By Dov Kornits
“I’d set aside pretty much the bulk of 2020, not to do any film work,” says the regular Tim Burton and Gus Van Sant composer, to name just two. “I didn’t take any work because I decided it’ll be like a real concert year. I had Coachella [Music Festival] booked for April. There were more concerts booked around that, but I also had my violin concerto, I had a world premiere for a percussion concerto and a piece for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain at the Thames and Elfman-Burton concerts, which is the thing we’ve been doing around the world, and Nightmare Before Christmas concerts. So, it was like, ‘you know what, I’ll make it a concert year’, and of course, the year I pick to take off and do concerts is the year everything’s canceled.”
For the prolific composer of scores and former frontman of the experimental pop/rock band Oingo Boingo, the sudden lack of activity was jarring. “I’d done three solid months of work in preparation for Coachella because, unlike anybody else who was playing in Coachella, I’m probably the only one who had absolutely no show,” Elfman explains. “I was starting a hundred percent from scratch to put together an entire show for the performance. And it was visuals and the music and orchestra, because it was half film music and half live and reworked music from my past. And I was starting to rehearse a band and getting really excited about it all. And then the whole thing collapses. I essentially retreated with my family to a house I have in the north of Los Angeles. I went into a funk up there, and out of that, I just started writing. Because I was psychologically primed for Coachella and having an electric guitar in my hand, I just started writing that. And out of it exploded Big Mess. It was an intense experience, but it was cathartic as well. I don’t do therapy, but I frequently pour it into my art. You can tap into that and let off a lot of steam.”
DARK MOFO INTO BIG MESS
“I had written this one piece the year before that I was hoping to perform at Dark Mofo in Tasmania. It was called, ‘Sorry, I’m So Sorry.’ It was a 10-minute instrumental concept piece. I said to them, ‘I’ve got this thing in my head of using a rock band and an orchestra in a way that I’m not used to hearing it.’ They were interested, and I wrote this piece, but I couldn’t come up with a whole hour-long set. That was the problem. I didn’t end up doing Dark MOFO that year, but I had this one piece already in my mind. So, when I started writing in April, in quarantine, I still had this idea of this chamber punk thing, like a rock band with an orchestra. Every piece was driven by that kind of concept in my mind, but it was like opening a Pandora’s Box – once I started, I just couldn’t stop. I had intended to write four or five songs, and I ended up doing eighteen. I eventually called my manager and said, ‘We better start finding a label and finding out who’s going to put this out because I won’t stop.’ I didn’t have a deadline, and I’m not used to writing for no deadline. With everything that I do – whether it be classical music for orchestra, and obviously film music – there are deadlines.”
THE DARKNESS
“I’ve always been a pretty dark person, but I’ve also always had bursts of hyper activity. You can feel that OCD, hyperactivity and darkness all mixed together on Big Mess. I’m so schizophrenic in my approach to music; it was very frustrating being in a band, but that same schizophrenia worked well as a composer because in film you can really shift from one extreme to the other. And that’s why I really took to that because I can go from really heavy action to very soft romance, to quirky, to ridiculous, to just bang, bang, bang, bang, and all these different directions. And that worked for me. It was hard to do that in a band. It was frustrating. Every two years, I wanted to be in a different band. But as a composer, you can just keep switching it up.”
SCORING FOR FILM AND GETTING UP FRONT
“When you’re doing film, you have to serve the needs of the film first. The film comes first and my own artistic needs come second. So you service the film and you hope that within the context of servicing the film that you can get your voice through, but you’re always serving the film. And I found that at a certain point it was starting to get very frustrating because through the first ten years of scoring films, I was also in a band. So, whichever one I was doing, I was longing for the other one. When I was on the road in the band, I was like, ‘Oh, I wish I was just writing a film score right now.’ When I was in the middle of a film score suffering, because it was so much work, I’d be like, ‘Oh, I wish I was on stage right now with an electric guitar sweating.’ And so after ten years, I retired the band and I was just a composer. I was getting a little bit stir crazy until I started taking these commissions. And that’s where I let off steam in terms of like, ‘Okay, now I’m writing just for myself. I can let my imagination go anywhere I want. And I don’t have to answer to anybody.’ That was really important. And I said, ‘Okay, that’s a good balance. I’ll do commissions, and I’ll do my films. And when I do my commissions, I get to really run amuck, without control, like a kid in a forest. I could be crazy. I could do anything I want. And on a film, I get serious. And I act like the craftsman that I try to be. But I didn’t anticipate doing a rock album; that caught me by surprise. It’s like opening up a whole other realm because now I’m actually communicating with my voice. I’m communicating directly out of my subconscious into the world. I’m sending messages. I had so much repressed frustration in me when I opened up to it. I needed to do it.”
BIG FILMS, SMALLER FILMS, CHALLENGES
“Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness will be my second Marvel film, after Avengers: Age Of Ultron. I understand that it’s restrictive. I can’t let my imagination run amuck, but I like the challenge. I like challenges. See, that’s the bottom line. So with a big Marvel film it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m not going to write anything I want, anything I feel.’ But I like the fact that it’s a great challenge. It’s a very precise box, and to see how creative I can be within this box. Challenges are critical to me: when I get in my comfort zone, I always try to push myself out. I did the score for Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, and the budget had enough for seven musicians, that was it. That’s a challenge. That’s not a problem. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m going to write a score for synthesizers and seven musicians.’ So now I’ve got a challenge. I’m going to fit it in this box. How creative can I be with this smaller thing? Marvel films have their own challenges, but they’re all challenges. And ultimately I like that. You take whatever the restrictions are and make it creative. What can you do with it? That’s exciting. Challenges are critical. And when I started Big Mess, I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and dive into a deeper area that I never got to explore back in the old days with my band.”
OTHER VOICES
“One of the first songs that I wrote [for Oingo Boingo] was a song called ‘Little Girls.’ Many years later, I’d hear, ‘Oh my God, that sounds like a pedophile song. Weren’t you embarrassed to do that?’ I go, ‘No, it’s important. That’s not me talking. This is from the point of view of a disgusting, vapid character who wants little girls who don’t question him because he’s got nothing going.’ There is a famous story out here with a character named Jeffrey Epstein, and I didn’t know who he was at the time, but that’s who was singing ‘I Love Little Girls’, it’s that character. And I wrote another one called ‘Middle-Class Socialist Brat’, which is blasting middle-class liberal socialists and people would say, ‘So, you’re very conservative.’ I go, ‘No, no, no, me, myself, I am a middle-class socialist brat. That’s exactly how I was raised. You don’t understand! I’m taking the point of view of someone who’s saying that, but that’s not me.’ And so this time when I got into the writing, I tried to really strip that away. There’s crazy sarcasm on Big Mess because that’s still part of me. I definitely let myself go much deeper and to write in a much more vulnerable way that I never allowed back in those days.”
SCORE: ZERO
“Sometimes a movie doesn’t need a score. The most famous example of that would be Martin Scorsese. For years, he never had a score, until his more recent movies. The most famous contemporary use of that would be Quentin Tarantino, who had never had a composer do a score until Ennio Morricone did The Hateful Eight. That’s fine. I love Quentin’s work. I’m like his number one fan and I’ve never had a moment where I thought he needed to score it. The music he chooses is always perfect for the moment and there’s nothing better that would do.”
SCORING TO PICTURE
“We’ll always frequently discuss it beforehand, but really until there’s music to play, it doesn’t mean anything because you could talk about music forever and there’s still the moment where you’re going to play things for the first time and they’re either going to respond to it or not. I try to get music written and out to a director as quickly as possible so I can get their input. I’ll experiment, and I’ll do as much as I can to see what they’re gravitating towards. That’s part of being a composer: finding out what works for the director. And until you’re playing the music, it’s all concept. We can think that we’re talking about the same kind of music for something abstractly, just talking, but then you actually play it and one of us will go, ‘Oh, that’s not what I was imagining.’ Tim Burton always brings me onto the set halfway through filming, and he’ll show me the set. I’ll watch them shooting some scenes, but then he’ll always have the editor take me back in the editing room and just show me a rough assembly of what they’ve got. And he wants me to get a sense of it early. I can start thinking about things, which is helpful because it’s when I see the picture that I start getting a concrete idea. I try not to imagine too much before I’ve seen anything, because the picture always feels and looks different than I imagined from the script.”
IN THE INDUSTRY
“People are always surprised that I don’t know many celebrities, and that I don’t know many people in the industry. If I go to an industry party after a movie, I won’t know a soul. As a composer, we’re at the very end of a project and our world is pretty cloistered. 90% of everything that I’ve done has been just two people: me and the director. I barely meet a producer, and usually I just shake hands and say, ‘Hello.’ I’ll almost never meet an actor. I’ll see them at the premiere and I might be like, ‘Oh, hi, I enjoyed your work.’ That’s it. We live this kind of weird little life in tiny rooms and studios with our directors.”
Danny Elfman’s album Big Mess is available now.
