[Wesley]

He’s the real deal as far as I’m concerned. When he’s working with a director whom he really enjoys, like Tommy Lee Jones or Proyas or Mangold, you can hear the energy he and his team have. Great instrumentation, thoughtful electronic textures, and a real interest in experimenting. If Young errs towards melody in these films then Beltrami definitely prefers electronic experimentation. Three Burials, 3:10 to Yuma, The Homesman, Gods of Egypt etc. all are really well-done and individual. His early ’90s stuff sounded really mature despite being only 30 and he was really flexing his orchestrational muscles there. The Faculty for instance is a good mixture of hip, young guitar synth pulse stuff and very appealing orchestral portions.

But when he’s doing a bad movie, you can just feel him calling a spade a spade and not caring to shake it up at all. E.g, for Angelina Jolie’s movie almost all the music is him or a lackey holding down one note on a synthesizer. For others like the Nicholas Cage Dracula, in interviews he doesn’t beat around the bush and will say things like, “Yeah, I really liked that movie when I first saw it, but then they took all the good scenes away and this is what you’re left with.” I think World War Z in particular broke him because he did a really cool percussion score with animal bones and all this other crazy stuff at Air Studio for the director, and then was told by executives to start again and do something else, and he’s been cruising on autopilot a lot since then. Logan was good and so was Mathilda, the Russian movie. I’m sure he enjoyed Mangold’s racing movie since he’s a car guy, but that type of music wasn’t my cup of tea.

Was his Bach project ever broadcast or sold anywhere? I’m curious how that turned out.