Danny Elfman Revisits the PLANET OF THE APES - Part 2

The composer discusses his latest soundtrack with CINESCAPE

By FORD A. THAXTON and RANDALL D. LARSON     August 04, 2001

To get a handle on PLANET OF THE APES and the type of music it needed, Elfman followed his usual technique of finding pivotal scenes and trying out his musical notions against them, to see if the aggressive, percussively driving score he had in mind was really going to work.

"Once I have my themes laid out, I need to see how they are going to break down, and the only way to do that is to apply them to some critical scenes," said Elfman. "If I feel that it's going to work for these scenes, then I'm covered. Then I'll go back to the start and work chronologically through the rest of the movie. But I have to hit the major points and I have to feel real confident that, melodically, I know now how these things could fit together - this piece can turn this direction or that direction if I wanted to."

Once he's established his primary musical and thematic architecture and he's identified the pieces he's going to use, Elfman then starts at the beginning and lets the music lead him. "Very often, then, the melodies and bits will do things totally unexpected," the composer said. "I don't fight it, I let the music lead me along."

What scenes did he key in on with POTA? "One was a big battle sequence at the end," Elfman said. "Another was a scene where the evil general is preparing for battle and the army has to come to arms, and the other was the hunt scene early on, where the humans are being hunted." Those sequences became the score's essential core, allowing Elfman to expand the music into the scenes before and after and make it work for the whole film. Elfman also played a softer side for the dramatic scenes. There was also another scene, between Mark Wahlberg's character and the sympathetic ape Ari (played by Helena Bonham Carter), which Elfman played up early on.

An interesting thing happened when the soundtrack, released on Sony Classical, was prepared. Due to its release schedule, it had to be completed before Elfman was done scoring the film, which resulted in several cues for the end of the film not being included on the CD, even though the gist of the score is present on the Sony CD. Sony executives, realizing the film score wasn't completely finished, asked Elfman to elaborate on what he had composed and "come up with a few things for the album inspired by the movie." Elfman complied by expanding cues, such as the "Main Title" and "The Hunt," nearly doubling them in length for the soundtrack, and composing three new cues, "Main Title Deconstruction," "Apes Suite No. 1" and "Apes Suite No. 2" which were based on material composed for the movie.

"At that point, I was two-thirds of the way done with the score, so it's not like I didn't know what the score was," said Elfman. "But I was now imagining writing for scenes that didn't really exist, writing from my own internal perspective."

As it turned out, Tim Burton became

so enamored of "Apes Suite No. 2" that he actually cut it into the movie, and this "inspired by the score" cue, through a unique kind of reverse engineering, became part of the film score. "That was amazing," said Elfman. "It worked, with only a few little tweaks, almost perfectly to an action sequence. So I almost can't believe I didn't write it for that scene! I had just come up with something that we all really liked, and it ended up as part of the score!

"This was the first time anybody's ever asked me and allowed me to have fun with a soundtrack in that way," he continued. "I only wish that I had more time to do more experimental pieces, because, as a composer, what's more fun that that? Taking a main title and deconstructing it, turning it around backwards and turning it in like a dub mix of a deconstruction, it's tremendous fun for me. It was very creative and I enjoyed it. I wish I could do that stuff more often!"

With POTA under his belt and his baton, Elfman is going on to compose a ballet of all things with British choreographer Matthew Bourne, based on of all things EDWARD SCISSORHANDS. "It's my first ballet," Elfman grinned. "God knows if I'll survive it! We're both trying to figure out, 'How do we begin?'"

Elfman is also completing a script (not surprisingly, a "really, really twisted script"), hoping to add writing and directing to his Hollywood scorecard. In January, Elfman will reunite with director Sam Raimi (for whom he composed DARKMAN and A SIMPLE PLAN) when he begins scoring SPIDER-MAN. The film is already sparking some interest, with as many fans wondering what Elfman is going to do with the music as they are wondering how Raimi will handle the heroic webslinger on screen.

"I've already been down that road with BATMAN," Elfman said. "You know, whether it is PLANET OF THE APES, BATMAN, or SPIDER-MAN, you can't worry about what hard-core genre fans are going to perceive of what you do or don't do. You have to take everything for what it is - the movie will be what it will be, and I'll do the best I can with it."

Elfman is also up for scoring MEN IN BLACK 2, as well as THE RED DRAGON (prequel to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) for RUSH HOUR director Brett Ratner, both due out next year. But at last word these hadn't been officially signed yet.

"I'm attempting to only do two films a year again, which is what I did for most of my composing career," Elfman said. "It's a little tricky getting that and all the other stuff that I want to do."