A Conversation with Danny Elfman – HuffPost 5.23.11

Mike Ragogna: Danny, let’s get into your new 16 disc box set, Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box. What does it include?

Danny Elfman: There are 13 CD of scores and three CDs of extra materials.

MR: The original movie scores are spread across 13 CDs?

DE: Each of these 13 scores have between one and 30 extra minutes than the original soundtracks would have had. There was so much extra stuff that it filled up three more CDs.

MR: I imagine you have some amazing outtakes, etc.

DE: Oh, yes, and really embarrassing stuff like funky sounding demos that I made of pieces going all the way back to Beetlejuice with really cheesy sounds and me making mistakes and even stuff with me experimenting with some noodling. It’s all on there.

MR: Whose idea was it to put such a comprehensive project together?

DE: My agent, Richard Craft, this is his brain child. I wrote an opening letter explaining that this was not a project from an agent to the person he represents, this is a project put together by an extreme film music geek, which is why I started working with him in the first place. When I met him, he was this weird guy with the biggest film and music collection that I had ever seen. About two months into searching in the back rooms for old demos, cassettes, tapes, listening to hundreds of hours, I called him and I said, “I feel so sorry for you on this project.” He said, “What do you mean? I am in heaven.” So, this was the kind of thing he was born for–extreme minutia, hundreds of hours of searching for weird, unheard stuff. He really loved it. This is really his thing in conjunction with the people at Warner Brothers who got excited about it along with him.

MR: These scores and albums were remastered?

DE: Oh, yes.

MR: Did all the masters come from what Warners had in the vaults?

DE: Oh, no, very few masters came from vaults. They had to find and assemble everything from all over, the tapes going back to original mag tapes, master film mixes…it wasn’t as simple as getting a master from a vault. Stuff was scattered all over the place and a lot of the old stuff wasn’t easy to find. You have to realize that film music isn’t dealt with with the same care as an actual print of a film. It’s just reels and reels of old tapes piled away in old mine shafts and stuff. It was a huge undertaking finding the old stuff.

MR: Basically, this is Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure through Alice in Wonderland?

DE: Correct.

MR: I would imagine the hunt for masters must have been pretty challenging, but these were previously released already as soundtracks right?

DE: Yes, every one of them has come out in some version of a soundtrack, yes.

MR: But on these versions, you didn’t just mimic the LP release, but you also expanded the discs songs.

DE: It was the full take and all of these pieces of the score that weren’t on the CD. You have to realize that in the old days, we were limited to 45 minutes because it had to fit on an album, and often, with union rules, we were limited to increments of time. We could only afford a record that was 45 minutes or 55 or 60 minutes, but it might be an 80 minute score. And sometimes, I just edited these CDs to make them more listenable. I would reject a lot of stuff. There are a couple of scores like Big Fish which had a bunch of songs on it, which limited the length of the CD. It was really only barely half or two thirds of the score was on the CD from the original soundtrack and the rest was never released. Some of the scores, there was not as much; others, there was tons. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure had never been on a single CD that way because we never really released that score. It was part of a double Back To School / Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure redo done in London. I tried to reassemble that entire score. The Nightmare Before Christmas, I went back to the stuff that didn’t make the album and played the entire thing with songs and score in real order exactly like it is in the movie. There is all the weird little source music–Beetlejuice, Waiting Room–kind of source music that was playing. Then, of course, my hideous demos.

MR: Danny, those “hideous” demos are beautiful. By the way, I’ve been a fan since the Oingo Boingo days, and I think most people associate Oingo Boingo, generally, with “Weird Science,” right?

DE: I don’t know. It seems like when I meet Boingo fans, “Dead Man’s Party” was the most known tune that I read from people. More people have probably heard “Weird Science,” but in terms of Boingo fans, I think they would say “Dead Man’s Party.”

MR: How did you first get together with Tim Burton?

DE: It was on Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and out of the blue. I was in Oingo Boingo and Tim used to see the band in LA. Pee Wee–whose name is Paul Reubens–he was very much aware of this cult film that my brother had done called Forbidden Zone. The theatrical musical troop called The Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo that I had previously been a part of did the music for Forbidden Zone. Paul knew me through Forbidden Zone. Tim knew me through the band Oingo Boingo. Why he thought I could score his film, I have no idea. He has never really given me a solid answer. Obviously, it was a huge gamble, and I almost turned down the project. I met him, I really liked him, and I came home and wrote a demo. I recorded it on an 8-track tape player, all the parts, and put it on a cassette and sent it to him never expecting to hear back. When I got the call two weeks later telling me I got the job, my first reaction was to tell him I can’t do it. I’m just going to f**k up his film, I just don’t have the heart to do that, he’s a nice guy. But I thought hard about it and decided, well, if he is willing to take the chance, then what the hell.

MR: And the rest is film history.

DE: It was my first time in front of an orchestra ever in my life. It was my first time writing for film. I had done the Forbidden Zone but it was with an eight-piece group of musicians, so it was a whole different animal.

MR: Did you also play Satan in that?

DE: Yes, I did.

MR: So, you also have a theatrical background.

DE: I really owe the Mystic Knights to Rick, my brother. It’s all been a series of accidents. Everything in my career has been a series of accidents. I never considered getting into music and never even considered it an option. It is a long story, which I describe in length in this incredibly long book that they put out. The short story is that my brother was in Paris playing with this theatrical musical group called The Grand Magic Circus. I had just picked up a violin four months earlier and was about to travel around the world for a year and was going to take it with me. I was practicing up in his apartment in Paris en route to North Africa and Asia. The director heard me practicing and I walked out of the room and he said, “Hey, you want to tour with us? That’s how it started. I went on the road being the fiddle player barely having any knowledge of my instrument and that was my first performing. One thing led to another, but it was just a string of crazy accidents.

MR: Your musical influences are Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman…

DE: …I was a massive film fan for sure as a kid, and then as a teenager, I became more of a serious movie buff. I spent all my free time in movie theaters. The idea of film music wasn’t foreign to me as I was a fan. But it was more like being a fan getting pulled into a game, almost like somebody sitting courtside at a basketball game who is a fan, follows the players, knows the plays, the game, but he is a fan, not a player. Then, to suddenly get pulled onto the court, and they say, “Here, you’re on.” That’s what it felt like for me. I knew the music of Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota. I was a huge fan of those two. My interest in film music really comes from Bernard Herrmann, which started at the age of 12. By the time I was in my early 20s, I could pretty much identify a score from Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, and Dimitri Tiomkin–the greats. I was pretty good at knowing the different styles I was listening to, but as a fan, I never studied music.

MR: So, this is all self-taught.

DE: All self-taught, yes.

MR: When you arrange, do you write on staff paper? Computer?

DE: I wrote on staff paper for the first ten years because there was no choice. I do have piles of staff paper in my own pencil. I went through thousands of pencils and erasers. Then, it got to the point where I really did work 18 hours a day. I was writing the scores, demoing the entire score for the director and writing it all down on paper. It was killing me. When mini notation came out, meaning I could take the parts that I’d already performed, and print them out with my computer, I began doing that and it knocked my 18 hour days down to lean, short 10 or 12 hour days. For me, that was heaven and life changing. I’m glad now that I had to write out my first 25 scores because I did learn something from that, and there is a discipline from that that is really important, but I don’t miss doing it.

MR: And there are so many other scores you’ve composed such as Midnight Run, the original Batman, Dick Tracy, Army of Darkness…

DE: I did four films between every one of Tim’s, and that’s while writing and touring with the band. Pee-Wee was number one, Beetlejuice was number 5, Batman was 10, and then I got a little off. Edwards Scissorhands wasn’t quite 15, it was now 14 or 16. But in the beginning, it seemed that every fifth film was Tim’s and he once made a joke, “You’re doing four films between each of mine,” and I said, “Tim, I wouldn’t be able to do your scores and learn how to do this as a craft if I wasn’t squeezing in four scores between each of your movies.”

MR: What is your relationship with Tim Burton personally?

DE: It’s hard to say exactly. He is like a brother, and a kindred soul. We don’t go on vacations together or hang out a lot. He is like part of my psyche. His first film was my first film. Our careers are almost synonymous. The year he had his MOMA show in New York, I was playing in Lincoln Center with the Twyla Tharp Ballet. It seems like my growth and career I owe to his growth and career, I can’t really even separate what I have done over the past 25 years from Tim and what he has done.

MR: Would you say he is the director you have worked with the most?

DE: Yes, 13 times, and the next most would be four times with Gus Van Sant.

MR: You also have music from the MOMA score on your 1985 through 2010 oddities discs.

DE: I was in the middle of some other score, and he called me and said, “Can you do this really quick?” I spent a couple of days doing all these tunes, and finally, I had to stop as he only needed two pieces of music and I think I wrote about 20. But I was loving it so much, I would have kept going, but I had to get back to work. It was kind of like being on hiatus from boot camp.

MR: Are there scores that you listen to and you say to yourself, “Wow, this was really pretty cool.”

DE: It’s interesting because I never listen to anything I’ve done, I never go backwards ever, and with this project, I had to go back in and edit all 13 scores. It was an interesting thing because the only one that was fresh in my mind was Alice in Wonderland, and going back from there it was, “Oh my God.” Listening to the entire score for Pee-Wee… was a really strange experience for me. It’s not that I don’t want to pick, but it’s hard because parts of certain scores have a lot of meaning. Overall, if I had to look for an overall score, Edward Scissorhands was quite unique in my life in terms of how I felt about it, feeling very cut loose from all restraints, and yet still, somehow, feeling like I was doing a poor job at the time and have it be the most imitative score of my career. That one stands out the most for sure. But just having been at a Halloween performance of a The Nightmare Before Christmas in LA with my five-year-old, I could say that is one of my favorites. It’s really hard.

MR: As prolific as you are, it’s sad, in a way, that you can’t just chill and enjoy what you’ve accomplished.

DE: It’s not because I can’t, it’s because I don’t. It makes me think, “Why haven’t I ever cataloged or archived anything I have ever done?” The reason why it was such a difficult project is that I have never kept anything. Once I am done with it it’s like it never existed. I have been almost a little psychotic about it. Now, it has forced me to really change my whole way of thinking, and I am beginning to go back and look for original film masters on all these early scores and create more of an archive. I was aware of how much I would love to have the original multi-tracks to Batman and Beetlejuice, but they are gone now, history, and I am paying a little bit more attention to it now.

MR: Are there any composers out there whose work you admire?

DE: Oh, yeah, there are a lot. Right now, his talent makes me miserable because he is even more prolific than me but I can’t dislike him because A, he is a great guy and B, he is a great composer, and that is Alexandre Desplat. I think he is the motherf**ker on the street that has to be reckoned with for other composers right now in my mind. Not the most successful, but that doesn’t define who the best is.

MR: Any artists on the pop scene that you would like to have sing on one of your scores?

DE: No. I have never collaborated. Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to collaborate with an artist like that, but having never experienced it, it’s hard to go, “Oh, that’s the one I would want to collaborate with,” because I wouldn’t know what to do with them. I have no idea how I would take another artist’s work and incorporate that into a score. I hope that it does happen to me because I would like the experience, but I can’t say, “That’s the person I would like to collaborate with,” because it all depends on what the film is.

MR: What is your advice for new artists, composers or musicians coming onto the scene right now?

DE: I do give talks to composing classes every year. I will be giving a talk to a class in Chicago in a few weeks. I never really know what to tell them and I don’t mind answering questions. The best advice isn’t necessarily the best advice because I tell them what worked for me may very well not work for you. The thing that worked best for me when I started composing was not giving a s**t what anybody thought, I didn’t care whether I had a career or not. I composed for ten years, and I was in a band and had a day job that allowed me to never think about will that score get me more work, how will it be perceived by others, will studios or producers like it. I really didn’t care. I only cared if the directors were into it, and if the director was into it, I never thought about whether or not it would advance my career. So, I never did anything to try and advance my career, only my skills. That’s what worked for me, but it may be the worst piece of advice ever for an up-and-coming composer. I can say this is what I did but I will always say you can’t necessarily try this at home kids. That also could have let me end up with no film music career and, at that point, that was fine.

MR: What is your creative process?

DE: They send me something to look at and for weeks and weeks, bang around fretfully on a piano and other sounds. On other things as well, like strings for example but mostly piano, I might get a feel that this is a brassy or a string score, and I have a lot of sounds at my disposal now. But it’s still experimenting and trying, it’s always the same thing in the end. You are always trying and I use this metaphor a million times–it’s the same with writers. I was with Aaron Sorkin just last week and we were both saying this exact metaphor. Lowering a bucket into the well, you just don’t know when you are going to hear a splash. You go through moments when you think you won’t hear a splash. Every time, I go through the same thing, I never know if I am going to find it or not. It’s the really exciting and terrible thing about this job no matter how many times you do it. I still feel like I am starting from scratch each time, and I still go through a moment when I could completely fail on this project. Nothing’s telling me I am going to succeed.

MR: Is there a score where you thought, “Wow, I wish I had nailed that a little better?

DE: Yeah, about 70 of them because I have done about 70 of them.

MR: You know, people know your works to push boundaries and therefore, they’re pretty important to the art form. In your opinion, are there any of your works that maybe several generations down the road might look upon as phenomenal or seminal?

DE: I have no idea…people tell me I am supposed to be complimented by that, but it’s always kind of weird.

MR: How do you react when you hear that?

DE: Well it’s like I say, “It’s ugh.” I don’t know what to make of this, it’s definitely what I was doing in this score two, five or one year ago. It’s different. Now, I can’t do that thing myself again. It’s always odd when something that you did earlier comes back later and another composer co-ops that and makes it their sound. Well, good for them, I can’t do that anymore. It’s part of the game. You can’t fret about it.

MR: Is it sort of comparable to pop music or maybe the tradition of singer-songwriters, where one might say they were influenced by Joni Mitchell or Paul Simon?

DE: It could very well be, and there are certain instrumentalists over the years whose style became part of the cultural pop language and then you always wonder how they feel doing their own thing now that half a dozen guitarists are bringing that into their own sound and making it theirs.

MR: That is a similar thing, and, of course, you have your distinct signature sound. But then you hear your signature sound in other works. It must be alarming in the beginning.

DE: Well, it’s alarming, but I think at a certain point, you have to take it as a compliment and move on.

MR: If it were inspiration as opposed to a blatant rip off, then, in a way, you’ve achieved yet another mission that maybe you didn’t even know you were on.

DE: Maybe, and then, occasionally, you hear the blatant rip-off and it makes you angry and you move away from it, and, occasionally, there are lawsuits. Once a year or two at the most, there is another lawsuit–that’s the irritating part because often, it’s not even the composer, it’s the director or producer beating it out of a composer. I blame more where film scores are heading than any particular individual. There are a lot of producers who “temp” a movie with a certain sound track and they want that sound. So, a composer, if they are trying to keep their lives together and earn a living, stay working, and very often, they just do it. Oddly, I don’t hold it against them. I know what it’s like being under that kind of pressure. So, I find myself kind of weirdly sympathetic to those things when I am being ripped-off. But I do want to send the producers and the directors a message, I don’t appreciate that.

MR: It’s unfortunate, and like you say, the poor composer is stuck in the middle in some cases.

DE: It’s hard. No matter what any composer is going through, even if it puts them at a crossroads with me, I still feel for them. It’s a brutally hard art. You have to balance so many things, you have to be a psychologist and a diplomat, still trying to be an artist at the same time. All the while, you are under incredible pressure from people who are holding all the strings to providing what they want. It’s difficult to say no. So, I have had a certain luxury early on to be able to say no–fire me, I don’t care. But I understand not everyone can do that, and I understand why. It’s weird. It’s kind of warfare, it’s art, it’s beautiful, and it’s bloody all at the same time. It gives me a huge sense of empathy even with people I find myself crossing swords with in weird ways towards the whole process that we all go through, and there is nobody I hate out there. There is not another composer that I hate their guts.

MR: Although the lesson to be learned is don’t screw around with Danny Elfman’s music.

DE: That is true for any of us. (laughs)

MR: Is it tempting to go on tour with this Elfman-Burton box? Maybe conduct some of the score at the Hollywood Bowl?

DE: No, no. I have avoided concert music of my scores for years, and I know that it’s something I have to address. It’s a huge amount of work to create a concert version of a score…you really have to put a lot of effort into it. You don’t just play a cue right out of the book, and, I learned early on, when I heard an orchestra playing Batman, how easy it is to play it all wrong. The rerecording of Beetlejuice in London where it’s like, “Oh my God, it’s the same notes but it’s all wrong.” It kind of made me gun shy all the way back from Beetlejuice and Batman. At some point, maybe I will take some time and get into it. I know there are a lot of composers who love doing that. I have never been that big on it and, again, it would be going backwards and putting effort into an older score, and I have an incredibly hard time doing that although I know, at some point, I will have too.

MR: Even for the different kind of experience that might throw you.

DE: I know what kind of experience it would be to take something and disassemble and reassemble something in a way that will work for a concert orchestra or on stage. You have to do things differently. John Williams is the best at doing this, of course, and he loves doing it. He gets great pleasure from it. For me, I would rather not think about it and think about it next year. Maybe at some point, but I haven’t been able to fit it in this year.

MR: What is the major difference in Danny Elfman from the kid who grew up in Baldwin Hills to now?

DE: Well, I don’t know. I don’t like to use the clichéd “the child is still alive inside of me” because that just sounds so stupid. Anyone of us who became artists from those little kids, that little kid is still alive in them. I still love horror movies, and I got to relive them with my daughters who are grown, and now I am reliving them with my five-year-old…the same movies I grew up on. I have been watching Jason & The Argonauts and The Voyage of Sinbad. Here, I am enjoying them again and he is really into them, that doesn’t really go away, so I don’t really know what the big difference is other than I got a lot more responsibility now. I can sum it up in one word–the difference between little Danny Elfman and current Danny Elfman? Deadlines.

MR: (laughs) Well done. Are the deadlines getting more crucial or does celebrity and success allow you a little more leeway with the directors these days.

DE: People don’t believe this, but it doesn’t mean anything when you work on a film. You may have a meeting to work on a film and the director will tell you, “Oh, I am a big fan.” The day you start work with them, you are anybody, they can’t control their desire to get something squeezed out of their head that’s nonexistent and completely abstract and put it into a concrete form. And whatever form it takes, it takes, and they can’t make themselves less picky or less concerned or less frightened of the entire process. It is what it is, even with Tim after 25 years. It’s not easier. In fact, in interviews, it offends him when people say, “Oh, you guys must have some kind of shorthand, it must be really easy.” Not at all. It’s still a big difficult process and success and celebrity mean nothing in film composing. It’s way, way, way unlike pop, rock or jazz. When you become a pop star, you produce a piece of work and people are dealing with, “Oh wow, a new album of so and so.” You don’t have to please anybody. As a film composer, you do not create your own work. You still have to get through the brain, psyche, psychology, the eyes of another human–a director. It’s a challenging process, and at that moment, your celebrity means absolutely nothing, and your past means nothing. In fact, it haunts you. They say, “Come on, can’t you give me something like Milk? Can’t you give me something like Beetlejuice. I really want something like Big Fish, Edward Scissorhands.” I can’t do that. I already did it. Sometimes, your past can work against you.

MR: Are you and Tim happy with how this box set turned out?

DE: If there is one thing I have learned to never do, it’s speak for Tim…I don’t know what to make of it yet. I am insecure about it because I put a lot more of my personal s**t into it than I imagined I would when Richard came to me six months ago about it. So, I am still feeling like I will look back years from now and say why did I put those funky photographs or early manuscripts and early demos on the records in there. I hope it doesn’t happen. He thinks it’s good for me to open my process up for other people to peer into. But when you are about to do that and it’s about to come out, I feel like I am about to go into surgery and I’m feeling okay. The anesthesiologist is smiling and saying, “Hey, it’s going to be fine Danny.” But I still don’t know if I am going to have 150 stitches and half my organs missing. I don’t know what to think right now other than it’s a lot different than six months ago. Now that there is 240 pages of interviews and all this extra stuff that is personal that I thought no one would ever hear, I am feeling a little bit lopsided and queasy.

MR: I bet there are many people who have enjoyed your works over the years who will say, “Thank God they put that out,” and it will be their favorite thing in the world.

DE: There is an argument that put me over the top. Richard put it to me like this” “Isn’t there an artist out there that, if they had a compilation of 16 cds and a book, you would want every detail on it?” No. Then I thought what if I imagined a state of Bernard Herrmann working with Alfred Hitchcock but they worked together for another five, six or seven films over another decade, and they had scored 13 films together, instead of five or six. But if that had happened, I would kill for every scrap of every detail of how they worked together, what Herrmann did on the side and if there was a recording of him singing into a tape recorder and playing piano. If that were the case, that’s what I would want. I don’t consider myself on the level of quality of Herrmann or the stature of Herrmann or the genius of Herrmann. I have always had a problem with this and why I never kept stuff, I just don’t see my stuff as having this value or worth, but I tried to use this argument on myself. If that existed, it’s what I would want, and I would want every little thing. I had a hard time with that in the beginning–what are all these extra things, out takes, interviews, this is too much. Who would ever be interested in this? Richard convinced me that there would be people out there who are, so let’s make this project for them, not for you who never collects that kind of stuff. So, that’s what I did.

MR: Danny we have covered so much today, I really appreciate your time.

DE: My pleasure, I enjoyed talking with you.

Transcribed by Erika Richards