What brought you to this project?
Lindsay Law from The American Playhouse and David Henry Hwang who was the writer. I knew Lindsay Law from Julie’s “Fool’s Fire”; he used to be the head of The American Playhouse and he was one of the producers on this film with the Goldwyn Company.
This seems like a calm score with a far-eastern influence. Was this a much-needed departure from the darker style of scoring you had been doing?
Yes. There’s also a very beautiful, delicate love story here. This takes a line that goes back to the theater piece “Transposed Heads” because I scored it with Indian clay flutes called bonsary. I had already experimented with these instruments in “Transposed Heads”, so I picked up that string to use those instruments in “Golden Gate”. From all the things I’ve done, this is one of my favorite little scores.
This score is very exotic, sounding like it’s from another culture. Was this your intent?
I wanted to use jazz elements, orchestral elements, and Asian sounds – not necessarily Asian music – and combine them. It’s just like the way it is when you’re in San Francisco; you feel the grandness of the Golden Gate Bridge, you see the beauty and glory of the hills and the ocean, you hear jazz, and you also feel a sense of Asia when you’re there. This is really my tribute to San Francisco.
“Golden Gate” was very moody and mysterious. Were you sensitive to the moods this film created?
Without a doubt this goes with the job. My approach dealt with the delicate relationship between the stillness of Zen Buddhism, in the sense of non-activity, and at the same time the stillness, beauty, and grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge. There’s a connection somehow between a Zen concept and the architecture of the bridge that turns me on a lot. Also, the feeling that San Francisco has a kind of a female quality. Female in the way that it embraces people in a feminine way. It embraces religions and cultures, jazz, Asia, you can have Japan Town, China Town, Korean Town, and all this has an embracing feminine quality about it.
How did you connect with the Buddhist element in this film?
In Buddhism things happen in cycles, and there’s a sense of repetition. There’s a sense of stopping the crazy clock and slowly perceiving time in a more restful, meditative way. When you look at the Golden Gate Bridge and its beautiful arc, think of all the processes that it took to get it that way. It’s a very beautiful Buddhist metaphor, but I think the metaphor would be complete if the bridge disappeared the next day.
This project highlighted you in scoring a romantic or love interest film. How did you feel about working in this genre?
It was more of a magical-realist type of genre when I started; much more surrealistic. It wasn’t just a love interest/detective kind of a movie. David Henry Hwang wrote a beautiful script and it was shot OK. It was a film by John Madden. Madden did a very good job, but the studio made him really afraid of all the surrealistic aspects of the movie. Everybody got scared and they turned it into a regular kind of romantic movie when it had romance plus magical realism. They just screwed all the magical realism out of the movie. It once was potentially interesting, but because people were scared that it wouldn’t make money, they screwed it up. When in fact, if it had remained the way it was in the beginning, people would have been interested.