Elia Cmiral

Cmiral first drew widespread attention as a striking and inventive voice among action-music specialists with his score for John Frankenheimer’s 1998 cult favorite Ronin. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1957 to an actress mother and a stage-director father, he completed his earliest symphony at the age of eleven and later supplied his first theatrical music for his father’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac. After leaving his Communist-ruled homeland for Sweden in 1980, he studied electronic music in Stockholm and received a grant from the University of Southern California that enabled him to train in film scoring; 1988 brought his initial Hollywood assignment, the underground success Apartment Zero. He nevertheless moved back to Sweden in 1991 and worked on numerous European films and television series until returning to the United States in 1996 to score the fledgling Don Johnson police drama Nash Bridges. Notice also arrived for his contribution to the video game The Last Express, yet it was the international acclaim surrounding Frankenheimer’s thriller Ronin that firmly established his reputation. After weathering the critical and commercial failure of John Travolta’s 2000 L. Ron Hubbard adaptation Battlefield Earth, Cmiral concentrated on a string of modestly budgeted horror pictures—Bones in 2001, Wes Craven Presents: They in 2002, and Wrong Turn in 2003—remaining a favorite among soundtrack collectors even as his broader commercial visibility declined.