Interview: Burton on Oscars, "Frankenweenie," Critics

Vulture spoke with Tim Burton to learn about Frankenweenie and its chances at winning an Oscar this year, his balance between films that are critical successes and box office hits, his broken arm, and more:

Do all the nominations and awards help make up for the film's less-than-blockbuster box -office performance?

It's really nice, especially for a film like that. Everybody works really hard for something like this, especially the people who work in a dark room for a couple of years. The thing about stop-motion is that it's such a slow, painful process — one frame at a time. The positive side is that it helps keep the medium alive. It's not high on to-do lists for studio execs to make stop-motion, let alone black-and-white stop-motion. There's still a bit of a stigma, so any sort of positive response is meaningful.

You would think after The Artist there would be less opposition to black-and-white — especially when it comes to films about Hollywood. Argo also got a lot of awards love partly because it's about Hollywood helping to save the world. And Frankenweenie celebrates classic horror films. Hollywood loves nothing more than celebrating itself.

That's true, now that you mention that. Even last year, films like Hugo did that. But I never really thought of that. It's certainly not my perception of the world. For me, it's just what inspires me, and those monster movies stay with you on some kind of level. Those early things are still inside of me. It was just fun to play around with words and themes and memories, because you don't get to do that on every project.

Loved the shout-out to Mary Shelley with the turtle's name, by the way.

[Chuckles.] My son's turtle was named Shelley. When you have a pet as a child, that's the first pure relationship you have. It's unconditional love. And it's your first experience with death as well, so it was an easy emotional connection to make to Frankenstein and monster movies. Those first relationships are very important. And to me, the Frankenstein story is about creating things, not the business of creating things.

But you still want it to be successful.

No one wants to feel like they weren't, unless they're doing some kind of weird art-house thing: "I hope nobody sees this film! And if they see the film, I'm selling out!" You hope for success, but it's a strange phenomenon. You have a movie that gets shitty, crappy, horrible reviews but makes a lot of money; you have a movie that gets good, decent reviews, but then no one goes to see it. I've been lucky, even if a film didn't do that well [at the box office], I end up meeting people who connected with it, and that evens the score.

How do you feel about the critics who say you should stop using Johnny Depp so much?
I'm in a no-win situation. Some say I use him too often, and then others say, "How come he's not in this one?" Whatever. I'm strangely used to that from the beginning.

I don't decide to make a film because of the actors first, even though there are a lot of people I love. I don't think I've ever gone, "Oh, I want to work with that person," and then specifically found a part with that person just to work with them. For Frankenweenie, I hadn't worked with Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short, or Martin Landau in a long time, so that was great. But the project drew me to them because they're all so talented.

With Catherine, not since Beetlejuice. People want a sequel for that one.

Those were fun characters, but I'd have to see what the script was like and if it was worth doing — I can't just make it because it's one of the worst ten movies of the year! The first two films I did, Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, made the ten-worst-movies-of-the-year lists. Then, years later, people said they were my best movies. What? So if those were my best, I'm in real trouble. [Laughs.] The point is, even if I wanted to analyze it, I'm not going to make everyone happy. It's easier when you're starting out and people don't really know what you are. But then you become a thing, and that's not really what you want. I never really targeted my films for kids. It's just what I like to make. But then people were saying The Nightmare Before Christmas was too scary for kids — too much singing, too scary. And then the kids loved it. So I've had conflicting information from the beginning.

How is The Nightmare Before Christmas too scary? It's no scarier than any fairy tale ...

Exactly. When you were a child, did you ever see Disney movies? There's some scary stuff in there. That's what made Disney movies to a large degree, but as people get older, they kind of forget that. There's a new generation looking at fairy tales now, and that's what monster movies were for me. I've always been interested in those kinds of stories, the ones that have been around for ages. When I go back and reread "Red Riding Hood," it's so bizarre, so weird, so fascinating, and we forget how strange they were, even if they've stayed in our consciousness for ages. Fairy tales are amazing, intense, psychological horror stories. But if you ask most adults, they immediately think it's all princesses and happy endings, and it's so not. Obviously.

Are you still thinking about doing Pinocchio next?

It's really hard to think about doing anything when I've got a throbbing pain in my shoulder! The painkillers are not that good here. The doctors are like, "Take two aspirin."

You're in London. Codeine is over-the-counter there!

Yeah, but it's a pretty weak form of codeine, probably. But you're right. I should do that. [Laughs.] I'm hoping the pain subsides soon, but it's like when you have a toothache, and it's hard to think, hard to do things, hard to focus on what's going on when it's throbbing away.

Once the pain subsides, then you can consider Pinocchio, or perhaps a Walt Disney biopic starring Ryan Gosling. Have you seen that poster?

The story at Cal Arts was that Walt was cryogenically frozen and somewhere in the basement. We used to spend Friday nights looking for him. So that's the story. Listen, I'm open to ideas at the moment!

Video: Burton on "Vampire Hunter," "Frankenweenie," Old and New Projects

Collider recently had a conversation with Tim Burton. In the interview, the filmmaker discussed a range of topics, from how Disney let him make his stop-motion Frankenweenie, his involvement with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, what he thinks of the test-screening process, whether there are deleted scenes from older films like Ed Wood, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and Beetlejuice, and his criteria in picking future projects.

Video: Seth Grahame-Smith on "Dark Shadows," "Vampire Hunter"

Writer Seth Grahame-Smith joined Harry Knowles for a discussion on movie vampires and making Dark Shadows and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter with Tim Burton. They discuss writing for different characters, researching and adapting the source material, and the ultimate showdown: Barnabas Collins vs. Honest Abe. Grahame-Smith appears at about three minutes in:

Paul Reubens on New "Pee-wee" Movie, Elfman's Music

Paul Reubens -- better known as "Pee-wee Herman" -- has revealed that his new Pee-wee movie is ready to begin casting. The new film will be produced by Judd Apatow (The Forty-Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up).

“We just did a very, very quick lean and mean rewrite of it and we have a meeting with Judd Apatow this coming week, five days from now [as of Saturday],” Reubens said. “I’m hoping we’re going into production soon after that. We’ve been sort of toying with talking a little bit about casting already so I’m excited to just be able to make a couple phone calls and ask people if they’d be in it.”

“It’s a character I’ve always loved so I can’t wait to put the shoes back on and get that suit back on very soon and do this movie that I love,” Reubens said. “It has such a funny script and such a weird twist to it all. There’s some really good detail to it.”

Reubens also expressed interest in having Danny Elfman compose the score, as he did for Tim Burton's Pee-wee's Big Adventure and its follow-up movie, Big Top Pee-wee. Elfman also composed some music for the acclaimed television series, Pee-wee's Playhouse.

“I shouldn’t say this because I haven’t talked to him about it. We talked recently but we haven’t talked about that for a long time. Also I’ve never made a movie with Judd so I don't know what Judd music-wise how he would feel, although I can’t imagine that Judd would be, ‘Danny? No.’ But Danny, I feel like we have an unspoken sort like ‘I’m I’m making a Pee Wee movie, you’re doing the music. Don’t make me point out that I started your career, okay?’ [Joking] That kind of thing. The answer is yes. I love Danny. Both scores that he’s done for me I think are incredibly overlooked. He should have been nominated for the first one I think although as you probably know it’s Nino Rota’s score to 8 ½ really. Most people don’t know that.”

No release date is set for the new film yet.

Elfman on "Dark Shadows," "Batman," "Nightmare Before Christmas"

Composer Danny Elfman sat down for an interview with the AV Club. Elfman discussed his long working relationship with Tim Burton and his career at large, including Batman, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and his latest project, Dark Shadows:

The A.V. Club: Your collaboration with Tim Burton stretches back to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. How did the two of you first come to work together?

Danny Elfman: Well, it really was out of the blue on Pee-wee. I got a call from the manager of [Oingo Boingo] saying, “This young animator is doing a film,” and then he asked me if I knew who Pee-wee Herman was. I said, “Yeah, I used to go see Paul Reubens at the Groundlings.” So I already knew of him. He said, “Well, they’re doing a movie with Pee-wee.” I just assumed when I met with him that it was going to be about a song or songs, you know, because I was in a band, and when it became about a score, I was pretty shocked. I said, “Why me?” [Laughs.] But it was just one of those random pieces of luck. Tim seemed to think, “I think you can kind of do a score,” and I’m like, “Hmmm…I don’t know.” But I saw the movie, and I went home and conjured up the first piece of music that came to my head, and I did it on my eight-track player, a little funky demo, and put it on a cassette and sent it out to him and didn’t expect to hear back. And a week or two later, I got a call saying, “You got the job.” And I almost turned it down.

AVC: Why?

DE: Well, my reasoning to my manager was, “You know, that was fun doing the meeting, and it was fun doing the demo, but I’m just gonna fuck up their movie. I don’t know how to do a score. And they’re really nice guys.” But he says, “Yeah, you know what? You call ’em and tell ’em you’re not gonna do it, ’cause I’ve been working on this deal for two weeks!” [Laughs.] And he gave me a phone number, and I looked at it and looked at it and thought about it overnight… and I just never made the call.

AVC: You’d seen Paul Reubens when he was with the Groundlings, but did you actually know Tim Burton prior to that initial meeting?

DE: No, amazingly, though it’s possible we crossed paths. And it’s possible that Paul and I could’ve potentially crossed paths without knowing it—and John Lasseter, too—because we were all at Cal Arts at the same time.

AVC: So how did your name come into the mix, then? Were they just Oingo Boingo fans?

DE: Tim was an Oingo Boingo fan, and Paul knew me through the Mystic Knights Of The Oingo Boingo, which came before Oingo Boingo and did a score for my brother’s cult film, Forbidden Zone. So Paul was a fan of Forbidden Zone and Tim was a fan of Oingo Boingo, so my name came up for both of them, but from two different incarnations.
AVC: Having done the score for Forbidden Zone, how did you approach doing the one for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure?

DE: Well, it was hard, because nothing had prepared me for that. Forbidden Zone was just a thing with the 12 pieces that I played with every day, just writing out some music for them, so writing an orchestral score… I didn’t really know how to begin. And I just tried to look to the music that I loved, and I said, “I’ll just do what I think would be fun to do.” And I really did expect it all to get thrown out, because it didn’t feel like the kind of stuff that goes into contemporary comedies. I didn’t expect any of it to survive.

AVC: And how much of it did?

DE: All of it. It was just one of those weird things, though, because even as I was writing it, I was thinking, “Yeah, Tim’s fun to work with, but the studio’s gonna hear it, and they’re gonna toss it and get a real composer.” [Laughs.]

AVC: When you’re composing the score to a film that’s based on an existing property, like Dark Shadows, do you go ever back and listen to the music from the original in search of inspiration?

DE: Well, interestingly, this is the first time we have done that. Because on Planet Of The Apes and Charlie [And The Chocolate Factory] and Batman, we made a conscious decision to make no references—ever—to the originals, that they should be their own thing and that we shouldn’t even listen to it. But here, this was different. Tim really did like the tone of the music to the TV show, and he got me listening to it. So half the score is kind of big, melodramatic orchestra, and… We didn’t really know how to approach it at first, but it finally kind of evolved into this clear design where, when we’re in the big part of the love story in the past and how Barnabas became a vampire and his battle with Angelique, we’re using the orchestra in a more or less traditional way. But whenever he’s with the family in the house, we’re going to use an ensemble that’s very much like the ensemble might have been in 1970. A very, very small orchestra, mostly just three solo instruments: a bass clarinet, bass flute, and vibes. And the vibes and the flute very much are taken and inspired from the original TV music. Furthermore, there were these riffs that they did that I really liked, so I did pull some music from the TV show into the score, and Bob Cobert, the writer for that, is credited in the cue sheets for those moments where it kind of becomes a co-composition. So it really was unique. The only time in 75 films or whatever that I’ve ever paid attention to the music of the past was Mission: Impossible, because I knew I was going to use Lalo Schifrin’s song, and Dark Shadows. And it wasn’t a specific piece. It was just a tone, a sound, that we both really liked. So that did make it kind of more fun and special in that way.

AVC: Under more typical circumstances, what’s the composition process like for you? At least when you’re working with Tim, presumably you generally know well before filming begins that you’re going to be handling the score. Do you read the script and see where your mind takes you?

DE: Well, yeah, I read the script, but then I forget about it. Because wherever my mind takes me when I’m reading it is going to be the wrong direction with Tim. [Laughs.] I learned that years ago when I got started three weeks early on Beetlejuice and started writing all this music from the script, and then I saw the rough cut and realized that there wasn’t one note of what I’d written that had anything to do with the movie. So now when I go and I look at the footage with Tim for the first time, I try to actually do the opposite and blank out everything from my head. I want my brain to be pure static. But Tim brings me onto the set always about halfway into production, walks me around, and likes me to sit on the set, because he knows that I got the Batman theme actually from that first visit, and he’ll show me about 20 or 30 minutes of footage. So when I go home, now I’ve got a really good idea of what the movie actually is, and I will in fact start getting some early ideas from that and log them down. And then when I finally start the film usually a month or two or even three later, when the first rough cut of the film is together, it is what I’m expecting now. And then I just pick up where I left off.

AVC: How collaborative is your process with the filmmakers that you work with? Do you go track by track and say, “How’s this work for you?” Or do you wait until you’ve got a whole rough score together and submit it?

DE: Oh, no, no. It’s very collaborative, cue by cue. In fact, tomorrow morning we’re meeting and I have three more cues for Frankenweenie to play [for Burton]. Very often… I’ll drive him crazy. [Laughs.] It’s a little bit maddening, because early on, I go through lots of ideas, and I’m putting, like, “Here’s six things to listen to, here’s four ideas,” and he’ll go, “Oh my God, I can’t focus on that much.” And I go, “C’mon, c’mon, you can do it.” And going through all of those ideas, that’s how we’ll home in on what the score is. Because in the beginning, I really just tried all kinds of stuff. There’s never, ever a single clear idea that this is what it’s going to be.

AVC: Does that connection with him make it easier to work him versus other filmmakers?

DE: Well, it’s not necessarily easier or harder. Every filmmaker is their own unique kind of psychological entity, and some are just very, very picky or fussy and… They’re just more difficult than others. Others are a little bit more removed and just kind of, like, get the feel of it and move on. Tim is kind of neither extreme. He definitely doesn’t think things out. It’s visceral. He has to listen and respond. He won’t talk about music, and when we spot a movie, for example, Tim’s famous for the shortest spotting sessions. [A spotting session is when a director and composer decide where in a film music will occur, usually before the score is written. —ed.] I’ve been on movies where the spotting took two days. If his movie’s an hour-45, I’ll be surprised if our spotting will take more than two hours and 15 minutes. [Laughs.] He doesn’t want to talk about it. He’ll just say, “We’ll start music here, we’ll end music here. We’ll start here, it should end here.” And occasionally he’ll tell me how he feels about a scene. “The scene makes me feel this way or that way.”

So in that sense, it’s kind of perfect, because really, any more information is not really useful anyhow. So with Tim, it’s all about, “Don’t talk about it, don’t analyze it for sure, just do it,” and then he’ll see what he gets a visceral response to. And as he gets a visceral response, it’s my job to home in on that and try to fine-tune it and make it work for him. So it’s never easy. But it’s always exciting, and it’s always a challenge. There’s no coasting with Tim. Ever. Some people think that it’s like, “Oh, you know him so well you can write the score without even meeting with him.” That’s so not true. I actually spent more time on Big Fish than any film I’ve ever worked on with him. Finding what it is can be a real interesting and sometimes winding path before we actually arrive there. It’s a journey. And it’s an interesting journey, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a piece of cake.

AVC: Is there any particular score that you look back on and think, “I still can’t believe I got out of that alive”?

DE: Well, the most difficult score of all my however many scores—I said 75 earlier, but I really don’t know exactly how many it is—was Batman. For sure. But that wasn’t because the score itself was so hard to write, even though I’d never written a drama, I’d never written anything serious or melodramatic or dramatic. I’d only written comedy. But mainly because the studio and the producer didn’t want me on the film. [Laughs.] So I was struggling, and Tim was struggling to keep me on. So there was, like, a strong movement and desire to not have me there, to have somebody more experienced, somebody who knew what they were doing, and so I really, really had to fight for that one. I felt like it was just uphill all the way, clinging on by my fingernails, until finally I crossed this threshold with [producer] Jon Peters. I played him this cue… I was with Tim, and he said, “Play him such and such,” and I played him a piece that ended up becoming the main titles. And that was just one of dozens. I didn’t know how to present stuff well at that point. And suddenly Jon leapt up out of his chair and he started conducting with his hands. [Laughs.] And Tim gave me a look, and it was, like, “That’s it. We’re in.”

AVC: Many of the cues you’ve written have resonated with listeners on an emotional level. Have you ever been in mid-composition and just gotten caught up in your own work, where you were, like, “Wow, if this is moving me, I must really be onto something here”?
DE: No. I mean, I’ll never get so impressed with a piece of music I’ve written that I’ll go, “Wow, that’s the shit!” [Laughs.] I’m just not wired that way. I’ll sometimes get emotional when I’m scoring a scene because the scene will get to me. But it’s not because I’ve written such a killer piece of music and I’m going, “I am so the motherfucker here.” One area that I think Tim and I are very similar is that the highest compliment I’ve ever heard him pay his own work is, “I think it came out interesting.” And that’s pretty much how I feel about my music: “I hope it’s okay. I think it came out interesting.” And maybe in a year or two I’ll actually think I did a good job.

AVC: In addition to your film work, you’ve also done several TV themes over the years, but the one that’s probably been heard by the most ears is The Simpsons.

DE: Well, it was a lucky break, you know? I’ve written, what, about 15 themes? And that one was the one that I thought nobody would ever hear. I wrote it in a day. It was one day’s work. I had it in my head in the car on the way home, and by the time I got home from meeting Matt Groening, I’d already written it, and I basically just walked in, made a demo, sent it out to him, and got a message back saying, “Great, fine.” [Laughs.] It was about as simple as it gets.

AVC: On a different TV-related topic, there’s a clip of The Mystic Knights Of The Oingo Boingo on The Gong Show that’s made the rounds on YouTube. What, if anything, do you remember about that experience?

DE: Well, we were literally passing the hat on the streets in those days, so I remember we got the gig, and we thought it’d be funny, but… We were trying to get gonged. And we didn’t. What you don’t realize was that my brother had the rocket ship with a fire extinguisher, and he was purposely ready to blast the judges. But we never got to do it! So not only did we not expect to win, we expected to get gonged and we were looking forward to it! [Laughs.] So it was kind of a disappointment when it was over.

AVC: You mentioned Forbidden Zone earlier, the Mystic Knights’ film. How was it to work on that, given your limited motion picture experience at that point?

DE: Well, at that point, I wasn’t trying to make the music sound like a motion-picture score. It was really kind of like doing what we did onstage, but doing it for pictures. So it actually was really easy and fun. It was just a minor adjustment, the fact that we weren’t doing it for a stage show but for pictures, but it was the same kind of music, the same type of thing, the songs were in the genre that we were doing. It was really just being the Mystic Knights.

AVC: What about the aspect of being in front of the camera?

DE: Well, it was like shooting a rock video. I’m only comfortable in front of the camera if I’m lip-synching. The few times I’ve had to speak lines in front of a camera were just the most miserable experiences of my life. If you’d asked me as a teenager what I wanted to do, I would’ve said film. And if you’d asked me what, I would’ve said, “Anything but acting and composing.” [Laughs.] I thought I was going to be involved in the visual side. It never occurred to me to do music, but I knew from the beginning that I never could be an actor.

AVC: So did anyone have to twist your arm to get you to provide the singing voice of Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas? Not that you were onscreen, but it was still acting.

DE: No, you know, when I was doing Jack… I was doing all the demos. I was writing a song probably every three days. It was so quick. Tim would come over, he’d tell me part of the story, and so I did all the songs. I even had to do Sally’s song. So I did all the pieces, and then we went in the studio and did, like, more finished demos of everything. So I literally did virtually every voice… Except for Sally, where I did bring in a singer to help me out. [Laughs.] It was just a little too silly singing Sally in falsetto. So by the time we were way down the line, there was a certain point where there was a feeling that was like, “Oh my God, no one else can sing these songs, because they really are me. They’re my stories, almost.” I felt such a kinship to the character. His story was reflecting how I felt with my band and everything else with that period of time. I wanted to leave my band, but I couldn’t, and I wanted something else, but I didn’t know what. So Jack Skellington’s whole journey to Christmastown was really my journey out of Oingo Boingo. That was my Halloweenland, my wanting something else. I so related to him on so many levels.

AVC: It’s strange to think that there’s an entire generation—more than one, probably, at this point—that has no idea that this guy who does the music for Tim Burton’s movies even used to be in a band.

DE: [Laughs.] Yeah, probably.

AVC: Do you ever miss the days of being in Oingo Boingo?

DE: No. You know, when I stopped doing The Mystic Knights—because you’ve got to remember that I did The Mystic Knights for eight years before Oingo Boingo. So when I started the band, I never missed doing The Mystic Knights, and when I started doing composing, I did both for 10 years, and that was hard. But I wanted to move on. And I think I was, weirdly, always more comfortable as a writer than a performer. Although I admit that I did love getting up there, especially when we were in the clubs. I found it more stressful when we started moving into the bigger arenas. And I don’t know if I was ever as much of a natural. I don’t think I was cut out to be that. I don’t know how bands stay together for all those years and keep doing the same songs. It would drive me insane. And I couldn’t tour more than three months, because even six weeks would drive me insane. I’d reached a point where I was like, “If I have to do this song one more time, I’m gonna blow my brains out.”

I think there is kind of a wiring you have to have, both to be in a band or to be in theater, where you’re gonna do the same show every single night. And in a band, even though you’re going to do new material, you’ve still got to perform the old stuff that they want to hear, and I would just quickly reach this point where I was like, “I can’t bear it. I just can’t bear it any longer.” I can’t do a concert without doing any older material, but I can’t stand going up there and doing songs that I know.
I think people who do that love it. There’s a reason why U2 and The Rolling Stones and these bands can get up there and keep doing it. They must love doing those songs regardless of how many times they’ve done them, in the same way that someone goes up and does a stage play or Broadway every night. I don’t know how they do it. I could never do it. So I just think it’s kind of an internal wiring, and I think I just wasn’t meant to have my career in that. The fact that I lasted so many years was more than enough than I needed for a lifetime. Sometimes I miss just using my voice more, the singing, but I don’t miss the pressure of going onstage and having to learn a shitload of songs.

AVC: Is there a definitive Oingo Boingo album to your mind? Is there any one that captures the band’s sound perfectly?

DE: No, I don’t think we ever caught the sound perfectly. I don’t know. If you asked the fans, most of them would probably go with Dead Man’s Party, but for me, I was never happy with the sound on any of the albums, and every album I did, I always wanted to figure out, “Why doesn’t that sound the way I wanted it to sound, or the way I thought it would sound?” I never was able to get that part of it together. I was never able to get that sound that was in my head.

AVC: How do you look back on your solo album from that era, So-Lo?

DE: I don’t. I had extra tunes, and I just kind of wanted to try that. And I did it, and I said, “All right, that was that.”

By the way, I don’t mean to cast disparaging remarks when I say I don’t miss being in Oingo Boingo, because that could be taken the wrong way by Oingo Boingo fans. I did enjoy doing those shows, but I just don’t think it was my destiny to be a stage performer forever. I was happier writing and recording songs than I was in recording them, except in those few moments when it was just really fantastic. You know, there were these great moments at the Universal Amphitheater and at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater that will always be really precious to me.

AVC: Did you feel that the band lost anything when it shifted from being The Mystic Knights to just being Oingo Boingo?

DE: Well, no, because we became a different thing. The Mystic Knights was totally non-electric. It was all acoustic and brass. I played trombone, acoustic guitar, and percussion. In Oingo Boingo, I picked up an electric guitar. We just stole the name, really. [Laughs.] It was really nothing else that we took from The Mystic Knights. The whole idea was to do something that had no sets, no costumes, no makeup, none of the stuff we were burdened by for all those years, that we could just plug in amps and do a show.

AVC: So less an evolution than a brand-new entity.

DE: Oh yeah. It was just like, “That’s it, Mystic Knights are gone, let’s start something new.” I literally woke up one morning, I heard a ska tune from The Specials, then I got into Madness, The Specials, The Selecter, and that was it. It was all over. I just wanted to be in a ska band. So that’s what I did. End of one story, beginning of another story. Now, the next 16 years were pretty convoluted as far as where that ska band went and trying to figure out what we were. [Laughs.] And I definitely had some great, great moments that I treasure. But I think my destiny was to be someone who scribbles in dark rooms, not somebody who goes out there performing their material every night.

Video: Elfman's 90 Minute "Dark Shadows" Q&A

Danny Elfman sat down for a 90-minute-long Q&A session in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Elfman comes on stage at about 16 minutes in. The composer was greeted by many fans, and discussed Dark Shadows and more, including how Johnny Depp used to steal guitar picks from him, the falling-out he and Tim Burton had that nearly destroyed their relationship, movie genres that he can't stand to compose for, the easiest and most difficult scores he has composed for Burton, the forthcoming Frankenweenie, among numerous other topics:

Video: Burton Didn't Consider "Dark Shadows" a Comedy

Get More: Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

In an interview with MTV News, Tim Burton explained the recent reactions to the trailer for Dark Shadows. He expressed that he didn't consider the film to be just a goofy comedy. "Everything that's in [the trailer] is in the movie," Burton told MTV News. "It's a funny film for me, because I never considered it a comedy. I was always trying to capture the weird vibe of 'Dark Shadows,' which is a weird thing to try to capture. It was a weird daytime soap opera."

"It's not like I'm being campy with it or anything," Burton said. "The guy's been locked in a box for 200 years, and [when] he comes out ... something weird is going to happen."

Burton also talked about the interviewer's comparisons to Edward Scissorhands. "Edward Scissorhands was more of a naive character. Barnabas has been around the block a few times," Burton told MTV News with a laugh. "There is something about a character who doesn't quite fit into the world, which is similar, just in this case, he's been around a long time."

He also briefly responds to questions regarding a sequel to Beetlejuice, and whether or not he would make another Batman or Pee-wee movie. "I think I have enough on my plate," the very busy filmmaker replied.

Tim Burton Collection Blu-Ray Exclusive Set

Amazon.com will be releasing an exclusive Blu-Ray box set on May 1st, 2012: The Tim Burton Collection. The box set will also include a book, and includes Tim Burton's seven films made with Warner Bros.: Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Mars Attacks! (1996), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and Corpse Bride (2005). Click this link for more details.

Video Interview: Danny Elfman

ARTISTdirect has an exclusive interview with Danny Elfman. There's also a special video from Elfman in which the composer talks about his earliest film music influences (especially Bernard Herrmann), stories behind making some of his most iconic music for Tim Burton's films, some of his favorite Burton characters, and much more. Click here to watch the video!

Here is the interview:

Is your music more inspired by a film's characters or the script? What exerts a heavier influence on your musical choices?

Well, I only tried working off the script once with Beetlejuice because I had some extra time and I thought I'd get a head start. Not one note I'd written from the script survived into the movie so I learned, especially with Tim Burton's films, never to anticipate what the movie's actually going to be like. The script is always one part of what's going to make a Tim Burton movie. I wait until I have a movie to look at, and I try to look at it with as blank of a mind as I possibly can—no expectations and no preconceived notions of what it's going to be.

Do you feel like you get especially close to each character, whether it's Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas or Batman?

Yeah, in the same manner that Tim clearly gets close to certain characters in his movies, I end up gravitating exactly the same way. There's no way not to—whether it's The Penguin or Catwoman. It doesn't matter who it is! It could be The Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow. You just gravitate towards a certain thing, and you find that's what pulling you along. Sometimes, you don't know what it's going to be. In Big Fish, clearly I was trying to follow the trajectory of the story and the main character but thematically I kept falling back to this mermaid character that we meet in this early fantasy that becomes a theme for Helena Bonham Carter's character later. I don't know why, but I just kept getting drawn to that as a common theme which carried me through. I never know where it's going to come from. It just does what it does.

On the box set, there's a fantastic piece called "Herrmann-esque Thing," it's a worktape from Batman. Is Bernard Herrmann someone you've always looked up to?

Well, he's the reason that I got into film music. When I met Tim on Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, I was in a band. It never occurred to me to become a film composer, but I was a fan of film music since about age eleven. I owe that strictly to Bernard Herrmann. I loved his scores. I think I was about eleven-years-old when I heard the score to The Day the Earth Stood Still, and it's the first time I noticed film music and a name. I realized, "This isn't just there. Somebody actually did it." Herrmann was always my god in terms of my love of film music.

It's interesting how everything culminated on his score for Taxi Driver.

More than interesting, it's incredible. I'll never be Herrmann in my life time, but he's the model I would strive for just in terms of the use of being inventive, melody and emotional content.

Do you have particular memories about the Sleepy Hollow score?

Yeah, it was just really fun. I didn't really know exactly what I was going to do with it. Once again, the main theme of "The Headless Horseman" wasn't The Horseman's first theme that I wrote. It became "Ichabod Crane's Childhood Theme." I ended up with this theme for him as a child and it started just following him. I just learned somewhere along the way never to argue with those impulses because they're doesn't have to be rhyme or reason. Nothing has to make sense. In fact, sometimes it's better that it doesn't. I'll look back later and go, "Well, I could see psychologically how this would've fit with this." At the time, I'm not thinking that way at all. It just kept coming back. I loved The Headless Horseman. I was incredibly proud of Tim because it's the first time he did a villain that was really a villain. He had no redeeming qualities. Normally, we love Tim's villains. They're usually the characters we associate with. The Headless Horsemen just cut off heads. There was no sense like, "Oh the poor guy, look at him stumbling around his house knocking everything over because he can't see anything while he's trying to make his cereal in the morning." [Laughs] He was a monster. When he killed that family and pulled up that little kid from under the planks, I was so proud of Tim [Laughs].

Music's the perfect way to get close to those emotions. It's the language of emotion.

Well, I guess! I'm never sure what I'm exactly tapping into when I'm doing it. I think that's for other people to judge better than me. I just go with it. With Tim's movies in particular, wherever he goes, I try to go.

How similar are orchestral music and rock 'n' roll?

They may complement each other, but not writing the music. They couldn't be farther apart. The years I had being in the band, I had to unlearn everything I'd done with them and move backwards in time to when I used to be in this musical theater group. Your sense with a band is always verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus—like that. When you're writing orchestral music, you have to get that out of your head really quick. There are so many places to go. You don't really a verse and a chorus. You have themes. There are limitless ways to present those themes. It doesn't really help. In a weird way, I think it's almost detrimental. I was able to figure it out, mostly due to my early studying of film scores. Although I wasn't actually studying, I was in my mind studying the scores of Herrmann, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman and, of course, Nino Rota who was also a huge influence on me and really inspired the score to Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

Is there a score that really sticks out for you?

It's a hard to pick a favorite. Listening back to everything, which was a very weird experience, there were bits of different scores where I was like, "Oh, I really like that moment." If I had to pick an overall score, it might be Edward Scissorhands. Probably, if nothing else, because it was following the intensity of Batman and we were totally left to our own in this weird world. I had no model, as I never seem to have, of what type of music will fit his films. It's just a score that I still have very fond memories. It was a very simple experience working on that film with him.

Elfman Interview: Burton 'Opened Every Door For Me'

Gina McIntyre of the Los Angeles Times' "Hero Complex" had an interview with Danny Elfman. In it, the composer discussed the collector's boxed set which chronicles his massive history of collaborations with Tim Burton, how working with Burton had had an impact on his career, what was particularly embarrassing to rediscover (and make available) when making this boxed set, and much more:

GM: How did this project originate?

DE: It’s so far out of my realm of what I know, collectors’ things like this. I’ve never owned one. It’s been a whole kind of learning experience. Richard Kraft, my agent, this is really his baby. I tried to explain that in the opening letter [included in the collection]: This isn’t the project of an agent doing something for his client, this is the product of a major film-music geek who lives for this kind of thing. We had many discussions. I was really resistant to putting on certain kinds of material I thought was private and trying to understand who it is that buys these things and what they’re like, slowly trying to get an understanding of the kind of person who really looks for the odd, the rare, the unreleased. I thought, what if Bernard Herrmann had done half a dozen more movies with Hitchcock over another 10 years. He’s the only composer out there that I would probably get a little nutty over. His career with Hitchcock I think of as this great collaboration, but it wasn’t that long. Then not only would I want the box set, I would want anything — if he sang into a tape recorder, I’d want it. I’d want everything. Using that as a model, I started finally to [think], I should let some of this stuff go, even though it’s embarrassing.

GM: How involved were you in the process of assembling the set? What embarrassed you exactly?

DE: They came to me with the idea. I just imagined it would be a collection of CDs. Only a couple of months ago really did [Richard] arrive, saying, we have our deadlines. I thought, oh my God, I have to edit and master 16 CDs. It was a huge amount of work. It’s really a good thing I didn’t think about what it would involve [beforehand]. … Everything anybody approaches me about that’s an extra anything, I go, “I don’t have time, I don’t have time.” I found myself in the middle of this huge thing. Richard and one of my assistants, they spent months combing through boxes and storage rooms. I write about this in the project. It’s very bizarre. There’s not a single thing I’ve collected over my entire lifetime that I haven’t saved — things that I shouldn’t, artifacts, things that I’ve come across — but I’ve never, ever saved a piece of music. Everything got thrown into trash bags and boxes and only because I think various assistants or housekeepers were afraid to throw it away — because I never gave any instructions about anything — it got dumped into storage rooms. I think I have seven storage rooms, none of which I’ve ever gone into. They just sifted through box after box.

In between an old box of unplayable synthesizer parts and old toys and books, there would be a box of cassettes, unmarked. … They spent months sifting through hundreds and hundreds of hours of old audio cassettes and DAT tapes. When they finally came to me a couple of months ago, it was like, “Alright, we’ve sifted through this stuff, but now, you’ve got to listen to everything.” Then there was the incredible experience of listening to 25 years worth of work, both released and unreleased.


When I was talking about the embarrassing part — my demos. I never expected one of my synth demos of a piece of music would ever be for anybody’s ears. There are two levels; there’s one I call a work tape, which is me working stuff out. … Work tape is getting to the point where I’d even play it for Tim. That was very strange. I’m not a composer that puts a lot of polish work into their demos. … I’m probably in the minority that doesn’t invest in really extensive libraries of stuff and/or have people that work with them just for that purpose of polishing up and making these demos really spiffy. Every demo, every work tape is my own hand. There are mistakes, bad notes, bad playing, and probably the most embarrassing thing is the early synth sounds back in the mid-’80s were really bad. By today’s standards, it would be like what you hear in a kid’s keyboard. In the middle ’80s, that’s kind of what there was. It’s embarrassing because everything’s of my own hand, and I’m not a great keyboardist, and the earlier they are, the more embarrassing they are.

GM: Are some things more embarrassing for you than others?

DE: The demo for “Batman” is an incredibly embarrassing thing. It wasn’t until the mid-’90s that suddenly these demos are becoming less cringe-worthy for me, somewhere between the middle ’90s and 2000. The sounds just got better. In my opening letter, I try to say, you know how we look at old science-fiction movies with really cheesy special effects and go, well, that’s what they had. You can’t compare that to today. It’s the same with these. In the middle ’80s through the early ’90s, the sounds that we had to work with were what they were. You didn’t think about it at the time. It’s incredible for me to think now, this is a demo that I actually played for Jon Peters and Tim Burton to sell the “Batman” theme in 1989. Now it sounds so horribly bad, if you put it on, somebody would laugh. But at the time, everything kind of sounded like that. It was a lot better than banging on a piano and singing them a melody, which before that period, that’s really what you did. For “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” that’s what I did. I vowed I would never, ever do that again. I quickly embraced the technology to work up pieces of music to sound listenable. … I had one of the very first Macs ever, a very primitive version of what I have now, but the sounds available were very minimal. I remember I had a little box and it had strings long, strings short [laughs]. That’s it. Two string choices. Trumpets, French horns, trombones — one, one choice of each — and sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the French horn and the trumpet because they all sound like car horns at a certain point. It was still, for a director, a lot better for them to understand what I’m doing than playing on a piano and trying to sing a melody.

I’ve always been a big proponent of working out my ideas that way so I can hear what I’m doing and what I’m playing [for the director] is really trying to be a facsimile of what he’s going to hear with the orchestra. As each year went along, [the demos] sounded more like what the orchestra was going to sound like. Today, it still doesn’t sound as good as an orchestra, but you can hear the whole progression from, I think the first demo is from 1987 [for] “Beetlejuice” and “Alice” being the last demos. That was the embarrassing part. I decided if I’m going to do that, I might as well put on the stuff that’s interesting to me, and the stuff that was interesting to me was the stuff that didn’t make it in the score. I did a lot of moments of purposely picking a piece of music that isn’t exactly the piece as you hear it in the movie. I guess once you open that door, you might as well embrace it and let the listener who is interested into the process of how I put something together. By the time I got to “Alice,” I did a thing where I picked the one thing, the “Alice” theme which was on the CD, and I did three other versions of it going backward — an earlier first orchestral attempt at something that never got used and two or three synthesized versions going back to where you could just hear the beginning of the melody and now you can hear the B part of the melody. Now you can hear the whole thing, and then you can hear it go to orchestra, and then you can hear the final thing. If one was so inclined, they could hear the development of a theme, how I work.

GM: In the culture that we live in now, where people listen to DVD commentaries and watch behind-the-scenes features so frequently, there would seem to be a real interest in seeing exactly how something like that comes together.

DE: I don’t know whether this type of person who’s really interested in this … level of minutiae and detail, whether it’s 10 people, hundreds or thousands, but it doesn’t matter. That’s who we put this together for. However many or few they are. The book, the same thing. At first I thought, this is going to be viewed as the most self-indulgent thing ever. I would die if I read that. Again, Richard was like, “No, no. … You have to think of this not as a biography but really extensive liner notes.”

GM: How much of an impact would you say your partnership with Tim has had on your composing career? Didn’t he initially come to you to ask you to score “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” before you had considered writing music for film?

DE: I’d never even thought of it. I was a film fan, and I was a film music fan. At that point, Bernard Herrmann was a god. I could listen to the scores of Max Steiner, Franz Waxman and [Erich] Korngold and identify them. I was really proud. I could hear something and go, “That’s definitely Max Steiner,” and Nina Roto was huge. I was a fan. Really it was almost like, the best way I can describe it, which I’ve often done: If you’re a basketball fan and you’ve always got court-side seats, you’re right there on the floor, and you know the game, and you’re a fan of the game, and you know the moves, you know the players, but you’re just a fan, and suddenly somebody threw you the ball and said, “Come on, get in the game.” This was a case of going, “Well, what’s the worst that could happen?” It was way off my radar, the idea of a fan becoming a player is not something a fan ever expects. My first reaction was actually to tell [Tim] no. I came home and met him, really liked him, I did an eight-track demo of a piece and sent it on a cassette, never expected to hear again, and two weeks later, I got the job. I said, “Tell him I can’t do it.”

Then I decided, I’ve never backed away from a challenge before, it’s on his shoulders if I blow it. It will be a lesson, don’t go to rock-and-roll guys for film scores. I did have this pre-Oingo Boingo background with the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo where I was writing music for an eight-piece ensemble. I decided if I could write for eight pieces, I could write for a dozen pieces. If you can write for a dozen pieces, you can write a film score. Even though my first score was 65 players, you’re not writing 65 parts. You’ve got groups, you’ve got your violins, you have your cello, you’ve got your trombone and your French horns. You’re not really necessarily writing for that many parts. Especially as I look back, it’s a good thing “Pee-wee” was a very simple score. That was the first thing that struck me when I listened to it because I hadn’t heard it in all these years.

Tim opened every door for me. Every score for the next 10 years opened up a new side of my career. “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” got me offered every quirky comedy … made in Hollywood. Out of the blue, I’m offered 10 movies, and they’re all kind of contemporary, slightly — some of them were not so quirky — comedies. Then “Beetlejuice.” Oh, fantasy, you can stretch out a bit more. Then “Batman,” that was the roughest of my career — the time where I really had to fight for something — [it was,] “Oh, do a big movie.” … Then “Edward Scissorhands” and it’s like, ah, well, romantic, sure. Every one of those was opening up another door. Suddenly, the offers after each of those would be of a more diverse nature. By the time I got to “Batman,” I wanted to keep doing it. I’d thought of my band as the day job, and this was my night job, my weekend job, my side project. By the time I got to “Batman,” it was like, no, I’m enjoying this and was putting a tremendous amount of time [into] trying to learn the craft. Tim used to joke in between each of his films, I was doing four. “Pee-wee” was one, “Beetlejuice” was five, “Batman” was 10, my 10th film. “Edward” didn’t quite make it to 15, I think it was 14 or 16 or something. He said, “How are you doing all of these films in between each of my films?” I told him, if I don’t, I’m not going to be able to do each of your films because each film was asking more of me. I didn’t want them all to be like “Pee-wee” with a different melody or different tone.

Interview: Tim Burton's Art Retrospective Coming to Toronto

The massive Tim Burton art retrospective, which began its highly successful tour at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City last year, will make its third stop at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox. The exhibition will open at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on November 26th, and will remain until April 17th, 2011, when it leaves for Los Angeles.

Us Magazine had an interview with Noah Cowan, the artistic director at the TIFF Bell Lightbox:

Q: First of all, tell Us about this marathon of movies called the “Burton Blitz.” It’s 36 hours, right? Sounds intense.
It starts with “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” at 6 PM on Friday November 26 and ends around 10 AM on Sunday November 28 with “Alice in Wonderland.” Not even a 10-minute break. I think the end credits is when you pee. Back to back to back. The concessions will be armed with lots of coffee and snacks to keep people going. We have people looking forward to it!

How many people do you expect at the Tim Burton show?
Our projections show about 100,000. But it got 275,000 visitors in Australia. And 700,000 in New York. We’re arming the barricades. Tourists from all over the world come to see it whereever it plays. I’m looking forward to the first day we let the public in. So they see how unique it is.

Why this director?
He speaks to our interest in how films and the visual arts interact. Through his sketches, you really understand him as an artist -- even better than you do watching the films. He’s a great example of a filmmaker whose background in visual arts has allowed him to expand what’s possible in the medium.

How will the show be different than the one that ran in NYC?
We are reorganizing it. MOMA followed the parameters of a drawing and painting show. It showed the development of his craft as a visual artist. But the TIFF Bell Lightbox is a film-based institution, so the principal arc of the show will follow his film career. We have a large side annex that allows you to go deeper into his creative genius. You enter the doors and go to the source of the genius. We’re calling that area “Burbank” because that’s where he was born. You see his creative genius flowing as he grew up in the suburbs of LA. His upbringing was really central to the originality of his art.

We see you’re doing some really fun double bills.
We’re pairing his movies with unexpected influences. Alice in Wonderland is paired with John Waters’ Desperate Living. Another is the 1963 Jason and the Argonauts and Burton’s James and the Giant Peach. It’s been really fun putting it together. Some are more obvious, too – like Nosferatu and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

You’ll have lots of activities and workshops for kids too, right?
Every Saturday while it runs, kids can participate in activities like creating their own Burton-inspired creatures, or dabbling in stop-motion animation. Kids will be able to watch a clip of The Nightmare Before Christmas and create their own Jack -- and their own story. The various floors will all have presentations and exhibitions and areas for kids. We want families to be able to engage in all those activities, see a film retrospective and engage in hands-on youth activities. We suspect this will be really popular around Christmas.

Finally, we hear Tim Burton’s creating something original for your window?
He’s creating a special Christmas monster for us. It’s loosely based on a character from an abandoned project. All we know is it’s going to be a creature and he’ll be devouring Christmas. We’re working with the Tim Burton studio now to see if he’ll keep munching through various holidays.

Elfman on 'Batman,' Prince

In an interview with MTV News, Danny Elfman discusses his 25-year-long collaboration with Tim Burton, and talks about the role of Prince in the Batman film:

MTV NEWS: How have things changed in the way you score films, from "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" to "Alice and Wonderland"?

DANNY ELFMAN: It’s the same general process. I am still trying to lay it all down and I am going to have to play it for the director and, in that case, the producer. The difference is that I had a choice of two string sounds in '88. Strings long, strings short, and that was it. Now, of course, I can choose between many, but the idea of the assembly of it is not that different. But sonically, it really is the difference of a very cheap early blue-screen effect, where they were just trying to figure out how to put a guy swinging a sword in the screen with a dinosaur, and today, where it’s a lot more seamless.

The intention is all the same, but the technology is radically different. And it’s all there, I just decided, "F--- it. Put it out there." And that’s weird. I am a very, very private person, and there was a lot of arm-twisting. It’s kind of like letting people into that side of me. It’s a great leap forward — let’s put it that way. If you would've asked me a couple years ago if I would do it, I would’ve never even had remotely considered it — just the same way I would never be on Facebook. I’ll be the last person to not be on Facebook. I have no desire to share myself.

MTV: Ah, but for the film score nerds out there like me, this is a dream come true.

ELFMAN: That’s why I am opening myself up, and I made those exceptions — because with Facebook, I don’t care if there are people who are interested in my life. I am not interested in sharing my life. But I was a film geek, and I have a soft spot for film geeks or film music geeks. And this is different. This isn’t about what movie I saw and what I am doing tomorrow and where I went this weekend. This is about the work, and the argument is, this is something I should be able to share with those people who are very much like myself, who are actually interested beyond the personal geek side, which I can still keep as private as I want. The process side I know.

MTV: So what finally convinced you to go through with it?

ELFMAN: I’ll give you the exact argument that I made. I asked myself, "Is there anybody that I would be that way about if there was a box set where I would want every word, everything they ever wrote, every demo, and every idea?" I’m thinking, "No, there isn’t," but then I thought, "Oh no, wait a minute — what if Bernard Herrmann had a longer career with [Alfred] Hitchcock? What if he’d done 13 films of Hitchcock? Oh my God, over 25 years? I’d kill for that!" There’s nothing he would’ve done that I wouldn’t have wanted a piece of. I would have wanted anything. I would want to see scribbles on a napkin, I would have wanted to hear him grunting in a microphone... So when I thought that way, I said, "Okay, that’s how I feel about Bernard Herrman. So I guess as crazy as it seems to me, I should imagine that there are other people out there who care about what I do, even though I think they are silly for caring about what I do." There it is. There was my logic leap.

MTV: Let's talk about "Batman." What do you remember most about working on that score?

ELFMAN: For "Batman"... You know, that is the craziest story of all, of the whole quarter-century. There is quite a bit about it in the book in detail, but this is the really, really short version... It’s such a nutty story, the development of that [and] the powers-that-be wanting me to collaborate and to co-write the score with Prince.

MTV: What?! Co-write the score with Prince? I didn't know that!

ELFMAN: Having to step down, and refusing to do that — it was the roughest decision, still, in my entire career. Nothing has come close to having to potentially walk away from the biggest opportunity in my lifetime, and then having it come round full circle back to me. It was the most depressing feeling, like an "I’ve blown it, I’ve f---ed up my life" moment, followed by the most empowering "I did this for a reason and it's come back to me and now I can do the things I wanted to do in the first place" moment.

MTV: How did Tim react to them wanting Prince to co-write?

ELFMAN: It was a rough thing, but Tim didn’t have power back then to call all the shots for himself. "Beetlejuice" and "Pee-Wee" weren’t enough to make him a power player, so there were a lot of different personalities involved. I had major convincing to do on so many levels, a lot of people wanted me off the score — and I have to add, for good reason. I had never done a big movie before, I had never done a drama before, and I had never done an action film, so I was totally and completely unproven. I don’t think they were even unreasonable for wanting somebody else to do the score, but it was like a defining moment for myself in terms of "How far am I willing to go to keep my identity in mind and to do it the way I think it needs to be done?"

Elfman, Burton on Music Box, "Batman"

To promote the 25th anniversary music box, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman reminisced over the making of the now iconic Batman score. Click here to view the video.

Also, Danny Elfman recently gave an interview for ArtBeat of the New York Times, discussing the celebratory collector's gift:

Q: How long does it take to put something like this together and how long ago did you get started?

A: It was some months ago. My agent and my assistant spent a month sifting through a million hours of demos, work tapes, cassette tapes. I unfortunately have been almost bizarrely committed to not archiving anything. I kept nothing. And when we started getting into it, I realized I didn’t even have half of my soundtrack albums. So we started chasing down albums on eBay, literally.

Q: Why weren’t you saving any of this?

A: It’s like for some weird reason, once I finish a project, it doesn’t exist to me anymore. They literally had to go through storage rooms, sifting through cardboard boxes filled with junk, until they came up with anything that looked like tapes, DATs, CDs, reel-to-reel stuff. What amounted to zero effort of saving anything for a quarter-century. Now I’m becoming the other way around. Now I really want to get ahold of stuff, I want to organize it. I want to have shelves.

Q: So if you weren’t hanging on to these materials, where were you finding them?

A: My old work tapes just got dumped into boxes and put in the back room. I had six, seven storage rooms throughout the city. Places I haven’t gone into in decades. My agent used his tentacles in the underground film music world to try to find versions of things that didn’t exist anywhere. It was happening above and below the surface. Lots of detective work.

Q: How far back were you searching? Like, Oingo Boingo, “Bachelor Party”?

A: They were finding everything, but they were only bringing to me the stuff that was connected with Burton. Now that my brain is into that mode, I’m going to have them continue. Because now I’ve got a good, new storage space, and when you get a new space you get motivated. It really is a better idea just to know where stuff is.

Q: And what kinds of things were you finding?

A: It’s a mixed bag of work tapes, demos, and in those demos, ideas that didn’t make it into movies. There’s a whole stretch of a “Batman” work tape, of “Batman” music that never made it into the movie. On the one hand, that was cool for me to listen to. I’d forgotten I had all these ideas that never survived. On the other hand, I was horrified that 20 years ago, demos sounded really bad. I’m in the middle of writing this huge disclaimer, trying to explain what a work tape is, and the difference of what I was working with 20 years ago. Between “Beetlejuice” and “Alice in Wonderland,” you can hear, oh, O.K., big difference.

Q: When Tim first started working with you, were you looking for a way that you could make the transition to scoring films?

A: I wasn’t thinking that at all. It was totally out of the blue. Tim and Paul [Reubens] came to me together. I was shocked. It wasn’t like I was looking for an opportunity for film scoring. I hadn’t even really fathomed the possibility — that didn’t seem possible. “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” my first time ever writing for orchestra, was a very simple score. And I really did think I was totally destroying his film with a score that was so out of left field.

Q: Why do you think you and Tim have remained close collaborators all these years?

A: We literally did grow into our abilities together. Our aesthetic is similar.

Q: Do you share his appreciation for the odd and the gothic?

A: Not necessarily, so much as, for whatever reason, his world was an easy place to fall into. It was a place I was comfortable in. We grew up very similar, alienated kids, feeling like a stranger in a strange land. You find yourself gravitating toward fantasy and horror. We both grew up on horror films in the same period, relatively. I grew up around the block from a movie theater, and I spent every weekend of my life there that I can remember. Every weekend was a new double bill, and to be able to see, every single weekend, two new films was really cool. He saw more of them on television, but all the same movies: Hammer films, Roger Corman films. It was a very fertile era to be into the movies.

Q: Given those circumstances, I can see why you were so compatible.

A: He was in Burbank, I was in Baldwin Hills. They were different suburbs of Los Angeles, but our origins weren’t that far apart. So when we met, I said to him, “Why do you want to hire me?” He goes: “I don’t know. I’ve seen your band, I think you could do other stuff.” The ability to succeed as a composer, you have to be able to relax, take no shape and fall into a new place and re-form yourself. That’s the best way I can describe it.That’s part of what allows a composer to thrive. I was falling into a lot of different spaces, but every time I fell into Tim’s space, I found it was a particularly fun and comfortable space to be.

Pee-wee to Lead World's Biggest "Tequila" Dance at Sturgis

In recognition of the 25th anniversary of Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Paul Reubens (a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman) will lead the world's biggest "Tequila" dance at the 70th Annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis, S.D. Reubens is hoping to get the event in the Guinness Book of World Records. The Sturgis rally takes place on August 8th and 9th, but there's no word yet on when the mass dance will occur.

In related news, Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) will be producing the new Pee-wee Herman film. The story will be inspired by Pee-wee's Big Adventure, but not a remake. Instead, this film will also be a road trip story, but it may also feature characters from Pee-wee's Playhouse.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure was Tim Burton's first feature film.

Hardcore fans ought to get ready for Sturgis and study the immortal dance:

Burton's Art Retrospective in Melbourne

Tim Burton made his first public appearance in Melbourne, arriving in preparation for the coming of his massive art retrospective at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).

In a sold-out session of 400 eager fans, Burton said what some of his favorite movies were, and the ones he would take if he was lost on a desert island. These included Dracula AD 1972 and the original Wicker Man

''I wouldn't know a 'good' movie if it bit me in the face,'' Burton said. ''I don't seek these films out, but they're the ones I watch over and over again when they're on. Some people might say that's why I've made some bad movies - because I watch so many 'bad' movies.''

Burton will be staying in Melbourne for five days. On Thursday, he will be teaching a filmmaking masterclass, and will be screening his first feature film,Pee-wee's Big Adventure, on Friday. The sessions are already sold-out, of course.

The tremendous art exhibition at ACMI was originally curated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but comes to Melbourne with a significant proportion of new material mostly from Alice in Wonderland. The Burton retrospective runs until October 10.

Visit the official ACMI website for more information.

Elfman: Interview and Short Film

FirstShowing.net has an interview with Danny Elfman. The composer discusses his creative process, working with Tim Burton, his future projects, his inspirations, and more.

Also, Elfman fans might appreciate this stop-motion animated short film: DemiUrge Emesis by Voltaire, which was narrated by Elfman, and features music by Voltaire and Rasputina (and Burton-alum writer Caroline Thompson gets a "Special Thanks" shout-out, too):




Here's the interview:

I'm very fascinated with the process and the technique of scoring and I wanted to focus on that. Starting at the top, I was wondering if you could walk through a little bit of your scoring process. Do you read the script at the beginning? And what comes next in creating the score?

Danny Elfman: No. I don't actually start with the script. I'm sometimes sent a script. And I actually — believe it or not, I try to avoid getting any ideas or taking any ideas seriously from the script. And what I discovered over the years is that every time I started early and wrote music, none of it ever survived, not a note, when I actually saw the movie. Because what I came to understand is that there's so many ways to shoot the same script. And depending on how the director decides to shoot that script, really, will have a lot to do with what kind of music [I create]. You can take the same script and shoot it very theatrically, with the lighting and the sets, or shoot it very raw or more naturally. And if the cuts are quick and jarring, if the cuts are smooth with lots of dissolves, they just really want a completely different kind of music. Not to mention the huge factor of the performances. And the performances are really– for me, it just so changes what I imagined in my head. I've never seen a movie that ended up like what I thought it was going to be from reading the script.

So it sounds like your process comes from actually watching the finished product, or close to a finished product?

Elfman: Yeah, exactly. It comes from the visuals. Sometimes it's finished, sometimes it's unfinished. On one extreme, you've got a movie like Batman, where [Burton's] only halfway through shooting. He brought me in to sit in with them for a few days on the Gotham City set. And really, between looking at, maybe, 30 minutes of footage that they'd roughed together and walking around the set, I really did, in fact, on the way home from that trip to London, get the whole Batman theme worked out in my head, what became the main title. But that was the type of theme where 30 minutes was certainly enough to get the tone of it. So you have to see something– or rather, I have to see something. I think everybody works completely differently. But for me, as soon as I have a picture, whether it be rough or finished, in front of me, I start hearing the music. It's just an immediate response to image. And so I'm definitely image driven.

Now, it could be a polished, finished film, which happens sometimes when you step in at the very end. Or, more likely, it's just a big rough mess with huge gaps not there. That doesn't matter. You still get the tone and the feel and the performance and the story enough to get started moving. So it all starts with looking at picture, no matter what form that picture is. And then I just start immersing myself in it, really. I get into it a lot, and I try to write down my initial impulses.

I mean, the best way to describe my process is I'll try to pick three or four scenes that I think are crucial turning point scenes to the movie. Maybe, something in the beginning, something in the middle, and certainly there's always some major moments towards the end that define the bigger or more important moments in the film. And I'll put an inordinate number of hours into those scenes. Sometimes, I'll even add the main titles to that. The main titles may not seem important, but they often are to me. Because that's, again, very often how I'll define the tone of what I'm getting into and how it's all going to work.

So if I've written a main title, and I've got three or four or five scenes leading up to a finale. And I feel like I've got those nailed, and I can understand in my head where the themes go and how I need them to behave for me — meaning, do I need them to: If I have a theme I like, do I need it to get whimsical? Do I need it to get heroic? Do I need it to get serious? Do I need it to get mocking? Do I need it to get sarcastic? You know, what do I need it to do? And I need to know that it's going to do all those things I'm going to ask it to. So it's kind of like the theme become an animal, and I've got to make sure it can do all these tricks that I'm going to demand it to do. Before I, then, go about the process of starting the rest of the score.

Do you do a lot of revisions on a particular theme or a piece of music in the film? And how many revisions usually are there? For example, on the theme for Alice in Wonderland, how many different revision did you go through until you got to the final theme we hear in the movie?

Elfman: Well, I mean, there's two levels to that. But in the beginning, when I'm playing music, let's say on Alice for Tim, it's very common that I'll have half a dozen pieces worked out first time I play music for Tim on a particular scene. Because early on, I'll have a lot of ideas. And I'm not sure exactly what my main themes are going to be. I have pieces that I like. So I might try an approach to a scene that I like. And I might try one or two variations to that approach. And then, I might walk away from it, come back– in fact, that's what I try to do. And then approach the scene completely separately again from a totally different perspective. And then, if I can, to even do that a third time.

So whatever I've been working on, whatever I think, "Oh, that's interesting," I'm going to intentionally go back. Leave it for an hour, come back, and then try to write music for the same scene again and do something totally different. That's the kind of variation process when I'm first bringing the director into my world. When we get to the point where, okay, we've got all that stuff nailed down. We've got the big scenes nailed down, and I start scene by scene, there's really no limit to the number of revisions I can do. I mean, there are scenes — there's one scene I know I wrote 23 pieces of music before the final one actually got in there. That's kind of extreme on Alice. Others might've been three or four revisions.

Where does your biggest inspiration come from in composing in general? Is it other musicians or artwork?

Elfman: I don't know. I still think I'm inspired by what I grew up on, in a way. That's a hard one to answer. I grew up as a film music fan, as a young man, way before I started scoring or even was interested in the possibility of scoring. I was a huge fan of Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota. And I could tell, listening to an old movie, was that a Max Steiner score? Was that a Franz Waxman score? Korngold? Tiomkin? And I loved playing the game of tuning into a movie, an old movie on television, and then trying to guess who the composer was on old stuff, then seeing if I was right. I was definitely a film music nerd, but it never occurred to me to actually do it. So I liken myself to a fan that got pulled into the game, like a basketball player that suddenly gets thrown the ball.

Can you still do the guessing game with today's movies? Can you watch something on TV today or go to another movie now and guess who the composer is from today's movies as well?

Elfman: It's much, much harder today. But there are certain composers that have a real clearly defined style. I might be able to go, "Oh, that's a John Williams score. That's a Tommy Newman score." And there's certainly a lot of composers that surprise me. I go, "Wow. That's really good. I don't know who that is." And then I'll find out. But much more today than back in the old days, you've got a lot of very successful composers who really make their living by imitating other composers.

Of course.

Elfman: In that sense, it's really, really hard. Because I'll go, "Well, am I hearing — is this Jerry Goldsmith? I don't think so. I think it's somebody doing Jerry Goldsmith. But now, they're doing John Williams. And now, at this point in the movie, it seems like they're doing– oh, look at that. They're doing Danny Elfman. Hmm. Interesting." They sound a little bit like a smorgasbord of composers. So in that sense it's harder to tell. Because composers, back in the old days, they didn't freely, in the context of the same move, borrow the style of two to three other contemporaries of theirs and mimic them. But that's a big chunk of film music today.

So then how do you differentiate yourself? How do you continue to stay original and fresh and unique in the scores that you create, so that you can stand out from the others? It seems like that would be a challenge for you, at this point and time, to do that.

Elfman: Well, I mean, it's always a challenge, and I can't say, for a fact, that I do sound original or stand out from the crowd. I mean, that's for others to say. I try to just approach things the best I can. And I hope that what I'm doing is, to some extent, original. You know, nothing's totally original, of course. And believe me, it's also hard not to rip off ourselves. At a certain point, once we have a certain kind of style, there's always a temptation to fall back and do something exactly like we've done before, as well. And that's always a heavy temptation, even if a director doesn't tell us, "I want this style for this scene, and this style for this scene, and this style for this scene." Because I think the biggest difference in composing today and the old days isn't so much the composers — it's the way films are made.

When Alfred Hitchcock made a film with Bernard Herrmann, he wasn't telling Bernard Herrmann, "I really want this cue to sound like this Korngold score. And I really want this one to sound like this Alex North score. But for this cue, can you please give me that thing from, you know, whomever?" He hired Bernard Herrmann to do Bernard Herrmann. And they hired Alex North to do Alex North. The directors didn't get that involved in the music. It was a completely different system. In fact, the director frequently moved onto another film and the editor and the composers were just left to do their work. So it was just night and day completely different. And I'm not saying that that's better. It's just very different.

Now, you have directors who frequently will insist on different scenes in their moving sounding like something that they've already got in their head, or something from another movie. So I'm not really– I'm not trying to blast other composers for being derivative more than they should be or need be. It's really about the filmmaking process. Because I've been there, and every composer goes through this problem of a director's got something in their head. And it's just really hard to shake them out of it. It's the fact that directors are who they are, and their own personalities cause that. Composers, like everybody else, we have to– at a certain point you have to give them what they want. Or you have to, at a certain point, turn your back and split. It's a very difficult process.

So in terms of where it is and where it was and where it's going, it's really hard to say. But in the process of knowing that directors can be very, very picky and very difficult, I try, as all composers that are worth anything– and there's a lot of really good composers out there today. You try to keep your own voice. You try to sell it to the director from the perspective that you think makes the most sense. And sometimes you have to pick your battles. Sometimes it gets really bloody in the process. And sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's really easy.

So you never know what to expect. Every movie is like walking out onto this landscape. This is the best way I can describe it. Each film you start, as a composer, you're walking out onto this huge landscape. And you can talk about music until your blue in the face with a director. It doesn't mean shit. Because when you start actually playing stuff for them, it's never going to be what they're expecting. Because there actually is no way to describe music. And you can't show a picture of it. You're going to talk about it in an abstract level. At a certain point they'll hear it. And they're going to respond the way they're going to respond. And often, they don't even know why they're responding the way they respond. It's just how they're emotionally responding to the music. And that landscape, sometimes, is like this lovely bucolic stroll, where it's like being on a boat and gliding down a river. And sometimes that landscape, you find yourself in the middle of World War I. The army's tanks are coming from every which direction and gas grenades are getting thrown. And there's shells coming from everywhere. And you really put out your energy and try to keep your head down and not get hit.

So the crazy thing about it is that you often just never know what– you open a door, and you start into this landscape. And you take a few steps, and you really have no idea what that landscape's going to become. So that's really the best metaphor I can describe for what it's like starting a new film. Sometimes, you finish a film, and you go, "Man, I was expecting that was going to be so difficult. And it was just so smooth, such a lovely experience. And it was such a nice, straight, easy path." And then, sometimes, you know, you get to the other side really feeling like you just survived a war. And that can feel good, too, by the way.

Yeah. With Alice, you've, obviously, worked with Tim Burton I think more than any other director. And that must–

Elfman: Well, yeah. Yeah, 13th time, and I have to say I can't predict him any more now than on Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

So he's just as unpredictable?

Elfman: Yea, completely unpredictable. People think we have some kind of shorthand, that I know what he's going to be looking for. And he knows what to expect. He really isn't that way, at all. I appreciate and understand his sensibility. But how he's going to react to a particular piece of music, I have no way of predicting.

Does he want something new from you in every film he does? Or does he even reference his own films and say, "Oh, I want the sound from this one, or I want the sound from this other one?"

Elfman: No. He'll never say from anything. He'll really just say, "This music makes me feel this way." And I don't know why, but it does. And then, I have to sit there and go, "Okay. What is it? Is the orchestration? Is it the melody?" And so I'll, then, do a lot of trial and error. I'll take the same piece– sometimes, I'll write something completely different. Sometimes I'll take the same piece and just change a few things. Change the tempo and change the orchestration. And suddenly, he really likes it.

So there's a very tricky intuitive process of what's making the director feel this way. Is it this instrument? Is it the sound of the trumpet? Is it the sound of the clarinet? Or, really, is it just the melody? Or is it just this turn in a melody? And if I take this turn and change it, suddenly, it's feeling completely different. And so very often, there's a lot of experimentation, changing it, rearranging it, re-orchestrating it. And if it's still not working, at a certain point, you have to abandon it completely, and just go somewhere else. But sometimes, it's also surprising what an impact a small adjustment can make to a piece of music and in the actual orchestration of it.

What are you working on at the moment. Do you have anything else coming up? I think you're on The Green Hornet, right?

Elfman: Not quite yet. I'm doing Restless, for Gus Van Sant. And then, we move on to The Green Hornet with Michel Gondry.

How are those two going? I mean, I look forward to hearing all of your scores, but it's always exciting to know so early out how they're coming along.

Elfman: I don't know. I've really just written a little bit of music for Gus. I haven't presented him anything, yet. I know Gus well enough to know that we'll take a journey together. And I'll try lots of different things. Gus will encourage me to try lots of really radically different things. You know, approach it from completely different angles. And it'll be interesting. I've never worked with Michel, and I'm really looking forward to it. I'm a big fan of his. So I have no idea to expect from that.

I think that's a perfect place to wrap up.

Elfman: Well, great.

Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Elfman: My pleasure, totally. I'll talk to you again some day.