Academy Award-nominated composer Marco Beltrami scored the recently premiered 10th installment in the X-Men film series, Logan, marking the third time Beltrami has set the musical mood for director James Mangold. Beltrami also worked on Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma, for which Beltrami received Academy Award nominations.
Marco Beltrami is known for his decidedly dark as well as complex and moody scores. The composer started writing musical pieces in high school, and after a brief detour studying geology at Brown University, he pursued film composing at the University of Southern California under Jerry Goldsmith. Beltrami received his first big break with Wes Craven’s 1996 iconic slasher flick, Scream.
Despite Beltrami's wide—and acclaimed––range of work (he also received an Oscar nomination for The Hurt Locker and in 2014 was nominated for a World Soundtrack Award for Film Composer of the Year), Beltrami says he has found himself pigeonholed a bit from time to time for his work in the horror genre.
“I attract those [types of scores]. People I know have given me the nickname ‘Darko Beltrami’ for that very reason,” Beltrami says. “I think success in one type of movie leads others to hire you for doing something similar, and it takes active participation to push out of a mold. I did a lot of horror movies. I had to work hard to get out of that a little bit. I think just the fact that I worked a lot with techniques that lend themselves well to [horror], and I probably put myself in the place of the characters, easily.”
When he does horror films, Beltrami says “it’s hard” to avoid the clichés of the genre’s music. But therein is the fun part of composing, he observes. “I take projects not based on genre, but by individual project and what I think I can add to it and what I think I can get out of it.”
Most recent: Logan
For more information on Marco Beltrami, visit MarcoBeltrami.com.
