joel's films, talking to that, don't take yourself too seriously. It's, you know, enjoy it, enjoy the ride, you know? Yeah, totally. And that obviously very inspirational for you as an artist and a composer, because, you know, you really had this fantastic kind of energy. And obviously Joel Schumacher was a very energetic director, so you must have fed off that vibe. And when we're talking about the album, because I mentioned about the programming is excellent. And, you know, just after we have those brilliant, you know, Tim Pitts and the wailing French horns at the end of “Batman Forever”, kind of bookending the suite perfectly. Then we have this beautiful, elegaic homecoming cue from “Cobb”, which is kind of, lets us all breathe. There's a beautiful score with Tommy Lee Jones, a great performance with “Cobb”. It gave you a real, I suppose, a rare chance to write in that kind of Americana vibe, would that be right? I mean, you haven't had a chance over the years to do much of that, have you? No, actually not. And some of the material was based on an old Baptist, Southern Baptist hymn. And there was a pool filled with blood where sinners go and get absolved. So it was a very, very, very dark hymn. But the material let me have a conversation with the Aaron Copeland legacy that I knew very well because I knew Aaron very well. And it was a joy to work on that particular project. When thinking about working with directors, as Neil Jordan, you know, what a collaboration. You had such a fruitful time working with him. “Interview with the Vampire”, “Michael Collins”, and “The Butcher Boy”. And I know “Michael Collins” and ‘Butcher Boy”, you didn't have room to put these on the album, but I think it'll be nice just to digress quickly on “Michael Collins” because I know there was a wonderful event in Dublin a couple of years ago where RTE National Symphony Orchestra actually kind of commissioned this live-to-picture event. It was a spectacular evening, yeah. They did ‘Grand Gothic Suite’, “Michael Collins” and “Interview with the Vampire”. Yeah, it was tremendous. Was Neil Jordan there by any chance? Was he able to go? No, no, he was working on another movie, but his wife Brenda attended, yeah. Oh, brilliant. Fantastic. And I would urge listeners to check out, if you go to Elliot Goldenthal’s website, you'll be able to hear that concert. It was a great night, but the first note was very, very tenuous because the soprano who was singing for the Sinead O'Connor part that I wrote for the movie, the synthesizer part, which, it was only very little synthesizer, maybe two bars in 20 minutes, but it didn't work. And that she had to get her pitches from that to open up the evening. So a couple of pitches harkens to Charles Ives or something like that. But she got a footing and did a brilliant job. And I really recommend listening to the Coho concert. It was really brilliantly done. When we're talking about the likes of “Frida” and “Titus”, the, you know the Julie Taymor connections. Now there's two cues. ‘Arrows of the Gods’, this is track six on the album. You know, that's a nice punchy, short cue, but then you have the grand finale straight after. I mean, this is a film which I would urge a lot of people to watch and certainly to revisit, but it's one of these scores and motion picture experiences, which really lends itself well to the, you know, the power kind of inherent in your music and I suppose your style. I think that movie takes in most of my some cinematic styles up to then, including “Drugstore Cowboy”, the more grand movies, the action movies, the more introspective cues from other movies. It had an opportunity because there was no set time, no chronological specificity in the movie that I was able to skate around in, in different personal styles. And Julie, we presented that work on stage originally with only two trumpets and tape. And we did that, you know, a theatrical version of “Titus” about two years before the movie. So I was very familiar with Shakespeare's text and, and the ins and outs of the, the dialogue and the movie was very different, but we were very familiar with the work as a towering work of Shakespeare. Somewhere along the line, it got maligned in the 19th century. And I really recommend that movie and, and his play. You know, we're very fortunate to have your music represented very well on disc, whether it be from Sony Classical, and there's been some expanded versions as well over the years from La-La Land Records and some of the specialty labels, which is always good. You know, whenever we think of the “Alien” saga, we – remiss of us not to chat about Alien, or “Alien 3” in your case, because it was recently very nicely and effectively acknowledged by Benjamin Wallfisch in the latest “Alien: Romulus”. I don't – have you seen the latest, “Alien: Romulus”? I mean, do you, do you go out to cinema much or are you not? No. No, not recently because I was too busy, but… No. O.K. Well, there was a slight reference to the beautiful adagio you wrote for “Alien 3” and this tremendous suite on the new Brussels Philharmonic album, which is, it's just under 10 minutes. You know, builds and builds and we have the, the big adagio, which you'll remember listeners will recall with Sigourney Weaver, you know, jumping into this kind of array of fire, although there's two different versions, because I think there's a deleted scene of, I think, a chest bursting in one of the scenes, which I think they did away with, didn't they? Yes, that’s right. And it was contentious, it was two versions sent out, two reels sent out the on the week of – before the premiere. And they didn't decide to the last minute, you know? I know, it must be tied to the wire. It's very Christian ending because she's in a Christ-like pose and she's sacrificing herself to save mankind basically. And it was, it was something that ties into the, also on the album, the Agnus Dei, the sacrificial lamb of God, so to speak. It was, you know, you think about that end in the beginning; the child vocal in the movie relates to that. It's so powerful. And when there have been obviously recordings of this, I mean, the original recording in Hollywood is just incredible. There had been a few recordings over the, over the years. What I love about this new process for the Brussels Philharmonic recording with Dirk Brossé is thankfully those, those very big bass drum kind of, you know, timpani hits, dom dom dom, because in some of these recordings they get totally lost. And so with this, it is wonderful to hear, you know, with the Adagio “Alien 3” cue, because as you know, with it, with any cue, there's certain moments, which really – they have to, you know, be prominent, and those timpani drum hits are so, so key. I'm just wondering whenever you were recording that, was that kind of a directive, or did you go back and forth at all in getting that right? It's a funny thing about percussion. It changes in each hall. So sometimes it's not out of conviction. And sometimes it's the, the acoustics of the place. I remember recording in Abbey Road, the orchestral studio on the first floor; it’s very difficult to have the percussionist play at full volume because it overtakes the orchestra. So the acoustics favor percussion there, and each room, it's a different response and in Belgium, I guess it was just enough for you. You know, if it was too much for me, I had no choice because he can't take the percussion away when it's played live with a full orchestra. This is true. I’m very pleased with it. To finish the album appropriately, we have the 12 minute suite from “Final Fantasy”. Here's, in a sense, a perfect bookend because, historically speaking, this was a really seminal score in your career and also when thinking about Dirk Brossé, wasn't it, thinking back? Absolutely. Dirk conducted my music before in the Ghent Festival and I thought it was perfectly suited for that type of score. He was very comfortable with click tracks. He was very comfortable taking off the earphones and just conducting with his heart, so to speak. And he's amazing under the gun and the amount of attention and resilience he has in a high-pressure recording session is magnificent. And the London Symphony at that time was just tremendous. And this recording that I did in Belgium is just wonderful, and Dirk rose to the task again. You know, the Symphony Orchestra is amazing. Philharmonic, I should say. Yeah, no, absolutely. And there was a concert actually in London just a couple of months ago which highlighted some of the best scores the LSO recorded over the years. And rightly so, “Final Fantasy” was included. I don't know whether you had a chance to... No, I don't think I knew about it. It was done at the Barbican in June. Oh, yes! Right, right. “Final Fantasy”, you know, that was performed. So that was always a thrill. And thankfully, you know, whenever we think obviously away from film, you have done so much in theatre and on stage. So it's great to see the music for film, you know, be performed in concert so much, whether it be, you know, in Denmark, it's Danish. And of course, we just talked about London and then you're going to have a tremendous showcase as well in October at the World Soundtrack Awards, in addition to, of course, your award. But there's also Philippe Rombi will be there who you know well. And there's a tribute to James Horner So there's lots to look forward to at the World Soundtrack Awards this year. So I'm sure you are looking forward to being back with all your friends. The festival is a beautiful thing to behold. And if you get a chance to go – every year is just amazing. And when you leave the theatre just to be in that city, Ghent, it's just it's a miracle, you know. Oh, yeah. A beautiful atmosphere. And the famous Sala pub, which everyone loves to be there to 5 a.m., I think is… [laughs] Some wild evenings there that involve fisitcuffs. Oh dear. Right. Is that one for off the record? Maybe I should stop recording. Well, Elliot Goldenthal, thank you so much for chatting with us. “Music for Film”, the brand new Brussels Philharmonic Album conducted by Dirk Brossé, featuring some of Elliot's fantastic music is available on Silva Screen. And October 16th is the Red Letter Day where Elliot will receive his award at the World Sign Track Awards in Ghent. Thanks so much, Elliot, and we wish you all the best.