Keeping Score: How ‘The Terminator’ theme was created by accident
Imagine you’re being chased by a killer robot from the future; what do you think that would sound like? Probably a cross between an industrial factory, an epic orchestra, and a techno club.
At least, that’s what composer Brad Fiedel thought when he was assigned to write the music for one of the most influential science fiction movies ever made: The Terminator.
Prior to 1984, Fiedel had mostly worked on made-for-TV movies and horror films. In the days before his screen career, he worked various odd jobs in the music industry, including playing in a nightclub where he opened for comedians like George Carlin and Andy Kaufman and acting as a keyboard player for everyone’s favourite ’80s duo who now hate each other, Hall & Oates. His life changed forever when someone at his talent agency sent a tape of his work to a then-unknown director named James Cameron.
After watching an early cut of Cameron’s terrifying vision of the future and deciding he had to be involved, Fiedel set about trying to come up with a sound for this tale of time-travelling cyborg mayhem. “It was this idea of a mechanical man, in a sense, and his heartbeat,” he said in an interview reflecting on the film. Naturally, he turned to his expansive collection of synthesisers for inspiration, but it would take a happy accident for him to come up with something that would fit.
Due to the incompatibility of all his various pieces of equipment, the composer had to play each individual synth separately at the same time to understand what they would sound like together. As he so elegantly explains, “Part of the nature of the score is me trying to get control of the machines, while the machines are trying to get control of the people in the movie”. Fiedel had originally intended to play the film’s main theme in a 7/8 time signature, but, while trying to keep track of his various loops, he accidentally nudged one of them into the even more obtuse signature of 13/16.
What he ended up creating turned out to be a masterstroke. The unusual nature of the piece adds to the sense of unease surrounding the main character; that uncanny valley between nature and technology. It was also fitting that, despite being mechanical in nature, the music had been given a unique edge by a human ‘mistake’. This is very much in keeping with the ethos of the film: machines might appear to be all powerful but they are no match for the indomitable human spirit.
With his foundation in place, Fiedel went about putting together the instrumental that would become ‘Terminator: Theme’. He reused the idea of metallic sounds from a score he’d written for a film about Adolf Hitler. There had been fears that an orchestral piece would have made the dictator seem sympathetic, so he went with something much harsher on the ears. Fiedel recorded a bunch of clanging and banging sounds by hitting pots and pans from his own kitchen, contributing to the hodge-podge, DIY feel of the soundtrack.
When all was said and done, he had created the perfect theme song for one of cinema’s ultimate killing machines. His work landed him gigs on future Cameron productions of Terminator 2 and True Lies, as well as other projects like Fright Night and The Big Easy. He retired from film scoring in the late 1990s to focus his time on writing musicals instead.
