Words matter. These are the best Danny Elfman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It’s still their ball game. It’s their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director’s impulses.
Or certainly I would need time – which I would love to have but there almost never is on a film – to just spend a week with a roomful of guys laying down these patterns.
It sounds really stupid, I hate making cosmic comments like this but, I just let it do what it wants to do.
That still has to be there. And so, it’s kind of an interesting question you brought up. Because, on the one hand, yeah, it’d be lovely. I certainly don’t see that happening. In fact, I see the opposite happening.
The first thing I do is lay out that melody and figure out how it has to hold here and then finish to land here, because you know in advance you’re going to want the melody to catch four things in the action.
Oh see, first off you gotta realize – everything for me is a reconstruction or deconstruction. I would actually say deconstruction. Mission: Impossible would be the exception. That would be a reconstruction- deconstruction.
I had to do this very aggressive, big score in a very short time, and knowing that in the beginning, middle, and end would be this very, very famous theme, but I still had to weave a score around it and make it work as a score was really challenging.
I don’t see myself necessarily having a burning desire to write a symphony.
You have to nail the right tone because sometimes when you just see his films cold, you’re not quite sure. It’s the same in – I’m trying to think of other directors with a similar sense – David Lynch’s films, Tim’s films, some of Cronenberg’s stuff.
I’ll look back and I’d be better to answer that in about three months from now. Or when the movie comes out and I see it. I don’t even know what it is yet. I’ve still been in the middle of it.
The beauty of a main title is that you establish your main theme and maybe a bit of your secondary theme. You plant the seed that you’re going to go water later in the score. And so, having that removed just made it so much more difficult.
I think that there’s a lot more freedom in the low budget, the independent films where, unfortunately, you don’t have the money, necessarily, to get the orchestras in there to play a lot of stuff. But, you have a lot more freedom, very often.
In Tim’s films, more than most, if you miss the tone, you don’t get the film.
Sometimes I like them artificial and sometimes I like them real. And the reason is because sometimes I like a real close sound. And I like a very specific snare sound and I can’t get that in the big room.
You have to write a good score that you feel good about. At least, you’re supposed to. But, if the director hates it, it ain’t going to be in the movie!
I can’t get that live and I don’t have the time to take the tape, after I’ve finished recording it, into a little studio somewhere else where I can get a different kind of percussion sound.
I’ll just start laying out the melody exactly where I want it to fall. And then I’ll go back and fill it out. Whereas, in other pieces I’m really just going a couple bars at a time.
I like creating these rhythmic patterns. These interlocking rhythmic things are really fun.
I’m trying to interpret the film through the director’s head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.
