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Burton's Rock Music Man
by Randall Larson
as featured in the November 1989 issue of Cinefantastique
Posted by raleagh on Sat, 19th January 2008 at 9:34am
This article has been viewed 1161 times |
Rock and roll musicians have rarely made successful film composers, lacking either the ability, discipline, or versatility required to succeed in the complex world of composing music for motion pictures.
One unique exception is Danny Elfman, a member and songwriter for the group Oingo Boingo, who most recently completed the score for Tim Burton's BATMAN.
Though Elfman had worked on the rock score of FORBIDDEN ZONE, a cult film produced by his brother Richard, released in 1980 after Oingo Boingo achieved popularity, he hadn't pursued his aspirations to work in film until, out of the blue in 1984, he was asked to compose the music for PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, the first feature starring the comedian Pee Wee Herman. "They called me in and the first thing I asked them was 'Why me?" said Elfman. "They told me they wanted an orchestra score, and I told them I had no experience with orchestra and I didn't really know how to write music."
Director Tim Burton, however, felt that Elfman had the capabilities he was looking for. "We talked about musical styles, and who my influences were," Elfman said. "I think that's what did it. Everything I said was just dead on with what they had in mind - a little bit of Bernard Herrmann, a little bit of Nino Rota, and those two were my two big film music influences. When I was younger I dreamed of writing music in that style, but I didn't ever think I'd get a chance to do it."
After a week of studio decision-making, Elfman was told he had the job. Rather than being excited at achieving this goal, though, Elfman was petrified. "I thought I'd finally blundered my way into something that I wouldn't be able to fulfil, " he said. "But I finally figured I'd give it my best shot. If worse comes to worse, I'd fail miserably and go back to my nice comfortable place in rock and roll."
Through the course of scoring PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, Elfman and his Oingo Boingo associate, Steve Bartek (who Assisted him as an arranger), learned the technical side of timing, working with click-tracks to synchronize music and image, and other fine points of film scoring technique. "To my surprise," said Elfman, "what I thought was an enormously complex, technical job turned out to be - I won't say it wasn't time consuming and difficult - real easy."
The first thing Elfman did to prepare himself for writing symphonic film music was to discard everything he had learned during his experience in the rock field. "I've always been very critical of rock artists turned film composers," said Elfman, "and I didn't want to fall into their category. I took the attitude of forgetting everything I'd done with the band, and going back to myself as a teenager, watching and loving films. Even though I spent a lot of years in rock 'n' roll, it would be just as likely that I'd have the music to Fellini's CASANOVA or Bernard Herrmann's - JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH going on in my mind."
Elfman re-learned to write music while scoring PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE. Initially he had in mind simply to play his compositions on keyboard and record them on tape, having associate Steve Bartek put it into writing for the orchestra to read. "Then I thought, wait a minute, that's bullshit, that's how a rock 'n' roller does a film score," Elfman said. "So I made myself start putting notes on paper, which I hadn't done in a long time. I found that by the end of the score I was writing everything out. I had a real good music editor named Bob Badamay working with me, and he helped me a lot with the "technical side."
Elfman's score for PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (he called it a cross between Nino Rota and Hollywood- 1950s: "going for that overly dramatic type of musical style where there aren't many subtleties") was performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, and quickly led to further assignments in films and television, including a continuing association with Burton. Elfman scored Burton's 1986 ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS episode, "The Jar" remaking the 1962 original, which Elfman's big influence, Bernard Herrmann, had composed. "'The Jar' was really great because I got to write for a small ensemble, which I've always wanted to do," said Elfman. "I always emulated and admired how Bernard Herrmann would take a small ensemble and do all kinds of interesting things with it on the old TWILIGHT ZONE."
Elfman was signed to score Burton's BEETLEJUICE even before shooting had begun. "For me, working on BEETLEJUICE was a sheer joy, working with that kind of imagination, and letting my own imagination run wild," said Elfman. "Tim gives me few restraints, he basically just turns me loose and says, 'You know what I want, just go ahead and do it.’”
Although brought into the project early on, Elfman didn't actually formulate his musical ideas for BEETLEJUICE until he saw a rough cut for the first time. "I saw right away that the Betelgeuse character had this playfulness to him, yet he was twisted, but not really threatening," said Elfman. "So when I was watching the film for the very first time I had already formulated in my mind the Betelgeuse theme, and was thinking of Stravinsky-esque violins. There's a wonderful history of using them for demons, going all the way back to his opera, L 'Histoire du Soldat, which was a big inspiration for the film and also a very favorite piece of mine. For Lydia, I felt something more sad, melancholy and melodic was appropriate. For the rest of the score, I alternated between playing it strange or playing it serious or playing it comical or cartoony, depending on what was happening."
Most movies are given a temporary score, taken from other sound track albums or classical records, to assist the director in selecting or communicating the kind of music he wants and to accompany sneak previews of the film prior to the final cut which will see general release. In the case of BEETLEJUICE, however, a temp track wasn't used. "Tim decided right in the beginning that the music was very important, and that there wasn't a lot of it out there that would match the mood of the movie," said Elfman.
BEETLEJUICE had several sneak previews in order to gauge audience reaction and pinpoint changes which would make the film work better. Since BEETLEJUICE didn't have a temp score, Burton decided to have Elfman record his finished score before the previews, adapting it later to the changes that were made. Said Elfman, "Things got stretched out, they did a lot of recutting and had to reshoot one scene, and we had to have one more recording session to readapt a lot of the music around some of the new stuff. I had to write four or five new cues."
The music was recorded with an orchestra of more than sixty musicians, with a moderate use of synthesizer embellishment. While having a lot of experience with synthesizers, Elfman has tried to minimize their use in his film work (one exception being Emilio Estevez's WISDOM, which he composed and performed by himself purely on synthesizer). "There are so few boundaries with synthesizers that it can take a long time to get them to sound the way you want them to. You're under enormous pressure when the orchestra's waiting," said Elfman, who finds it more practical to do the synthesizer parts on his own. "On BEETLEJUICE I pre-laid a half-dozen cues on synthesizer and brought them in and had the orchestra play over that."
The orchestra was conducted by Bill Ross during BEETLEJUICE recording sessions. Elfman prefers to avoid this aspect of recording. "I haven't the slightest desire to conduct," he said. "On PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE I had a real good conductor named Lennie Niehaus, and I saw how difficult it is to pull an orchestra together. They can be like a wild classroom!"
Whereas some composers prefer to retain the degree of control over performance that can be gained through conducting it themselves, Elfman would rather hear the score in the mixing booth while it's being recorded. "I want to hear the music that I've written (which never sounds exactly like I thought it would) against the screen," said Elfman. "I want to see which sections work and which sections don't, and if you 're looking at your music you can't really do that. I want to be with the director to take his comments. And thirdly, I want to hear the balance that will be heard later in the theatre, not the deceptive balance of the musicians in the orchestra room."
The highly fantastic nature of BEETLEJUICE gave Elfman the opportunity to let his imagination soar and compose some really wild and broadly-colored music. The composer said he also relished his fantasy assignments on television, including "Mummy Daddy" and "Family Dog" for AMAZING STORIES. Elfman said the limitations of time and budget found in television also forced him to become very disciplined in his craft.
"Sometimes these little TV things have as many musical cues as a film does, even though they're all shorter," said Elfman. "It's 12 minutes instead of 45 minutes of music, but you have just as many starts and only have seven days to write it in. It's really challenging and was good training for me to work very quickly. "Family Dog" had some wonderful moments to write really cartoony music, and I had a great time doing it."
In addition to his exhausting schedule as a film composer, Elfman still devotes time to Oingo Boingo. "I'm under rather unique restrictions as a composer, because I can't take most of the jobs I'm offered," Elfman said. His obligations to Oingo Boingo take up as much as nine months of most years. "It's an awful, unique and wonderful problem all rolled up into one," he said. "These two careers are clashing more and more, and I've no intention of abandoning either one." |
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