When we first snuck into CONAN THE BARBARIAN in the early 80's as prepubescent tikes, we were both separately captivated by Schwarzenegger's size, the naked witch, and the fantastic epic music that accompanied it all. From our earliest memories of movie going, Poledouris' music was a large part of the experience. Basil Poledouris is already a legend in film and he has etched a huge place for himself in music history. His music is as timeless as it is fearlessly groundbreaking.

Talking to Basil Poledouris, you quickly forget that he is one of the leading composers working today. He is soft spoken, incredibly humble, but very straightforward and honest. He also loves sailing and in his words, salt water runs in his veins. So on we sail...

Vance Brawley: You've been working with your daughter, Zoë, this past summer. Tell us what you guys have worked on.

Basil Poledouris: She has a band called Doppler. Actually, she’s in two bands and writes for both of them. The other one is called Bombshell. It’s been a fascinating kind of exploration of contemporary forms of music for me. Not that I don’t listen, because I do listen to what goes on out there. This has been a really interesting kind of education.

VB: Have you been learning some new production techniques.

BP: Absolutely. I’ve got a full digital MIDI system here, with the Euphonic mixing console, and I’m getting into the automation of that sort of thing. We mixed STARSHIP TROOPERS here, and it presents so many possibilities of how one can choreograph by instinct. Then all of a sudden you come up with four separate stereo sources up front, as well as from front to rear on the sides. So the possibilities are really fascinating for what one could do; the score is written that way. It’s just not the sort of thing you can do after the fact. We did some of it in STARSHIP TROOPERS; the trumpets were antiphonal, set up hard left, hard right. The symphonies were antiphonal in that they were left and right, and the main thing about that is it all has to be discrete. In STARSHIP TROOPERS, Steve Foreman, the percussionist, did massive amounts of snare drumming out of each of the five speakers, discretely. It gave it this incredible wall of sound, with a militaristic kind of drive to it. So those are the kinds of things I’ve been to trying to get a little more in depth, just exploring how this would impact on the writing. The danger of that is it becomes exploration for its own sake, and that’s where the art of it comes in, blending the musicality of it with the truly new sonic possibilities of what could be done. Now DVD of course is a smaller version of the SDDS, where you have three speakers in front and two in the rear. In addition to that sort of thing, I’ve also gotten deeply into Protools, which has largely been the domain of the music editor until recently. What it does is gives me the capability to go back and edit out things from scores that exist. Hopefully I’m putting together a new sort of HONOR AND GLORY PART II. The other one cuts off with the Olympics, so there’s nothing newer than 1996. I’ve got a few more years of stuff.

VB: What sort of form do you think it would be released in?

BP: At this point it’s just going to be for promotion only, not for sale.

VB: There’s a great story of how you presented Paul Verhoeven with Zoë’s song for STARSHIP TROOPERS. How did that come about?

BP: Paul was looking for something and had an interesting problem, in that here’s a film set 400 years in the future. He needed some source material, particularly in the high school graduation scene, which was going to be shot on camera as it was in the script. David Bowie has always loved his films, and they have a relationship going back to SHOWGIRLS, that movie in Vegas. So Bowie had offered to work on the film and be in it, but Paul was concerned about having the persona of a contemporary artist for a film set in the future. He expressed that concern to me one day and said, "I don’t know what we’re going to do. There’s so many great pieces of music around, so many bands, but I’m ç hesitant to use this sort of thing." What I said is, "What you need, I suspect, is an artist no one’s heard before." He said, "Do you know any?" I said, "Well, let me find out and do some exploration on this." I put together a series of tapes for him of people who had submitted songs in the past, as well as my daughter, and I submitted them all to Paul anonymously one day. He chose hers and thought she had a voice that was sort of rooted in this time period but expressed it in a totally different way. I was a little stunned and said, "You know who this is?" He said, "No," and I showed him a picture. He hadn’t seen her since we did ROBOCOP, ten years before, and he said, "I don’t know who this is." I said, "Yeah, you do, that’s Zoë." He said, "Oh, my God!" So then of course she got to work in the film with him, and she did a terrific job. He was very pleased with her, and I got to cover the David Bowie song from the Outside album. The second song in the prom scene. David changed the lyrics slightly to reflect the 23rd Century; I think the original lyric said "the 21st Century dies." It was from an album about serial killers that he and Brian Eno did.

Nathaniel Thompson: Why wasn’t that song on the album? Was it a rights problem?

BP: It may have been, but we never really explored it. I think the song is quite good. Of course Zoë’s song was unencumbered, legally.

VB: Now going back to your first score, BIG WEDNESDAY, as with many of your other scores, featured water, and you have a passion for sailing.

BP: And surfing.

VB: Do you think when you’re composing, you treat the water as a character in the film?

BP: Absolutely. Also the entire idea, at least in the conceptual way that [John] Milius and I work, for FAREWELL TO THE KING is that the opening titles represent the sweep of the South China Seas. It has the power and mystery of the sea itself. Obviously it’s not set on the water; he only comes in by water, on a raft, to escape from being tried as a deserter. Milius always thought that was a very important aspect of it, and that was the mythological hit for the whole thing. I think water plays an extremely important part, and BIG WEDNESDAY has the "Ocean’s Theme," the secondary part of the main titles. With the exception of the sailing at the beginning, THE BLUE LAGOON really didn’t follow that as much. There’s a little bit in QUIGLEY DOWN UNDER as well with the ship opening. I think these are very important things because it’s the vehicle that has borne all of these characters to where the story is taking place.

VB: I'm sure WIND was especially rewarding to write, given your love of sailing.

BP: I think salt water must run in my veins; it’s a part of me. There are some interesting lessons from the flow of water that can be applied to the art of composition; you let the water take you where you will. You need to wind’s permission to get to a certain place, and you need Neptune’s permission to get to a good wave. I prefer to be in harmony with what’s around me than opposing it, which is a different kind of sailing and surfing.

VB: With the wind effect, WIND gives one their own sailing experience.

BP: I’ve never done that, interestingly enough. I normally don’t allow music on my boat.

VB: You’ve had some significant collaborations with directors - John Milius, Randall Kleiser - who were school chums, and very different as far as the films they make.

BP: They’re two very different kinds of people. That’s the part that makes it all fascinating. I think it would be boring to work with the same person, but the more I work with directors, especially the same ones over and over again, they - like composers - tend to have a particular point of view which pervades all of their work. You can have variations on that point of view, but generally it’s been occurring more and more to me that we’re actually scoring the directors as opposed to the films. The truth of the matter is you could score the movie ten different ways, and it would probably work, and what gives it its uniqueness obviously is the input of the composer. I think more importantly, since it is such a collaborative art form, is the input of the director. Their work is up there, so even if you didn’t see them face to face, you can learn a lot about people by watching their films.

VB: You have been lucky to work with directors who have not necessarily a musical background, but a sense of musicality.

BP: Yes, just take a look at a lot of the films I’ve done. Music plays a very important part in them. CONAN has no dialogue for the first 33 minutes, aside from the prologue. It had to have music. BLUE LAGOON is the same way, a series of incredibly beautiful montages put together to form a loosely knit plot. Films that tend to be more visually than plot driven require more music, and directors have come to me because of that. Obviously that’s why I’ve done those kinds of films; I hope it’s one of my strengths.

NT: Simon Wincer seems to fall into that category, too.

BP: Simon was actually taken by FAREWELL TO THE KING. We had just finished recording that, and Charles Ryan, my agent at the time, said to me, "We’ve gone through everything. Do you have anything we can give these folks for LONESOME DOVE?" I thought, God, it’s a cowboy movie; I’ve never done one of those. He said, "What’s this thing you just did?" I said, "It’s about Borneo, World War II! It doesn’t make any sense; you’re talking about 1860 Texas?" He said, "Well, just send it to me." So I sent him this tape, which they played for Simon, and it was exactly what he was looking for. What both Simon and John Milius wanted was heart, and they were both about male relationships there was something in the music that spoke to that, a masculinity with sensitivity. Simon responded to it instantly; it was uncanny, and that began our relationship.

VB: LONESOME DOVE has recently been rereleased with some previously unheard tracks, and I know you had some trepidation about releasing that material.

BP: Ford Thaxton brought the idea to me from his record company, Sonic Images, and they put a lot of energy into securing the rights to the music and getting access to the unreleased material. It was complicated because of the various ownerships of LONESOME DOVE on video and TV, all these ancillary issues. He had an enormous task of putting it together just at that phase. Of course, a habit kicks in for me; LONESOME DOVE has a certain structure and form. A lot of thought went into that when we did the first album. I was reluctant to change its shape for various reasons. Some of the cues Ford considered putting in I was reluctant about because of some of the performances. It was written, performed, and recorded quickly, and I didn’t think some of the performances lived up to what was on the album, which I think is pretty good. I have to admit I think he has added a different flavor to it, such as that honky tonk cue. It’s an interesting point of view that was never expressed on the album before, and it was used as more of a source cue but is a flavor that was in the film itself. I did a lot of piano throughout, but a lot of people aren’t aware of its existence in the film.

VB: We’ve heard from a lot of people, not necessarily collectors, who loved the movie and the music in it. We dare even the most macho cowboys not to cry during the main theme.

BP: It was all there, everything was just right. The adaptation of the novel was phenomenal. John Milius thinks it’s one of the ten best westerns ever made. I saw Robert Duvall the other night being asked what his favorite work was, and I expected him to say THE GODFATHER. To my surprise, he said that after LONESOME DOVE, he would have died a happy actor. I think that’s an extraordinary mouthful! Look over that career and the different kinds of brilliant projects he’s been involved with, and to him, LONESOME DOVE was the one he could have never done another move after that. It just blew my mind.

VB: So looking back on your career, do you have a favorite as far as the whole experience of scoring?

BP: LONESOME DOVE would fall into that category. It was a joy to write; it’s always a joy to work with Simon. He’s cut from the same cloth as Milius; maybe it’s an age thing, since they’re older and more experienced than the younger directors who feel like they need to be in control of every aspect of their film. There’s a little more freedom because they hire a composer and don’t just want him to imitate a temp track. None of these people have said, "Oh, God, I love this film score so much; can’t you make it sound like that?" Paul Verhoeven, who’s very hands on, will never force a piece of music or another person’s musical idea on you. He’ll use it as an example and then explore what it is about that that he likes, be it the harmony or the orchestration. There are so many elements to music that it’s even difficult for one musician to explain to another some of the ideas in a piece. I try to get as specific as I can when someone has something in a temp track they like. Sometimes they like it because it’s played on a trumpet, it can be as simple as that, or something as complicated as the rhythmic or melodic structure, the unusual turn of phrase. It’s dangerous to go off and blithely rely on a temp tracks for a sound. During ROBOCOP, Peter Weller loves jazz and suggested we use that in the movie. There are a lot of things I like about jazz, of course, and I’ve used elements of it for films, but for this specific film, it’s another matter altogether.

VB: That’s also a key as to why your music has this timeless quality about it. You weren’t working with a temp track where you had to do a certain style. You dealt with films like CONAN or ROBOCOP where those periods didn’t exist.

BP: I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been presented with a number of films which have been perceived as difficult things to crack. No one was sure, the music supervisors and Carroll Ballard, how WIND was supposed to be perceived, musically. Nobody knew what the hell CHERRY 2000 was supposed to sound like. With SERIAL MOM, John Waters knew he wanted to root it in a more traditional-sounding orchestral score, but it had to have elements of psychosis. How do you address the comedy versus the serious nature of the fact that she is killing people? Musically, how do you express that sort of thing? ROBOCOP is a prime example, too, and FREE WILLY, in which I had to find out how to not do a Disneyesque boy and his whale kind of music. RED DAWN was one, very atypical for Milius, where he didn’t want very strong, traditional themes. That movie had to stand on its head in a way. Even THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER was an action film, of course, but there were Russians in it. I don’t think McTiernan knew it was going to become THAT Russian! The studio was very concerned about the main titles, that audiences would think it was a foreign film. Whatever! To his credit, he really stood behind it. They were really pushing to have it pulled, and he said, "So, you wanna keep it?" I said, "Yeah, absolutely." He said, "We’d rather be hung as wolves than sheep?" I said, "Yep, every time, John." And he was right; he went to the wall for it.

VB: One of the most brilliant scores in the past few years has been IT’S MY PARTY, which for collectors of your work has become a favorite because it’s you playing, solo on piano.

BP: That credit goes to Randall Kleiser. I think he has it in the liner notes. In the "old days" - five years ago! - that’s the only way you could present an idea, on a keyboard or perhaps if someone’s a gifted guitarist. Randall was always taken with the directness and the simplicity of this kind of presentation, but you must also realize this is the nature of his films. While Milius tends to think on a canvas, Randall’s films tend to be much more intimate and more realistic in terms of what human beings are capable of. I think the solo piano had a simplicity he always liked, and it had an emotionality that could be frustrated by an orchestra which couldn’t deliver the same nuances. When it came to IT’S MY PARTY, he was very concerned. Obviously you have very delicate subject matter, a love story between two men, and he needed it to be emotional and to have a certain resonance. He knew he didn’t want to have trappings of Hollywood on it with a lot of manipulation. He certainly didn’t want to clobber the picture where the main focus area was the characters’ relationship. I was hesitant, and I said, "Look, let me have a small string section, an oboe, a couple of flutes." My main concern was that since there’s so much dialogue, the underscore (which is all the music, since it’s all interior) just wouldn’t register at all. But look how it turned out. Doing that score was really a privilege. They really had no money, and I did it for no money. I wanted to be a part of it. I think I got a dollar! Because of that he had a very loose schedule, and we worked on it for four or five months. I did other things in between, and it took a lot of thought. If I had put down my initial ideas, even as a piano solo, they were quite different from what we ended up with. He wrote the film and did the material so well; there was a directness of communication where he would say, "Change this, or try that," and it was instant. If you have an orchestra, you might be able to go back two days later and do a sketchy representation of what it’s going to sound like. Then there’s another process of going to the recording stage and doing it, then the approval for everyone involved. I think some directors are intimidated by the size of the orchestra with which we’re forced to work; the cash register is ringing constantly while you’re working. They’re hesitant to request changes and therefore might be displeased more than they’re willing to let on because there isn’t the time to do that. Of course, now we have the mock-up process where we can replicate an orchestra with synthesizers, fairly accurately (I hate to admit!). It may be lacking the emotion of live musicians playing the music, but the people involved can understand that, while this is a shadow of what you’ll be playing, it’s a pretty damn close one. That tends to work really well. We mocked up every cue for STARSHIP TROOPERS, and for LES MISERABLES for Bille August, so there were no surprises.

VB: Recently you attended a concert given by John Barry for THE BEYONDNESS OF THINGS, in London. How was that experience

BP: Just to sit there and hear piece after piece wash over you, saying, "God, he wrote that, and THAT!" It was just orgiastic. I just conducted a fundraising event where we did some suites from my films. I forgot how much fun it is, and how much work it is! There’s a huge amount of energy to preparing for a concert where it demands months of preparation. Just arranging the music is a huge task.

VB: There’s some great work of yours that’s not available. What part do you take in that decision-making process, as far as what music is released and what is not, such as BREAKDOWN?

BP: I would never stand in the way of the release of an album. I don’t write albums, I write film scores, and I approach them in a melodic, tonal fashion. I think they make pleasing listening experiences for someone who likes the film because it gives them a chance to relive it. The main consideration for albums is the cost, which is an unfortunate fact. A lot of films are done in the United States, and the musicians’ reuse fees can be quite costly. BREAKDOWN would have been very costly, and it came so close to a release. That’s the other indicator: record companies like to have things released at least a week before the film is released.

You’re one of the most collected composers (on CD). CHERRY 2000 sold for $2500. Your music on CD is something of a phenomenon on its own. FAREWELL TO THE KING was released by Varese and Milan and went out of print both times; now it’s worth quite a lot.

BP: CHERRY 2000 was the first of the series, and I also inaugurated Doug Fake’s label with RED DAWN. I didn’t know Milan did FAREWELL TO THE KING, just that they did CONAN.

VB: Any chance of a compilation?

BP: That’s also dictated by the reuse fees of those scores, though I’m working on that one right now for a promotional CD. Richard Kraft has been banging on me for the past three years to go somewhere and record these scores so that it could come up for sale and be accessible to everyone. Even on the first one, anything recorded outside of the United States is fair game and can be released with just the permission of the publishers, such as FAREWELL TO THE KING or CONAN, though that one would be difficult because Varese still has it in print. It’s really a matter of time, probably more so for me because I really won’t commit to something unless I can do the best job that I can do. I take a commitment seriously, particularly with music. It’s kind of a sacred duty; I feel like I’m carrying on a tradition and hopefully carrying it forward, adding to it a little bit. I have the greatest respect for the pioneers of film composition as well as the pioneers of music itself. Let’s not forget Mahler, Bach, all the people who invented folk songs from which all of this is an outgrowth. It’s much more than a commodity, and I’m lucky to be a part of it. I don’t take it lightly. However, this summer I began trying something I don’t normally do: writing music outside of films. I spent time in Ireland after I finished LES MISERABLES, and the place really struck me. I just loved it. I’ve never responded to a place like I did there, and I was totally overwhelmed from all aspects of stimulus and thought. I’ve been writing suites about those feelings, and they range from the mundane to some pretty good stuff. That’s the sort of thing that, if I had the backing, I’d love to record it. I don’t want to take on the concert stage, and I’ve never done this before. My first and only love, my form of musical expression, is film music. The interesting thing is that I’ll have to make up a film before I can write the music. Ireland’s full of fascinating ideas and history. Maybe it would be a poem, an ode, to the Druids. It goes beyond the Celts.

NT: When you were talking about CONAN, that was a rare example - in this case Varese - of an album being expanded from its vinyl version. Did you have a hand in the expansion of CONAN, and are there any other scores you’d like to elaborate the same way?

BP: Yes, I did have a hand in it. Bob Townson was very set on that score and wanted to put out that CD. I think we have a very open relationship, very respectful. However, he was wary of how I would react to that idea, so he brought all the stuff over to my house. He asked me to go through the master tapes and see what I would like to add. I’m sensitive to that need to add material, and I think what we added to CONAN worked really well. There’s that march thing that takes place in the kitchen, sort of a send-up of the Thulsa Doom music at the beginning. They’re just kitchen guys instead of warriors on horses. I wanted to work in the gladiator theme, but that would have required a remix from the 24-tracks, and those weren’t available. But who would have thought that LONESOME DOVE needed expanded until I started listening to it? I can’t think of anything offhand that impresses me as lacking on CD, though. Often my impressions will be how difficult a cue was to write or record, or how difficult the director may or may not have been during the process. When you get further away from that, you can judge the music better. I’d have to listen everything all over again. In the case of CHERRY 2000, I think we used almost everything that was in the movie. Certainly MAKING THE GRADE was that way, too. My scores used to run about 45 minutes, which was lengthy for a film score, and now they’re up to 70 minutes! There’s a lot of stuff laying around, though, such as LES MISERABLES, which turned out to be a little over 40 minutes.

NT: What happened with that album? The track titles list much longer times than the actual CD.

BP: I’m guilty. Here’s what happened: the studio really wanted to have this album in place before the movie came out. We all thought the movie would perform better than it did, and everyone seemed to be pleased with the music. I’m happy the score turned out the way it did. Because we were doing these mock-ups, we thought, why not mock up a record as well? It sounded great on paper, but unfortunately they needed all of the artwork, including the title lengths and names. They finished the layout two or three weeks before I finished writing the music, so it was just sort of a guess. It came out to 26 titles, which to me was a little screwball. I suggested it be broken down into four suites, so we wouldn’t locked down. It was still theoretical; if I didn’t like the way it went together, I wanted to option to remove or add material. We kind of guesstimated what the lengths of each suite would be. The main blow to that whole time discrepancy was a cue, originally seven and a half minutes long, that I always assumed would be on the CD. I recorded it, and it worked great in the film where they’re climbing over the walls. I just thought that section, called "The Queen of France", was a little long. In retrospect, I should have left it in. It’s a good cue. I just played it for some people the other day and was kind of dumbfounded that it help up. When you’re in the heat of it, you tend to have a little different perspective than in the cool light of dawn later on. I apologize for any inconvenience that may have caused anyone! (laughs) A lot of my titles and times tend to get messed up. The same cue is used twice on the ROBOCOP album, but I don’t know if anyone ever caught that. One of them has a mistake in the violas, and the other one doesn’t. I had intended on cutting the two together, but both takes got on! I didn’t even know it for a couple of years until after I did it, and I thought, ""God, didn’t I just hear that cue?" And I wrote it!

NT: It’s interesting that WIND was released in Japan by a New Age label [For Life]. Every now and then your scores kind of tread around the edge of New Age, such as WIRED and SUMMER LOVERS. How interested are you in that musical genre?

BP: I don’t really listen to it very often, but it’s hard to avoid sometimes. Maybe that’s the contemporary film music sound that I have, although BREAKDOWN dispels that one. That’s a very interesting score. In fact, I’m cutting together some of the cues on Protools right now. It’s got some wild stuff! It was written under duress, to a certain degree, and here I am going back over it saying some of it’s pretty good. If I hadn’t had to pad under dialogue I never would have written that in the first place. I don’t know where this is going to end up, though.

Hopefully it will end up on store shelves soon!

Special Thanks to Ford A. Thaxton and the very generous Basil Poledouris!