Still Life: Director, Julie Taymor and Composer, Elliot Goldenthal Discuss Frida

Excerpted from FSM Vol. 7, No. 8

Frida Kahlo was Frida Kahlo. Any terse summation of who she was or what she represented would be at best unintentionally pejorative and at worst blatantly inaccurate. Kahlo was born in Mexico in 1901 and died in 1954. She lived a painfully brief life during which she served as an artistic and political muse, ferociously and playfully bent gender stereotypes, and rubbed elbows with the who's-who of highbrow and lowbrow. She created, absorbed, celebrated, and suffered, yet the sum of her life was far greater than any of these parts. Director Julie Taymor and her longtime partner/collaborator composer Elliot Goldenthal last collaborated on the multi-era adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus. In Frida they again dabble in a truthful surrealism by blending art, life and political subtext into one ephemeral brew that's as profound and elusive as its subject.

Doug Adams: Where do the musical discussions begin between the two of you?

Elliot Goldenthal: I think things start to come together brick-by-brick. A lot of the early work is looking for source material that's not part of the original composition. Then there's also prerecorded music -- music that has to be composed before the movie. For example the tango and the "Viva La Vida" song. These things had to be preplanned. There had to be choreography aspects -- not only choreography with the dancers but choreography with boats that Julie had to figure out. Before that I did a lot of experimentation on the synthesizer, on the piano. Certain early ideas inspired Julie.

Julie Taymor: We went to a record store very early on. I wanted to have a female voice be a dominant part of the score, because we knew that Frida knew a woman named Concha Michel who was a singer, a communist and a revolutionary. So Elliot came home with 10 different Latin singers including Lila Downs and Chavela Vargas. He brought home 10 Chavela Vargas CDs and we couldn't believe it. We were so taken with her, and two of those songs, "Paloma Negra" and "La Llorona," I immediately knew would be instrumental songs in the movie and that I would actually cut [the picture] to those. Elliot then wrote three original songs. He wrote the tango for Lila Downs in advance, as he said.

Also we had two wonderful Mexican musicians/composers, young men who were the Mexican music producers. They sent us selections of unusual music, like the two young boys singing and the old men in the cemetery. They sent us a whole collection of music from the '20s and '30s and Elliot and I sat there and selected what we wanted. We found the living [performers] and put them in the movie.

I think one of the things that's very unique in our experience on Frida -- and this is why I think it's one of the most wonderful things Elliot's done -- is that we didn't temp it. I didn't want to temp the movie, because I wanted Elliot to write original music. We put original music from Elliot Goldenthal right from the beginning, which makes his music so organic to the picture.

DA: Absolutely right. That's one of the reasons I'm asking about this. Even going back to Titus, these don't feel like films that were handed over to someone and music was applied. It taps more into the text and the subtext, as if the music and the film were conceived at the same time. Do you see that as being one of the major roles for the music -- highlighting these unspoken elements in the film?

EG: I think it's one role. In reference to what you said, it serves the sequences where the paintings come alive, and some of the flashbacks to the bus crash.

DA: Did you have to do any specific research on Latin music or was this something that you're very familiar with already?

EG: As a composer, no. But as someone working with Julie choosing source music, we went through Hayden Herrera's biography and other writing. We chipped away and got closer to the type of music that Frida and Diego [Rivera] loved and what they were surrounded with and what the sound was. So research came in that area.

But the other aspect of the music is that it's extremely romantic, extremely melodic and very, very subtle. The melodies are stretched in a way where melody actually serves as cue -- it wraps its way around a scene and turns corners the way a more traditional approach to film scoring has to turn corners when emotions change and when camera movements change and light changes. The melodies were malleable in that way.

DA: You mentioned the subtlety. When I started listening to the score my first impressions were that it was largely going toward the setting, there's a lot of guitar to define place and time. But then it really creeps up on you and you find it's articulating much deeper ideas.

JT: I can't stand manipulative music. I think that even if Elliot's [writing] emotional music, he's not pushing a scene. We often say, "Does this scene need music? Is it better without?" If you add music, what does it add?

EG: Frida's work is mainly in miniatures, and there's a sense of her being isolated. So I wanted the music to feel like a ghost where Frida can roll over in her bed and the ghost can talk to her in her ear.

DA: I thought the solo guitar played toward that isolation because it's very much, in a theatrical sense, the main character of the score, speaking soliloquies. Everything revolves around it.

EG: Right.

JT: It's the solo voice.

EG: It's a solo voice that almost speaks. You can almost feel the breath of the guitar.

DA: Where did you come up with the idea of using the guitar so prominently? Obviously some of that goes to the film's setting, but in places it's practically a mini concerto. Is that again going to that idea of having a central character in the score?

EG: I think the idea came about from [discussing] what can go seamlessly in and out of source music. If you had, let's say, traditional Mexican Huasteca and Jorocho sounds, the score and the source music would not be so different in sonority. You just feel an unbroken voice in the movie.

JT: What I love about this score is the acoustic nature of it. With its rhythms you hear the strings being scratched. It has a rawness. It's not a slick score at all.

DA: The writing features a lot of solo instruments and smaller textures, at times it's like a chamber score. Was this something that was planned or something that came out of a necessity?

EG: Well, "chamber," the original sense of the word was "room." Frida's life was so much in a room that you get a sense of that kind of intimacy.

DA: It creates some really unique textures -- things that I've not heard out of your output before. It's very intimate that way.

JT: Very intimate. Very melodic, but also rhythmic, which is Goldenthal's forte, if I might say so.

DA: Which of those elements do you see as having the most impact upon scenes? Is it melody or rhythms?

EG: Well, it definitely depends on the scene. I don't think that you can generalize about that. The scene dictates what's necessary for the music.

DA: In your minds, what dictates whether a scene is melodically or rhythmically driven?

JT: If you've got a scene like after the miscarriage when she's looking at the fetus and Diego is alone in that hall, it's solo piano. It's a muted waltz that has a delicacy. Elliot uses the same theme later when Diego is talking about her paintings at the final gallery scene.

EG: Or, for example, the animation scene with the Day of the Dead figures. There was a very unusual music because I have the sort of rhythms that one would associate with Stravinsky played in a Mexican manner on the guitar, which is never done. There's also a string quartet and a string orchestra over it in a very unusual, rhythmically jagged way. If you listen to that, it's not like anything else I've done. That scene allowed me to have that sort of insanity. There are coyotes hollowing in the background. It gave me the opportunity to go that way.

DA: There seems to be a running theme through several sections of the score where elements impacting upon on another. For example, in the opening you have the female vocalist but there are those very low lugubrious sounds upsetting it.

JT: And the harmonica.

DA: Sure, yes, the glass harmonica as well. It feels like a lot of the score, not only rhythmically but colorfully as well, is based on a collision of elements.

EG: I think you couldn't have thought of a better word to describe Frida's life. It was defined by collision.
 

For the full story, please see FSM. Vol 7, No. 9.

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