Composer Elia Cmiral

Discussing his scores for Stigmata and Battlefield Earth

By Ford A. Thaxton and Randall D. Larson     August 12, 2000

From Ronin to Stigmata to Battlefield Earth, Czech composer Elia Cmiral (pronounced 'smear-all') is becoming a force to be reckoned with in contemporary film music. His expansive music for Battlefield Earth may be the film's single redeeming factor, and from the wreckage of the disastrous film Cmiral may emerge victorious.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Cmiral immigrated to Sweden in 1980, where he began to build a career in music. He moved to the United States in 1987 and enrolled in the film-scoring program at University of Southern California, studying with former Disney composer Buddy Baker, among others. This led to the opportunity to score the stylish thriller, Apartment Zero (1988). He returned to Sweden in 1989 to produce his music on records, and then returned to Los Angeles in 1993 to resume his film-scoring career.

One of Cmiral's first credits in Hollywood was composing a soundtrack for a video game called The Last Express (1997). 'That was my first computer game, and it was my first serious project,' said Cmiral. 'I scored it with a small orchestra. It was fun, except I had like 350 cues! Everything from two seconds to one minute!'

In 1996, Cmiral took a side-track from films to score the first season of the Don Johnson TV series, Nash Bridges. 'American TV can be a sausage factory,' said Cmiral. 'I didn't really realize it in the beginning. This was my first job on an American TV series. I had scored programs in Sweden, but how they approach scoring a series is very different from how it's done in Hollywood.'

Changing personnel, each with a different idea of what the music should be like, led to conflicting directions and awkward musical demands. 'The whole season was changing,' said Cmiral. 'I worked with three different post-production producers one after another. On the last episode I did, one of them said 'the opening should be something like Mancini.' Another one, 'something like Americana,' and Don Johnson told me 'something like world percussion.''

Another break came in 1998 when he scored John Frankenheimer's thriller, Ronin, with an 80-piece orchestra. The film's success, and that of Cmiral's soundtrack album on Varese Sarabande Records, led to his scoring the occult horror-thriller Stigmata (1999) for director Rupert Wainwright. Cmiral's textural, ambient score was very effective, giving the film a great sense of underlying malevolency and dark spiritual forces at work.

Initially, however, rock star Billy Corgan of the group Smashing Pumpkins had been signed to write music for the film. But it quickly became apparent that his rock music sensibilities were not completely able to provide a composition that would fit the rigors of a timing-specific horror film score. Cmiral was therefore called in to help Corgan with those sections that needed a more orchestral approach.

'His music editor and my music editor had divided the score into two parts,' said Cmiral. 'Billy got the first choice of the cues he wanted to score, and the rest was mine. So I took my list of cues and went back to my studio and started to work. Already at this time we were discussing orchestra scoring, how we could manipulate a 70-piece orchestra to work with Billy's purely electronic cues.'

Cmiral and Corgan composed their music independently, which was then combined by their music editors. 'It was a big headache for both music editors, and I think they did an absolutely marvelous job,' said Cmiral. 'Besides my orchestra cues, I also gave them a file with a lot of hits, crescendos, solo vocals, solo piano and flute, and the director and editors put that on top of Billy's cues. Then, the score that was from the beginning divided 50/50, ended that I had 45 or 50 minutes in the whole music, and Billy had 19.

With his music for Stigmata, Cmiral proved to be a capable performer in the Christopher Young school of sound mass/sound design horror scoring. Stigmata is instrumentally interesting, thickly orchestrated with an effective and intriguing--if often disturbing--mixture of synths and symphs. The music is heavily percussive synth and sound design, an ambient texture that occasionally gives way for raucous dissonant rhythms and pulsating percussion beating forth a chillingly upturned swirl of violins. Cmiral also uses an eerie ambience featuring synth-voice and brooding sound designs that ultimately give way to the plaintive boy's voice, tying the contemporary story in with its historical Middle-Eastern roots.

The commercial soundtrack, however, featured only Corgan's music. 'Billy's people didn't want to let us release a second album of Stigmata,' said Cmiral. 'There was concern that it would cause confusion in the market place. That was a very big issue.'

Cmiral finally worked out an arrangement where a limited promotional recording of Cmiral's orchestral music was released on the Intrada label, although with certain restrictions. 'Intrada was not allowed to sell more than a certain amount of CDs,' said Cmiral. 'The CDs could never appear in retail stores so my CD would clash with Billy Corgan's, and it shouldn't say 'score by.' It had to say something different.' The Intrada CD, which didn't use any of the movie artwork, read 'music from the original score composed by Elia Cmiral.'

Despite this commercial setback, Cmiral's work came to the attention of Battlefield Earth director Roger Christian and star/co-producer John Travolta. After several meetings, Cmiral was hired to score the picture. He wound up composing about 80 minutes of music for Battlefield Earth, which was recorded in Seattle with a full symphony orchestra, blended with a significant amount of electronics recorded in Cmiral's own studio.

The film's extensive special effects were a challenge, inasmuch as the final timings were not precise when Cmiral was timing his music cues, because the special effects weren't completed yet. 'The picture was not ever locked,' said Cmiral. 'That's natural thing in a movie where we have so many minutes of optical effects--you never really know the final timings until you get them, and by then you have to have music written already, hoping it's going to fit. So you get very good at editing. I probably had six weeks to complete it, minus a couple of days in the end for orchestration.'

Unlike most big budget science fiction scores like Star Wars and their ilk, Cmiral is not a particularly thematic composer. He decided instead to go for a textural, atmospheric feel in the music, using resonant ambience and dissonance to support the film's visualizations rather than themes linked to various characters.

'I am very sparse with themes when scoring movies, and I avoid too many themes in any project,' said Cmiral. 'I don't like the 19th Century approach, where every person, every sword, every horse, has motifs. It feels to me like the yellow pages! I like to keep it a little bit simpler. On Battlefield Earth there is just one epic theme.'

To support the divergent moods of the story, though, Cmiral was able to divide his music into, if not melodic themes, different types of music. 'At the spotting session, when we had all the cues on a piece of paper, I divided the whole score into groups: ethnic type cues, some Americana kind of stuff, four or five different groups,' he said. 'The next step was to decide which cue would be important for every group, to show Travolta and Christian the direction and concept.'

Cmiral had found the technique successful when he scored Ronin. Unable to simply begin composing with the opening credits and develop his music straight through to the end, the requirements of movie music necessitated a variety of musical motifs or groups be composed for use in different moments throughout the score. 'I found that very useful, because producers and directors don't usually have a musical vocabulary,' said Cmiral. 'Then, when you move to another cue and say, 'Okay, this is a cue from the battle cues group,' they already know. But it's not completely ideal, because then I have to go back and write something that occurs before, and then something after, so you don't have a kind of natural development of the music.'

Cmiral recognizes the need to elevate a director's comfort zone by giving them a clear idea, early on, of what the music is going to sound like. 'They get to know the music, basically, except the small transition cues, which aren't important,' said Cmiral. 'With all the cues already demonstrated, they won't walk to the stage and say 'I don't like this trumpet, I don't like that bass drum.''

Despite the failure of the film, Cmiral's soundtrack recording on Varese Sarabande records has met with some critical success. His music is thickly orchestrated and largely symphonic with electronic overtonalities. The music weighs heavily, a broad orchestral pressure that surges in slow-moving waves. Nicely textural and often otherworldly, it's also multi-layered. Cmiral adds a intriguing drumset beat to drive home some of the more active cues, and often peels back the various orchestral layers to emphasize instrumental textures and voice from time to time. The CD makes for a stimulating listen on a home stereo.

Following Battlefield Earth, Cmiral went on to score Six Pack, a French thriller for director Alain Berberian. Having come into the big-budget world of film scoring in hardly any time at all, it will be interesting to hear what Cmiral comes up with next.