Danny Elfman Breaks Down His Most Iconic Tim Burton Scores | GQ

it was just Tim and I it was really kind of like two kids in the you know kindergarten class and the teacher leaves and they're just like running their own class and there's no adult supervision and I I didn't understand until later what a luxury that was high GQ I'm Danny Elfman and I'm gonna talk to you about some of my more well-known television and film scores [Music] Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice [Music] I wrote music before I saw a rough cut of anything I had a little extra time and I thought I'd get started I read this script and I wrote a bunch of music all got thrown away as soon as I saw it I was like oh this is not the movie I was imagining in my head this is something else completely and Michael Keaton brought this energy and that's what I'm latching on to that it's really intense but it changes changes changes changes on a dime because that's what he is so Tim just let me go crazy and run a muck and I was like great if you're a game I'll just go nutty the whole time until you tell me to stop until you do like you tell me that I've gone too far and he's almost never told me that I've gone too far fortunately which is one of the reasons I love working with him I didn't realize in hindsight how lucky I was that when we did these movies nobody was paying attention to us they were small enough budgets that we could do them and nobody from the studio ever showed up saying can you play us some music there was no presentations it was just Tim and I it was really kind of like two kids in the you know kindergarten class and the teacher leaves and they're just like running their own class well I'm back I feel real good about myself you know what I mean so without further delay [Music] welcome to Windy River it was a really deceptively hard score to play I didn't realize it at the time just the Simplicity of um really strict time so half the brass is actually going off beats like that and there's a tendency to want to let it swing no no no no no and portugu player is like turning blue without a break just like they tried to record it in England like for a best of album the conductor in England looked at the score and they started playing he picked it up and he threw it on the floor and he said this is unplayable and it's like I'm enjoying this I mean weirdly this kind of like weird stuff was really fun for me you know I came from many years with Oingo Boingo and I was a total brat and I was out to aggravate everybody I don't know how else to explain it it's like I thrived on negative energy in in the same way that you want to kill Godzilla you're not going to kill him with radiation because he was made from radiation so you hitted him with an atomic anything he just gets stronger and that was me with negative energy you know both with Oingo Boingo and as a film composer and I think that served me well because then when I became a film composer I thought all right I'm not going to write scores like a band I want to write scores like the scores I grew up on I was a a film music fan so it's it's basically taking a fan and saying here you go do it I knew what the score is of course Bernard Herman but I also knew Jerry Goldsmith's work and I knew Max Steiner and corn gold you know the famous composers of the 30s 40s and 50s you know I wanted to turn to that but at the same time I still had a little bit of that punk attitude that I took from the band which was my combativeness all the other composers hated my guts and I loved that that fueled me on because every score I was writing you know for those first 10 years I was writing it was all about check this out that was my motivating force it's like you're gonna be imitating this next year and you're gonna hate me for it in hindsight I wouldn't have it any differently if if everybody loved my first score and I was accepted it probably would have hurt my career foreign at the end of Beetlejuice at the end of Edward Scissorhands it's like God I could just keep writing variations I'm I'm loving doing this and it's so sad that I have to stop so to get a chance 35 years later to like do it again that's like the weirdest sequel ever I'm really excited to like get back into that Batman and Batman Returns [Music] I've never done anything harder than Batman because first off I had to prove myself you know it's like okay he's the quirky comedy guy and here I am doing like this Batman movie understandably I think they were like uh we need somebody who knows how to do this kind of music but nobody knew what kind of music it was there really was no superhero music there was just Superman and we said we know we don't want it to be Superman and John Williams and then there was an element with the producer in the studio of wanting it to be a pop score there was definitely this moment of like Danny we want you to collaborate with Prince and co-write the score and I go I can't do that people go you really said that I I love Prince but not for that score I already knew what the score was and I knew that if I collaborated he'd be writing tunes and I'd be orchestrating his tunes and I would be essentially a glorified arranger rather than a composer you know because he was world famous and I was still nothing I had to walk away I was so depressed I felt like I just blew up my own career and then a month later I got the call saying Danny um you're back on we gotta get moving come on come on it's like this gamble paid off but it was a miserable period of time on the other hand I already heard the music in my head I knew what it was and I was determined that that was going to be the score the producer was so hard on me John Peters and then there finally he's in I think it's the third presentation and I didn't know how to do presentations I was playing this weird music stuff that was all like inspired crazy and then Tim says play the March play the March play the March that's what he called the titles I go oh yeah I got this piece here and of course now I know you you lead with your headline obviously I didn't really know understand that back then and I put this piece of music on and John starts conducting in his chair and at a certain point he stands up and he's going like this and I and Tim looks at me and he's like yeah we got it Nightmare Before Christmas [Music] was the most depressing time of the year for me it was a very lonely time for me as a kid you know I didn't have other Jewish friends all my friends were celebrating Christmas and I was just kind of staying home playing some game in you know my room or annoying my brother and I imagined them all together holding hands around a Christmas tree and singing carols and you know just kind of warm family thing in my mind all my friends are doing this and I'm just like so Tim comes to me with Nightmare Before Christmas and you know first thing is like oh God Christmas here we go Tim and I had never done a musical so neither of us knew how to start and there was no script and we're just like how do we begin he said well let's just start with the songs Tim would come over every three days and I'd say just tell me this story like you're telling it to nephews and nieces you know around a fire at night and you say okay come in here and he'd show me the drawings and he'd show me with zero and Jack looked like and he goes Jack is wandering into the forest and he comes across these three doors and these three trees and he gets sucked down and when the door opens and this all this stuff he has no idea what it is what is it what is it and I'm just going what's this what's this there's other everywhere what's this there's white things in the air what's this I can't believe my eyes I must be dreaming wake up Jack this isn't fair and now it wasn't decided that I was gonna sing but I was slowly becoming more and more attached to the character because I wasn't quite conscious of it at the moment but You Know Jack Skellington is like the the king of Halloween land but he wants something else and at that moment in time I had my own band I had Oingo Boingo but I wanted out in my heart you know when you're the songwriter and lead singer in a band it's like that's your mini universe that's your that's my Halloween land I felt this obligation to keep going you know because the band depended on me but my heart wasn't in it anymore and so I put that into Jack Skellington my desire to kind of free myself of this responsibility that I felt chained to so I I understood Jack emotionally on that level even though the creation is a hundred percent Tim I was pouring my own feeling into the character but who here would ever understand that the pumpkin [Music] were tired of his crown if they only understood he'd give it all up if he only could and so we went into the studio one night and all night long I just recorded every single song all the voices for every song except for Sally's Song finally exhausted it's like middle of the night and got all 10 songs recorded I say to Tim so uh Tim I um I uh and he goes you'll sing don't worry thank you because I was already imagining a scenario in my mind where well of course we're gonna have to hire like you know a real singer professional singer and then all these accidents would happen like the singer would be walking down the street and a piano falls on his head it's like oh well let's find somebody else so I didn't have to resort to dropping pianos out of Windows on on other singers Edward Scissorhands but Eddie from all humiliation and discomfort Tim doesn't talk about his films when we're starting them I mean he's no different now than he was 38 years ago he basically will just show me what there is to show he'll tell me a little bit how he feels emotionally about the movie he'll show me drawings and you know in that case there was a script and I read the script I didn't really quite understand but you know from his drawings I got a sense of it there was no template for what this is supposed to sound like that's heaven for a composer there's no genre that this fits into so I just started writing and for a while I was kind of stressed I remember sitting with Tim because I have two themes for Edward really I've got this a theme and a b theme and I think you know you're supposed to just pick one theme for a character and I don't have any Love Theme at all and Tim is just like I don't know it just works because one of them became like the storybook theme and the other became like the ice Dance theme that followed Edward and I just took those themes and I let them follow everything from his perspective [Music] and like often with Tim's movies it previewed terribly you know they'll often preview a movie before it's totally finished and the score is still like a weeks or a month away from recording and I remember being there for it the audience did have they had no clue what to make of this thing there was this one guy I forget what Anthony Hall's character's name was he's the antagonist in the film and this guy gets up in the focus group and he goes I felt sorry for him and I remember thinking oh my God and Tim is like oh this is not going well it really just made me think more the sense that no one's gonna see this movie and I really love it but it's just that's going to be one of those films people don't get it and they're not gonna see but that's the way I felt about Beetlejuice in fact the studio tried to rename the movie house ghost when it came out because they said no one will come and see a movie called Beetlejuice too complicated sorry house ghost in the end they just said ah it's going to be a disaster anyhow let's just put it out and of course you know it did really well and Edward Scissorhands found an audience and uh it just felt really good because I I just had this sad sense when I was working on it that it's going to be one of those a really sweet little movie that 10 people will see Wednesday [Music] well I never done an episodic TV I'd only written themes for episodic TV The Simpsons Desperate Housewives you know tales of the crypt you know it was only like one piece of music and here it's like oh wait I got four episodes so we spent Forever on the first episode because for Tim it was just like doing a movie and he's like giving me notes and talking about stuff and I'm changing the red ants at Tim you know once we get past this you know we're gonna have 10 days per episode to like do the next three scores he's like really so once we got it all defined with the first episode then I had to dive in like the next three were like oh my God I end up with such respect for episodic composers you know and fortunately I had a partner that I brought in that co-composed the score you know I did the first four and he did the next four we got him Chris bacon and he'd done a lot of Television before so he was he would keep me calm good don't worry Danny it's gonna be fine Chris this is insane this is insane any cup it's gonna be okay it's gonna be okay but I you know it was so fun how could I not love it even though it was really intense [Music] foreign 's family and I really loved Jenny you know it just helped so much when you have a character on screen that you're following constantly and you just love looking at them her deadpan sensibility which I really related to and of course how could I not relate to Wednesday Adam and thing you know I'm obsessed with hands you know I've got amputated hands I've got hands all over the place I must have like 40 hands in my collection and so you know here's like oh my God it's Jenny Ortega and a hand it's thing that I grew up with thing really when Tim told me he was going to work on it I really just said what took you so long no like oh my god really you doing Adam's family this is like supposed to happen so what was the conversation about bringing in the original theme song well you know Tim is usually adamant that we not do that Batman we never touch it Planet of the Apes we never touch it Charlie and the Chocolate Factory never referenced it he says I want to start from scratch but with Wednesday he was more open-minded and I kept saying I'd like to bring in just a harpsichord in the sound just to connect us to the original and he was like okay we can do that and the beauty of the original theme which I love so much is that I could be playing playing playing like this whole piece of music and end with it's the easiest theme in the world to create a connection to and every now and then I would sneak it in go see if Tim's gonna like smack me down you know I need listening again okay I was like yes

Channel: GQ

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Keywords: celebrity, danny elfman, gq, gq magazine, iconic, iconic characters, part one

Id: 8YPv1F5sGBs

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023