In an interview with Cinema Score, Jerry Goldsmith spoke about how he got the job. “Steven Spielberg called me about five months before it went into production and wanted to know if I would be interested in doing it. He’d long been an admirer of mine, and we had met several times. I said I’d be very interested, so he sent me a script and I loved it. I was very excited
about being involved with anything with Spielberg, anyway. “
Jerry Goldsmith would work closely with Spielberg during the creation of the score.”With Spielberg, probably more than any other director, there’s a tremendous amount of discussion. He’s very articulate about music, and one can discuss for hours about approaches. Anything I did was not on my own volition; it was a joint effort in that we both agreed what we were trying to do with the music for the picture. We wanted a childlike theme for the little girl; Spielberg felt that much of the action in the closet should have a quasi-religious atmosphere to it. There was something definitely non-human about it, yet it was not evil all the way. It was discussing specifics like that which resulted in our approach. “
Because of all the effects in the film, Spielberg had give Goldsmith an extremely vivid description of what the audience was going to be seeing, but it wasn’t until the score was finished that much of the effects footage started rolling in. In some cases, the cues were actually longer than the scene was. Goldsmith spoke of one scene in particular: “The sequence where
the Victorian ghost comes down the stairs was originally blocked to be twice as long. If you hear the album and see the picture you’ll see where it had to be cut for the picture. When the effects came in, there were only half as much of them.“
Arthur Morton worked as the orchestrator of the score. Morton once described their collaborations in a simple manor, “I take the music from the yellow paper and put it on the white paper.” Goldsmith and Morton had been working together since Take Her She’s Mine and would do so until LA Confidential, a score he went uncredited on.
