MUSIC INTERVIEW: DANNY ELFMAN

Composer Finally Gets to Run Away & Join the Big Top for Cirque du Soleil's 'Iris'

By: Daniel Schweiger

September 25, 2011

It’s hard to think of a performance venue that Danny Elfman’s music hasn’t conquered, be it the rock stages where Oingo Boingo reigned, the movie theaters where Elfman’s scores to Real Steel and Restless are playing, the television sets where his theme for The Simpsons hasn’t stopped, or the concert halls whose ballet dancers have pirouetted to Elfman’s gossamer percussion. 

Just about one location remains that Danny Elfman would be a natural to shine under, and that’s The Big Top. Ever since his early days in the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, a madcap percussion akin to circus music has been an Elfman trademark, continuing through numerous Boingo songs to the nightmarish clowns of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice’s demonic carousel, and the Penguin’s twisted fairway minions in Batman Returns. Even when there’s no cackling clown on hand, the very nature of calliope music seems part of Elfman’s DNA, his hellzapoppin rhythms jumping through soundwaves like a trapeze act. 

Now Danny Elfman has at last come home to the place he was always meant to be for Cirque du Soleil’s live carnival of movie love called Iris, which has a likely infinite run at the Kodak Theater at the Hollywood & Highland complex. It’s more than fitting that the town’s most popular ringmaster has gotten his chance to inspire absurd clowning and death-defying feats right next to the Chinese Theater -- the heart of people’s imagination for all the romance and adventure that movies represent at their purest dream state. And it’s this iconography that Iris beautifully taps into. Without ever specifically naming classic movie titles, the Cirque’s always-stunning staging has dancers evoking the rites to summon King Kong, acrobats trampolining about a film noir cityscape straight out of Rear Window, then recreating the De Mille-ian bustle of a backlot soundstage. 

As his dynamic music provides the impossible synch points for these performers, Elfman’s tribal beats, haunting violins, hard-broiled jazz, ethereal choruses, and gossamer bell magic also evoke the sum total of his prolific scoring career, bringing to mind images of Edward Scissorhands, Dick Tracy, Nightbreed, Black Beauty, and Standard Operating Procedure, among his many soundtracks. Yet the astonishing range of the whimsical, savage, and modernistic styles on display are utterly unique to themselves, inspiring breathtaking leaps and dances from the Cirque performers, all with the same fervor that Elfman’s music has taken listeners on their own flights of fantasy. But perhaps most impressively on stage in Iris is how Elfman and Cirque go beyond conjuring film’s greatest images to playing the magic of movie creation itself. Rarely has music been so inextricably tied to a Cirque show, or so different from their musical approach at that. Where Hollywood is striving for new dimensions of audience involvement, Iris and its music truly make us part of a living, joyful screen, with Danny Elfman’s music capturing the bliss of its flickering, magical light that makes us dream of the stars. 

Daniel Schweiger: How would you describe the impact of circus music on your life and your music?

Danny Elfman: Well, what can I say? I grew up with red hair and was called Bozo the Clown all through elementary and junior high. So I guess I was pre-ordained to have something to do with the circus from the very beginning. I hope what I’m doing right now with Iris is just a bit more sophisticated than the music Bozo might have used for his show.

DS: What was your experience like writing for other mediums than film before you got to Iris? 

DE: I’ve just done two commissions in the last 26 years of writing for film, which was Serenada Schizophrana for the Composers Orchestra, and Rabbit and Rogue for Twyla Tharp. It was ironic that my third time out, writing outside of film, would be about the subject of film, at least surrealistically speaking. But over the course of almost three years of working on the project, Iris became a story that was inspired by the “idea” of cinema. The show’s creator, Philippe Decoufle, was designing extravagant visual images and set pieces, but every group of performers was completely unique from each other. You’ve got the specific needs of the Russian “hand to hand” balancing artists -- they’re two couples -- two men and two women -- who are balancing on each other’s shoulders and flipping from person to person. How they move is completely different compared to the Mongolian acrobats, who are used to doing their act while paying no attention to the music at all. So I had to really learn that it wasn’t writing for a group of performers, but writing for a dozen very individual performers, each with very different needs. I began to think more about really designing things for them this past year, which was a new and very unexpected challenge, like customizing music for the Atherton twins, who begin the show on the high wire. That approach also led to me realizing that our lead acrobat was a pianist as well, which meant I could write a piano part for him. It was all really cool, but very much not what I expected. 

DS: Before composing Iris, what was your impression of the Cirque shows and how music was used in them?    

DE: I had seen a number of Cirque shows and thought they were great. I particularly loved going to Las Vegas to see their shows. I’ve watched O, KÅ, and Love several times.  I also saw their equestrian show, Cavalia, not too long ago, in Burbank. I always had a feeling that their music was of a certain specific nature, which wasn’t the kind of music I really did. Then things began happening in a weird way that would lead me to Iris. It all started three years ago in New York, when a friend who represented my concert music called about a show he wanted to take me to. It was this dance thing, so I said, “Okay, great.” I meet him outside of the theater where he then tells me we’ll be seeing a solo artist. I told him, “Oh my God. You’re taking me to a solo fucking dance show?  I’m going to die.  This is going to be so boring.” I just couldn’t believe it.  The idea of watching one dancer for two hours seemed just impossible. But this show turns out to be absolutely fantastic, just remarkable.  It was by this artist named Philippe Decoufle, and I said right at that moment, “Man, I’d love to work with him someday.” It wasn’t even six months later that I get a call from my agent, Richard Kraft, saying, “We’ve been approached by Cirque du Soleil about doing a show.” When I asked him, “Why me?” Richard told me that it was because it was a show inspired by the cinema, and that it was going to run in Los Angeles. I asked Richard whose show it was. He said, “It’s by someone you’ve never heard of, this obscure French director, Philippe Decoufle.” Then it was an immediate “Yes!” from me. There was really nothing left to decide because I loved the Cirque shows, and I loved this guy. I was really curious to see what he’d come up with. 

DS: You got your start with The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, which was like an avant-garde rock circus. Did that make it easier for you to do a show like Iris?

DE: Yeah, but I’d have to correct you because The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo had no rock and roll. We had no electronic instruments.  In fact, for almost a decade that I was in the group, I didn’t even listen to music recorded after 1938. All of the music for the Mystic Knights was driven and inspired by Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Django Reinhardt, Igor Stravinsky, and Darius Milhaud.  It was all early 20th century inspirations. My first performing experience wasn’t even with the Mystic Knights. It was in Paris with my brother Rick at Le Grand Magic Circus, a kind of avant-garde musical theatrical troupe directed by Jerome Savary, who ended up becoming the director of the National Theater in France.  Rick was already a part of that troupe. I was on my way to Africa, and I had only picked up a violin four months earlier. He heard me practicing and he hired me, and I toured with them. So you could say that I started with a troupe that had the name “Circus” in their title. The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo was directly inspired by Le Grand Magic Circus. It was Rick’s own take on what they were doing, but reinventing it in a much broader American sense with burlesque and a nod to early vaudeville -- all the kinds of things that Rick loved. And because I loved old music, Rick made me musical director. Yet the Knights were far from being a “rock circus” because there were no amplified instruments allowed in the show.  I played trombone, violin, guitar, and West African percussion. Everybody else in the troupe had to play three instruments, preferably one string and one brass instrument, so we could double between them like a string ensemble or a brass band would. The other thing I did in the Knights was fire-breathing, which was also a talent of Guy Laliberte, who owns Cirque du Soleil. So it all definitely came full circle in a weird way when I became part of Iris.

DS: I just want to make this clear. Anyone going to see Iris will not be seeing Danny Elfman breathing fire as part of the show... 

DE: I will not be breathing fire in the show.  What you will hear me doing is singing the introductory cautionary announcements. 

DS: Did Iris’s acts exist before your music, or did the music exist before the acts?

DE: It was both. I’d written quite a bit of music before there were any acts to see. By the time they started rehearsals, Philippe was already applying my pieces to some of the acts. Then, when I started going to rehearsals in Montreal, I got an idea about how I’d need to change my music for the requirements of the different performers. Take the piece I’d composed for the Atherton twins, who fly over the audience at the very beginning of the show.  It’s an amazing act, yet my music didn’t have the right vibe for them. But it turned out the trapeze artists really enjoyed that music, so I took the piece I’d originally written for the twins and reapplied it for the trapeze, all while starting from scratch for the Athertons. The piece I’d written for them was too delicate, especially because what they were doing was more masculine. So their music needed a different kind of a feel with a little more of a beat. I was constantly reinventing my score like that, greatly elaborating on the music and redesigning it for the artists when I began to learn what their needs were. 

DS: What’s the importance of alternating the more furiously percussive pieces with the slower ones so there isn’t a continuous barrage of energy? 

DE: We just kind of developed a flow as the show came together. It was hearing where we wanted the music to be very aggressive, dreamy, or going for more sporadic percussion. Each piece has its own thing, and as it all came together, it just seemed to develop its own connective tissue. 

DS: When you score a film, the timings you had for their images are never going to change. But while you have the freedom of live performance in Iris, the music still has to remain in perfect synch for them.  

DE: That was an enormous challenge. I have to say that, in the whole last year leading up to our first dress rehearsals, I began to think more and more that this was an idea that couldn’t possibly work, especially because Cirque du Soleil had never attempted anything like it before. We had no template to follow or look at. I went through quite a few sleepless nights thinking that maybe I’d just took them down a horribly wrong road. Even in the first couple of weeks, it seemed to me as if I’d created a monster.  Then there was a point where the show actually started to click and pull together. I also had to realize the difference there would be from recording the music on a sound stage and then getting it to sound right in the Kodak. I’m used to mixing in five-channel stereo for film. The Cirque’s sound system has something like 21 channels.  It’s not like anything I’d do for a movie soundtrack. That really meant a lot of work to design the sound in the room -- a solid month of figuring it out every single night. I was also mixing every single show for the first month. Then, after that performance would wrap, we’d continue working from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 in the morning. It was an incredible effort to figure out how to incorporate the live musicians. Nobody could help me with it. I had to really wing it.  Fortunately, the Cirque has good sound people. They were patient and did whatever it took to it make it right, even if we had to stay there until sunrise. It was a fantastic level of commitment from them to get it working by the end.

DS: How do you think the music of the show embodies your own score repertoire?  

DE: I don’t know how Iris relates to my other work, because it was all just improvisational, where I’d be grabbing from this and that style. But there are a few moments where I was referencing a specific cinematic moment, especially in the rooftop scene where I wanted to reference the Latin elements of West Side Story.  It worked for a scene that looked like a gang fight between cops and robbers, so it made sense there.

DS: A particular highlight of Iris for me is where dancers recreate the optical illusion of film itself, where they embody moving frames. 

DE: It was difficult, at first, to musically achieve that. What I’d written was too short for that segment, and the performers had to loop the music over and over to get the right length. I felt so bad for these people who had to spend months and months with this single piece of music, over and over again -- seven and a half minutes looped from about a minute and a half!  It must have made them insane. So I got back to the drawing board and started taking what they had, elaborating on to create a whole new piece of music. And it turned out that was one of the scenes in the show that was significantly cut down during rehearsals.

DS: Do you have a favorite act, musically or visually?   

DE: Not really.  There are certain acts where I hold my breath every time I see them, particularly the Atherton twins. What they’re doing always makes me grip the sides of my chair in horror, because they’re holding on to each other with just one hand each, with no safety harness or strap, 30 feet in the air. It’s always fun watching the Chinese acrobats and the contortionist, who are just so precise and amazing.  They nail it every night, listening and replicating what the music is doing. And it’s never the same two nights in a row. The simplicity of the trapeze artists is absolutely pure. But the West Side Story trampoline sequence is one of the most insane acts, which is something people don’t realize. There’s a tremendous amount of intricacy in how they’re all going off of these rooftops onto the trampoline, and then back up on the rooftops while not killing each other. They make it look a lot easier than it is.  Ten of them are going on and off at different moments, and at any moment, the slightest bit of timing being off could make them collide.

DS: Iris definitely has it all over Spider-Man the Musical, but thankfully without the accidents. In that respect, what is it for your music to have the “power” of life and death?

DE: It’s a whole different thing. When I saw, in the first dress rehearsal, one of the performers in the “hand to hand” act almost get killed... In fact, I thought she did get killed. The accident happened because of a miscommunication.  It was a simple thing of somebody leaping off somebody else’s shoulders and grabbing her feet. But she went into one routine, and he went into another, and she slammed her head into the stage. The thing is you don’t need to be suspended 40 feet up for this type of thing to happen. Every moment is dangerous.  It requires absolute perfection in communication. I had never seen anything like that before. It was like sitting in a theater and watching an actual car accident or train wreck happen in front of your eyes. They stopped the show and carried her off unconscious on a stretcher. The owner came out and sent us all home.  He just said, “This is our life. This is the circus. We’ll meet tomorrow and start again.” It was that reminder that this is the real shit.  This is not the movies. Every single night, the performers put their asses on the line. They’re absolutely extraordinary.  This show, more than any Cirque show I’ve ever seen, is absolutely reliant on humans.  Very little of it relies on the set. KÅ and O are these incredible pieces of engineering, but you also get the feeling that, if anybody did twist their ankle or get hurt, there would be somebody else to fill their place the next day. In this show, I would say it’s 95% humans doing their thing very, very carefully. Almost all of them are irreplaceable. In that sense, I think this is the most “old school” circus show that Soleil has ever done. 

DS: Iris is going to be at the Kodak for a very long time.  How do you see the music and the show developing through the years?

DE: I really have no way of anticipating that.  I’m told, in the normal Cirque world, that it’s when things settle after the opening that they start to develop one or two alternating acts. That means, if somebody gets injured, they have to have some act to put in that person’s place. Iris has no alternates right now. Already in the last two months, there’ve been acts that have been down for three or four days at a time. But as they come up with replacements, I imagine I’ll have to score them. So I see Iris as a constantly moving thing -- an entire show that depends on the fragility of human tendons and ligaments.  I have no doubt I’ll be called in again and again to make adjustments, changes, or to write new music for some new piece that will be going in.  

DS: Even though it’s not a movie, Iris is very much about the images in movies that we instantly recall through music. In that respect, what do you think Iris has to say about the importance of music in the movies?

DE: I don’t know if Iris is saying anything important about music in film. I think the show’s music just speaks for itself. While it has nods to movies like West Side Story and King Kong, there are also moments that are just from my own imagination -- one that’s filled with film music. So I figured that, without even trying, Iris’s music would sound cinematic, whether I want it to or not. That’s just because it’s the way I’m wired. 

DS: Now that you’ve conquered “the big top” under the Kodak, what’s your next musical Mount Everest outside of the movie screen? 

DE: Next on my wish-list would be chamber music. It was my desire this year, before it got too busy, to be able to compose a small chamber piece for piano and percussion. It’s something I hope to do soon. 

DS: What’s one of the things that stands out for you about the whole experience of Iris?

DE: I didn’t think it would take me this long to say that one of my greatest moments was rushing into a rehearsal one night, I was late, and I’m driving down to the parking lot where they had special areas for the Iris customers. The guard was saying “Are you here for the circus?” I flashed my badge and said, “I’m in the circus!” As I was running upstairs, I asked myself if I really just said that. And wow, I did. I screamed, “I’m in the circus!” furiously to some parking lot attendant. It took me this long to be able to say that, and I didn’t expect that to happen at this point in my life.     

Buy tickets for 'Iris' here. Danny Elfman’s score for 'Iris' on the Cirque du Soleil label will be available on CD in November on Amazon and at the 'Iris' gift shop at the Kodak Theater at Hollywood & Highland.

Top photo by: Hama Sanders

Other photos by: Matt Beard © 2011 Cirque du Soleil; Costume credit: Philippe Guillotel

Special thanks to Peter Hackman for his interview transcription.