Danny Elfman Revisits the PLANET OF THE APES - Part 1

The composer discusses his latest soundtrack with CINESCAPE

By FORD A. THAXTON and RANDALL D. LARSON     August 02, 2001

Composer Danny Elfman and director Tim Burton have collaborated nearly consistently since the director's first feature film, PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, in 1985. Elfman, who gained popularity as one of the members of the eclectic rock group Oingo Boingo, had started to compose films in 1980 with THE FORBIDDEN ZONE. His acquaintance with Burton resulted in his first orchestral score with PEE WEE.

Elfman went on to become one of a rare group of popular musicians who have succeeded in the complex world of film music. Even though the world of symphonic film composing was a new one professionally, Elfman had grown up with a love for movies and the movie music of Nino Rota and Bernard Herrmannand the Warner Bros cartoon music of Carl Stalling. "Even as a rock and roll artist, I came out of musical theater, and those roots were helpful," Elfman said. "All during the '70s, until I started the band, I didn't listen to any rock and roll, so I don't consider that a strong part of my musical roots. In fact, the only reason we started the band in '79 was because we detested contemporary music in the '70s!"

Elfman's liking of Rota's Fellini music and 1950-ish Hollywood film music found a bombastic home in the PEE WEE score and solidified his association with Burton, who brought him along to score his ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS episode, "The Jar." Elfman went on to score big with BEETLEJUICE, BATMAN, BATMAN RETURNS, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, MARS ATTACKS and SLEEPY HOLLOW. In fact, ED WOOD (composed by Cronenberg mainstay Howard Shore) is the only Burton film not scored by Elfman.

This month, Elfman's collaboration with Burton reached a new mark with the director's stylistic take on PLANET OF THE APES. A consistent percussive rhythm holds much of Elfman's tempestuous score together, with bursts of horns and winds heightening the fast tempo. Elfman's action music is terrifically dissonant, but without ranging out of control. Much of the intricacy of his efforts are obscured amid the picture's sound effects, but on CD the effect is truly amazing; the clacks and whisks and rumbles and rings and whatnot of Elfman's drums and sticks and cymbals and bells create a miasmic and claustrophobic sound design that envelopes the listener and creates the mood of charging, equine apes almost as well as Burton's visualizations do.

Shortly prior to the film's opening, entertainment news web site, Inside.com, posted an interesting report on July 17^th that "studio executives are said to have requested significant changes in composer Danny Elfman's score. Honchos asked the longtime Burton collaborator to make the music more 'heroic' sounding, says one source. They wanted to be able to sell the film as a sci-fi GLADIATOR." This rumor soon circulated throughout the Internet, prompting plenty of conjecture and controversy among newsgroups and film music email list-servers. But Elfman was quick to point out to Cinescape and other investigators that the rumor was quite untrue.

"That

never happened," said Elfman. "These things are always very amusing, where something starts and it can't stop. It's probably somebody says something to somebody and it spreads like wildfire. The irony of that story on PLANET OF THE APES is that I was actually holding evenings for additional sessions, because I was expecting to have to re-score stuff, not because of conceptual problems, but because of technical dilemmas. As the film gets edited and all the effects are coming in and changing up to the last second, very often we have to re-score something to try to comfort it, and I didn't have to use one of those dates! There was absolutely no re-scoring and I got nothing from Fox but big smiles while scoring was going on."

Coming into the film, Elfman initially had a degree of trepidation but not so much because of the classic stature of the original 1968 Franklin Schaffner film and its equally classic Jerry Goldsmith score, which remains one of the most inventive compositions in science fiction film music history. As it turns out, Elfman was not that familiar with the original APES film or its score, so competing with an acknowledged masterpiece was not a real concern for him.

"The only trepidation I had is that I didn't know this film very well," he said. "I saw it once when it came out when I was a kid, and I never saw it again. I actually wasn't a big fan."

When Burton brought him into the new POTA, Elfman picked up the original APES on DVD to reacquaint himself with the film and its music. That gave him some reassurance that the approach he had in mind wasn't in conflict with what Goldsmith had done 33 years earlier.

"I had been more concerned that the score was going to be more of a traditional, very aggressive Jerry Goldsmith score, which he does so brilliantly," Elfman said. "The fact that it was such an ethereal, otherworldly score, immediately eased all problems I may have had, because I saw that there was not going to be any overlap. I would have been more concerned, if his score was more traditional and aggressive, of what to avoid, so as to not cross over or step on his toes. So it really became very easy once I watched the movie again and heard that the score was such a beautiful odd, dissonant piece of work. I felt, clearly, this is a completely different animal - no pun intended! And having just seen a rough cut of the film, I knew it was going to be very big, aggressive, muscular, kind of tribal, driving score."

Check back Saturday for Part 2 of the Danny Elfman interview.