MUSIC INTERVIEW: DANNY ELFMAN Q&A - PART 2 OF 3

The Darkened Theater Composer Discusses His Transition Into Scoring Dramas Like 'Batman'

By: Team Buzzine

June 13, 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. In this second part of our three part series, Scott talks with Danny about where inspiration can strike, expanding from being seen as a composer of music purely for comedies into more dramatic work, and the intimate linkage between diplomacy, psychology and psychiatry in the course of working closely with film directors...

Scott Goldman: I think there are examples in the box about how some of these ideas, or many of them actually, come to you while you’re driving in the car…

Danny Elfman: The car has always been a great thinking place for me, and I always have a tape recorder with me in the car … The most famous story in [the book within The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25^th Anniversary Music Box] is the Batman story, where the theme for Batman hit me on a 747.

SG: On the flight… This is after you had gone to London to see…

DE: I’d been on the set, and they showed me about 30 minutes of the movie, and I’d walked around, and on the way home, it hit me. I knew it wouldn’t last the trip, so I began running into the bathroom, and the bathrooms are really loud on those 747s in those days -- a roar of the engine. It’s just the way they’re designed. And I’m going, “Part number one: French horn; part number two…” And then I’d just go back to my seat, and I’d run back in there, “First counterpoint: dah-dah-dah; just do it as a march, (dah-dah-dah.” And I’m singing part after part after part until I have, like, 20.

But half way into this, every time I come out, now I’ve got first one, then two, then three flight attendants, “Can we help you?” [Laughs] “No, I’m fine.” “Are you ill? Do you need anything?” “No, no, I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.” And they’re watching me really close the whole trip because I couldn’t do it in my seat because there was somebody sitting next to me, and the one thing I can’t do is sit next to somebody else and go, “[Sings a melody.] First section, second section…” And when I got home, as expected, the landing music wiped out my memory of the piece. I was carrying it…and I knew that would happen. If the plane lands and they put on “Hey Jude” for a second, and then it’s gone. It’s all gone.

And I get home, and I’m listening to the tape, and I’m hearing mostly like [makes a hissing, roaring noise]. I went like, “First part…” The first and second and the third part, nothing, and then suddenly fourth or fifth… Okay, if I carry the first and the second or the third, now I’m hearing the fourth, now it’s making sense. And it came back and I kind of nailed the main title, which ended up being the titles.

SG: This is actually a good point, to talk a little bit about Batman. Because Batman kind of marks a moment, I think, in your career, in that this was probably your first big, if you will, event-oriented movie…

DE: It was also my first non-comedy. I tell this to every composer who’s starting out: you have to have a lot of commitment, and you have to have talent, and you have to have a lucky break. Without the lucky break, all the commitment and talent just isn’t going to do it. But the lucky break was that Pee Wee was noticed, and it instantly opened a floodgate of quirky comedies. In fact, every quirky comedy made after Pee Wee came out came to me at some point.

And I also realized that I don’t like doing comedies very much. Unless they’re weird or dark, I’m not good at it. So I tried mucking through a couple that were just [sigh] miserably hard. Easy film, but hard for me because there just wasn’t much to grab onto. But I needed to get in front of an orchestra, so I just banged out these things. Then Beetlejuice, and it’s like ah, that was fun. That was really fun. And then doing more comedies, and then Batman. So now it’s like, uh-oh,…

SG: And of all the tortured processes that perhaps you’ve been through, that one was somewhat of an education…

DE: That was the worst. The producers didn’t want me on the film, the studio didn’t want me on the film — only Tim wanted me on the film, and they wanted somebody more reliable. And I don’t blame them. It was a totally sensible thing. You have this heavy, big movie -- you don’t hire the quirky comedy guy. And it’s like, “Yeah, you did a good job for Tim on Beetlejuice and Pee Wee, but this is something else. We need somebody who writes that kind of music.” So I had to really prove myself, and then there came a point where the producers wanted me to collaborate on the score with Prince, and I had to leave the film for a short period of time because I didn’t want to do that.

As much as I respect Prince, a collaboration of a rock artist and a composer at that point means the composer does all the work, and the rock artist gives you some melodies. And I didn’t want to be the orchestrator for even a very talented… I said, “Unless I can get my voice in there, I just don’t want to do it.” So that was the hardest decision of my life, because there were several weeks, maybe a month, where I felt like I just ruined the biggest opportunity of my life. But I tried to stay true to the fact that I didn’t care if I ever had another job. I told myself that every film. I said, “I don’t care. Could be the last one. This isn’t really what I do.”

The frustrating part was that, at Batman, I was really starting to enjoy it. After Beetlejuice, I was really starting to enjoy it because I had so much fun doing Beetlejuice, and I saw that I could actually stretch out and do things, so there was potential. So they’re hooking me more and more, and this was like…I knew what the music should be, but I just couldn’t get myself to not do that and then just take somebody else’s tunes and orchestrate them.

SG: But this film effectively changed, in many ways, the way people considered your work...

DE: Each one of Tim’s films would open another door. Pee Wee opened a big door. After Beetlejuice, then, “Oh, he can do fantasy. Okay. Crazy fantasy.” After Batman, it’s like, “Oh, we can give him big films and darker films.” And after Edward Scissorhands, it was like, “Oh, well he can do romantic.” So all the early Tim films, each one of them marked, equally, another door, because then I was trying to work in every genre. So I was really aggressively trying to always get out of every niche that I was in. I wanted to do romantic, I wanted to do ridiculous, I wanted to do dark… Bernard Hermann was able to do everything, and I wanted model myself after him. And Jerry Goldmsith can do everything, every genre. So, to me, these were the guys who I felt like, even if I could never approach their level of talent and musicianship, I wanted to try to go, if I could, for the level of versatility I found that they were showing.

SG: You’ve said this: what you’re doing is part diplomacy, part psychology…

DE: Oh, it’s a huge part psychology, or psychiatry would be a better word, because the directors are far too complex to even call it psychology. We’re looking at dense psychiatry. And that’s the torturous part of it. You really have to maneuver around a director’s psyche. And it doesn’t matter what your ideas are. If you can’t sell the director and make it work with them, it won’t be in the movie.

Bernard Hermann never would have functioned in today’s world. The directors would drive him insane. He would have quit in two seconds -- he didn’t have the temperament for it. So you really do have to, I think, have a strong masochistic streak, because you’re really going to have to take a lot of pain of the insecurity of the director, and their insecurity is going to deliver a lot of pain of not being sure.

And how do you make them sure? You have to do a lot of work and show them a lot of things and take them down a lot of paths until you finally start to narrow it down and narrow it down and narrow it down. So I think it’s ten times more work now. If I do a score that’s 75 minutes long, I’d be surprised if I wrote less than three hours of music for that film. If you hear a big four-minute cue in a film, I’d be surprised if I had less than 12 or 15 versions of that, leading up to the final version. And the old guys, I don’t think, could have dealt with that. So you really have to have a strong capacity for punishment.

SG: Let’s say you’ve got a four-minute cue and you’ve got 12 minutes of music. Is part of that decision-making made in the moment as you are literally scoring, and you’ve got the director sitting next to you and the director is saying, “That’s not working, try something else”?

DE: When you’re with an orchestra, it’s too late to say, “Try something else,” although it happens. That becomes an incredibly expensive thing, so that’s only on the films where they have unlimited budgets. I heard stories about Lord of the Rings -- what Howard Shore had to go through -- that were pretty gruesome, if the descriptions were true, of being exactly what you were told… “Can you do something else here on the spot?”

Even rewriting four bars… I try to work out everything with the director with synthesizers before we get there, so by the time they get to the scoring stage, they know the whole score. They know every single cue, they’ve heard everything, and I’ve mocked them up myself to be as close to the final orchestration, because most of my orchestration is during that process. The director’s got to hear the whole thing. He can’t hear part of it, he can’t hear the melody -- he has to hear the whole thing. So I’ve got to orchestrate the whole thing for him -- all the parts, everything. And then when it gets to the stage, it’s got to sound like that and better. So it’s a very, very, very different process.

Even if when you get there, it’s like, “I have a problem with this one area. Can it do something else?”, you could lose 40 minutes. When you have a three-hour session, 40 minutes with a 10-minute break, that’s essentially an hour. And I’ve spent an hour on 12 seconds of music, trying to get it just right, and something’s wrong and you’ve got to redo the parts, get the copyist in there. Or you walk out and you have to explain, “Okay, first violins, we’re going to do the second violins…” It’s amazing -- even 12, 16 bars -- how long it takes to read it all down. We have to make a quick decision. Do we do this now? Even though we’re really close, can we get it after lunch, and get the parts to the copyist so you can get them on the stands? It’s a bitch.

SG: I want to talk a little bit about the process that you and Tim have worked out over time. And you said repeatedly that it does not get easier, that there is no shorthand, that every film is new and different unto itself. But the process that you guys went through for Nightmare Before Christmas, and the idea, at least as I understand it, was that the script was really developed from the music…

DE: Right. That was one of the few exceptions, where everything just went down really easy. Because once we made the decision that there was no script yet, and the animators were getting antsy and ready to animate, we said, “Let’s do the songs.” And he would just come over and tell me part of the story, show me pictures. I said, “Just tell a story like you’re telling your kid a bedtime story.” And I would start to hear an idea, and I would shoo him out, and three days later, I’m back and playing the song. He’d tell me the next part of the story, and averaged about three days, four days per song. And it was a rare thing. It was about as quick and easy as anything. It just came easy went down easy, and he would listen and go, “Yeah, that’s great. Let’s go on to the next one.”

SG: And much different than anything you had done previously in terms of the process…

DE: I’d written a lot of songs, but this was a different kind of songwriting, so it was kind of simple. I always turn to my inspiration sources. With scoring, it was Bernard Hermann and a lot of the old guys that I loved. And with the songs, theater -- it was Kurt Vile and Gilbert & Sullivan, and occasionally a little bit of classic Rodgers & Hammerstein. But Kurt Vile was always, for me, the source, if I’m going to do that kind of thing.

SG: Is there anything at all different in your process when you’re composing to something like stop motion?

DE: No, it wouldn’t have made any difference if it was live or stop motion, animated or not. You’re telling a story. This was consistent with everything I’d done up to that point. It was like not caring what everybody thought, because that’s what kept me going. I knew I was going to get killed by critics and people who loved musicals, because Tim and I talked about this. I said, “We’re gonna go to these Gilbert & Sullivan and Kurt Vile, and these old sources for the inspiration. No songs sound contemporary in this at all. They’re going to hate us -- the fact that there’s ten songs instead of five, which was like the magic formula. They’re going to hate us.” And they did; the worst reviews of my life came from Nightmare Before Christmas.

SG: But you had also run into criticism after Batman as well…

DE: I had criticism all the time, but this was the nastiest because I was treading on sacred territory -- much beloved Disney ground. Batman was like a bitter thing. “He didn’t really write the score. Who wrote the score?” So I took that as a backhanded compliment. “He couldn’t have written this -- somebody else wrote it.” So I said, “That’s a compliment.” On Nightmare Before Christmas, it was just plain nasty. It’s like, “We hate these songs.”

SG: Ouch!

DE: Yeah. [Laughs] Thanks.

SG: But there was some scuttlebutt at various points, where people were saying, “He didn’t write that.”

DE: That was the first 10 to 15 years of my career. [Laughs] It was a constant thing, and I just had to get used to it, and it was really annoying. I don’t blame anybody for thinking that because, for me, as I became a composer, when I hear of somebody coming from a band and doing a score, the first thing I’d go is, “Yeah, who really wrote it?” So there really had to be like a 10- to 15-year period where everybody was always looking for everybody who worked… Everybody who worked with me got jobs scoring films because they thought it was my conductor, an orchestrator… It doesn’t matter. It’s like anybody who was around me was getting hired, and it really took about 15 years for people to finally go, “All right, maybe.” Because the smoking gun just never appeared, and because I’ve always worked in a really small way. I’ve never had a factory…

SG: You still work out of, basically, a studio in your home…

DE: It’s as small as it gets. Directors come into my world and they’re going, “Where is everybody?” And I go, “Well, I have my assistant, and if something breaks, Greg’s in the other room and he’ll fix it, and that’s it. And we do everything. I still have the same guy -- Steve Bartek, who was my guitarist. He only got the job on Pee Wee because I said, “I’m going to need some orchestration,” and I said, “Have you ever done orchestration?” he goes, “I took a class at UCLA.” I said, “You’re hired.” So he’d never orchestrated before, I’d never composed before, and Tim had never done a feature before. So I always tried to keep my world as small as possible. I’m sitting with a director, there’s no one in the room with us, and when I’m doing my mock-ups, my demos, there’s no one ever involved. So later, when it’s done, then more people are going to get involved because then it’s got to get from MIDI take-down onto the paper, and the printing of the ProTools sessions that are gonna go to the orchestra…now it opens up to a huge group of three. [Laughs] But I think, because of that [laughs], it was really frustrating for people to try to find the smoking gun in the system.

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

Click to read Part 1 and Part 3 of this Grammy Museum Q&A session with Danny Elfman now.

All photos by Martin Santacruz, Jr.