Danny Elfman:
Building Music for the Movies
Late at night, when no one is around, Danny Elfman flips the light on in his studio, turns to his Mac and experiments with the rhythms, propulsive beats and choral textures for his newest film score.
“Any unusual thing I’ve done,” says Elfman, one of the hottest composers in the movies today, “has been through experimenting on the Mac. Because I’m hearing it, I’m not thinking it. If you listen to any dense piece of music — which is most of it — the density comes from my ability to freely experiment and play on the computer myself. I develop ideas of this against this against this against this. With the Mac, I have an experimental freedom that’s not possible unless you have unlimited amounts of money and unlimited amounts of time to bring in players to experiment and experiment and experiment.”
“Batman” to “Simpsons”
Elfman is the composer behind such widely-different projects as “Spiderman,” “Red Dragon,” “Batman,” “Men In Black,” “Summersby,” “Good Will Hunting,” “Mission:Impossible,” “Dolores Claiborne,” most of Tim Burton’s movies including “Edward Scissorhands,” “Beetlejuice” and cult classic “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” He also composed the delightfully quirky theme for the television cartoon series “The Simpsons.”
Elfman earned dual Oscar nods for “Men in Black” and “Good Will Hunting” in 1997 — two films that showcase his talent for rich instrumentation and turn-on-a-dime mood shifts.
“Sometimes the job of the score in a movie,” says Elfman, “is propelling energy. Sometimes it’s creating drama or tension. Sometimes it’s creating a whimsical framework to remind us we’re not supposed to take things seriously. But it’s always most gratifying when I can let my imagination run amok. Tim provides very few restraints.”
A Mock Orchestra
Elfman generally begins a project by viewing a rough cut of the movie. “And I live with it,” he says. “I really soak it in, and I start developing ideas and experimenting. I have a number of synths and samplers, a kind of mock orchestra. After I get a feel for the film, I do two things simultaneously. One, I start to get melodic ideas and tone ideas. At the same time, I start to build a template for the movie, the template being, ‘What sounds do I want for this score?’”
Elfman spends a couple of weeks laying out the template for his score. “It’s going to be a brassy score,” he proposes. “I’m going to look through my library and find some very aggressive brass sounds. Maybe it has some solo strings, so I’ll find some good solo string sounds. Then I’ll get to my own library of percussion music, and I start pulling up banks and banks and I think ‘Oh, I want this Indian drum…this gamalon Indonesian sound…this wood block… prepared piano…prepared harps.’ They’re sounds I can’t get out of a real instrument with the orchestra.
“So I’ll go into the studio and coax the sounds out of the instruments. And that might provide a framework. ‘Yeah, I like the sound; I’m going to bring this element back repeatedly.’ And in one movie it might be all percussion — Red Dragon is prepared piano, with a certain type of interlocking harp pattern. That simply could never happen live.”
