Goldenthal: “Teese has worked with me on about twenty film projects. Sometimes he produces, sometimes I do, and many times we share the credit. Hopefully a producer will come in during dangerous situations and help or rescue you; that’s why they’re hired. It’s a question of what the spirit of the word ‘rescue’ means. He’s the beauty of having someone that thinks along with you during the whole process, but also logs everything down, and is aware of what take is the best one and what’s not. He keeps an overview about stuff while you continue to create and to go into the abyss. This is the reason you want to have a producer. When I produce or do everything on my own in that respect, I sometimes miss having to talk to someone who can be objective. It’s very difficult to jump out of yourself and ask yourself a question.”
How did you meet Elliot?
I met Elliot in Cambridge at the American Repertoire Theater in the fall of 1988 where he was writing the music to a Gozzi play, “Serpent Woman”, directed by Andrei Serban. He had already done Gozzi’s “The King Stag” with Julie, so he was a well-known entity at the ART. I had just written the music to another theater piece, so they asked me if I could play his music along with a percussionist.
As we were putting together this music for the theater piece, Elliot got the call from Mary Lambert in L.A. to potentially do the music for “Pet Sematary”. She sent the first reel and he started working on the titles. All day long we’d work on the theater piece, while we’d move my equipment at night to the artistic director’s office to work on the titles for “Pet Sematary”. We would send off a tape every day and it would come back with comments and we’d rewrite it. Soon after he got the gig, we worked together on this whole score which was just for strings, voice, piano, some percussion, and a lot of synthesizer. I was doing all the programming at that time and working with a little dedicated sequencer. Bob was doing some of the orchestrations and Steve Mercurio was the conductor.
What happened when Richard Martinez came in as the electronic music producer in “Drugstore Cowboy”?
During “Drugstore Cowboy” I was working with Carly Simon at the same time. I was also doing both an album and a film score for Mike Nichols with Carly, so I couldn’t do “Drugstore Cowboy”. This is when Richard came to work with Elliot. We all got together on the next big picture, “Alien 3”. This was a shared position; all the synthesizer programming and performing was done by both Richard and myself. We started working in parallel with Elliot because he didn’t have a setup at the time, so we’d all work at my house. Richard was working with Elliot on his theatrical projects even before his film work, and continues to do so.
In the layer years, since our job descriptions have changed, Richard is more in charge of the electronics and I’m more in charge of the production overall. This makes more sense because Richard lives close by. He’s the obvious choice to take care of Elliot’s equipment and to set him up for any given project, whether it’s film or theater. The theater pieces now are really re-mountings of older pieces on larger stages. “The Green Bird” is about to start on Broadway, while “Juan Darien” is an ongoing thing with various lives. The last non-film project I started with Elliot is the opera “Grendel”. We did an exclusive twenty-minute demo together because we happened to be in the Vineyard together.
When you think about it, this might have to do with the type of music it is. Richard is both much more skilled and interested in continuing the world of sampling, discovering, and developing sounds for Elliot. My strength within synthesis lies more in the orchestral.
Who else have you worked with?
At the same time I was working with Elliot, lots of other composers asked me to produce their film scores. I’ve worked with John Corigliano, Carly Simon, Dave Stewart, Michael Small, Michael Kamen, and recently on a score for a German-American film with a new composer, Marius Ruhland.
Which of Elliot’s scores stand out in your mind?
Certainly “Titus” will stick out for a long time to come. Prior to that, “Michael Collins”, “Interview with the Vampire”, and “Alien 3”. “Titus” because it was a combination of aspects of both Elliot’s art, my relationship with him, and his relationship with Julie. The idea to finally do a film score, for me to finally work with Julie – I’d never worked with Julie before even know I know her very well – it was those combinations. I remember the first time I saw raw footage when it came in fresh from Italy, seeing the performances and direction, the subject matter, and then ultimately what I knew was going to be a huge, huge task by Elliot to fulfill this musical score. When you add all of that up, all I could think of was, ‘I’m going to be there every step of the way and do what I can do facilitate the score.’
“Interview with the Vampire” was a defining film because it dropped in our laps with very little time to pull it off. Defining in a sense that it really delineated our strengths and weaknesses, therefore solidifying Richard’s position as the electronic music producer. There was no time for anyone to do anything else but whatever they could do best and fast. Elliot would write really fast, Richard would make sure all the sounds were there, I would take Elliot’s compositions and either fix them up so he could play them for Neil or later edit them, or take earlier-written pieces and apply them to scenes later in the film. I had to come up with a schedule in a running order that would allow all the music to be recorded and show up on the dub because we were working simultaneously with the dub. That’s more like an organizational/producer-type job, but I found in that moment, at that time, that this was a strength of mine. The ability to keep everything somewhere in my head and stay on top of it so that the entire score could be finished on time in the three-and-a-half weeks we had.
Could you describe your responsibilities as Elliot’s producer from the beginning of a project to its end?
It changes every time. Some of the things I’ve mentioned are certainly mainstays. On the production level it’s schedule, and lately also the budgeting of the score. Before, in the “Batman” or Warner Bros. world, it wasn’t as much of a budget ever. You’d just say, ‘This is what we need,’ and they’d say, ‘O.K., here’s whatever you need.’ If we needed more time to record, that’s what we would do.
More recently the studios are unwilling to go that route and they demand that the composer has an overall budget, a package deal. So you try to come up with numbers that both work for the budget but also give Elliot the amount of time he really needs to make it a good score. Let’s say Elliot starts to write a score; he’s got a whole bunch of ideas that he may or may not have applied to the film. Sooner or later I get my hands on those ideas, and I might apply them to a scene or several scenes. I also edit his performance and orchestrations so it sounds better than his 5:00 a.m. versions, to a point where it can be shown or played for a director, or even used in an early temp of a film. If necessary I usually find a way to fix the music within a scene so that the integrity of the music remains, even though I edit the music to fit the new cut with the scene. Like in “Alien 3”, all those chases scenes at the end were carefully constructed to specific cuts which kept changing. I spent hours and hours, even after it was recorded, editing the music to those scenes so it would still match or follow. I’m always preserving the continuity of Elliot’s music as best I can.
Also, I often spend time with the music editor after it’s all recorded and mixed, cutting it in, because I often disagree with their choices. We now have a couple of really great music editors, but even with them I’ll get into discussions about the choices they make. Sometimes I’m even at the dubbing stage for the same reasons.
In the end, the CD becomes a collaborative effort. I spend a lot of time coming up with running orders of the CD, but it’s almost like another example of Elliot’s brilliance. His take on what a CD should be is very unique. What I come up with is a springboard for Elliot to take it a step further and vice versa; it becomes like passing the ball back and forth.
So I deal with the budget, the schedule, the contractor, the recording studio where we do the mix. I’m also the link to the film studio because they usually talk to me about all the elements, whether it’s budgeting or schedule, and then the soundtrack CD.
What have you learned from Elliot when working for him?
It starts with how to conceptualize a film score. It goes so far; it goes into an outlook on life as well as the history of music. His outlook on life is so entirely different from anyone else’s I’ve ever met, so I’ve learned that from him. The same approach holds true for him sitting in front of a new film and deciding what a scene needs. You can put a film in front of me after the thirty films I’ve done and say, ‘What should this music be?’ and I’ll give you a couple of examples that should be pretty standard. However, to predict what Elliot would do is very difficult. Certain scenes I could tell you, but with the important scenes I will be way off the mark, just because what he focuses on to ultimately make the music right and special for the character to that scene in that film. To take those ideas and not only make them into brilliant film scoring, but into brilliant concepts as well.
Elliot’s film music can hold up as a serious composition in itself as well, even if it’s only a minute long. Think of “Titanic”, for instance. It has sold twenty-two million copies of CDs. If you listen to those cues, there’s nothing there; there’s no music there. There’s not even a good-sounding mediocre piece of music. He’s sweetened a huge orchestra with synthesizer. If you take any one of Elliot’s cues, this will be a seriously-structured sound composition, a melody, harmonic textures, and orchestrational textures, which all blend into a conceptual piece. That’s incredibly rewarding to work on.