MARCO BELTRAMI and MARC SHAIMAN

Ex-Terminated
Marco Beltrami and the Rise of the Orchestra

Excerpted from FSM Vol 8., No. 5, on sale now...

Terminator 3 may be one of the most unlikely film projects to see fruition in recent memory, with the collapse of original production company Carolco, seemingly endless script development problems, an aging Arnold Schwarzenegger and the non-involvement of original director James Cameron. Jonathan Mostow (Breakdown, U-571) took over directing reins from the unavailable Cameron and original producers Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar (original founders of Carolco) returned to mount the massively expensive production.

Composer Marco Beltrami was brought onboard to expand the Terminator musical palette beyond the familiar theme and electronic textures developed by Brad Fiedel on the first two Terminator pictures. Everyone involved in the production agreed that while it might have been desirable to retain the familiarity of Fiedel's original Terminator theme, Terminator 3 had a scope and breadth of action that demanded a full orchestral score. "Early on there was a whole thing as to whether we would use the original Terminator theme," Beltrami says. "The intention was to incorporate it into the score but as it turned out that's such a strong theme that Fiedel wrote and it's so associated with the first two Terminator movies that whenever we used it, it took the audience out of T3 and put them back into T2-land. Jonathan was actually doing something new for this movie and he thought it was actually distracting from this movie to keep using that theme. I wrote an orchestral arrangement of the Fiedel theme and I think that plays when we go to black at the end of the movie, which I think works pretty powerfully. I had the option of doing other things and I did some other versions for possible use there but I think that's what they're going with. That theme is only used in the credits and only one ending scene in T2 anyway, so it's not like it was used throughout that movie either."

While Beltrami does incorporate the rhythmic elements from Fiedel's theme and certain harsh and dissonant synth textures for the film's new "Terminatrix" character into his score, he says that the overall approach is quite different from Fiedel's originals. "It's all pretty much new material," he says. "The scope of this movie is different anyway; it's bigger and there are more special effects and with that the score needed to feel bigger too, and that's why it's a more orchestral score although there are synth and electronic effects built into it. It was more of an orchestral update. There were some things in the original scores that worked really well electronically, like these spooky mechanical sounds, and I tried to incorporate some of that for the Terminatrix character, like this human breath sound and this cello stuff that was bending that created a kind of mechanical identification for the Terminatrix which was a cool blending of synthetic and acoustic sounds. This movie was more about John Connor and his character. So the main theme was working more in that direction, and that was something that hadn't existed in the previous film."

While Fiedel's original theme eventually became associated with Schwarzenegger's T-900 cyborg character by the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Beltrami says he didn't write a specific theme for the T-900 in this film. "All of the stuff that's newÖI have thematic stuff for the machine, mechanical stuff, but there's no theme for Arnold. There is a theme that I use that you hear in places where you see the Terminator because in most cases where you see the Terminator you see John Connor too. I guess it would be more of a theme for the picture itself, which embodies the Schwarzenegger character. There is no main title; there's music toward the end of the movie that is sort of elongated, which presents the theme, and then the thematic material is used throughout the movie."

Beltrami got a lesson in elaborate action scoring for a huge vehicle chase sequence that will rival Matrix Reloaded's already fabled chase on a virtual 101 Freeway. "It's really hard to play over huge explosions and cars and trucks and all this stuff," he says. "What we ended up doing was instead of playing through we laid out of the beginning of it and let the sound work, and then when the music comes in it becomes very angular with pauses and rests and it really works around the sound effects. It's not just a bed, it's full of holes that make it work in conjunction with the sound effects. Jonathan was very conscious of that so this approach allows the music to do as much as possible and not wind up getting wiped out by the sound effects."

While the composer has worked on more than his share of genre pictures (including Mimic, The Faculty, Resident Evil and Blade II), he acknowledges that the scope of an immense sci fi action production like T3 was new even to him. "There's definitely some huge music involved in it," he says. "There are big action scenes on a scale I hadn't done before and big thematic moments, too. This picture more than any I was very conscious of keeping a theme in play."

Down With Love and Marc Shaiman

Down With Love carries forward a developing trend in Hollywood as filmmakers take on period projects that don't bring to life the period itself so much as the style of filmmaking prevalent during the period in question. Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven was a dead-serious attempt to revive the '50s "women's pictures" of Douglas Sirk, while Peyton Reed's Down With Love is a spoofier re-imagining of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson romantic comedies of the late '50s and early '60s. And just as composer Elmer Bernstein used his own period-specific experience to score Far From Heaven, Marc Shaiman found that providing music for Down With Love was an exercise in letting his truest instincts thrive.

"Down With Love was not so much me catching the groove of those old scores," Shaiman admits. "I didn't have to force myself to discover how to score in that style, it was finally a movie that matched my scoring style. This was a movie where I really got to do all the things you're not supposed to do anymore, and I just had a joyously wonderful time writing the score and working with the director Peyton Reed. It's just the sort of movie I was born to score."

Shaiman says Down With Love allowed him to explore all the forbidden fruits of film scoring that contemporary movie projects have denied him. "You know, like following every single piece of action with music, mickey-mousing -- back in those times they would definitely do that," he says. "In fact one day while I was writing the movie, I had just watched this movie Move Over, Darling [score credited to Lionel Newman], with James Garner and Doris Day, and I just watched 15 minutes of it and I called Peyton and said 'Oh my god -- I went too subtle! We have to go back and redo everything!' I couldn't believe it. It was literally music throughout the movie that followed every line of dialogue and every reaction. That's fun to do, and Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger really did their homework -- she was really making the Doris Day reaction faces perfectly."

Shaiman prides himself on having applied a piece of musical punctuation to every smile, wink and nod in the movie. "I think the only thing I missed is at one point a hair on David Hyde Pierce's ass moved and I didn't catch it." But the composer also acknowledges that the movie's hyperbolic comic style has caught some viewers -- and reviewers -- off guard. "I read all the reviews of the movie and one of them said 'the composer should be strung up' or taken out and hanged or something. I've reached the age where I don't let reviews bother me that much, but this was a Florida newspaper and I thought my mother might read it. I called her and said this thing might be arriving on her doorstep the next day. And I also knew that in this case, maybe when they said it about my work in another movie they were right, but in this case they simply didn't know the style of the period. So I don't take these reviews seriously; in this case it's just reviewers not knowing any movies before Desperately Seeking Susan."

Part of the approach in recreating the frothy, early-'60s sound included a vamping chorus noodling their way through a restaurant scene to underscore star Rene Zellweger and a female co-star removing their coats to reveal hyper-fabulous '60s fashions. "That was one of the happier stories of a temp score," Shaiman says. "In this movie I had a great temp score experience because they couldn't really temp it well. They tried to temp it with some of the actual music from the Doris Day movies and wherever that worked it was successful, but still it was a hard movie to temp because since the style of that period is to follow the action so closely, you can't temp it except in bits and pieces. The idea of using the chorus in that scene came from this cheesy record that they had staged and filmed the scene to, so I did my own concept of that. But in the rest of the movie I was gloriously on my own without any temp score love, and there wasn't a moment where the director or anyone else said 'can we do what the temp score is doing here?' Which is always the case, and it was just glorious to be free of that."

Shaiman says Down With Love required virtually wall-to-wall scoringÖperhaps even something beyond mere wall-to-wall scoring. "I wrote 16 hours and 32 minutes of music," he jokes. "I think the music ends around 30 minutes after the movie." But the intensive effort didn't necessarily change his normal approach, which involved finding a key scene from which to build the musical core of the score. "You pick important scenes to work on, and when you and the director have signed off on how to musically approach the movie, then you may have a theme three-fourths of the way through the movie that I have basically scored by experimentation, which can be good and bad because if you're trying to hang on to that as an actual cue, you have to use that as a guide when you're working toward that scene. There's a scene where they're looking through a telescope and you think that he's seduced her and there's a lot of double-entendre dialogue, and there's a long pan to them so the music can be a little more up front, and they're looking at each other and saying lovey-dovey things and they kiss, so that was a scene I definitely tried to work their main love theme into. But in this case Scott (Wittman) and I wrote the song that's in the end titles, right as I was starting to score the movie -- the producers and director had asked us to write a song in the style of the movie, hot off our success of Hairspray. So we wrote the song and that became their main theme."

An earlier scene also provided a crucial element to the score. "When finding how to score the movie I actually did attack the scene where they meet at the dry cleaner's, about a third of the way into the movie, and that cue remained virtually intact from what I originally sketched out," he says. "It's note-for-note how I wrote it in my development phase, so that scene served a purpose as a model of how to attack these scenes the way they did in these older movies. That became the template; that's when the director fell in love with me and I felt like I was ready to go. And of course I attacked that scene the way I naturally always would have wanted to, and the actors were doing a great job in that scene, too, so I could really work in tandem with the actors."

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