Marco Beltrami page

'Most of my music is assaulting and I like to be assaulting as a composer. It's important to me to kind of slap the audience in the face a little bit. The worst thing that could happen to me as a composer is that my music is just treated like wall paper. It's just in there like lighting. I think that music should confront the listener and say something, it shouldn't be neutral.'

Personal quote

Marco Beltrami = horror composer. Or something like that. It's true that Beltrami has scored his fair share of horror albums and its simply the fact that he's very good at it. Despite some light duds (Joy Ride even though quite good in the film), its Beltrami's voice that thrills such features as Scream and Mimic. These are the examples of his best work. But there is more, basically Beltrami has shown it but do we search for it? Texas Rangers was rejected, I Am Dina was forgotten, Angel Eyes not released, The Dangerous Life of Altar Boys simply ignored, Terminator 3 not truly accepted and David and Lisa is the big unknown to all the fans. So why is that? Basically its a mix of what's released and what's heard. Beltrami is a good composer and a fan favorite when his thematic voice does the work, but true, he need's to break through yet to get the status of big film composer. For now its film composer, which is more then enough given things today.

Biography

Composer Marco Beltrami was born on October the 7th, 1968 in USA. Though growing up in Fornero, Italy, Beltrami's roots were in America, and after studying in Venice with Luigi Nono, he moved to The Yale School of Music to finish his education. Later on he moved to Los Angeles, getting in contact and training with legendary film composer Jerry Goldsmith. After working with orchestras and symphonies, Beltrami scored his first feature film with The Bicyclist, moving further to compose Deathmatch and the series Land's End. One year later though he scored jackpot when Wes Craven and he reinvented the slasher genre with Scream. Beltrami received imminent stardom from the fans and they saw him reunite with the cast and director in the sequels Scream 2 and Scream 3. Other collaborations between composer and director became apparent when Beltrami scored impressively Mimic for director Guillermo Del Toro. While Beltrami was seen by fans only as the horror composer for films such as The Faculty and Dracula 2000, while writing additional music for stock horror fare as Nightwatch, Halloween H20 and Halloween Resurrection, Beltrami is more then that, scoring David and Lisa (receiving an Emmy nomination for that), 54, thrillers like the quirky The Minus Man, The Watcher, Deep Water and Joy Ride as the drama for Jennifer Lopez namely Angel Eyes. I Am Dina, The Dangerous Life of Altar Boys and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines proved his more versatile voice while he co wrote Resident Evil with Marilyn Manson. Beltrami received more fans with his great score for Hellboy and finished I, Robot in weeks time. The remake of The Flight of the Phoenix brought his more quirky side back and Cursed among Scream like territory. Red Eye lets him return to Wes Craven's territory. But Beltrami remains hot no matter what, with Underworld: Evolution, Captivity, The Omen (remake), The Invisible, Live Free or Die Hard and the acclaimed 3:10 to Yuma amongst others, he remains scoring thriller, horror, science fiction, action and western in the typical quirky sense. And there's no stopping him.

1997

I think what I did was better and worked better for the picture which is more important than the Broken Arrow thing, but it never happened. Now they're using the Broken Arrow thing, so my music won't be in there. The fact that they're taking music that was written for another movie and putting into their movie is totally absurd. Whenever Dewey appears, they use it as his theme. It's kind of mind blowing to me.
(on the use of Broken Arrow in Scream 2)

1997

A last laugh, just so that all in all it's a movie and you can't take it too seriously. You have to have fun with it somehow. If I have too much fun they're going to yell at me and kick me off the set, kick me out of my job, or whatever. I figured if I can do it very subtly somehow, at least I'll appease myself and hopefully not offend them. I was never fired, so I guess I did okay.
(on using the original La Cucaracha in the song for Mimic)

1997

That's basically what film scoring is, abstracting the events happening on the screen to some sort of musical characteristic. The more creative you are, the more original it sounds.
(overall impression)

August 9, 1998

I also had to make the Scream and Mimic stuff more to the nature of Halloween, take out some things that would identify it as Scream or Mimic music. That was my primary task.
(on Halloween H20)

August 9, 1998

That's the downside, there are only 15 minutes from each movie on the CD. It's a very short CD. In fact, I had to edit down many of the cues, I couldn't put the whole length on because it would preclude putting other cues on. It would have been nice if it was twice that length. While it still would have been short, it would have been enough to get a good feel for both films.
(on the Scream / Scream 2 CD release)

August 9, 1998

Wes taught me a lot about how to maximize the scare potential in horror movies. One common rule is if nobody's there you "sting" it, and if the killer is there you go silent.
(on how to score for horror films)

December, 2000

Even though I broke through with Scream, it's led to other kinds of jobs. I haven't found the genre associations to be a problem with getting other work; mostly I feel like nature takes its course.
(on being called a horror composer)

March 11, 2004

Well, there are a lot of strong, individual characters in the movie. And I think to acknowledge them musically brings that out - there's also a fun quality to this movie. I think by having a theme that accompanies the characters and all, you get to sort of emotionally feel them on a different level.
(on themes for Hellboy)