Danny Elfman's Manic Movie Music, Part 2

By: Randall D. Larson
Date: Saturday, July 01, 2000

Besides his numerous film scores, Elfman has also contributed bits and pieces for other films. He contributed songs to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, GHOSTBUSTERS II, LEATHERFACE: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III, SCREAM 2, and wrote the theme for SHRUNKEN HEADS (1994), working for his brother Richard for the first time since FORBIDDEN ZONE (Richard Band wrote the rest of the score). Additionally, he has continued to accept small assignments for TV series that interest him. In addition to writing the theme for THE SIMPSONS and scoring episodes of shows like AMAZING STORIES, he also composed the series themes for SLEDGEHAMMER, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, THE FLASH, and DILBERT.
Working on television, according to Elfman, was good training. 'They were in-between projects, and they were great little ways to experiment with stuff, working real fast,' Elfman said. 'Sometimes those little TV things have as many starts as a film does, even though all the cues are shorter; it's 12 instead of 47 minutes but you have just as many starts and only seven days to write it in. It's really challenging, and I really liked it. It was good training for me to work very disciplined, very quickly. 'Family Dog' had some wonderfully fun moments with cartoon music, and you don't get to do that very often. I had a great time doing it. 'The Jar' was great because I got to write for a small ensemble, which I've always wanted to do. I've always emulated and admired how Bernard Herrmann would take a small ensemble and do all kinds of interesting things with it on all the old TWILIGHT ZONEs.'

Rejoining Tim Burton for THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993) proved to be one of their most effective collaborations, Elfman not only writing all the music and songs but singing the part of Jack Skellington as well. 'I wrote eleven songs, very much in the style of an old-fashioned '40s musical,' Elfman told Deutsch. 'What I was interested in doing was to be progressive and old-fashioned at the same time...to try and bring in an original flavor to it, but turn the clock way back, because, although some people argue with me all the time on this, most of my film scores are really rooted in the 1950s.' After Elfman's songs were recorded, actor Chris Sarandon was selected to play Skellington because his voice matched Elfman's singing voice. The work garnered Elfman a Golden Globe nomination for music.
Elfman ventured into family drama territory with a wholly symphonic romantic score for BLACK BEAUTY (1994) 'Finally a chance to really turn on the sentimental valve up to maximum,' Elfman said in Music For a Darkened Theatre. 'If there's one thing I really love, it's sad music!' He also provided a percussion-based score for the thriller, DEAD PRESIDENTS (1995), but quickly found himself back in the cinema macabre with scores for Stephen King's DOLORES CLAIBORNE (1995; 'Sweet to heavy, heavy to sweet. I really got deep into this one with its long dark passages.') and TO DIE FOR (1995; 'Pure wicked fun with very few rules to obey. The schizophrenic nature of the film make for a great time.'), starring Nicole Kidman.
The latter score impressed Kidman's husband, Tom Cruise, who reportedly insisted Elfman take on the scoring reins to MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, despite the fact that composer Alan Silvestri (PREDATOR, FORREST GUMP, CONTACT) had composed and begun recording a score. For this and other 'creative differences,' Silvestri found himself without a film and Elfman was on the Brian de Palma-helmed project. Elfman had only 5 weeks to compose, orchestrate, and record more than an hour of music. 'Anybody coming into a film second has a huge advantage of understanding what the director doesn't want, at the expense of a lot of work already put in,' said Elfman. 'I knew they wanted energy, something a little more operatic and theatrical. It wasn't an easy task, having Lalo Schifrin's theme to work with, even though it wasn't used that many times. I had to develop fresh themes that would come back and play different scenes, but there was always this past reflection that had to be referred to, so it never completely went away.'
Elfman underscored the dark humor of Robert Zemeckis' THE FRIGHTENERS (1996) with a rich undertone of rhythm and rhapsody, yet with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, ala BEETLEJUICE. 'My favorite musical moment was when the first poltergeist attacks this couple's house,' Elfman told interviewer Steve Biodrowski. 'A little Raggedy Anne doll starts grabbing her. I played that as the biggest moment in the movie! When her husband is hitting the Raggedy Anne with the pillow, the music is huge. It's as if this little Raggedy Anne actually had the power to kill them when, of course, it didn't. That was fun for me. I played it just like the Raggedy Anne had huge razor-blade teeth that could slice her to ribbons. When the scene is played straight, the music makes the scene funnier.'
A temporary falling out with Tim Burton kept Elfman from scoring ED WOOD David Cronenberg composer Howard Shore did it, but, like siblings reuniting after a disagreement, Elfman and Burton were back together with the manic science fiction invasion farce, MARS ATTACKS! (1996). Rather than create separate themes for the film's multitude of characters, Elfman pinned his score on a single motif, a deliciously tongue-in-cheek homage to the ethereal science fiction music of the '50s, but played entirely straight, giving Burton's bulbous-headed Martians the perfect malevolent leitmotif, dominated by the eerie sound of the theremin. With Elfman's filmmusical roots firmly found in Bernard Herrmann's theremin-dominated THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, scoring MARS ATTACKS was like a grand musical reunion, a respectful recapitulation of the movies Elfman loved as a child. As with BATMAN, Elfman came into the project early and was able to formulating his musical ideas during shooting in Kansas. Using a palette of low-tech synthesizers and sound samples, Elfman crafted music that was brimming with a lovably ostentatious EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS sensibility. 'The first thing I did was to assemble banks of Moog synthesizers and older, first generation synths,' Elfman told Biodrowski. 'I wanted the sound to be very low-key, with distortion.'
MEN IN BLACK (1997) was a very suitable companion to MARS ATTACKS. Like the space-invasion epic, the tone was tongue-in-cheek with plenty of site-gags and farcical situations. Elfman' score, an energetic amalgamation of PETER GUNN, DRAGNET, and BEETLEJUICE, was splendid, giving life to the tumultuous antics of the heroic government agents who protect Earth from the scum of the universe.
FLUBBER (1997), Disney's lavish and effects-ful remake of THE ABSENT MINDED-PROFESSOR, gave Elfman the chance to score with a Cuban orientation to the music. 'They wanted the dance piece to be like a samba,' Elfman told interviewer Nuno Markl of Premiere magazine. 'I gave them an idea for a beat to animate to, and they didn't. The animation took a completely different beat than the one I had written. It was a mistake in communication. So, rather than them animating to a piece that I wrote, I had to write music to what they had done, which is very difficult in animation... I had to make it look like they had animated to my music, and in the end I was very proud of the way it turned out. That was hard!'
Paired again with Sam Raimi in 1998, Elfman's subtle, exotically-tinged music for A SIMPLE PLAN involved a wealth of strummed instruments including banjos and zithers, percussion and hand drums, piano, and a notable lack of brass.. 'A SIMPLE PLAN needed some special or unique tones,' Elfman said. 'There are two thematic ideas, one of them was a flute ensemble, just strings and nine flutes, mostly alto and bass. The other part of it was these specially tuned pianos that I prepared before I started. I worked the music around the sounds of these micro-tuned piano chords and special banjo samples that I did myself. It was a very simple score, really.'
Throughout his career, Elfman has continued to provide themes or songs for films that were scored by others. He wrote a 'March for the Dead' theme that appeared in Sam Raimi's ARMY OF DARKNESS (1992). He wrote an 'aria' which appeared in SCREAM 2 (1997), in the midst of Marco Beltrami's spooky score. He composed the main theme for TV's PERVERSIONS OF SCIENCE (1997) and DILBERT (1999), and also for MODERN VAMPIRES (1998), letting the other scoring reins fall to other composers. He scored Gus Van Sant's TO DIE FOR (1995) and GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997), and came back to do Van Sant's frame-for-frame remake of Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1998), adapting the original Bernard Herrmann into the new shoes of the remake. His admiration for and influence by Herrmann made him the ideal composer to translate Herrmann into the slightly new '90s incarnation. Elfman's approach, like Herrmann's, was string dominated, with only the slightest bit of synth to reinforce the pizzicato strings. 'That's the most minimal use of synthetic that I have ever done,' Elfman told interviewer Kevin Monahan of E-MU. 'Little bits of pizzicato reinforcement, that if I took it out, you wouldn't notice it at first... Even the snap bass was all real because we wanted it to be very organic.'
A dramatic and introspective score for INSTINCT followed in 1999. Much of the music on this film, as it was in A SIMPLE PLAN and A CIVIL ACTION that same year, was performed by Elfman himself. He used a lot of xylophones, marimbas, thumb pianos, and African instruments and drums, associated with the character's past history in Africa. 'That's all my stuff,' Elfman said. 'I have everything running live with the orchestra [versus pre-recording it on tape], and it gives us the flexibility to speed up or slow down the tempo.'
Reuniting with Tim Burton on SLEEPY HOLLOW (1999), Elfman composed one of his finest scores, a richly exotic work full of haunting filigrees, ghostly vocals, and ferocious, head-chopping dissonances. 'I had a theme for a boy's solo voice which I originally was going to use under the flashbacks of the young Ichabod, but I ended up incorporating it right over the Horseman and all this other stuff,' said Elfman. 'That surprised me. Often, I'll have something I think will be good in one place but it pops up in another and moves into places where I don't expect it to, On a literal level, it makes no sense that the same theme is playing over Ichabod's flashbacks as a child that is playing over the Horseman, but sometimes this theme would just pop up and we'd need to play it. I never resist those things. Ultimately, I believe there are no rules about what can play over what. If it works, I don't question why.'
With only about 10 minutes in the whole film without music, SLEEPY HOLLOW gave Elfman a chance to really flex his musical muscles, in a way that is completely in support of the film and never becomes ostentatious. Elfman used voices very effectively in the score, sometimes associated with Ichabod's past, other times with the Hessian's past shadows emerging out of the past to affect the character's contemporarily. 'It all starts to become a big puzzle or a tapestry,' Elfman said. 'The fun part of a big score is having a general outline of what the tapestry is going to be, but then as you're filling it in there's all these surprises.'
Since SLEEPY HOLLOW, Elfman has taken a break from film scoring. He's writing a script, having signed a non-exclusive contract with Disney in 1997 to write, produce, and direct films as well as compose. So we may see a lot more of Danny outside of the recording studio. Musically, he'll be back this summer with a score for PROOF OF LIFE, with Taylor Hackford. He also wrote a fiddle tune for Sam Raimi's forthcoming film, THE GIFT, which he performs on screen. Visualizing red-headed Danny Elfman as a backwoods Cajun fiddler certainly conjures up some interesting pictures. 'Sam conned me into that,' Elfman grinned. 'It'll never happen again in this composer's lifetime!' He will most likely also compose the score, schedule permitting.
Elfman will continue to score films but hopes to slow down a bit from the three to four films a year pace he's kept at the last few years. 'I don't like doing this full time,' Elfman admitted. 'It's a great part-time job. My way of working does not lend itself to doing this full time. When I do it full time, that's all I do. I've never been good at balancing work and having a life, especially when I'm composing. That takes up every bit of my time, and I realize now why it worked so well doing just a couple films a year.'
So what has Elfman's secret been? What is it about his approach to film scoring that makes his music so accessible, so playful, and so festively ghoulish? 'What's my overall approach? I couldn't begin to describe it!' said Elfman. 'I don't even know what it is! I like to move very closely to the images and to have a style, it may be a little bit schizophrenic, which is maybe why sometimes my soundtracks are hard to listen to on record because I'm following, on a frame-by-frame basis, what I'm seeing. And sometimes that makes it kind of an astounding bore, but I like lots of dynamic. I like to get really big, and really sweet, and really soft, and really sad, and really funny. A score should be busy telling the story. I like to think that, if you played a film with just the score and you couldn't hear what they were saying, you'd still understand a lot. I mean, not the intricacies of plot, but you'd get a lot of the story out of it.'
Is there such a thing as a 'Danny Elfman Sound?' Something that, despite differences in melody and instrumentation, that rings distinctive and recognizable, emerging from the energetic strains of BEETLEJUICE and MARS ATTACKS and MEN IN BLACK and SLEEPY HOLLOW? Elfman can't really define it. 'I love dissonance,' Elfman said. 'I'm always happy whenever a scene will allow me to get dissonant, whether it's DOLORES CLAIBORNE or SLEEPY HOLLOW. It's always great fun for me. Probably the most fun scene I had in scoring SLEEPY HOLLOW is the scene where the horseman breaks into the house of the family and kills them all and grabs the little kid and the mother's head that's my favorite scene! I mean, when the mother's head rolls up and you see the eye looking through the floorboards! I wanted to catch all the changes and really shift around, going from deep to high, to just strings, and then the brass doing crazy pushes when he's swinging his axe at the floorboards, and having fun with percussion, too.'
Elfman has enjoyed his Double Life as a member of Oingo Boingo and as a film composer. 'It's a weird combination,' he said. 'The wonderful part of it is that, whichever one I'm doing, I get to fall back on the other one. In other words, when I'm in the middle of a score and it's really hard, I'll get to a point in the middle when I just long to get on a concert stage and just to be in front of those wonderful fans. On the other hand, whenever I'm in the middle of a tour or in the middle of an album, I'm longing to get back into a film score. When you're in the band, you always have the problem of repetition. You have to repeat songs you don't just write a bunch of songs, do an album, perform it once and never do it again. So you have to deal with the fact that you have to do material over a certain number of years, which can be enjoyable and sometimes it can be difficult. With a film, you have the beauty of just doing it once, and you never have to do it again. You start clean, you end clean.'