MUSIC INTERVIEW: DANNY ELFMAN Q&A - PART 1 OF 3

A Career Retrospective at The Grammy Museum Opens Up the Elfman/Burton Music Box

By: Team Buzzine

June 12, 2011

To celebrate the release of the Danny Elfman and Tim Burton 25^th Anniversary Music Box, Danny Elfman recently sat down in front of an excited audience at the Grammy Museum's intimate Clive Davis Theater in downtown Los Angeles, California for a lively Q&A with The Grammy Foundation's Vice President, Scott Goldman. 

Scott Goldman: His range and diversity is well-demonstrated in the work he’s done for films ranging from Spider Man, Good Will Hunting, Beetlejuice, Batman, Dick Tracy, Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas…and many, many others that you could all name. He’s also a classical music composer, having made his Carnegie Hall debut with his symphony Serenada Schizophrana. That was followed by The Overeager Overture, which debuted at the Hollywood Bowl. But we are here tonight to discuss his remarkable 25-year, 13-film career working with director Tim Burton. This began in 1985, when he was pulled from his band, Oingo Boingo. The collaboration has obviously continued through last year, when they released the incredibly worldwide successful Alice in Wonderland...

Danny, did you ever imagine, at some point, someone would want to look back across your career?

Danny Elfman: No. I don’t know why anybody would want to.

SG: Do you still feel like you have to prove yourself every time you go to score a film?

DE: Constantly. There are very few composers -- only maybe Ennio Morricone and John Williams -- who don’t have to -- of living composers -- still constantly prove themselves.

SG: But to go back, you grew up going to see classic horror films and those kinds of films…

DE: Oh yeah, I grew up on movies.

SG: Were you playing an instrument at that point?

DE: No.

SG: That didn’t come until you ultimately went to Europe to see your brother [Richard Elfman]?

DE: Yeah, I was 18 when I picked up my first instrument, and I was also 18 when I got my first gig. It was only four months after I picked up a violin.

SG: That was in Paris, right?

DE: It was in Paris.

SG: Talk a little bit about that time…

DE: I was really clever in high school. French and Spanish were offered, and I decided to take Russian because everybody took Spanish, and when am I ever going to need French? And only two years later, I was working in France [laughs] and then forgot all the Russian very quickly because I never got to use it. But my brother was a conga drum player, and he got hired… It was all freak accidents, everything. I can’t go into the whole thing, but the short story is my brother’s a conga drum player, my father has a heart attack in Toronto. He flies to visit him in the hospital — he was okay. He sees a theater troop in the street called the Magic Circus. He says, “I’m a conga drum player.” They said, “Sit in with us.” He plays drums. They hire him. The next thing, he’s off to Paris to join Le Grand Magic Circus.

He meets a costar there that becomes his girlfriend and then his wife, and I am en route to Africa, and I stop in Paris to visit my brother and his girlfriend. And while practicing my violin in the back room, I come out and find the director sitting there and he goes, [French accent] “Little Red…” he called me. My brother’s taller than me. He says, “Come tour with us,” just like that. So his getting involved was a coincidence, and my getting involved was a greater coincidence. It was like, “With this? With this fiddle playing?” So my first time playing was in front of probably eight or nine thousand people, because they played arenas and stuff. It was really out-there stuff -- wild shows.

Every now and then, there’d be riots in the house. A couple of times, my brother was like, “Get your fiddle and get behind the stage.” Chairs were starting to fly… But I dug in, and I really enjoyed it, and I picked up a mandolin and composed a little tune, and he liked it and I started the show. I did the overture on solo mandolin. [Laughs] So this was all very much a surprise to me because I never played anything. And all my friends in high school were musicians, and I was the one who didn’t play anything. I was the non-musician.

SG: And you were basically teaching yourself -- you’re completely self-taught…

DE: When I got the violin, I tried taking some lessons. I tried taking first some guitar, which failed, then the violin, and it failed. I could not play in front of an instructor at all. I found it more intensely terrifying than what would soon be me going out on stage in front of a lot of people, playing for one person. It was impossible. And if any of you saw the movie Shine, about Geoffrey Rush playing Rachmaninoff, playing the other Rachmaninoff concerto, and the sweat’s pouring off his forehead, that’s what it was like for me in my lessons, just trying to play scales. Sweat just pouring down. I was intensely uncomfortable.

SG: And yet here you were, ultimately playing in front of crowds of thousands of people…

DE: I learned I had an ear during that period. So when I came back, I was drafted to become the musical director of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, which my brother founded in homage to... So he left the Magic Circus and started his tribute to the Magic Circus, which was based on Le Grand Magic Circus, in Los Angeles with a bunch of his friends, and I went off for ten months to Africa. I’d get little letters from him. I got on in Ghana, another in Nigeria: “You have to come and join us.” And I’d go, “I hope there’s something left for me to do when I get back.” I was going around the world. I didn’t make it around the world, but when I got back, I saw, oh, there’s still a little left for me to do. It was a real rag-tag street group [laughs], in the extreme.

SG: And around that time also -- this is just one of those remarkable sort of coincidences in the universe -- that you were auditing courses at CalArts…

DE: That was in the early days of The Mystic Knights; I’d heard about the gamelan, and at that point now I’m into all kinds of music, film music, and Harry Partch is a composer I was really into. And I began to think that maybe my future was to be an ethnomusicologist or an ethnic percussionist, because that was now becoming a passion. I’d come back from Africa, I’d brought a lot of instruments with me, I was pretty good at that. So I thought maybe that was a direction for my life. And I heard about the gamelan, and I already knew what the Balinese and Javanese gamelan was, so I quickly went out there, and I just started playing, and I continued playing for two or three years. And he said, “Sit. Play.” And I said, “I should tell you I’m not a student here.” And he said, “Sit. Play.” And I did, and I continued sitting and playing. And when Tim and I and Paul met later, it turned out we were all there, crossing paths.

SG: But you did not meet him at that time…

DE: No, none of us met. And then it also turned out that an animator in the next room, while I was playing, who was really bothered by the music, who told me later and complained about it constantly, was John Lasseter.

SG: So to wind back to the beginning with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and getting hired… You get hired to do this film, all of a sudden now you either have to learn or re-learn the writing of music…

DE: I had to re-learn the writing of music, because I taught myself to write with The Mystic Knights because I had to. It started out as like seven, eight street guys, but by the end, we were 12, and everybody had to play three instruments. And I was doing transcriptions from Duke Ellington and Django Reinhardt pieces, which I wanted to play as accurately as humanly possible. So I taught myself to write, and I started composing for them, and the last thing I wrote for them was a very ambitious five-minute little concerto. So when I got hired to do Pee Wee, now it’s years later, and it’s like I haven’t written. In Oingo Boingo the band, you don’t write anything down in a rock band. There’s nothing to write.

SG: Except maybe the occasional lyric, but…

DE: Well no, you write the lyrics, but you show a song -- you don’t write it. And I’d sketch out a melody for a horn part, but there was nothing -- it was really simple. So when I got Pee Wee, I had to sit at the piano for the first time in, I think, seven years since I’d written a note on paper, and there was a panic. It was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I had to think, “How did you write the little concerto?” Okay, it was only written for eight or nine musicians, but it was eight, nine separate parts. I said,  “If you can write for nine parts, you can write for an orchestra. Just think simple. And here’s middle C, and start from there.” Because I found I never could read. I never learned to read, but I could write anything that I could hear. And I found writing a million times easier than reading. Infinitely. Reading, for me, was always a paradox which I found baffling in the extreme, because I’d never played scales, reading chords, reading things at the same time -- I just felt like I was missing part of my brain. But writing was real simple; you freeze it and you break it down -- it’s just simple math.

SG: Is that because you’re hearing it in your head?

DE: Yeah, and I realized, when I was transcribing the Duke Ellington, I could hear anything I needed to hear. I could play a little bit of the record, stop it, freeze it, and get all the piano parts that he played. I could get it all down exactly. And I also learned, in those years, that I was able to hear parts that the musicians, who were all better than me, couldn’t hear, and I thought that was odd. He’d play a wrong harmonic conversion in a chord, and I said, “No, no, it’s like that, like I wrote it.” And he goes, “Oh, are you sure? I hear it the other way.” And I’d listen to it and go, “No, it’s definitely that.” And then he’d go, “Oh, okay.” So I learned to trust my ear, basically, in those years.

So there was, like, eight years of pushing myself really hard to go from the street thing to this multi-media two-hour show that we were doing with all these pieces. So I had to back up and put myself back in those shoes, because when you’re writing simple orchestra parts, you’re not writing… Pee Wee’s orchestra was about 65 parts, but you’re not writing 65 different parts. You’ve got 24 people playing one thing and 12 people playing one thing, and your French horns are playing your French horn parts. French horns aren’t playing six different parts. So I found it really wasn’t that hard, and if you listen to the Pee Wee score, it’s pretty primitive and simple.

SG: But it must have been somewhat daunting, the first time you stepped on a scoring stage…

DE: The timings was daunting. Learning how to time to the picture was daunting for about a minute. I found that to be really, really easy. Once I got the hang of, like, starting here, here’s my click… They tried to get me to use a click book, I didn’t want to use a click book. I said, “I’m not going to do that.” I want to hear a click in real time. And I found, when I was watching the scene, I could usually -- and I still do it the same way -- if the editor is a decent editor, you can find a rhythm. And if you find the right rhythm for that scene, you can make your downbeats fall right on cuts. It’s amazing how often you can patch the cut, two, three, and cut, two, three, four, and door slams, two, three… It’s like you’ve found his rhythm. And I would just find that with a click and a play click, and I learned to write what I called a hit chart. So the top of each page had a hit chart of everything I wanted to hit, and then I started with the piano, did the strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion. Then I ended up modifying the special custom score paper for myself because that’s how I like to write [laughs], and the real score paper was all inverted and…that doesn’t make any sense. I’d say, “You start with the piano, work down.” So that’s how it happened.

SG: Talk a little bit about the first time. Because here you are now, you’re working with Tim Burton -- a guy that you actually did not know until you got hired for Pee Wee. Talk about the first time that you went to play him some of what you had composed…

DE: [Laughs] The first thing I had to play him was the “Breakfast Machine” in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and I was Geoffrey Rush [laughs] back in Shine again. This time, sweat really was dropping on my keyboard, because I was trying to play it in real time. And even at that point, I’d played half a dozen instruments -- none of them being keyboard. So I played violin, I played trombone, I played guitar, I played a lot of different percussion, I even played a little bit of baritone horn and a little bit of alto sax… I was picking up everything – accordion…but never two hands on a keyboard. So it was a horrible, horrible thing. And fortunately, at that time, the first primitive sequencers had come out. So I played the first couple of pieces -- the main theme, the “Breakfast Machine” -- enough that he felt comfortable, and the producer came and felt comfortable, and then I started, “Okay, I’m going to take the time and step-time the music in, and get it so I could hit ‘go’ and have it play back in real time.” So I said, now this is working for me because I can play slow. I can slow it down half or even a third of the tempo and get all the parts right slowly, and then play it back in tempo.

SG: And what kind of reaction were you getting?

DE: At that point, he was just like, “Oh, cool.” It was just like that. I wrote it, he listened to it, “Oh, that’s cool. All right.” And we went to the orchestra, and that was incredible. I’d never heard an orchestra, standing close to an orchestra before.

SG: Talk a little bit about that, in terms of here you are now working with…

DE: It was a big cue. It was the bicycle race, which was one of the bigger cues, and it was just a very powerful moment. It was like, this is film music. It actually sounds almost like film music [laughs], so I thought, at that point, maybe I can do it.

SG: Not absolutely certain at that point…

DE: No, definitely not absolutely certain. It took about nine more films before…

SG: And actually, you went on to work with other directors after Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, before you circled back…

DE: Tim would joke, because he said, every time I worked with him, I did four movies in between his, and I was writing and touring and performing with the band. So it was very busy years. My daughter Mali, who exactly was born the year I did Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, I owe her apologies because I really wasn’t around a lot because I was trying to sneak in one or two films a year around the band’s schedule, because I was really hungry to learn. But Tim’s film was 1, 5, 10, and then 14. Didn’t quite make 15. But I was trying… He said, “How are you doing these films between my films? Why are you doing so much?” And I go, “So I can learn how to do your next film.” Because each of his next films was trickier than the one before and if I hadn’t done four other films, I wouldn’t be able to do it.

SG: As you were balancing Oingo Boingo and you’re now beginning this film composing career, was it hard for you to give up the band?

DE: At that point… I’m trying to think of what year. I was still into the band, but I was already starting to look for other stuff. I have a really short attention span. I don’t know how I’ve made it this long doing film. I think I have to do other stuff, so it actually worked for ten years, doing the two things worked out okay because whichever one I was doing, I wanted to do the other, and it was kind of perfect. When I was on the road, I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to get back so I could write new music every day in film. You don’t ever have to repeat yourself -- it’s beautiful. And then when you’re in the middle of the pressure of a score, I really longed for the physical release of being on stage and sweating...

SG: You tell a great story about when you went to work on Beetlejuice, that you wanted to get a little bit ahead of the process, and you started to write based on what you were reading in the script…and you learned a very important lesson at that point…

DE: Nothing that I wrote before I saw the movie got into the movie, and I learned that there’s a hundred ways to shoot a script, and the one that you have in your head is usually not the one that ends up on the screen. And there are so many factors that tell you what kind of score to write -- amongst them the way the camera moves, the performances, the lighting, whether it’s done realistic or theatrical -- and they’re just different scores. So I started actually then doing the opposite, of being as unprepared as possible, and going in to see a movie for the first time, I tried to clear everything that I thought I might be taking in with me, clear it all out of my head, and then just watch the film and see if I hear… If I look at any picture, I’ll hear something. It may not be great, but I’ll always hear something.

SG: To the untrained, that actually seems like a much simpler process -- to just walk in, see it, and see how you react…

DE: And usually my first impulses then actually do have some value. I don’t always hear the theme right there on the spot, run home, and write the main titles, although it did happen once: Mars Attacks! I actually heard the whole title sequence when I saw the mockup of it, just exactly as it was. That’s the only time it’s ever happened...

The Danny Elfman and Tim Burton 25^th Anniversary Music Box was released May 3, 2011 by Warner Bros. Records.

Click to read Part 2 and Part 3 of this Grammy Museum Q&A session with Danny Elfman now.

All pictures by Martin Santacruz, Jr.