Rise of the Musicians

By: Randall D. Larson
Date: Thursday, July 03, 2003

Composer Marco Beltrami started out writing Hollywood film scores in 1994, but it was in 1996, with his score for the phenomenally successful teen horror film SCREAM, that the Italian composer really hit his stride. SCREAM was quickly followed with a critically acclaimed score for Guillermo Del Toro's MIMIC. The success of both pictures led to a myriad of further assignments in the genre, as Beltrami seemingly took on the horrormaestro mantle that countryman Pino Donaggio had taken two decades previously.

Beltrami had been born in Fornero, Italy, but was raised on Long Island, New York. He returned to his native country to study music composition with the Italian music master, Luigi Nono. Beltrami completed his studies at Yale on a full scholarship. In 1992, he moved to Los Angeles to undertake a fellowship with composer, Jerry Goldsmith. After several orchestral commissions for various orchestras, Beltrami landed his first film scoring assignment with a short film called THE BICYCLIST. Two years later Wes Craven came SCREAMing for him, and the composer has been at it ever since. Scores for SCREAM 2, THE FACULTY, THE MINUS MAN, THE CROW: SALVATION, SCREAM 3, DEEP WATER, THE WATCHER, DRACULA 2000, SCARY MOVIE 2, JOY RIDE, BLADE II, and RESIDENT EVIL soon found their way onto Beltrami's credit list. While he had enjoyed opportunities to score quieter dramas (Jennifer Lopez's ANGEL EYES, THE DANGEROUS LIVES OF ALTER BOYS, and WALKING ACROSS EGYPT among them), the sheer volume of science fiction and horror films on Beltrami's filmography certainly labels him a genre specialist. The composer's latest and largest score, for Jonathan Mostow's TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES, will surely add one more lavishly-engraved tombstone to Beltrami's graveyard of guignol compositions.

Beltrami almost [IMG6R]didn't get to score T3. He was brought in because director Mostow was having a temporary score affixed to early edits of the film, and several of Beltrami's scores found their way into that temp mix, including MIMIC, CROW, JOYRIDE, and THE WATCHER. "It was weird to hear cues from MIMIC used in that picture when I first saw it - but it definitely worked, and put a neat spin on it!" says Beltrami.

"I met with Jonathan Mostow and he mentioned that there was a lot of stiff competition for this and that it probably wouldn't work out, but that he liked the music a lot and he'd keep in touch," Beltrami says. "And over the next six weeks he would call me every couple of weeks and tell me that it's looking better and better, and he was really pushing for me to do it. So it was through the director that I got the job."

With Beltrami announced as the T3 composer, many fans of the first two films objected, sight unseen (or, perhaps sound unheard would be more appropriate), to Beltrami's having displaced composer Brad Fiedel, who had defined the relentlessly mechanical Terminator sound in the first two films. But the film's new director wanted to put a new spin on the classic character, and chose a new composer and a new musical direction for the project. After several attempts to adapt Fiedel's original TERMINATOR theme into the new setting, both Mostow and Beltrami felt that it sent the wrong message. "Every time we put the [Fiedel] theme into the movie it automatically took the viewer back into TERMINATOR 2 land, and the director and the producer found that a little disconcerting because they were really trying to do something new here," says Beltrami.

In the end Fiedel's theme was not used in the film, although Beltrami's orchestral arrangement of the piece does appear over T3's End Credits. "I thought it would be powerful at the end of the movie, after all the stuff had been played," he says. "The other TERMINATOR movies had electronic scores, so I did an orchestral arrangement, and I think it's cool."

In TERMINATOR

and T2: JUDGMENT DAY, Fiedel had used his electronic score to effectively associate with the relentless mechanical creatures that inhabit the future, and threaten our present. Beltrami still utilizes that effect in T3, but the more prominent sensibility is an orchestral one. "The scope of this movie is a little bit different than the other ones," says Beltrami. "It's a little bit bigger in scope, so even though I do have quite a bit of electronics in this score about 120 tracks of electronic music overall it's an orchestral-based score. I think the scope of this movie just lends itself to something that breathes a little bit more, and that has a little bit more space to it. Having 95 musicians in a room adds such a bigger dimension than just an electronic score. In that sense it's different."

Beltrami did adopt some of the musical design from the previous films, particularly in the use of music to represent the malevolent mechanical machines of the future era. "There are probably a few other things that were inspired by the first two scores, but overall it's new material," Beltrami says. To accompany the antagonist of the new film a female Terminator Beltrami used a female singer to create a more feminine texture for the music associated with her. This was created by manipulating the singer's breath sounds with chords from a cello and a trombone to create an identifiable motif associated with the Terminatrix.

Rather than basing his score solely on the threat of the machines, Beltrami set out to ground the score more in the humanity of the main characters, and by doing so he has enriched the heart of the story in a very affecting way. He played up the mechanistic nature of the machines, but did so by grounding his musical approach in the perspective of the character of John Connor. "I wanted to recognize that he is just a normal kid but he has this huge responsibility," says Beltrami. "His coming to terms with that, and the fear that's involved with it the fact that being in his shoes would be an incredible, frightful experience was what I wanted to identify with in the music. That was the foremost thing, and secondary to that was playing the action and the machines and all of that." 

Beltrami's main theme is associated with John Connor's character and his interaction with the character played by Claire Danes. Connor's theme is closely linked to an overall theme Beltrami composed for the movie itself, and out of that one have come a number of sub themes including a motif for the Terminatrix and one for the Terminator. "But they're all subsidiary themes of the John Connor Theme," says Beltrami.

The Connor Theme is actually based on a passacaglia, which is a musical term referring to a piece of music in which a theme is continually repeated and developed. "I've never done that before," says Beltrami. "It just starts off just with a simple, single line, and it builds as it goes through the film, growing with the strength of the character."

The simplicity

of the theme allowed Beltrami to interplay it among the other themes and effectively develop it throughout the film. "You first hear the John Connor theme at the opening of the movie, where it's played with the choir," Beltrami says. "As the movie progresses it's performed by the strings and it develops a little more complexity." By the end of the movie the theme integrates with the subsidiary themes and is heard in a much more dynamic rendition than at the film's beginning.

Beltrami worked closely with Mostow as they initially established the right musical design for T3. "Jonathan would come over once or twice a week, pretty much for the whole contract of the project, which was from December through April," Beltrami says. "He has a real good musical sense so he would give his input, although he was insistent that I would be creative and do my own thing. But he definitely pushed me into new areas that I probably wouldn't have gone on my own, so in that respect I think it was a strong collaboration."

It was Mostow who encouraged Beltrami to invest a larger degree of humanity and warmth into the music. For example, in one of the climactic battle scenes between the heroes and the Terminatrix, Beltrami initially played the sequence like a big battle scene. "That was my initial impulse, to play the machines," says Beltrami. "It was a very mechanical scene, but since all the mechanics were on the screen it didn't need that in the music. What it needed was much more emotional impact, feeling it from the character's perspectives. Jon pushed me in that direction with a whole new set of musical instincts that initially I wouldn't have gone into, but he was right, and I think it works a lot stronger."

Instrumentally, TERMINATOR 3 is a standard orchestral score enhanced by electronics and a large percussion section. "This is a percussion heavy score," says Beltrami. "I had 13 percussions on it, along with standard orchestra and choir, and then my assistant Buck Sanders and I spent about a month beforehand just working on sounds for the movie, coming up with those new electronic components of the score."

Beltrami brought in a couple of exotic percussion instruments in order to create some effective acoustical sounds to balance the electronic textures for the machines. "We used something called the Mahler Hammer, for instance," says Beltrami. "This is a big wooden platform that's played with a pair of wooden sticks. I think Mahler used it in his 6^th or 7^th Symphony."

Beltrami was also attracted to a unique instrument called the Huxley Beam (a.k.a. Blaster Beam) that synthesist Craig Huxley developed in 1979 for STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE. The Beam is a 15-foot long aluminum beam welded in such a way to make a sounding board resonator, interwoven with strings, magnets, and crystals which, when struck, emits eerie twangs and tones. Huxley used the Beam to create the neat sounds associated with V'Ger that embellished Jerry Goldsmith's musical score. Beltrami was taken by the sound potential in the Huxley Beam so he arranged to use the unique instrument for T3. However, when the Beam was delivered, Beltrami found that 25 years in storage had damaged the components in such a way that it couldn't be used to the extent originally envisioned.

Working with

sound effects can always be problematic on a large-scale action film like TERMINATOR 3. Beltrami worked closely with Mostow and also conferred with the sound effects people to make sure he knew where the major sound effects were going to be so that he could work around them with his music, and not conflict. "For instance, there's this big train chase, and instead of just playing with the music blaring all the way through, we decided it was better to play it with a real angular type of scoring that would cut through and work with the sound effects," Beltrami says. "We spoke with the sound effects people on the phone a couple of times and I heard what they were doing. They had 800-some odd tracks of sound effects going, and just being aware of that as I was writing the score was helpful."

All told, Beltrami composed about 80-85 minutes of music for T3. With a four-month post-production schedule, this actually afforded the composer plenty of time to develop, orchestrate, and record his score. "I'm used to working a much tighter schedule, so this was sort of a luxury to have this much time!" he says.

Beltrami orchestrated (fleshing out the composition by determining which specific instruments will play which sounds, and how they will merge together orchestrally) about thirty percent of the score. Peter Anthony, Bill Boston, and a few other orchestrators were called in to do the rest. "I like to orchestrate when I can," Beltrami says, "but there were so many changes coming down right to the end that I would start orchestrating and then have to put it down because I'd have to go back to composing, and that becomes very time-consuming. I'm finding that a lot in movies now; it's really much harder to orchestrate your own material."

Despite the fact that well more than half of his filmscoring output has been for horror and science fiction films, Beltrami remains comfortable with his musical niche in the genre and feels that he is able to find fresh ideas to invest into these films. "I feel like I still have a lot to say as a composer, and not just in one genre," he says. "I think I still have things to contribute, and if the point comes that I don't, then I'll get the hell out!"

Beltrami adds, "The truth is that I have a real hard time watching horror movies, and up until SCREAM I really never saw one. I think that really plays into it because, when I view the movie, I view it as almost one of the characters in the movie being scared out of my wits, so I think that lends itself to the music. It's not a jaded approach at all."

As for

TERMINATOR 3, Beltrami enjoyed the experience and feels the score remains distinctive among his other efforts. "Sonically the sound of the score is something different," he says. "Creating a whole sonic world for TERMINATOR 3 is different than the other scores that I've done and was a lot of fun to do."

Next up for Beltrami is Guillermo Del Toro's new film, HELLBOY, which is about a demon, raised from infancy after being conjured by and rescued from the Nazis, that grows up to become a defender against the forces of darkness. "I'm looking forward to that," Beltrami says, "because again I can really work on creating a new sonic world."  He is also slated to score Wes Craven's next film, CURSED. Both are scheduled for release in 2004.

For additional notes on Marco Beltrami's score for TERMINATOR 3, see the music section in Cinescape's print magazine.

Soundtrax is our weekly Movie Soundtrack column.

Comments or suggestions for future columns? Contact Randall at Soundtrax@cinescape.com.