We already know that Danny Elfman is composing the music to director McG’s “Terminator Salvation” and that the original theme written by Brad Fiedel will probably be included if it “seems appropriate,” Elfman said.
However, at the New York Comic Con this weekend during the “Terminator Salvation” panel, McG — who also called Christian Bale on his phone, more on that later — said he had reached out to Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Academy Award-winning Argentinian composer Gustavo Santaolalla (“Babel,” “21 Grams,” “Brokeback Mountain”) to write some music for the film.
“We talked about Gustavo getting together with Thom Yorke from Radiohead which I thought would be very interesting. And they may still do a couple of sounds for the movie,” McG said sounding hopeful. As for why he chose Danny Elfman? “I needed someone who understood film as a whole and understood the delicate nature of humanity and the the brutality of the machines.”
While the thought of a Santaolalla/Yorke collaboration makes us froth at the mouth, we’re not sure “Terminator Salvation” would be the best place to showcase those kinds of potentially amazing sounds. We’re also a bit skeptical about the collaboration happening in time, or either artist agreeing to the McG-made request, but we’re sure this report will flush some news out there either way.
We should note, McG seems like a nice guy, but man, he’s either constantly amped or had chugged three Redbulls beforehand. One does need to be a cheerleader to be a film director, but McG seems to have really taken that concept to heart and constantly kept asking the audience to bring up their energy and enthusiasm and kept baiting them into cheering for everything (“What do you think of Danny Elfman?! Huh? C’mon!”). It struck us as a little odd. The seven minutes of footage we saw impressed the geeks with it’s non-stop high-adrenaline action, but we’re not convinced, by what we’ve seen so far that this isn’t “Charlie’s Angels” set in the Terminator world. We’re hoping there’s going to be some drama, story and something for Christian Bale to really chew on, but that was only mildly hinted at in what we saw. Then again, the action-packed scenes are exactly what Comic-Con’ers are looking for and they definitely approved of what they saw.