How did you meet Elliot?
I met him during “Interview with the Vampire”. We had a problem with the score and Gary LeMel of Warner Bros. suggested that I listen to this new composer he’d come across, Elliot Goldenthal. He played me some material from “Cobb” and it was quite extraordinary. I met Elliot in New York, showed him the movie, and he had an immediate response to us. His musical language was terribly refreshing to me in that he saw the musical motif that the film brought to mind in his mind, which was terribly exciting. Before this I might have heard of Elliot Goldenthal through director Ron Shelton, whose house I was renting in New Orleans when I was filming “Interview with the Vampire”.
What were your first impressions when hearing Elliot’s music?
What I heard was using the entire range of contemporary classical sonorities, but it somehow sounded like it came from the streets. Extraordinary. It was both contemporary, but yet very symphonic at the same time. I thought, This man as a composer has a real vision here. Then I met him in New York and he composed the opening cue for “Interview with the Vampire” over the three-minute helicopter shot that was going towards San Francisco. He used viola da gamba, an old baroque instrument that sounds almost like a classical saw. He also used these boy sopranos singing a quote from the standard Requiem, you know, Libera Me. So he got something both religious and spooky at the same time instantly. He is that kind of composer; he responds in a unique way to a movie. He had about four weeks to compose this and came up with this quite extraordinary score. That’s when I wanted to work with him from then on.
Next he worked with me on “Michael Collins” and again he came up with an entirely different kind of score with an equally dramatic response. I think the most interesting thing actually was when we came to do “The Butcher Boy” because the things I’d done with Elliot before that were usually orchestrally huge, and in “The Butcher Boy” we found all these crazy songs like ‘Nut Rocker’, songs by Dion and the Belmonts, and some bits of Frank Sinatra, but he composed a totally different score for that film. His musical range is staggering and quite broad.
What came to mind when you decided to hire Elliot?
I used Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony that has a contralto voice and is very doom-laden and terrifying. I’d used that as a temp track to preview “Interview with the Vampire” with. There was something very dark, scary, and very operatic that was needed. Elliot understood that kind of mode or language very quickly. He managed to give me that and quite a lot of other things besides. Immediately when I heard his score to “Cobb” I knew I had to hire Elliot. So I met him in New York, showed him the movie, and we had a few conversations. That’s when I decided for sure.
When you’re looking for an approach to score your films with Elliot, how do you deal with it?
I’ve never come across anybody who can read a film as well as he can, who can read the soul of the movie as well as he can, and reach the emotional texture of what’s going on and what you’ve shot as well as Elliot can. A lot of composers are scared of emotions and big statements as well. I’ve done four films with him, so there’s a combination of total musical openness to what he’s seeing and really direct emotional engagement with the material that you get. I haven’t come across that before with any other composer. I also quite like the stuff he writes that’s not for movies [laughter]. His oratorio, “Fire Water Paper”, I thought was very good. I’ve also seen a lot of the stuff he’s done with Julie, like “Juan Darien” for instance. After seeing the work he’s done with Julie I can see exactly where Elliot’s musical range comes from, because it comes straight out of drama. He really responds to an essential sense of drama.
How do you communicate to Elliot what you want for the film?
It’s often a matter of just driving the person to the point at which they deliver something that they don’t know they can deliver. During “The Butcher Boy” Elliot in the end had to write the music as if he were Francie Brady. I remember when he was writing and toying with different ideas to the scene where the Virgin Mary first appears to Francie; he was talking about different musical languages, some dramatic, some religious, and I remember saying to him quite heatedly, “That kid hasn’t got access to that kind of language. That kid has only one language for what’s appearing to him, and that’s the kind of music we should hear.” He came up with something actually very wonderful, funny, and moving at the same time. That was an interesting case because for Elliot to compose the music for that movie he had to imagine himself into the brain of this little guy in Clones, Ireland, County Monaghan, while all he knew were comic books and the Catholic Church.
Elliot said, “It was very difficult to find a way into this picture,” and at one point you felt that he didn’t have to score “The Butcher Boy” if he didn’t want to.
I remember that night at his apartment in New York. We had a kind of a session, as they say in Ireland. In the end his solution was to write the score as if he was Francie Brady or that character. He came up with great stuff; that trumpet waltz he played when the father goes to see him in the institution or the orphanage was a beautiful piece of music, absolutely gorgeous. I remember at the session when Elliot got that poor trumpet player to do it about twenty-five times because he knew exactly how it could be played himself; he was a trumpet player, you know.
Do you think Elliot’s strength in scoring is his ability to delve in the human psyche or drama of the moment?
He does extraordinary things; often I look at a movie and say, “Elliot, we should be hitting this and this here.” And he says, “Hang on; there’s somebody in the background looking there. If we hit that, that will lead into something else.” Reading a movie correctly is a very difficult thing to do. A composer often is the one who picks out the hidden textures and movements of the film that, as a film director, perhaps you don’t even know you’ve reached. I’ve never come across anybody as good as him that can do that. I suppose you’ve got to have a tremendous amount of emotional openness to be able to score film in that way.
Also, he’s got an extraordinary musical history; he was taught by Aaron Copland when he was just a kid. He grew up in Manhattan in a poor family playing the piano and trumpet. He’s got a lot of rock ’n’ roll and jazz in his blood, but yet he works with orchestras. It’s an extraordinary combination that I don’t think very many composers have.
So Elliot’s ability to score what is not obvious really enhances your film.
In “Interview with the Vampire” there is a scene where Brad Pitt finds Claudia, the little girl, for the first time. She’s in this house with her mother not realizing that her whole family has been killed by the plague. She doesn’t understand that her family are dead yet, so Tom Cruise comes in and dances around with her mother’s dead body. The piece of music Elliot wrote for that was a dance, a tarantella. He found the exact musical language or piece of score for that scene. It was also straight out of Italian operatic tradition. I didn’t know what a tarantella was, but he knew that was exactly the kind of language and note to strike at that point. He does stuff like that which is very bold and brave.
His score here definitely had this sort of playfulness and sardonic approach to your film.
Yes, in general. It comes up again when Brad is burning down the whole of Paris. He did it like crazy for the dance. This is when Brad burns all those Parisian vampires and Elliot strikes the notes with the tarantella.
What do you find unique about Elliot that stands out?
I think it’s his emotional commitment to the movie, really. He is so totally involved with his emotional commitment to the music and to the whole state of composition of the music. He’s a very emotional man. I don’t know what Chopin was like, but I imagine he would be rather similar. Elliot refuses to short-change anything in the process. He puts the greatest amount of himself into the movie itself.
When you’re scoring an intense drama like “Michael Collins” it’s not easily done.
Look at the opening section of that film. It’s the center of Dublin being blown to bits during the rioting; that’s how the movie opens. We had different ideas about playing to the opening sequence of that. I said, “What do you think?” He said that he heats a chorus of fish wives. He came up with this huge orchestral thing, but behind it there’s a kind of anguished sound where he got Sinéad O’Connor to sing the main part of it. That’s something I would never have heard; of course, it suited it very well.
It sounds like there were a lot of religious overtones in this as well.
He needed some words so I came up with a poem in Irish that Padraic Pearse had written. He was the leader of that particular rebellion.
Then you also did “In Dreams”, which was psychologically demanding because of its subject matter.
Nobody liked that movie in America, as you probably know. I constantly was trying to use guitars on the temp score, like using bits of Radiohead or Massive Attack. The problem always was when the rhythm section kicked in, so I was trying to find something that was with the sound of guitars like feedback, but without that pulse. Elliot actually composed the entire score with symphonies of guitars that feedback; a very interesting score. I thought it was brilliant, actually.
It plugged into the psyche of the characters.
The guitar’s a very scary sound, you know. There’s an amazing range to it. He didn’t get session players; he got heavy metal players from New York and spent about three or four weeks with them creating all these textured sounds. It was quite extraordinary.
Do you think it’s valuable to work with a composer who has the talent to interpret or become the character in the film?
Absolutely; that’s how film music works. It’s very strange. Frederico Fellini said that every time he showed Nino Rota his movies, he’d instantly fall asleep. He’d wake up when the lights came on and say, “Oh, I must hire the movie.” Fellini claims he never even got to see the films, but Nino wrote great stuff for them. It’s a very bizarre process.
Do you think a film score can create a concept for the film and make it complete by tying things together?
Yes it does, absolutely. It’s the element that creates the emotional glue that can arouse the audience into the world of the movie. A film score can be anything and everything; often movies are most interesting when there’s less rather than more music. In “The Butcher Boy” there’s not a huge amount of music in that score, but the music that is there is very pertinent. I think a score can be anything. I mean, look at “Dog Day Afternoon”; there’s no music in that movie at all, but it feels like music. It’s often very refreshing to watch a movie without music, in a strange way.
I think with a lot of contemporary composers, because people are using temp scores all the time, it’s almost as if you’re getting back to the way it used to be in the forties, where from start to finish there are orchestras blaring away through an entire film. I think that the kind of orchestrations and musical colors that the composers use are becoming very similar at the moment or in the last ten years. With Elliot every sound is fresh and every piece of orchestration is original.
Did Elliot’s film scores satisfy your vision as a filmmaker?
Brilliantly! He’s tremendously satisfying to work with. What’s great about him is that he can use music in different ways. He can use Paige Hamilton’s guitar and also use the New York Philharmonic; they both have equal power in his hands. That’s what’s great about him.
Out of the four scores that Elliot gave you, does any one of them come to mind as being more effective?
It’s very hard for me to say, but I suppose the most complete one was for “Interview with the Vampire” because the characters were going through these swaths of time; they were going through centuries, really. He had the opportunity to create deeply ironic score that reflected all sorts of musical changes as well. I think all his scores are profoundly different, which I find very refreshing.
I suppose the most surprising thing he did was “The Butcher Boy”. That was the hardest for him to realize, but when he had realized it the results were incredibly surprising, incredibly gratifying. Also, I actually love what he did for “In Dreams”.
Will you hire Elliot to score your next picture?
I definitely hope so, yes.