Grammy Award-winning and four-time Oscar®-nominated composer Danny Elfman will be at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank, CA to host a live Q & A open to the public on Tuesday, May 8 at 6:00pm. The event will be moderated by DANSE MACABRE author, Jeff Bond. Signed DARK SHADOWS CD's and signed DANNY ELFMAN AND TIM BURTON 25TH ANNIVERSARY MUSIC BOXES will be available.
I thought the second film was missing a Vincent D'Onofrio, a villain who had real menace to him and raised the stakes. Would you say Jemaine Clement brings that back?
Well, yes, thank you for asking me that. For one, on the second movie, I think we forgot to pay attention to having a really strong villain. D'Onofrio was fantastic, because he was both menacing and also very funny because he was so frustrated by earth. In this movie, Jemaine is an incredibly good villain. For one, Rick Baker's makeup, which took Jemaine four and a half hours every morning to put on, really turned Jemaine from the nicest human being you'll ever meet into someone who both looks and acts really scary. He's a really mean and great-looking villain. We learned from the second one and are back to have a really strong villain. In fact, Danny Elfman, who did the score on all three movies, is huge Jemaine Clement fan and loves every moment of Flight of the Concords. The first time I showed him Men in Black III, he said, "That villain is fantastic. Who is he?" I said his name was Jemaine Clement, and he said "no way." Danny Elfman not recognizing one of his musical idols was very satisfying.
Danny did a fantastic job on the score, with it being reminiscent of the first movie, but also new and hip. Also, by going to 1969, it allowed me to have a lot of really great music from the era. However, some of the music I chose is not so much pop, but Velvet Underground, Cream, and a Rolling Stones I had never heard before called 2,000 Lightyears From Home, and it's a fantastic song.
I have to admit, during the first seconds of ‘Dark Shadows – Prologue’ I thought I had mistakenly put in my Bob Cobert CD from the television series Dark Shadows. The sound is unmistakable, but that’s where the similarities end (mostly). Step up the real Danny Elfman! From around 4:20 and onwards is the best part where he admittedly stals a little from his excellent Wolfman score, but it sounds better than ever with power and the choir. It has a bit of fun too and cues like ‘Shadows Reprise’ shows off some excellent sound design with some amazing synth work combined with a catchy theme.
The score has lot of great cues and there isn’t a weak cue among them.
Well, not to state the bleeding obvious, but I enjoyed this score a lot. It has a little bit of Bob Cobert in there which ties it nicely to the original TV series and then it’s mostly all Elfman and his excellent take on gothic horror.
At 4 p.m. on May 6, film music historian Jon Burlingame will lead an in-depth symposium discussing Elfman’s career. At 7 p.m., top-drawer BMI composer David Newman will conduct the American Youth Symphony in an inspiring concert featuring Elfman’s compositions.
Oscar-nominated Elfman is a living legend. After composing his first score for Tim Burton’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, he went on to craft ingenious work for some of the most influential and popular films of the last several decades. He has collaborated with directors such as Tim Burton, Gus Van Sant, Sam Raimi, Paul Haggis, Ang Lee, Rob Marshall, Guillermo del Toro, Brian De Palma, and Peter Jackson. His credits include the four Oscar-nominated films Milk, Good Will Hunting, Big Fish and Men in Black, along with Edward Scissorhands, Wanted, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mission: Impossible, Planet of the Apes, A Simple Plan, To Die For, Spider-Man (1 & 2), Batman, Dolores Claiborne, Sommersby, Chicago, Dick Tracy, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Alice in Wonderland; as well as the famous themes for television series The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives. Most recently he provided the music for Gus Van Sant’s Restless and Shawn Levy’s Reel Steel, and is currently working on Men In Black 3, Sam Raimi’s Oz: The Great and Powerful, and two Tim Burton projects: Frankenweenie and Dark Shadows.
For more than 25 years, Burton and Elfman have collaborated on some of the cinema's most beloved and recognizable films and soundtracks, including Big Fish, for which Elfman received an Oscar® nomination; Beetlejuice; Batman; Edward Scissorhands; Sleepy Hollow; Corpse Bride; and, more recently, Alice in Wonderland.
"Tim had some specific ideas about the music on Dark Shadows," says Elfman. "I knew that the bigger dramatic scenes would be played in a rather grand theatrical manner, but the real treat was tapping into the retro pallet Tim had imagined. He wanted something that payed homage to both the original TV series and other '70s horror genres as well. For that we kept it minimal, eerie, and atmospheric with only electronics and a few solo instruments carrying the melodies."
Elfman has also received Oscar® nominations for his scores for Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black, and Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting and Milk. Movie audiences worldwide have also heard Danny Elfman's unique sound and style in some 80 film scores, including Sam Raimi's Spider-Man; Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible; Martin Brest's Midnight Run; Jon Amiel's Sommersby; the Hughes Brothers' Dead Presidents; Rob Marshall's Academy® Award-winning Chicago; and Shawn Levy's Real Steel.
