Goldenthal: “Steven Mercurio and Jonathan Sheffer have conducted most of my film scores. Edward Shearmur, a composer in his own right and a fine man, conducted ‘Butcher Boy’ and did some of ‘In Dreams’. In the non-film scoring area there’s a conductor named Carl St. Clair, who’s the conductor of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, and Seiji Ozawa, who conducted my ‘Fire Water Paper’ in Boston, at Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center. Also, there’s Emil De Cou who’s really great; he conducted my ballet ‘Othello’. For ‘Titus’ I used both Jonathan Sheffer and Steven Mercurio.”
What led you into conducting film music?
I went to Juilliard as a composer but, like Bernstein or Mahler for that matter, composing is your personal side while your performing side is a conductor. So most of my conducting, or the lion’s share of it, three-quarters of it, has been opera. Elliot’s a good friend of mine, so whenever I get a chance, if my schedule is free (which is almost never is) and he’s doing a film at that time, if the schedules coincide I love to stuff it in. It’s fun to do one of those a year, just as a chance of pace.
So Elliot led you into conducting film scores?
It sort of happened side-by-side because of Elliot’s first film score, “Pet Sematary”. He was establishing himself and didn’t have a penny to pay anyone. We met before that; I was the associate conductor for the Brooklyn Philharmonic and Elliot had won one of those ASCAP Young Composer awards. The Brooklyn Philharmonic was doing a program of three winners and there were three pieces on the program at Town Hall. Since John Corigliano was a friend of mine and Elliot had studied with him, Lukas Foss took one piece, another conductor took another, and I took Elliot’s piece, ‘Shadow Play Scherzo’. So I met him in about 1987.
A lot of Elliot’s proportional notations had come from that Corigliano school of design. There are a lot of similarities in the notational context more than musical, but notational. Next year he had the opportunity of doing “Pet Sematary”, so we got together with Teese and did that on a shoestring; it was like two or three days of recording. We did it for the fun of it. So whenever I was available I got together with Elliot to conduct many of his scoring sessions all the way up through “Titus”.
What scores did you conduct for Elliot that stand out in your mind?
They all did in their own way. “Heat” was bizarre working with Michael Mann, while “Batman” was a lot of fun because of how much force was involved in it. This was a long session; it was three weeks. Working on “Titus” was great because it was Julie’s first feature film. Also, there were some great things when we worked on “Sphere” together. “Sphere” was done in New York; half of it was the New York Philharmonic and the other half was the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. That was an all-star band of sorts. I love the L.A. readers, London is great; but, being from New York, when you’re looking in front of you and you see half of the New York Philharmonic and half of the Metropolitan Orchestra, it was a lot of fun.
With the amount of things that we have to change quickly, Elliot will throw a cue up on the stands, but when we hear it back with dialogue or what the dramatic effect really is, then they’ll say, ‘Let’s move the climax ten seconds to the right. Let’s take the woods out of here. Let’s make that a crescendo instead of a diminuendo.” By the time you finish with the cue forty-five minutes later it’s changed. Some of them are completely rewritten in a matter of minutes. It’s just a lot of fun to be in that part of the creative process with him. You have to be his lieutenant in a certain way, to deal with the orchestra so that he can keep his mind in there with the director and just deal with what it feels like looking and hearing it with the film, and not dealing with the orchestra as a technical being at that point.
What do you find unique about Elliot?
His influences were a little different. I think a lot of the film composers come from a more pop world, but the fact that he was classically trained and he’s developed a lot of those techniques again, from Corigliano and other contemporary music, gives him the knowledge of contemporary composition that a lot of other film composers don’t necessarily have. His palette is a little wider than most and you hear it in “Titus”. He’ll go from one jazz tune, which is perfectly orchestrated and written for a jazz band, to some wild spacey cues, to this amazing final cue, which we labored over ad nauseam and is groundbreaking for Elliot because it’s a long, romantic, sequential type of cue. The fact that he feels comfortable moving around in a variety of styles, but it always comes out like Elliot eventually, is somewhat unique. Elliot’s personality is pretty damn strong, so even when he says, ‘I’m going to write a cue that sounds like Mahler’ – it’s very, very funny. He thinks it sounds like that, but the fact is it only has the flavor of that; in the end it basically comes out like Elliot.
When working with Elliot, what have you learned from him?
When you do film scores – how much patience you need, and how flexible you need to be. You can think you’ve got the world’s most perfect cue and then you’re wrong, or it’s not what the director had in mind. So it’s the flexibility factor between two people. Sometimes it can work against the composer; it can be so flexible to the point where the music doesn’t have an identity of its own. Not every film gives you the opportunity to really show what you want to show, so you have to realistic. Some films you have to say, ‘Well, it’s only going to be this,’ and then there are some musical moments in some films where you can say, ‘I’m going to be able to really stretch out here and the music’s going to be able to tell the tale.’
Elliot said one very interesting thing to me when we were talking about “Michael Collins” being nominated for an Academy Award. This was the same year “The English Patient” won. He said, “I watched the beginning of ‘The English Patient’ and there was silence. In the first three minutes I knew I’d lost; I didn’t hear any music yet.” It’s because you can tell that silence, or sound, was going to be an essential part of this film. Whereas in “Michael Collins” there’s so many battle sounds, gunshots, and so much dialogue that, no matter how great the music is, it will never have a great emotional impact. It won’t be shown up to the audience as being important. Whereas in “The English Patient” right away, because the scope of the piece and the poetic nature of the visual of it, it was letting you know right away that the music was going to have an important role in this film.
Do you enjoy conducting Elliot’s scores?
Of course! We’re both wild men, you know? The same things make us laugh, that’s for sure. We have the same sense of drama, both in the way I love conducting and he likes to write these big rude gestures. Big, big climaxes, and then other weird and crazy sounds. We both have the same desire for musical nonsense and excess. You’re not going to get a bunch of pretty-boy tunes where it’s like little girls running through a field, this sort of non-descript musical scoring, where every cue is basically just padding. No, no, no, regardless of whether there’s going to be gunfire or trains derailing or, in “Batman”, with people sliding all over the place – if you hear those tracks by themselves, there’s some wild stuff going on.
Will you indefinitely work with Elliot?
Sure, absolutely, but I hope to work on a lot of other projects other than film too. Symphonic projects, ballet, or an opera. I’m dying for Elliot and Julie to write an opera together. I’m dying for the two of them to collaborate on a theater work, a large-scale theater work. I’d love to be part of that because that’s also going to require a lot of writing, re-writing, orchestrating, and re-orchestrating. They’re both so brilliant; it’s fun to add a clear perspective to what’s going on because I have an awful lot of reality-performing perspective and nothing ever shakes me – nothing!