Did you view this as your first major motion picture opportunity?
Yes, because this was a franchise-type movie. It had bigger orchestral forces and involved a great deal of preparation and time. This is a movie where I developed the score over a period of six or seven months. At the end, the director, David Fincher, started changing everything. This was an opportunity for me to really pick up the strains of both electronic and orchestral experimentation and combine them. You can score a Hollywood picture and writing something that achieves the goal of working dramatically, but also doing it in an alternative way.
Why did the film start changing?
They made the director cut it down and take out a half-an-hour or forty-five minutes. My score was done and basically working on every level, which was the involved work I did with Richard Martinez in terms of electronic discoveries and all of the orchestral work and experimentation I did with Bob. This is the first time I really got to experiment with a big orchestra. All those things were working and I was very happy with it and then it all got changed. But it was essentially the same movie.
This is where Matthias Gohl comes in because he has a tremendous ability to edit. He’s not a music editor, but in this particular case he edited the compositions so that, in the scenes that were changed, they fit new cuts. Sometimes I was very unhappy about it because I couldn’t get the whole idea across, and other times it just helped and worked. At the same time I had to recompose new music because they put in new scenes at the end. At the eleventh hour I remember Fox sending out two films to all the theaters: one with one ending and one with another. I had to stay up two nights in a row working on this big finale which didn’t exist before, go back to the scoring stage, recording it in wee hours of the morning, get it off, and then mix it.
Your wee hours of the morning were spent in California at Fox.
We did this on the original Fox scoring stage and I used the original Fox organ in this score, as well as for the last cue. It’s a giant organ.
Were you trying to use the instrumentation to sound like the creature in this film?
Some films use leitmotifs for characters. I wanted to use sonorities, orchestral sounds for themes for environments. If you heard this particular sound and you thought it was a room, you wouldn’t want to enter that room. Sounds were created to create different, other-worldly, and eerie environments. There was a particular instrument called the steel cello, which is a metallic acoustic instrument played with a steel bow. I used that acoustic sound sampled and played in different registers. I felt it was the voice of the alien.
The orchestral sounds, mainly the states of mind, the rooms, the environment that you’re in, I wanted the orchestration to sound very biomorphic by taking French horns, for example, and playing low modulations below the usual register. Different horns were then playing quarter tones and half tone, slow modulations together; it almost sounds like creatures, humans, or biomorphic musical shapes. I wanted everything to feel like it was alive, like a little molecule sucked into some big organism.
Wasn’t there a contrast to that feeling in your score?
In this respect I asked David Fincher, “What I want to do for the little girl is play her theme on the piano,” because in the midst of this strange, eerie world, to have a piano, which is most domestic of all instruments, makes you feel like the planet Earth and yearn for it.
What other challenges did this film present you?
The other difficult thing about “Alien 3” was that ninety percent of the movie was a chase. A composer’s job usually at the end of a movie in Hollywood was to have this chase scene. Well, this was the entire movie. How do you vary and create a sense of pursuit, make being pursued throughout the movie work, without being redundant? That was another challenge that this movie offered to be solved.
So how did you create different textures to get a sense of pursuit?
That’s the definitive question for the creation for most of the score, because most of the score was about chase. One had to create different textures, environmental sound schemes, and orchestrational techniques to achieve that end. Sometimes I’d take the full orchestra and create these boxes where musicians would play certain tonal clusters at a certain particular metronome marking until a particular place, and then it would overlap with other musicians. Or, let’s say woodwinds, violas, cello, and it would create an orchestral sense of mayhem and expectation. At the same time I was creating an electronic score that was doing the same thing. It could be taking samples of the common scissors that you use to cut your hair, or taking a piano and preparing it, or using sounds that would usually be reserved for the sound department, but doing it in a rhythmic and musical way, an organized way that would work within the orchestral sounds so that each chase has a personality to it.