MUSIC INTERVIEW: DANNY ELFMAN

Tim Burton’s Favorite Composer Leaps Down The Rabbit Hole for 'Alice in Wonderland'

By: Daniel Schweiger

March 9, 2010

When it comes to jumping into the rabbit hole of a director’s wondrous imagination, few composers have taken such memorable leaps as Danny Elfman has done for the worlds of Tim Burton. Beginning with 1985’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Elfman has been the Cheshire Cat to Burton’s Mad Hatter over the course of 13 features that Burton has either directed or produced. In his strikingly melodic and often delightfully twisted adventures for the filmmaker, Elfman has heard the magical chorus of Edward Scissorhands, Wagnerian heroics for Batman and Batman Returns, heart-warming ghoulishness in The Nightmare Before Christmas, and a tender father-son bond with Big Fish.

Now Elfman’s imagination delivers for Burton again with eccentric style in a new take on Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll would certainly find himself a bit out of place in the darkly adventurous realm that Burton has envisioned — a blighted sword and sorcery wonderland very much in the same dimension as The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings, and that gives Elfman license to unleash his biggest fantasy score yet, full of stormy darkness and ominous voices yet still possessed with the tale’s satiric playfulness. While this Alice might be revamped by way of dungeons and Jabberwockys, its sound is also completely recognizable as coming from the eccentric brain trust of the two most imaginative mad hatters working in Hollywood. Here to talk about walking once again among the wondrous creations of Tim Burton is Danny Elfman.

Daniel Schweiger: When Tim tells you he’s got another film for you, what goes through your head?

Danny Elfman: The first thing that probably goes through my head is that I’ve got to look at my calendar and figure out how to clear the time to do the right score for Tim. I’ve been pragmatic like that for 25 years, ever since Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure dropped in out of the blue.

DS: What about the creative challenge that’s coming at you?

DE: I know that whatever he comes up with is going to be fun and out-there, and I also know it’s going to be very hard work, because Tim is not an easy person to work with, nor are his films. So although I’m always prepared to jump into his crazy worlds, I know I’ll also have to really work hard because there isn’t going to be a simple straight line to the music we ultimately end up with, and our process of discovery will be a roundabout journey instead of a rollercoaster ride. I’ll have a lot of ideas to play against picture, and Tim will absorb them through osmosis. I can do something that he kind of likes, yet he’ll still be bugged…and finding out what’s causing that can be really difficult. Could it be the melody, the instrumentation, or the orchestration? Sometimes the solution is as simple as changing a trumpet to a French horn and it’s done. At other times, it’s a lot more complicated than that, so it’s important for me to go through that little bit of extra mental process to allow me to be fresh and ready, so to speak, for a movie of Tim’s that I know is going to consume all of my brain cells and I’m going to be way in one of his big and enveloping worlds for a while. It’s kind of like taking a vacation, except you don’t know if that trip is going to take you to Hawaii or Iraq! But the one thing I know going in is that all of the work will be worth it on the backside.

DS: You’ve got a strong, almost masculine theme for Alice that occurs through the whole score, especially when she finally dons a suit of armor to do battle with the Red Queen.

DE: Originally I had three different themes for Alice. One is what I call the childhood theme, and that comes back several times and connects with her as a little girl. Then you’ve got a theme that you first hear at Alice’s proposal — one that signifies important decisions she makes for her life. Her main theme originally didn’t start until about a third or halfway into the movie. I called it “The Hero Theme.” It was perhaps a silly title because I didn’t know how it could work, but Tim immediately gravitated to that. As always, when he gravitates toward something, I start doing variations on it. So the theme became about Alice finding herself and turning into a true adult — the “heroism” of moving forward in life, however you want to interpret that. In Alice’s case, she literally has to fight a dragon to achieve that. As Tim and I went further down into the film, it was like, “We should use that theme here, when she’s running to the rabbit hole.” Or, “We should use that theme here…” “Okay, cool. Let’s try that.” “The Hero Theme” even ended up working its way into the Disney logo and introduction of the film, which I hadn’t intended, but it really gave you a precursor toward the big character thing of Alice becoming her own person.

DS: How did you develop “The Hero Theme” into a song?

DE: After scoring this whole action sequence for Planet of the Apes, I wrote a big wild track as afterthought as to how to replace that music, and Tim and I both thought it worked better. So now Tim always says, “If you have any ideas or thoughts that you want to try, go for it.” On Alice, I had this version of Alice’s “Hero Theme” that was three-and-a-half minutes long. I had a chorus for it but didn’t know what to have them sing. So the first time out there, we tried to do it with mock Latin lyrics, but then it hit me that the orchestra behind them was saying “Alice” – not literally, but in my mind, with their strings and brass. I was listening to this in an airport and going, “Oh my God, I’ve got to turn this into a song.” My flight was delayed because they were having all those storms in England, which gave me time to write pages of lyrics that came into my head. I became obsessed about doing the piece as a lyric and non-lyric version, but I didn’t even tell anyone I was doing it because this version wasn’t supposed to be in the movie and would probably get denied. If I tried to explain it to Tim, his head would’ve exploded because he was already overloaded with the effects shots that were coming in. I’ve never seen him so stressed in my life, but I also knew that, with Tim, it would just be better to play him the idea instead of describing it. Suddenly, this three-and-a-half-minute piece has become a five-and-a-half-minute piece. I recorded two versions of it — one is just music and the other has a chorus singing, “Oh Alice…” I knew, if nothing else, the piece would be fun for the soundtrack, and I was hoping it’d wind up in the End Credits. I told Tim that I’d be happy with whatever decision he made, and right up until the final cut, I didn’t really know what he was going to do. Then my music editor, Bill Abbot, called and told me that Tim went with the version that had the lyrics.

DS: When you listen to the song, it reminds me of what a wonderful lyricist you are, and that obviously brings to mind Oingo Boingo. Is there any chance of a return to the band, or is that idea down the rabbit hole forever?

DE: Oh man, that’s way beyond the rabbit hole! It’s like in the vault in the back of the Red Queen’s castle ten stories underneath her bedroom!

DS: How dark did Tim want to make the score, since the film’s about a now-adult Alice going back to Wonderland, which could definitely be a sword-and-sorcery realm next to Narnia?

DE: I wouldn’t say the music is really dark. Going into Wonderland is just kind of strange, and the Red Queen’s music is really “fun dark” because she’s so over-the-top, in my mind. She’s not like a character from Lord of the Rings! She’s just like an insane monarch whom you delight in watching. At the royal family premiere in London, somebody said to me, “You know, they’re not that many generations removed from a time when ‘Off with their heads’ really meant it!” It’s only when the Jabberwocky appears that the score becomes heavier, yet at no point did Tim want me to go in a “serious” direction because the core of Alice is about growing to facing your fears…

DS: Beyond its fantastical elements, did you also want the score to reflect Alice’s above-ground life in England?

DE: No, I never tried to. There was only one cue in the score for Alice’s proposal where I tried to be somewhat formal and English-Victorian. That’s because I’m always trying to play everything internally. My music for Tim isn’t of any time or place. Thank God, on Edward Scissorhands, he let me play music for this character that has nothing whatsoever to do with Eastern Europe, even though Edward’s theme is decidedly Eastern European. With Alice, I’m playing it as if I had her perspective on this strange world.

DS: How was your score affected by the film being a hybrid of live action and CGI?

DE: I don’t think the score would have been any different if Alice had been completely animated or all live-action. The story is the story and the characters and the characters, so the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter are musically the same for me, no matter how they were realized.

DS: In spite of all the crazy imagery in the film, this is overall a distinctly less “insane” Tim Burton score than something like Sleepy Hollow or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

DE: You picked up exactly what Tim’s intent was. He was constantly saying, “Don’t get too far out. Keep it grounded.” He was afraid that the imagery, especially in 3-D, was so out there that crazy music would just end up push it over the top. I did keep playing with how far I could go. My operating instructions were: “You can have fun here and there, and be a little crazy here and there, but not too much.” And Tim was right because Alice needed grounding so it could play the fun and emotional sides of the movie.

DS: You’ve always made wonderful use of the chorus in all of your scores for Tim, and voice plays an especially big role for Alice in Wonderland. What do you think a chorus adds to fantasy films like this?

DE: I’ve always loved writing choral music, so I use it when I can. There’s something about having voices in a fantasy film that makes them sound both human and ethereal at the same time, especially since they aren’t musical “instruments” as such. Since I knew I’d be going to England to do the choir for Alice, I consciously wrote for boys’ voices because that country is the only place I’ll record a boys’ choir in.

DS: Between watching them do “street dance” choreography for the Best Score nominees at the Oscars, and seeing Godzilla do a jig after beating Ghidorah, the Fudderwacken dance that the Mad Hatter does is truly one of the biggest WTF? moments I’ve seen for a “film” dance number. How did you come up with it?

DE: From the very beginning, I knew I was going to be like, “Oh my god. What am I going to do for this Fudderwacken?” So I wrote about half a dozen pieces early on, and Tim was like, “Okay, I want a little more folky, ethnic.” Then, toward the end, he was like, “No, I want something funky.” And I said, “Funky. Oh dear. You sure?” Tim told me, “Yeah, I want it to be a jump-out-of-your-chair funky dance.” When I said, “But, we’re in Victorian England,” Tim told me, “It doesn’t matter. We’re in Wonderland. Anything goes.” So I could only say, “Okay, that’s what we’ll do!” I must have written 22 or 23, if not more, Fudderwackens before finally coming across the Fudderwacken that’s in there. I must have done every Fudderwacken under the sun to get there, including folk, rhythmic, drums, loots and guitars and zither! You could make an album of nothing but Fudderwacken takes, which there never will be, thank God.

DS: Do you think you both have a sort of outcast imagination which makes your work together so creative?

DE: I don’t know. What is an outcast? I’ve always felt removed from humans in general, so I guess that would make me something of an outcast with my various careers. And Tim definitely was an “outcast” when I met him. He seemed like an odd guy and was probably an odd kid. So we definitely had a common bond there — the feeling of growing up on the same kind of horror films and probably being pretty nerdy. But that’s true for lots of kids out there. Since I was around ten years old, I felt like I had one foot in humankind and one foot out of it. I used to put a lot of attention on how to behave in school based on watching how other kids behaved because nothing came naturally to me. When it came to how people act and react, it was like I was coming from some other place and trying to do the same thing. When most people my age were going to college, I was this street musician and who literally thought he was living in Harlem in 1931, going to The Cotton Club at night. Then, as an adult, I spent ten years of my professional career refusing to listen to any music recorded after 1939. I considered myself a man out of time, especially when it came to popular culture. I don’t know whether that makes one an outcast, a reject or just a nerd, because there are a lot of descriptions that one can apply to that type of personality. They all apply.

DS: It’s almost impossible not to imagine a world without you scoring Tim’s films, yet there was a break for you both with Ed Wood. Did you know you’d always get back together after that?

DE: I think if you look at two people with very eccentric personalities over a 25-year period, somewhere in there you’re going to have a clash of wills, a clash of egos, and hurt feelings and emotions. It’s just got to happen. Tim and I used to joke that we’d end up like Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann after they fell out on Torn Curtain. Then suddenly, this does happen, and I’m going, “Oh my god. We are now like Hitchcock and Herrmann. We’re never going to speak again.” This happened just at a point in time when we were so much in each other’s faces. I was in the middle of The Nightmare Before Christmas after two years of Batman Returns and crossing into Ed Wood. There was just so much going on, so it was inevitable that things would get tangled up, and that’s what happened. I fell down in an abyss of frustration that led to anger, which led to an explosion. Afterwards, I just felt bad. I realize, in hindsight, it’s just like what happened when I had big fights with my brother [Richard Elfman]. I said, “I’ll never talk to that asshole again.” But then you sit there later, and it’s like, “I miss my brother. This kind of sucks. Actually, this is really shitty.” So that’s what it was like. When I left Ed Wood, I thought that was it for Tim and me forever. A year passed. I felt bad, and I guess Tim did too. Then I got a call asking if I would ever consider talking to Tim again, and I was on a plane the next day. We met in a coffee shop in Kansas and we were just like, “Let’s just forget the whole thing. We won’t even talk about it again.” That’s literally how Tim and I dealt with it, and I learned a lot from the experience because I’ve never had a problem with Tim since. Sometimes, when I feel like I’m getting too close to a situation and getting too worked up, I try to do exercises. I look at the same picture from further back, which is what I didn’t do then. If you can look at what’s frustrating you, you’ll realize it’s not that big of a thing. You say, “This situation’s ridiculous and it’s not worth fighting over it,” and you get over it. So what happened between Tim and me was just one of those things. I was lucky that I was able to go off and gain that kind of perception so we could actually work together again. I feel lucky to have gone through that and come out of it.

DS: Is there a creative shorthand that you have with each other after 25 years?

DE: Everybody thinks we must have this feeling of “I know just what to do,” but I have as little of an idea how to start one of Tim’s films now as I did when I was working on Pee-wee or Beetlejuice. I never know how he’s going to react to my music, so there’s no time where I go, “I know he’s going to love this.” And there’s no point where I write a piece of music going, “He’ll hate it. I won’t even play it for him.” Tim is full of surprises, and that’s the fun thing about working with him. I’ll play Tim something that I’ll think is really off-the-wall and he’ll go, “Oh, what is that? That’s great.” And I’ll play him something that I think is really a slam-dunk and he’ll go, “I don’t know. It’s just not getting to me. There’s something about it that bugs me.” Tim is completely visceral in his response to music. But then it’s pointless to talk to a director about music until you’re blue in the face, because the music is never going to be like how they imagined it. So Tim and I don’t talk very much at all about music. In fact, the sessions where we “spot” music into a film are the shortest ones on the planet. I can still make my lunch dates after them because it’ll be like, “Music here, stop here. Music here.” But then it’s my job to come up with that music. Then he’ll have a lot to say when he hears it. But until that point, it’s just a waste of time to talk about the kind of score it’ll be.

DS: How do you think your relationship with Tim has affected you as a composer? And conversely, how do you think your music has changed his approach to film-making, knowing that you’ll always be give him something uniquely appropriate for every film?

DE: I don’t think I’ve affected how Tim makes movies, but he definitely is more involved with the music. He’s got far keener ears! Yet I also don’t write differently because of that. I compose music just as I imagine I should, and I’m going to gauge his response by looking at his body language. If I see his head is in his hand and pulling his hair, that’s not a good thing. If I see kind of a hint of a glimmer, then that’s probably a good thing. Tim’s never going to jump up and down or go, “That’s great!” Fortunately, I don’t need a lot of encouraging or backslapping. I can tell that a score is going to work when Tim gets into it.

DS: If you don’t get asked to score a Hobbit or Narnia film down the line, will you ultimately view Alice in Wonderland as your epic fantasy score?

DE: No, I don’t think so because Alice is just like a fun frolic. I don’t consider it my “ultimate” anything. First off, it’s only one film. Maybe if there were going to be three Alice in Wonderland pictures, then it could evolve into something that I might consider to be a great fantasy. So in the end, I don’t think Alice in Wonderland is any more my big moment of fantasy scoring than Edward Scissorhands, Batman, or a lot of the stuff I’ve done for Tim.

DS: Could you ever pick a favorite?

DE: It’s hard. There are moments of Beetlejuice that are still scoring favorites of mine, and Edward Scissorhands is always going to be a favorite for me just because of the way it went down so beautifully and simply. Then there’s stuff in Nightmare Before Christmas and Big Fish that I love. It’s really hard to pick favorites, but I also knew, when I recorded Alice‘s theme, that it would be a personal favorite just because I was so obsessed with covertly getting it done.

DS: Is there a film or subject you want to see Tim Burton make just so you can score it?

DE: I don’t know. Honestly, my favorite film of Tim Burton’s is the one I didn’t work on. Sweeney Todd is my favorite Burton film, without a doubt, and there’s never going to be another Sweeney Todd, so I can’t think of the Tim Burton film that would be.

Explore Danny Elfman’s Wonderland HERE