Horror calls, Danny Elfman answers.

Danny Elfman is a singer-songwriter, musician and award-winning composer who is best known for his film work. Notable among over one hundred scores to his credit are Edward Scissorhands, Milk and Spider-Man, as well as the themes to television shows such as Wednesday and The Simpsons.

His latest project to hit the big screen is Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale (released in France and coming to the UK and North America soon). “Needless to say, when Luc called with Dracula, I was delighted,” Elfman says. “First off, I was delighted about working with Luc and secondly, of course, the material: an odd, quirky Dracula film that's also very romantic, because these are all things that I love. If it was just a dark gothic horror, I'd be right there with it; I love writing romantic music, especially if it's dark romantic music; but the fact that it's quirky – well, that just made it even more appealing.”

Experience has taught Elfman that composing before seeing the film is a waste of time as it will almost certainly be nothing like he has imagined. Now he goes in to view the rough cut with as few preconceptions as possible and only then does he start to come up with ideas. “It’s like you learn how the director feels about their film emotionally, and then you start experimenting and putting stuff in front of the director: ‘We can go this way, or we can try it like this, or we could tilt it more.’ And the only way you know is by doing it.” This was the approach he took with Besson, presenting his original thoughts for the director’s responses. “It was really fun, and Luc did not disappoint – he was just great to work with, and I hope we do it again.”

Elfman’s route into film composing was unconventional. With no formal training, he started out performing avant-garde musical theatre before becoming lead singer-songwriter of Oingo Boingo, drawing on an unusual mix of influences. He had encountered highlife during his travels across West Africa but was spending most of his time in the early 1970s reorchestrating jazz and big band standards for his street theatre troupe. “I was listening to no popular music – in my mind, I was living in Harlem in 1933,” he recalls. “Then suddenly I heard Madness, The Specials, XTC, and that just changed my whole perspective. Immediately, I said, ‘That's what I want to do’. It was definitely the kick in the butt that got me going.” Another significant inspiration was Bowie’s 1980 album, Scary Monsters. “The sound of what a guitar could or should be doing was defined for me, right then and there, because I never heard guitar approached that way.”

But film music had always been there in the background as well, particularly the work of influential composer Bernard Herrmann (Elfman went on to adapt his hero’s famous Psycho theme for Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake). “Growing up, even as a kid, when I saw Bernard Herrmann's name, it almost didn't matter what the movie was, I just wanted to see what the film was. That's what brought me into films, that sense of certain personalities that you're always going to want to see what they're doing.” Nonetheless, Elfman didn’t even consider working in cinema until Tim Burton invited him to compose the score for Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985). “It never occurred to me that I was going to get into film music – it just wasn't even on my list.”

“Unfortunately, you can’t restore the stuff that was cut out of Darkman because they cut it out of the negative. The fantasy sequences in Darkman were each twice as long and crazy. It’s sad for me that the audience never got to see that stuff.”

— Elfman

That film launched a fruitful creative partnership which has resulted in some of his best-loved work, and which continues to this day. Looking back, he sees the first films they did together as an extended apprenticeship, with Elfman fitting other jobs around Burton films to extend his range and experience. “Tim’s scores obviously defined my progress as I went, because Tim was the one who gave me my start. So, between Pee-wee, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Nightmare, I was trying to make these leaps because all my training was in that period, right there. In between each of Tim's films, I would try to figure out a way to work in four more.” For the first ten years of his composing career, Elfman also continued to perform and record with Oingo Boingo. “So it was crazy days, because I was still in a band, and I still had to tour and produce albums, but I was trying desperately to get two films each year if I could, four films if it was a two-year period around Tim's, just to be able to get in front of an orchestra and learn more.”

One such project was scoring Clive Barker's Nightbreed (1990). “I really liked hanging out with Clive. He was a hoot – a very smart, funny and interesting guy. That's what I remember most about Nightbreed.” Darkman, also released that year, initiated another long-term working relationship, with director Sam Raimi. Both films were subject to considerable studio interference but, while Nightbreed can now be seen in full in the restored Director’s Cut, much of Darkman has been lost forever. “They were both weird movies – the kind of movies the studios didn't quite understand. Unfortunately, you can’t restore the stuff that was cut out of Darkman because they cut it out of the negative. The fantasy sequences in Darkman were each twice as long and crazy. It's sad for me that the audience never got to see that stuff.”

Probably his most ill-fated project was Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman; rejected by the studio when it no longer fit the film after editing, his score was replaced by an electronic soundtrack that was then also rejected, leading them to revert to Elfman’s original. In spite of this troubled history, he remains very fond of the music; his orchestral suite based on The Wolfman will premiere at Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Future Ruins festival in November. Classical music has become increasingly prominent in Elfman’s oeuvre, and he also regularly performs songs from A Nightmare Before Christmas, both as part of the concert Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton and as a live orchestral accompaniment to screenings of the film.

Nightmare’s enduring popularity bears out Elfman’s opinion that previews are an unreliable predictor of a film’s reception. The original screenings were a disaster, leading Disney to conclude that it was too scary for children – an idea that has since been comprehensively disproved. “My favourite thing about Nightmare, going and performing it each year like I do, is the huge number of families that bring kids. Generation after generation, people send me their kids singing the songs, they tell me how much their kids love it and they play it every Halloween. And that, to me, is the greatest satisfaction: that years later, it would find its place in the culture, and that place did include the imagination of kids.” While acknowledging the value of previews, he believes they can be particularly misleading for films that do not fit neatly with genre norms. “Edward Scissorhands previewed horribly. Beetlejuice previewed horribly. Darkman, I think, got the lowest preview score in Universal's history. And all of these movies did well. It just had to find its audience. And so it's deceptive, but films often get tragically stomped on after a preview, and that's the problem.”

Elfman acknowledges his good fortune in having long-term working relationships with such inventive directors as Tim Burton, Gus Van Sant and Sam Raimi. “It was a fun year working with all three of them back-to-back,” he notes, having scored Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Van Sant’s Dead Man's Wire either side of his work on Besson’s Dracula; now he is about to start recording the soundtrack for his latest collaboration with Raimi, Send Help, which will be released early next year. He describes the plot as “whacked. I don't know what to say about it! It's about this power dynamic on a desert island, shifting between these two people, and it gets more and more crazy until – I don't want to give away too much – things get pretty out of control.”

Both Dracula: A Love Tale and Send Help have given Elfman the chance to work on a genre for which he feels a particular affinity – “It's a little frustrating for me that, even though I was a horror kid and grew up on horror and it's defined my entire life, I've done so few horror films” – whereas many of his previous collaborations with Raimi have been on superhero films such as Spider-Man and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. “I love working with Sam,” Elfman says. “He's the funniest, nicest guy on the planet. So when we do a session, it would probably take me an hour to an hour and a half to present all the music I'm going to have, but we'll probably sit there for three because Sam is going to be telling jokes and entertaining – he's one of the most fun people ever to work with.”

Author: Rachel Goodyear

Check out the full score to Dracula: A Love Tale below.