Danny Elfman:
Building Music for the Movies
Doubling His Playing Speed
One-time leadman for the rock & roll band Oingo Boingo, Elfman composed the score for his first major film, Tim Burton’s PeeWee’s Big Adventure, in 1985. “I was right on the first Mac,” he says. “I had a primitive sequencer so I could play some stuff for Tim. I was really keen on sequencers because I was working on the piano myself. And I’m not a good pianist. I could record a part playing at half time as my ability would allow, and then play it back at full tempo for the director instead of having to bang out tunes on the piano with sweat dripping down my forehead like a fever.”
“I had double duties with the Mystic Knights. Trombone, because we had one in the basement, and fire breathing.”
Today, Elfman uses his Power Mac as his central MIDI workstation. “The Mac does everything,” he says. “My music editors are doing edits on the Mac on ProTools. They run the work by me, I make suggestions for album mixes and suites for an album, and they’re doing all that work simultaneously on a number of Macs lined up all over the place.”
Elfman also keeps a PowerBook on his desk hooked to a cable modem for network access. “I send my demo tracks to Steve Bartek, who does the final orchestration. I drag the tracks onto a server, and he drags them onto his computer. While he looks at the written score, he can listen to the same thing the director heard and go ‘Okay, yeah, I see, it’s getting soft here,’ and ‘He’s laying it in thick here.’ It gives him more guidance in terms of what dynamics the director approved.”
Trombone and Fire Breathing
Curiously, Elfman never formally studied music. He didn’t learn to play an instrument until he was 18, when he traveled to Africa. He took a violin. After joining an avant-garde musical theatrical group in France, Elfman was inducted into his brother’s ragtag ensemble, the Mystic Knights. “I had double duties,” Elfman recalls. “Trombone, because we had one in the basement, and fire breathing.”
That’s when he began exploring his love of percussion. “I never really stuck with the violin,” he says, “and the trombone, I learned what I needed to learn. But percussion, from that year in Africa, really held me. Even today, it’s what I love the most in terms of playing and performing. I will always be in the percussion bay.”
From Mystic Knights, where he learned to write music, to Oingo Boingo, where he explored rock & roll, Elfman developed his flair for turning musical conventions upside down and creating some of the finest film scores of our time — the fantastical choir work in Edward Scissorhands, the suspenseful score of Mission:Impossible, the Wagnerian vibe of Batman, the jazzy, cool score of Men in Black.
“It all worked in its own way,” he says. “The rock band gave me the arrogance to follow my own instinct, whether I failed or not. Thank God I was able to take that attitude, because it’s the fear of failure that makes mediocrity. And without fearing that, I was able to find my own voice.”
