Marco Beltrami - Life and Career

Life and Career

Beltrami was born in Long Island, New York of Italian and Greek descent. He attended Ward Melville High School, and afterwards, graduated from Brown University and studied at the Yale School of Music, and then moved west to the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, where he studied under legendary composer Jerry Goldsmith.

A few classical commissions and USC student films aside, Beltrami scored his first movie feature in 1994, the thriller Death Match for director Joe Coppolletta, and reached a higher level of public acclaim in 1996 when he wrote the score for Wes Craven's smash hit shocker Scream. Since then, Beltrami has become firmly entrenched as a composer of choice for the horror/thriller and action genre, with the Scream sequels and hit movies such as Mimic (1997), The Faculty (1998), Angel Eyes (2001), Joy Ride (2001), Resident Evil (2002), which he co-composed with Marilyn Manson), Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004), I, Robot (2004) and Red Eye (2005) featuring prominently in his resume. Apart from horror/thriller and action, he also scores certain independent films such as The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys and Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada. He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his score for the film David and Lisa in 1998, indicating a desire to spread his musical wings beyond the bounds of his genre pigeonholing. One of his recent works include Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth installment in the Die Hard tetralogy, for which Beltrami used some of Michael Kamen's original themes from the previous three films due to Kamen's death in 2003. Beltrami earned an Academy Award nomination for his work on James Mangold's acclaimed 2007 western remake, 3:10 to Yuma. Despite having met a mixed critical response, he was also nominated, alongside Buck Sanders, for the 2010 Academy Award for Best Original Score for his score to The Hurt Locker. In 2011, he was met with critical praise and won a Satellite Award for Best Original Score for his score to the drama film Soul Surfer.

Beltrami's signature style is based around highly percussive texture. He often employs both traditional percussive instruments like bass drums, as well as violins and brass instruments, forming layers of hits and stabs.