DANNY ELFMAN INTERVIEW: "THIS IS DAUNTING IN THE EXTREME..."

The Big Issue mewawancarai Danny Elfman, berikut kutipannya:

My youngest son Oliver is eight. My first conscious moment each day is a kiss goodbye when he goes to school. I then hopefully get a few hours more sleep before I start my day. I try to see him either at dinner or at bedtime. That’s all I see him during the week. On Saturday nights we have movie night. Right now we’re going through all the films of the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. My favourite is always going to be Spirited Away. Oliver’s is between Princess Mononoke and My Neighbour Totoro.

I shuttle back and forth to London a lot when I’m working with Tim [Burton], which we will be soon on Big Eyes. If we’re not talking about work, we’ll go and sit in a pub for a pint and talk about how our families are doing – I am godfather to his son, Billy. Other than that, we usually are talking about music and the films and work. We’re both rather obsessive.

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Sound of Cinema: Composing for Hollywood

BBC mewawancarai beberapa composers, termasuk Danny Elfman. 

Journalist Jonathan Coffey is in Los Angeles to meet some of today's leading film composers to assess the business of writing for the movies.

Dengarkan wawancaranya di sini.

DANNY ELFMAN ON HALLOWEEN AT THE NOKIA THEATRE: “FOR GODSAKES, COME IN COSTUME”

Danny Elfman diwawancarai oleh KROQ, berikut ini kutipannya:

“I think I’m probably the only one in Hollywood who sighs a big sigh of relief when they don’t get an Oscar,” explained Elfman to Kevin and Bean on Thursday morning (September 12). “I don’t want to go up there. I really don’t want to go up there. More terrifying than performing in front of a zillion people is ever talking in front of a microphone.”

“First off I’ve never sung any of these songs publicly ever, so it’s not like I’m doing an Oingo Boingo song,” Elfman explained. “I only sang these in front of a microphone twenty years ago.”

“I have a terrible, terrible memory, Like really bad. Brain damage bad when it comes to names, when it comes to words, when it comes to lyrics, I used to to just be horrible back in the Boingo days. I’d black out all the time. Black out on lyrics,” he said, clarifying he doesn’t mean alcohol. “I’d walk into a void, like I’m singing and suddenly there’s nothing there. Like chorus number two, what happened? It’s nothing. One fraction of a millisecond like the breath before that chorus it would come to me. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. But when it comes to melodies, I really can remember stuff.”

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Danny Elfman interview: Oz, Sam Raimi, Burton, Batman & more

Den of Geek mewawancarai Danny Elfman, berikut kutipannya:

I was thrilled to see that at the Royal Albert Hall on October 7th, there’s going to be a live performance of your music from the Tim Burton films…

There will indeed! And once again I’ve gotta go back, that’s my job for the next couple months is I’ve got to sift through all those scores and create some suites, because I’ve got to figure out what we’re going to play.

This time I’m going to go even deeper, because on the records I just had to listen to everything and re-organise tracks and sometimes take a few mixes or something, but here I’m going to open up the original scores and go back and reconstruct pieces and/or elaborate on them. So it’s really going back! I’m going to be potentially creating suites for Pee Wee and Batman and Beetlejuice that probably don’t exist…

[At this point, I think it’s safe to say, I had an overwhelming wave of excitement hit me at the prospect of hearing the new arrangements] Oh wow! Well I look forward to that. What actually inspired the decision to do the live performance over here?

With most things like, this it occurs because it’s a brainstorm of my agent, who is always coming up with some crazy scheme and he asked me some time ago, "Would you be into doing a concert?" and I said [hesitantly] "I don’t know… sure… why not" as I was always afraid of that, because of the work involved. I’ve avoided doing concerts because I’ve worked for 27 years and it’s hard – you have to re-imagine stuff and put work into it, and me not liking to go backwards, I’ve just avoided it and avoided it, so I said, alright then, I guess maybe it’d be fun.

Then at another my agent called me and said, "Would you be willing to possibly sing a song or two from Nightmare?" and at the point I was like, "Oh yeah, yeah, sure whatever." Then the next time I heard from him he says, "Guess what, tickets went on sale and they all sold out", and I’m like "What? When did that happen!? Really…" [Laughs] and then suddenly the reality of it [hit] and I asked him, "Did I say I was or wasn’t going to sing?" and he told me I was, so I figured, okay, I’m not going to go back on my word, but then suddenly it’s like, "Oh. What did I get myself into" but it’ll be good.

If I can get the music all sorted out – I went through it last week and realised, my god, there’s only 90 minutes [to perform], there’s 15 scores, that’s only six minutes a score – it was a little bit daunting last week when I began to look at it, but I’m sure I’ll sort it out.

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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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James Franco, Mila Kunis, Michelle Williams, Sam Raimi & More Are Off To See The Wizard

Buzzine mewawancarai beberapa orang termasuk Danny Elfman, berikut kutipannya:

Nicole Rayburn: You’ve worked on so many phenomenal films in your career – what sets this one apart from the rest?

Danny Elfman: You know, this movie was one of those really, really rare ones. I've done close to 80 films and I can't think of, in the last 15, 20 years, where I've done anything where it just came so naturally and easily. It's just one of those knock-wood, "I wish they were all like this..."

But Sam and I talked a little bit and I just fell right into the groove, and the very first things I came up with became the themes. Usually there's a lot more struggle involved and I'm used to that, so to have it not happen, it was almost like a dream. So this really was my dream project.

NR: What was the collaboration process like?

DE: Well normally, I don't start on a movie until it's done. There's a director's cut, I look at it, and then I get ideas, and I go home and I work on it. In this one, Sam needed some of the music before he started shooting, so he came to me early on with the script and he says, "I need a waltz because they're going to dance to this waltz onscreen." So I quickly wrote a waltz and I gave it to him, and I said, "Here, it's a little music box theme." I didn't know that a year later I'd be coming back going, "Oh, yeah, is that the thing I wrote for you?" and it became the witches' theme in the movie. I'm just lucky that I wrote something that I liked a year later, because it could have been otherwise.

NR: Did you drawn any inspiration at all from the first movie?

DE: Really, no. The only thing we decided up front was that we would have no references to The Wizard of Oz, that this was its own entity and disconnected in every way, except the story links and that we're learning how Oz becomes the Wizard. But musically, we knew up front that we would not be touching anything from the movie—the original movie.

NR: Well, you have such a distinct sound that your music is instantly recognizable. What was it in particular about OZ that inspired this score?

DE: Well in this one, it's just one of those things where there's such a fabulous landscape to work in that it was just real easy to kind of cut loose and not be restrained, which is really fun.

NR: Did you have any particular characters who really got your creative juices flowing musically?

DE: Well, always it's the villain, so the witches. The witches' music was the most fun for sure.

NR: Well, the villains are also a big part of what Sam Raimi does – much of his work is very dark, whereas this film is a lot lighter.

DE: Well, this is definitely not like a Sam horror film, but he definitely has some moments in it that get pretty wild and crazy ... because it's still Sam. I mean if there's one link, whether it's a comedy or a horror film or a fantasy, it's always just a little crazy.

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THE 4-MINUTE DAYS & SLEEPLESS NIGHTS OF ‘OZ’ COMPOSER DANNY ELFMAN

American Film dari American Film Institute mewawancarai Danny Elfman, berikut kutipannya:

I had a kind of unique situation in the writing of OZ. I’ve had a very busy, hectic year, and I was a little worried about my energy, coming into such a big score. And for reasons that I still haven’t figured out, I fell into the most rhythmically perfect writing period that I think I’ve ever experienced. Without trying, I fell into the themes really easily and I just started writing it. And every day I was looking at what I’d written and I was going, "I’ve never written that much before!" I’m used to writing, struggling to get two minutes a day and I was finding three and three and a half and even four-minute days, but I wasn’t trying! It was really weird. I actually finished the score two and half weeks, three weeks ahead of schedule, which is incredibly bizarre. It was such a magical thing that when I went back to work on my next film it was more like my usual torturous process.

I’ve actually had extended dreams where I say in the dream "This is ridiculous, I’m dreaming!" And some technicians come out and go, "No, no, no... you’re hooked up to a hard-drive, everything you’re working on is getting saved." "Really?" "Absolutely." "This is fool-proof?" "In fact, there’s a redundant backup system, even if it crashes, everything’s being saved." So I continue writing, I continue working. And of course, I wake up, and it’s like "Nooooooo...!"

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Danny Elfman - The Great and Powerful - HD Interview PART 1

Wawancara dengan Danny Elfman di acara pemutaran perdana Oz: The Great and Powerful.

Interview with composer Danny Elfman on Oz the Great and Powerful

Wawancara yang informatif mengenai Oz: The Great and Powerful, lihat videonya di sini.

Composer Danny Elfman's year: 6 film scores, 6 different styles

Dari L.A. Times, berikut kutipannya:

"With another director," Elfman said, "I may have tossed up my hands and just said, 'I can't handle this.' I like him personally, though, so I was able to kick back and relax and just let him go where he goes. If there ends up being music, there's music, if there ends up being no music, then that was my job. My job was to show him that he doesn't want any music."

In the end, there was music. "Silver Linings Playbook" was an anomaly among Elfman's scores. Largely centered on a jangly guitar, a cresting piano and fragile vocal harmonies, it was pop-focused and full of odd little melodies.

And though the composer does not like comedies ("It is a genre that is clearly off my list. I do not do them"), "Silver Linings" hooked him, and that's because it reminded Elfman of films that no longer exist. "I felt like this was Frank Capra and Billy Wilder. This film connected with a period when I actually did like romantic comedies."

Elfman had already revisited the work of famed composer and Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann, so he instead used a small orchestra and actually played it not too unlike that of an old-fashioned romantic comedy. Violins carry the score, but they're in a constant give-and-take with French horns and a piano.

"The music is in many elements a comedy, and Sacha [Gervasi] wanted to make it clear that it's OK to have fun with sections of this movie," Elfman said. "The heartfelt part needed to be very heartfelt. I tried to create an old-fashioned romantic theme, not from any particular era but in the mold of how a classic romantic theme might be."

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OSCARS: Danny Elfman

Situs Deadline mewawancarai Danny Elfman, berikut kutipannya:

After composing five film scores straight, without a weekend off, it’s fair to that Danny Elfman has had a very long year. Still, there was no limit to what he would do to work on a film about his idol, Alfred Hitchcock. “I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I have to do this,” Elfman recalls about committing to Fox Searchlight’s Hitchcock, which was scheduled for delivery right before his opus on Disney’s Oz: The Great And Powerful. “I wouldn’t have a film-music career if it wasn’t for Bernard Herrmann, who has inspired me since the age of 12.”

“He literally bought sections of the orchestra out of his own pocket,” says a gobsmacked Gervasi. “We were recording with the top musicians in London, and we couldn’t afford to keep them through lunch. Danny asked the orchestrator, ‘How much do the violas cost? 3,000£? I’ll take them. How much for the French horns?’ And Danny held the musicians through lunch.”

Also keeping Elfman at the top of his game is the company he keeps with offbeat directors who challenge him. At first, when Elfman heard Silver Linings Playbook was a romantic comedy, he resisted. “That is the genre that I feel no affinity toward at all, and it’s the only one I stay away from. I did a few early on in my career, and they were incredibly difficult.”

“I was playing around with instruments and put my vocals onto one piece as a goof, and David was like, ‘Do more of that! Do more of that!’, like he was producing me. Before we knew it, that’s what we were doing,” Elfman says with a laugh. “It was really crazy and off the track of what I’m usually doing, which is writing very intense, big scores.”

As one of the few scoresmiths who can churn out a panoramic orchestral creation, Elfman will likely get his due from the Academy one day. Already his eighth reteaming with Sam Raimi, Oz: The Great And Powerful, sounds like the type of epic, á la Lawrence of Arabia, that voters crave.

“The movie has this big, blustery old-fashioned feel, and I wanted to give it a big, effective, narrative score,” Elfman says. “It’s huge—105 minutes of music.”

A very good read. Baca lengkapnya di sini.

DANNY ELFMAN ON SCORING RED DRAGON

Berikut kutipan dari situs Runmovies:

Generally I don’t deal with temp scores. I don’t even listen to them. PLANET OF THE APES and RED DRAGON were exceptions where I did want to listen to the temp because I wanted to know what to avoid - both of those having previous movies and scores that went with them. One is a remake and one is a prequel to a really well known and very well done movie. I wanted to be aware of what Howard Shore had done in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, and then I thought, “All right, that’s what it is. I neither want to put all my energy into avoiding any nuance that’s similar, but also I want to make sure that I’m not directly falling into something that is the same.” If you put all your energy into avoiding something, then it becomes an obsessive thing that will eventually dictate the tone of the score, and I didn’t want to do that. Howard and I happen to have a lot of tonalities that are very similar. In PLANET OF THE APES, though, I heard the Jerry Goldsmith score and said, “What I’m doing is so radically different, I don’t even have to think about it. Having heard it now, I won’t even think about it again.” With RED DRAGON, it was different because tonally the movies are very similar, so it was something I had to be aware of. I knew already that Howard was one of the few composers with whom I’m going to have a certain amount of overlapping even on films that have nothing to do with each other. When SILENCE OF THE LAMBS came out, I remember thinking, “Wow, that was very close to BATMAN!” The main theme of BATMAN was working exactly the same scale as SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. I remember being relieved that I hadn’t been exposed to it because some people might have said, “Oh, one’s copying the other.” I knew he wasn’t referring to me in any way, but I’ve been aware since then that we tend to use the same kind of minor scale repeating motifs. Even though ultimately his style is much different than mine, there is an area, especially in a kind of modal, melodic, scale dynamic, that is similar, and I needed to be aware of that.

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Danny Elfman's Accidental Movie Career

Classic FM mewawancarai Danny Elfman, berikut kutipannya:

“I fell into writing; it wasn’t my choice,” he says. “When I grew up I didn’t play any instruments and I took no music lessons. I wanted to be involved with film but composing was the last side of it that I imagined doing. I imagined myself being an editor, maybe special effects.”

He adds: “If you’d have asked me when I was 17 or 18-years-old what I wanted to me I may have said cinematographer or maybe a director but something in film. But I never would have said music; that was quite accidental.”

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Dark Shadows composer Danny Elfman on his long collaboration with Tim Burton

A.V. Club mewawancara Danny Elfman, berikut kutipannya:

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.

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Composer Alexandre Desplat Talks EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE, HARRY POTTER, TWILIGHT, Wes Anderson and MOONRISE KINGDOM, and More

Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub mewawancarai Alexandre Desplat dan dapat dilihat di situs Collider.com. It's a really really good interview. Berikut kutipan wawancaranya:

What is the score that you did not write in the last year or two that you absolutely love and wished you had done it?

I like The Hours a lot, I think it's a great score. I love what Danny did on Milk, I think that was a really great score and very different from his big Marvel films that he does so well, so brilliantly. He's a fantastic.. I also like his call for Alice, it's a beautiful score.. (inaudible). I love what Thomas Newman did for Revolutionary Road, it was a beautiful score. Going back, I could say Javier Navarrete score for Pan's Labyrinth was stunning. Way back, John Williams' Geisha, John Williams' Catch Me If You Can which should have won everything, I think. His opening title is forever. It's forever, just for that he should have had the Oscar, just for that. Genius.

Lihat video lengkapnya di sini. I so love this composer, but I'm miserable with his productivity I can't keep up with his albums!

MORNING BECOMES ECLECTIC

Jason Bentley dari Radio KCRW mewawancarai Danny Elfman di acara Morning Becomes Eclectic tanggal 23 November, terutama mengenai Iris. Excellent news! Danny Elfman sedang mengerjakan Men In Black III, kemudian akan segera mengerjakan Dark Shadows, Frankenweenie, terus time-off dan Elfman ingin membuat chamber music dan kemudian film Oz: The Great and Powerful. Dengarkan dari situsnya di sini. 

Hollywood Dailies - Danny Elfman Interview

Video interview dengan Danny Elfman tentang Elfman-Burton Music Box, lihat di sini.

Big Top Danny

Danny Elfman diwawancarai mengenai musiknya untuk Iris, berikut kutipannya:

GCD: Are you a big fan of musical theater?
DE: You know, I'm really not a big fan of musical theater onstage, but the things I love, I really love. My tastes run close to Tim's: my favorite musical would probably be Sweeney Todd, so I was incredibly happy when Tim was doing that. I'm not a fan of contemporary musicals per se. I love classics: West Side Story, old Rodgers and Hammerstein. In the last 30 years, I've liked bits and pieces here and there but I'm not a fan of pop musicals. When Broadway went with pop in general as a motif, it kinda lost me a bit. But I haven't given up on it. I still want to do something interesting and strange that I could get my teeth into. It's just a matter of getting the right project.

GCD: So there is a possibility we could see a live stage musical from you some day?
DE: Oh yeah. A Broadway-style production? Absolutely. I have worked on a few already. I've dabbled.

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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!