Exclusive: Danny Elfman Career Interview

Empire Online mewawancarai Danny Elfman, berikut kutipannya:

How does working with Sam Raimi compare to working with Tim Burton?They're very different. Sam is very easygoing, when it comes to the studio and the music. He just seems really to fit into it and enjoy it. Tim doesn't enjoy it. He's much more intense during the process, figuring out what his movie is. Sometimes he has to go on a journey himself with music, and discover where the centre of it is. It's a little more of a game with Sam - like we're playing around and goofing. Not that he doesn't take it seriously, but it can feel sometimes more like we're having a good time and goofing off. Tim... (pauses) It's not that we never goof off. Usually by the time the score is written and he's in the studio, he actually can get really silly and funny. But during the actual process, he's usually pretty intense.

How did Oz differ from your previous experiences with Sam?It actually took me back to Darkman, in a sense. This is the easiest time I've had with Sam in a long while. The score went really quick, and it was just like right on the nose from the first beat. It was like I'd nailed it for him from the first presentation. I don't know why this one was like that, it's rare. I wish they were all like that! It was a reminder that even a 115-minute score can be relatively easy, [whereas] sometimes a 25-minute score can be excruciatingly difficult. It's a strange business, but every now and then one just comes down really easily. I remember having that with Tim on Mars Attacks!. Just for whatever reason, BAM!, that one shot out of the gate and I heard the main titles as soon as I saw the rough cut of the opening sequence. But I've done like 80 or 85 films, and we're talking half a dozen like that. Most of them evolve from suffering!

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Q&A: Sam Raimi, director of “Oz: The Great and Powerful”

Berikut ini kutipan wawancara dengan Sam Raimi:

What was the best part of working on the film?

The best part of the picture for me, as a director, was once I had worked on the thing for two years and eight months, was to hear Danny Elfman, our composer, create such a fantastic score. He took the emotions that were in the movie and he elevated them. He took the drama and he deepened it. He basically made everything better. He was the secret sauce that brings it to the next level.

What you do think Elfman’s music brings to the atmosphere of the film?

He made the love story much deeper. The Wizard in Kansas, he has a love story with a girl named Annie, played by Michelle Williams, and this is a love that’s right before the Wizard, if only he would recognize it. It’s only once he gets to Oz that he starts to realize that true love is the most valuable thing that one can strive for. Danny Elfman creates a love theme that he’s decided to play with Annie and the Wizard, and it’s an incomplete fragile broken thing. Later when the Wizard meets Glinda and their love story blossoms, you’ll hear that theme in all of its orchestrated fullness. It helps you feel that a mistake that he made in the past could be corrected, the same love can be reborn. He also added great mood when those winged baboons are around, and the drums and the horns come on. They’re very primal and they get your heart beating. He’s the emotion of the picture.

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Composing wizard Danny Elfman talks sweeping, gigantic ‘Oz’ score

Tanggal 10 Januari lalu, LA Times merilis cerita mengenai Danny Elfman dalam membuat musik untuk Oz: The Great and Powerful, berikut kutipannya:

In one instance, though, that directive proved especially tricky — when writing a song for a sequence in which a group of happy Munchkins welcome James Franco’s Oz to the Emerald City, Elfman found himself in something of a predicament.

“These Munchkins are little people in a joyous town of fantasy singing an up-tempo welcoming song. There really aren’t that many ways to apply that,” Elfman said during a recent interview in his home studio in Los Angeles.

“‘Oz’ was very clear, what the tone was,” he said. “We’re going to take an approach that’s old school but not self-consciously old fashioned. Let the melodrama be melodrama, let everything be what it is. I also think there’s the advantage that I’m able to write narratively, and when I’m able to write narratively I can also move quicker because that’s my natural instincts, I can tell a story in the music.” 

As for that Munchkin song? Elfman said in the end, he opted to sing that number himself — and he did not alter his voice to give it any kind of familiar ring. No Lollipop Guild retreads here, but maybe not a radical departure from the past either.

“They’re still singing, and they’re still merry,” Elfman said.

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Grammy Museum Audience Questions Take Elfman Back to Boingo & Forward Into the Future

Bagian ketiga dari wawancara dengan Danny Elfman di Grammy Museum sudah di-publish oleh Buzzine, and yay this is the most interesting one! Berikut kutipannya:

...composers have been full of bullshit since day one. Ever since Bernard Herrmann said, to answer the question, “Why did you write the Psycho score for strings?” “Because it was black and white,” and people still say that now. Of course that was bullshit. Citizen Kanewas black and white. That doesn’t mean anything. It’s just something that popped into his head. So that is part of the job. None of us know how what we make work works, and I think any of us that are any good, in particular, don’t know what we’re doing really, or how it works.

...for ten years I went between the band and scoring, and it was a love/hate thing, but it kept the balance. And then for the next ten years, I didn’t, and I found myself really losing it. I had to find something else, so I started writing scripts, and I wrote three scripts and sold them, but I never really stuck with it. But I had to do something else, and then I realized I’ll take this commission. And when I did that, I realized I need to do something every year that’s not for film. I haven’t been totally true to that, but I’m trying, and I know exactly the piece I wanted to write this year. I want to start doing chamber music now; the ballet was a great experience. And these things are great pressure valve releases because I can’t do just film music or I’ll go nuts.

...as it turns out, I have five films booked, which is the most I’ve ever had in the future, which is weird. I’ve never been able to see more than two or three ahead, and I don’t like, actually, having my future all booked up. So it’s a very weird thing because it’s like, “Oh, I see. Fourteen months of my life is already totally spoken for,” and it’s scary, but it just happened. It’s a two-Tim Burton year, and a Sam Raimi, so there’s three. I’m not going to say no to Tim and Sam -- that’s already three movies. And then Men in Black, well of course I don’t want somebody else to do number 3, so there was another one. And then another one called The Hunger Games popped up, which seemed like really interesting thing.

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Wow... banjir! Restless dari Gus van Sant sudah selesai tinggal menunggu dirilis 16 September 2011. Iris akan mulai dipentaskan oleh Cirque du Soleil tanggal 25 September 2011. Film Real Steel akan diputar 7 Oktober 2011. Berikutnya The Hunger Games 23 Maret 2012. Film Tim Burton terbaru, Dark Shadows direncanakan akan diputar 11 Mei 2012, diselingi dengan Men In Black III 25 Mei 2012, dan kemudian film Tim Burton lainnya Frankenweenie tanggal 5 Oktober 2012. Terakhir adalah Oz, The Great and Powerful tanggal 8 Maret 2013.

Oz, The Great and Powerful adalah "a prequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum, told from the point of view of the Wizard. It tells how the Wizard arrived in Oz and how he became the ruler." yang akan dibuat oleh sutradara Sam Raimi yang artinya ribut-ribut antara Danny Elfman dengan Sam Raimi di Spider-Man 2 sudah selesai dan Elfman mulai lagi membuat musik untuk film-film Raimi, yeah!