Those familiar with the Blade films are no doubt aware that the bristling soundtracks accompanying each installment present a hi-octane mixture of fist pounding rap turgidity and hyped up electronic blitz. The score crafted by RZA and Djawadi remains true to this established musical theme, blending down tempo undulation with often frenetic symphonic overlays.
Goyer's decision to utilize the talents of the RZA was no accident. "I like the Wu-Tang Clan and I really liked what he'd done on Ghost Dog," recalls Goyer. "I was in the middle of directing Blade: Trinity when Kill Bill came out and the RZA had done music in that was more score and not just songs and I really liked that. I remember talking to one of my producers, Peter Frankfurt, and saying 'What do you think about the RZA?' And I swear to God, completely coincidentally, the RZA's agent called me and asked 'What do you think about the RZA?' And I said 'Wow, synchronicity!' But I was interested in the RZA working with a more traditional composer because he doesn't have a background with orchestration."
Which brings us to the pairing of one of rap's signature musical voices with an up-and-coming cinematic composer: Ramin Djawadi. "We found this guy Ramin Djawadi, who is a prot¿g¿ of Hans Zimmer, who I'm sure you know as he's done the scores for Pirates of the Caribbean, The Lion King, things like that. Hans has four or five young prot¿g¿s that work with him and sometimes write additional pieces of score. Ramin had grown up out of that and had written some pieces for Pirates of the Caribbean and he's a classically trained musician. It's interesting because he's either Arabic or Persian, but he grew up in Germany, so he's got this interesting background, so I thought it would be cool to partner the two of them together. I didn't want the RZA to just write songs and Ramin to just do orchestra. I wanted them to sort of throw sounds back and forth. And then I wanted the RZA to write music that Ramin would orchestrate, as well.
"The RZA ended up doing about six or seven pieces for the film. Some of them were songs proper and some of them were fusions with Ramin. It took awhile for us to figure out a vocabulary to work with, but we had a great time and I think it's a really cool score. In some ways I think it may be the best score [of all three films]. And the RZA, I loved. I loved working with him. He's a really nice guy."
In addition to the music of the RZA and Ramin, which runs throughout the film, Goyer also managed to insert some of his own personal music tastes into the picture, specifically in terms of Jessica Biel's character Abigail Whistler. In fact there's a rather humorous sequence in the film in which the sultry Whistler is seen loading up her iPod with a variety of electronic and rap tracks ranging from Fluke and Underworld to Jurassic 5. It's explained that she likes to listen to music when she's hunting vampires, specifically "darkcore, trip-hop, whatever kids are listening to today."
The playlists that scroll by on Whistler's laptop in the film are in fact actual songs from Goyer's iPod cache. "That's my list," he laughs. "That list in the film was actually taken from my iTunes. " As mentioned, the list was heavy with electronic oriented music, augmented by generous doses of rap, specifically a preponderance of J5. Turns out Goyer is a rather huge fan. "When I was first writing the script I was listening to some Jurassic 5," he explains. "There's a fight montage in the movie that originally I was thinking of using a Jurassic 5 piece for and I was thinking of using some Fluke for some later sequences. But then I decided that I mostly wanted to use music that hasn't been released yet. I think there's only two songs in the movie that were previously released. But everything else on the soundtrack is stuff that hasn't been released before. I just decided that I wanted to do something fresher."
