Welcome to AMR! Use the menu to navigate [Please enable javascript]	AMR Site Specials Elliot Goldenthal provided a nice interview with "Music From The Movies" magazine. Unfortunately, I've lost information as to the article or issue #. These snippets were part of a larger interview. So in a way, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE was much more easier than ALIEN 3, although you were given much less time to do it? Yes, definitely. Whatever I composed, with a few exceptions, was the music to be in the movie. In ALIEN 3 things changed and changed and changed. So even though I had six months to work on ALIEN 3 nothing was ever solid or consistent. If I did something right in INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, it was done and there would be no more discussions about it. The beginning of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE is done in the same way as ALIEN 3. - Yes, it's the same technique, but they both have different reasons. The latin in ALIEN 3 is "Agnus Dei", lamb of God, because the characters seem to be very much like lambs being led to slaughter, and there was no hope, they were all weak lambs, and they had no control or no power over their lives. In INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE I changed the latin words in "Libera Me" from "Save me from everlasting death" to "Save me from everlasting life". And also, the other latin in it is "Lux Eterna", which is "eternal light". So, although there is the sound of latin in certain things that I do, there is a meaning and a difference, it's not for the same reason. Lets move on to some of your scores a little more in detail. I'd like to begin with ALIEN 3. How did you get that assignment? - The director [David Fincher] was very interested in a score that would not sound traditionally Hollywood, so they came to me. He would have already heard DRUGSTORE COWBOY, and I went to David Fincher and I told him that I had the perfect sound as the voice for the alien, this instrument called the steel cello, which is heard throughout - it's an acoustic instrument. I also created some demonstration tapes for him, to show the direction I was going to, and we agreed that I would have the time to experiment and there would be money to experiment for maybe five-six months before the movie was scored. We'd do a series of experiments, so nearly a half year was spent electronically in working on different sounds. And then, when the orchestra got there, there was time for me to orchestrate everything, and it was just a lot of time on that thing, and I think that was one of the advantages of working in that system. But there was a lot of re-editings? - That just drove me crazy, beacause once the film was done, the studio gave the director a very hard time. I was no longer working with one person, I was working with 30, I was working with the studio and all the assistants. It became impossible. It was a much more interesting movie before the studio got involved. When I studied your score for ALIEN 3, I found some interesting connections between the orchestraions and the story. For instance, you have those french horn glissandi, almost sounding like an alarm foreboding the horror and catastrophy seen in the film. And in the scene where Ripley examines the dead body of Newt, you use a simple piano as a way to underline the human relation between Ripley and the girl. Is this the way you try to think when you compose your scores, to manipulate? - Well, maybe not the first one, in terms of an alarm. I use the french horns in many, many different ways - sometimes I use them isolating pitches, it creates a sense of uneasiness in the stomach. And it also creates an environment for the rest of the orchestra. In terms of the glissandi, it's very dramatic, sometimes to emphasize certain pictorial images, it's used for different reasons at different times. But you're correct about the piano. We're in outer space, in another world, and the most bourgeois, most family-type of instrument you can imagine is the piano. It's in many, many people's homes, in families where mothers and grandmothers and children gather around the piano, so I wanted the sound of the piano in space to make a point that it reminds you of home and children and family. To contact me with info, comments, or whatever, just send me an email!