Film Composers Keep Their Composure (from The Business)
Interviewed by Claude Brodesser-Akner
2006.08.27 (aired)
Audio source: http://www.kcrw.com/show/tb
Audio dialogue transcribed by Bluntinstrument
CLAUDE BRODESSER-AKNER: When you go to the local cineplex you're
going to watch a movie, not listen to it, but there's so much in a film that
you hear, not see. The music for instance. But music can make or break a movie
as much as any visual element. Consider this happy beach scene and how it changes
when the music changes.
[audio from Jaws, introducing the memorable shark motif]
Music is one of those cinematic elements that's only doing its job well if
you don't notice it, and great film music can help make a film great.
DANNY ELFMAN: I could think of a million movies where the music
made the movie. I think of Lawrence of Arabia [clip follows], Maurice Jarre's
score The Godfather, Nino Rota's score, all the incredible stuff that
Bernard Herrmann did from Citizen Kane to North by Northwest to
Psycho [clip follows].
CB-A: Have there been instances where the music UNmade the movie
so to speak?
DE: Oh yeah. A million, and I'm not gonna name any of them.
CB-A: In the last 20 years, Danny Elfman's music has helped make
the movie many many times. He;s written maybe a hundred scores including most
of Tim Burton's films, from Batman to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
and some of the most recognisable music in TV history, like the theme to The
Simpsons. He's been nominated for a slew of Oscars, Emmys and other statues
and plaques, but he started his music career as a Paris street busker and then
the leader of the New Wave slash punk band Oingo Boingo. [Oingo Boingo clip]
DE: Five years into.. seven years, six seven years into having
a rock band, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens appear and ask me if I'm interested
in writing music for a movie. [It] never occured to me before and I went home
and wrote a piece of music, and recorded it, sent it to them and never thought
about it, and went back to work. I got a call, I don't know, a week or two later,
saying I was hired. [Pee Wee music clip overlaid]. This was like the
defining moment because when I got the news I told my manager that "naa
I'm not going to do it". I like them too much to take this on and ruin
their movie. I thought about it and woke up in the moning and I said "ah,
what the hell, it's on their shoulders."
CB-A: Elfman's music sounds like nothing you've heard before,
but he insists that like all film scores it relies to a certain degree on the
tropes that were invented by the first film composers, like Franz Waxman, who
did Bride of Frankenstein [music clip is overlaid], Max Steiner, who scored
the original King Kong and Erich Korngold, who came up with the music for all
those early swashbucklers.
DE: The amazing thing to me is that they had nothing to go on. There was [sic.]
no guidelines to say "what do we put under action or narrative, or how
do we show emotion or what do we show for tension?". They were inventing
it on the spot. And what made them come up with the fact that holding long strings
for a tense moment and letting it build and build into the orchestra until you
have your shock moment or misleading us with a little melody [cute clip overlaid]
that might make us think that things are just fine and plodding along and suddenly
wham something happens because the melody was misleading us into thinking that
nothing was going to happen, and/or straccato strings providing energy in a
way, brass and horns with blustery fanfares which give us a sense of heroism.
CB-A: Movie music not only creates and manipulates mood, it's
there to accentuate actions.
DE: You're in a scene where you've already decided that there's
twenty things that the music has to catch as you're seeing it. [talks fast with
Pee Wee's Big Adventure music in background] A door slams, a bicycle
hits the street and the music's gotta do something, then it takes off, and it's
gotta take off, and then it's going to slam into something else and the music's
got to stop and there's got to be like a tensiontensiontension, and boom! something's
going to go off, and then something's going to fall, and then... you want to
catch all of that with the music.
CB-A: Elfman, like every working composer, has his own process
for writing film music. But it all starts with watching a rough cut of the film,
and then being able to grab at a musical idea whenever and wherever it strikes.
[Batman main title plays in background]
DE: Tim flew me out to the Batman set in London, then I'm on
a 747 on the way home. And.. the theme that became Batman's theme, suddenly
starts playing in my head. I mean it played itself out as clearly as if it were
playing in the theatre. So I got a tape recorder, that I learned never to travel
without, and I ran into the bathroom. And I'm trying to lay it out in a way
that'll make sense to me later, but 747s are really loud, and the bathrooms
in particular are really loud, and I can't just sit there in my seat and start
singing - you know, I'll be the crazy guy on the plane - so I'm running to the
bathroom over and over and over again. Now the stewardess is getting nervous
- "Sir, are you okay?" - "Oh yeahyeahyeah, I'm fine." -
"Are you sick? Is there anything we can get you?" - "Nono, I'm
fine." And now I can see them talking to each other, and it's like, obviously
this guy is a junkie. What's he doing? Is he shooting up? What is he doing?
He's, like, been in the - he says he's not sick - every ten minutes. And I'm
going - I'm trying to lay it out like.. [whispers] "so, a snare drum, celli,
bum, bum-ti-bum, bumbumbumbuum, bumbumbumbuum, bumbumbumbuum", and I'm
trying to lay [it all out] in pitch, and I'm going, "French horns bu-bu-buuuuu
bububububububububu-dunk, bubububuum" and obviously what I'm singing in
the tape recorder is all meant to enable me to remember that piece of music,
because I know that I'm going to land and I'll forget it because they're going
to play landing music when they hit the floor, and it's going to erase everything.
They're going to play a piece of muzak when they hit the tarmack and it's going
to be like a Danny Elfman brain eraser, and then I'll be going home - "what
was I thinking?" It's going to become that fish that got away. So I get
home and I turn on my tape recorder and mainly what I'm hearing is "kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk"
- just an enormous roar, and a little bit in the background [muffled] "bwwwww"
and my first couple of times through I'm going "it's gone! I can't get
a sense of.. what was.." And then I listened to it about 10 more times
and it was just enough - and then it came back, the whole thing just came back
into my head. And I was at the piano, and I got the whole thing down, and that
became the main titles to Batman.
CB-A: Back in the day, the composer would have to sit down at
the piano and play the theme he'd created for the director. But these days composers
use a sequencer: a keyboard synthsizer connected to a computer program that
can mock up the sound of an entire orchestra, AND play precisely to film images
on a computer monitor.
DE: It's a great tool because the director can actually sit there and go, "oh
yeah, that sounds very exciting, I like that" or "no, I don't like
that part" before you're in front of an orchestra. You can kindof work
it out with them.
[Background music: from Big Fish]
CB-A: Like his music, Danny Elfman's home in Los Angeles reflects
his baroque sensibilities. There's a complete monkey skeleton in the living
room on the coffee table. Actual shrunken human heads sit a-top the baby grand.
Walk downstairs to his basement studio and you're greeted by an assortment of
antique prosthetic legs, arms and hands. The studio itself is draped in red
velvet and looks a little like the lair of the Phantom of the Opera, with Elfman
playing the role of the mad genius facing an alter of keyboards, monitors and
mixing consoles. He's currently working on the score of a new live-action version
of the classic Charlotte's Web.
[Background music: from Charlotte's Web, in progress.
Danny describes the scene as the music progresses]
DE: So, I'm playing her theme for the first time but I'm using piano's, I'm
using celestes and I'm using bells because we're seeing her legs movingmovingmovingmovingmoving.
She's weavingweavingweaving and there is a loose strand of web. Now I'm telling
the audience that that means something. She has an idea. ... Now I'm getting
more emphatic, and I'm playing her theme for the first time full-out that we're
going to hear. Now she's beginning to fly around and she's got a plan. We don't
know what it is yet. She's cutting and snipping, I'm giving emphasis to big
cuts and big snips to help give it a little more - er - power to the movements
that she's doing. And then finally we pan back ... And we see a moon against
the web, and we don't yet know what she's done. [music stops]. This is all synthsizers
you're hearing, and in a week this'll all be played again with a real orchestra,
and sound much better. But yet this is close enough for the director to sit
there with me, listen to the piece, and we could talk through the whole thing,
work out all the beats. And by the way, my goal, I should add, with these mock-ups,
is that there's as little disagreement in front of a 90-piece orchestra as there
possibly can be, because with that many players you don't want to be arguing
about how this hits and how that hits and if this is big enough or if this is
strong enough or that should get smaller. You hopefully want to have all that
here, in a room, just me and a director and a bunch of synthesizers which aren't
running on the union clock, costing a fortune every hour.
CB-A: You may not have heard of Harry Gregson-Williams or James
Newton Howard but they're among an elite group of maybe 15 guys who write the
lion's share of all big budget film scores. And yes, I did say guys. The vast
majority of studio film composers are men. While there are no monogomous relationships,
many composers are known for their work with particular directors. In his 20
year film composing career Danny Elfman has worked with director Tim Burton
on at least ten films. One reason for these kinds of collaborations is a shared
creative sensibility and a kind of shorthand that develops between the director
and the composer. Another is simply knowing what to expect.
DE: There's certain things that go along with being a composer that probably
most composers have to deal with, I'm guessing. One of them is the extremely
idiosyncratic nature of directors and that fact that you're going to have to
deal with all their insecurities. And most directors are understandably so.
They've been working for a year to two years of their life on this one thing
and here they are in the eleventh hour and it's almost done, and now they're
getting bombarded with outside input that they never had from a studio, from
different people, and worst of all from a dozen or a couple of dozen people
out of a preview audience who've been elected to become film critics.
CB-A: The larger a film's budget, the more nervous a studio can
get. The guys in suits start trusting the artist less and focus groups more.
And that can play hell with a composer's work day.
DE: A lot of scores are getting thrown out more and more these days, you know,
when a movie runs into a bit of trouble [and] there's not much else he can do.
You can throw out music and try putting in other music. "Audiences.. we're
not getting the numbers high enough. What can we do? We can't throw anything
else out - throw out the music." And all too frequently the music ends
up being the target because there is no other target . Once again, there are
only two things he can change by the time they're previewing the movie: you
can re-edit or you can change the score.
CB-A: One of a composer's other biggest nightmares is when a
director falls in love with the music they've used before the score was written.
DE: You know, every movie, when it starts previewing - right when a composer's
coming on the movie's done, they've started to edit and preview - they're putting
in a temp score, which means they have to put in music to preview for an audience.
And the director is going to be living with this temp score from anything between
3 and maybe 6 months. Now some directors are going to get hopelessly attatched
to that temp score and it's going to prove to be a major problem, and I know
that the project is going to become a real bitch.
CB-A: Composers of major film scores make somewhere in the vicinity
of one hundred to two hundred thousand dollars a score. Directors are paying
for a composer's particular sound and sensibility, but it's not just artistry
that earns them the big bucks, it's grace under fire. Since they almost always
begin work after a film is shot it's a matter of "be a genius - a little
faster, would ya".
DE: We're in a pressure-cooker. We're dealing with a lot of hysteria often
- sometimes it's a virtual battlefield between producers and studios and directors
and you're in the middle of it - and you have to be able to deliver the goods.
You can't implode, you can't collapse and you can't even conceive of not delivering.
So all of us have the same thing in common - if we've succeeded we've shown
under fire (under battle) that we can deliver regardless of the pressure: if
we say we're going to deliver a score we're going to deliver a score.
CB-A: Director idiosyncracies, studio insecurities and the ticking
clock all make the process of composing music for film an utter crap-shoot.
DE: You never know when you start on a film is this going to be a pleasurable
project or is it literally going to make you want to kill yourself, y'know,
and I've been on both. I've been on movies that I come out of it and go, "That
was really hard work but it was so enjoyable and fulfilling," and I've
been on movies where I've had to tell my wife to hide the ammo, keep sharp objects
away from me and take the keys from my car because if I don't kill myself I'm
going to go on a tri-state killing spree and take down twelve other people.
CB-A: I'm going to go into the park at night with piano wire
and people are going to get hurt.
DE: Exactly, y'know, because this director is going to make me insane.
CB-A: But perhaps the biggest challenge isn't with those composing
today. It's with those who are already .. de-composed.
DE: I was err.. driving home, listening to the classical music channel and
I'm hearing a piece of music...
[background: excerpt from Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony*]
.. I didn't recognise and I think to myself, "Oh my God. What movie is
this from? This is the most amazing piece of film music I've ever heard."
And I thought it had to be film music because it was starting and stopping and
lunging about. And I sat outside my house and I can't go into the house, I have
to wait until the end of the piece and find out who did it. And I'm already
rolling this around in my head: you know, if this is one of my contemporaries,
I quit right now because I'll never be able to write a score like this. Of course
it was Shostakovich.
CB-A: Of course as one of Russia's most famous pre-cinema composers**
Dmitri Shostakovich only had to deal with wannabe tyrants like Joseph Stalin.
Not the truly power-mad, like Hollywood's directors. Check out the September
14th issue of Daily Variety for an in-depth profile of Danny Elfman. A very
special thanks to Rob Noakes and the amazing online library Sounddogs.com for
sound effects and music used in our piece.
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BLUNTINSTRUMENT FOOTNOTES:
* Elfman does not reference this piece in particular. Although I have not yet
found evidence for it, I had thought he mentioned a distinct work in another
interview (perhaps even by Prokofiev).
** This is factually incorrect. Shostakovich wrote film music.