All language subtitles for Edward.Scissorhands.1990.25th.Anniv.Bluray.1080p.DTS-HD-4.0.x264-Grym.comm2.eng

Hi, my name is Danny Elfman
and I'm the composer of the score.

I'll be doing a bit of commentary.

This is where the two primary themes for
Edward Scissorhands play back-to-back.

The story theme
and Edward's two themes, really.

The first one you just heard
and the one coming up at the end of this cue.

And here's the next theme
beginning right now.

Edward Scissorhands,

after doing, at this point, as I speak,
I believe, 37, 38 scores,

still is either one of my favourites
or perhaps even my favourite.

So many levels.

I'll get into some of that, I suppose,
as we go in this commentary.

What we just finished
was an extended title sequence.

Titles are really important to me,

especially in a movie like this,
in a fantasy film,

because they have to tell us
what we're going to see and feel,

what we're getting into.

This was an interesting one.
It was divided into three different sections.

The opening, over the credits,
was what I would call Edward's first theme.

And it's more the playful,
storybook side of Edward,

the fact that he is in a fairy tale,

and this is a fairy tale
and that's what it's saying.

Then when we go to the grandmother,
Winona Ryder, talking to her child,

it goes into a piece
that I don't consider a primary theme.

It's basically carrying on
a different version of...

it's a story and this story
is really beginning here.

And very critical to Tim and I,
at the end of that scene,

we're going to see Edward
for the first time.

And that was gonna be the very first time that
we would hear Edward's emotional theme,

his second theme,

which is really the theme
that represents the heart of the character.

And Tim and I talked about whether that
should play in the beginning over the credits,

but decided to just save it and play a bit of it
like a premonition of what's to come.

And it felt like the correct thing to do.
So it's kind of odd,

because in a way
it's the main theme of the movie,

but we just play it for a few moments
at the very end of the scene.

When I first start a score, I play around
for quite a bit with the thematic ideas.

I have to really know that they're gonna play
all the beats that I want them to play.

There was a number of weeks where I was
coming up with ideas, playing them for Tim,

and not really necessarily putting them
against individual scenes in picture.

But it was just knowing that
there were these different sides of Edward.

One would play over the inventor
because that's one part of the story.

The other would play over the ice scene,
that was Edward's emotional centre.

And Edward's music
would even play over Kim, as a character,

that she wasn't going to get her own theme.

I suppose, classically speaking,
that's odd too,

but I like following the emotions,
not the characters.

I've always felt that way
and that carried into this score as well.

Here we're playing the entire opening theme,

very darkly this time.

Well, that cue had a lot of jobs to do
and it was so much fun to write.

I had to cover everything that we were seeing.

And I think it taps into my love of
the really old, old-fashioned movie scoring,

back to the '30s and '40s,
which is the stuff that kind of inspired me,

because it's all about storytelling.

You're telling the story in the music
that you're seeing,

so even if you watch the images
and listen to the music,

you know what they feel and think.
It's taking that first frolicky theme

and turning it more ominous and switching
between ominous and wonderment,

and wonderment to menace,
and menace to a bit of a light frolic.

And we're gonna change pace totally in
a few moments and go to our suburbia theme.

And the suburban motif
is a little bit kind of like Muzak

and follows the look and the feel
of this neighbourhood that they live in,

which is kind of a Muzaky neighbourhood.

The fun thing about that cue was

turning the chairs around, in the sense that,

instead of the wonderment of everybody
coming into Edward's existence,

this was Edward seeing suburbia,

which of course,
looks absurd to our standards,

but to him, it's this incredible new
wonderland, this thing of his dreams.

And the wonderful joy I had
in writing this score

was that the themes were so simple

and I got to do
all these different variations on them.

And I'd been doing
so many chaotic, big, heavy scores,

or kind of insane scores,

that to have something that I could stay
within the context of simple melodies,

that the variations would be very subtle,
was something that meant a lot to me.

Of all the variations on Edward's main theme,

this next one coming up
was really my favourite.

I didn't know it when I wrote it,
but how it came out,

it was very, very simple and understated

and captured in many ways

what I was attempting to go for
in this kind of innocent heart of Edward.

And it's funny, you never know
those things beforehand.

I thought the bigger statements
would be my favourite,

but this one always stayed with me.

I don't want to keep going on forever
about how special Edward was for me.

I'm gonna get all mushy here.

I think it was really one of Tim's purest works.

It's so much of Tim in Edward.

And Johnny Depp pulled it off so great.

I remember being sceptical at first,

cos I thought of him as a television actor.

From the scene that we just saw on,

I was so sold on the way he was playing it,

the way he looked and everything about it.

There were many other elements too.

Everything about it.

The writer, Caroline Thompson,
was my girlfriend.

We had the pleasure
of having the opening night

and being able to sit together.

It was an amazing experience for me.

It was also right at the time
in my composing career

where I was starting to feel
a lot more confident.

The first films I did,
I had no idea what to make of anything.

It was just like this kind of strange world
and I didn't think I was doing a good job.

I thought I was blundering,
although I was having fun,

especially with Tim's movies,
Beetlejuice and Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

And by the time I survived Batman,

I thought I could handle
just about anything now.

"lt doesn't get harder than this."

And having gotten through that,

I think I was feeling for the first time like,
"Oh, I guess I'm a film composer now."

Up until that point, I thought it was still kind
of something I was dabbling in on the side,

but finally I started feeling like

maybe I even knew what I was doing
a little bit and I was learning a lot.

Every film I was learning more, and by
the time I got here, probably my 15th film,

I was actually feeling like, beginning
to feel like I knew what I was doing

and I was getting lost in it

and experiencing it
on a completely different level.

I guess, for no other reason,
I was not nervous any more.

I was looking at films

and certainly Edward was one
where I felt like I was the right person.

I understood it completely.

I don't think, and I didn't think,
that I was the best composer, and I still don't,

but when I'm in a movie
that I'm really engaged in,

I feel like I'm the best composer,
at that moment, for that movie.

When I write the music,

I think I'm doing it
the way it really should be done.

And I'm not saying that in a conceited way,

because I guess every actor
has to feel that about a part,

and I think a composer does too.

A movie that means a lot to them,
they have to feel they're right for it

and I really felt right for this one.

There's not much to say about that cue.

A little bit of fun and then one more statement
of one of the secondary themes,

which happened a bit,
usually in the beginning and the end

of getting us into
one of the more primary themes.

I don't wanna start going on about that
too much cos I'll start to trip myself up.

The suburban music was fun to write.

That was one of the first things
I encountered on the project,

cos I came and visited the set in Florida
when they were shooting.

There was all this suburbia. I couldn't believe
they'd turned the neighbourhood into this,

but I didn't know how that was going to relate
exactly to the rest of the movie.

In Tim's movies in particular, I've learnt not
to try to second-guess where it's gonna go

or what it's gonna look like.

I knew there was going to be
a lot of really fun music.

In Beetlejuice, for example, we got to do
some bits of lounge-inspired music,

when he's waiting
in the waiting room at the end.

Beetlejuice and the shrunken head -
that scene. There were these moments.

I had a feeling that in Edward,
we would be able to tap into

a little bit of this '60s-inspired,
lounge-influenced element to suburbia.

In the last scene,
we got to use that "clip-clop, clip-clop",

with the wood blocks
to kind of give it this clock tempo.

And the next one coming up,
the "ballet du suburbia" again was...

We called it a ballet
just because it looked so choreographed.

The first scenes that Richard Halsey, when I
went to Florida, showed me, was this stuff.

This, by the way, is a scene
which meant a lot musically to me.

That's because there is no music,
and I was extremely grateful for that.

This is a moment, classically, where I would
be asked to score and I'd do it reluctantly.

And I could write a cue for this scene,
but it wouldn't make it better,

it'd probably make it worse.

The way Johnny played this,
it was so dead-on perfect,

and I was so glad
that we didn't have to put any music to it,

because it worked, it didn't need it.

But as many times as I've said that
in the past, I'm usually ignored.

The craziness in that scene was,

for absolutely no reason,
in the middle of it, it gets dramatic.

There are so many things
that happen during a film score

that have no real rhyme or reason to me,

but at the moment it seems like, "why not?"

Put a little drama in the middle
of this car pulling out of the driveway.

Tim, thank God,
lets me get away with that stuff.

In fact, whenever I play a cue like that, I dread
the moment that something's gonna happen.

I expect that he's going to go,
"Are you crazy?"

And Tim's the opposite.
Moments like that usually delight him.

I guess we have the same sense of humour
when it comes to certain oddities like that.

Most directors would have simply gone,
"All right, Danny, great, thanks."

"Play me what you really want to play there.
You're obviously just having a bit of fun."

Tim is one of the few directors
who would listen to it and go:

"Yeah, let's do it. Great."

"lt's interesting, it does something, and
whatever it is, it's fun and we should do it."

So I'm very grateful to him for that.

This is a scene where there's going to be a
major cutting piece of music coming up soon,

but I was very glad
we didn't have to play this.

The lack of music at certain moments
makes other moments so much more special.

It's hard to explain.
When there's music all the time,

it ends up diminishing the entire impact
of the music that's there.

I think that most films have too much music,

but here we got to have some moments
that I didn't have to play.

Again, I was really grateful for it cos it
was perfect and it didn't need any music.

The Esmeralda character was definitely
one of the odd things in this movie.

She has her music, though.
Not a theme that played a number of times.

You can hear the religious element here.

I think we're about to come up
on Vincent Price's entrance here.

And I'm sure that if you listen to Tim's
commentary, he'll talk about Vincent.

Funny thing between Tim and I
is that when he grew up,

Vincent Price, I believe, was his idol,
and Peter Lorre was mine.

And of course, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre
acted in so many films together.

Vincent, of course, usually being the torturer,
and Peter Lorre being the tormented.

I don't know for sure whether that
comments on Tim and I or not.

But I did get to meet, through Tim,
Vincent, before he died

and it was one of my great pleasures.

He was a great, great idol.

Again, it was getting back
to that thing that I loved doing,

that musical storytelling
in the very old-fashioned sense.

The difficult thing about that scene...

And I'd already gone through this earlier,
in the first movie I did with Tim,

the breakfast machine
in Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

But this one was much more difficult to score
because there was such a rhythm

that you felt in all of these walking devices.

I might have mentioned,
I love playing footsteps and walking.

I wasn't supposed to, but I played the mother
walking up when she first discovers Edward.

And here, I was trying
to give a tempo to all the machinery,

yet the machinery wasn't going to any tempo,
they weren't following a click or tempo.

They were just more or less moving in
rhythm, so you'd see the feet, the machine,

then it'd cut away and cut back.

I'd have to make sure
that by the time we cut back,

we feel like we're back in a tempo.

There was a long stretch
with the machine walking.

It looks easy, but it's very tricky.

It means a lot of very subtle
manipulation of the tempos.

And a scene like that,
as much fun as it was to write,

took an enormous amount of time
to block out.

It's hard to explain.

Before writing a note of music to a scene,
there's tempo mapping.

It's creating a map of every beat in the cue,

and what's going to be caught exactly where.

In a scene like that, as short as the scene is,

it can take a day to block the tempo out,
before actually writing a note.

When you're on a film score and you don't
have a lot of time to write the music,

taking big chunks of time just to work out
your tempo mapping can get pretty scary.

All the time you're doing that, you're not
writing music and you're getting behind.

Yet, in the end, to see it work is so gratifying.

I guess it's like an animator feels

when they're working
on a very difficult segment.

The audience may not know

how difficult getting a piece of animation
a certain way might be,

but they all know the sweat that goes into it.

I love that last scene and I love that we're able
to end with Edward's theme again.

Vincent Price

thinking of the idea
of turning this machine into a boy.

That smile is so wonderful.

I just love that scene.

It's so simple and so sweet.

Once again, that's the element
that made this movie so special to me.

I was used to having to take my themes
and always play them in fragments,

except for maybe a few scenes
where I got to play it all the way through.

It's just something you're used to.

Very often you start a theme
and something happens in the middle.

You switch gears,
you're not allowed to play it out.

And here, almost every time I started a theme,
I got to play it through.

It was so strange
how so seldom did I have to struggle

to make a particular piece of music
fit the scene.

I would look at it and it was very clear,

in a scene like the etiquette lesson,
what it was going to be.

It was going to take
that first fairy-tale theme of Edward's

and slow it down,
play it a little more soloistically,

give it a little bit of playfulness
to keep it very simple.

To attempt to feel the delight that Vincent
Price's character was having with Edward

and the childlike quality of Edward.

But I didn't have to force anything and this
kept happening over and over in the movie.

I would see it and I would know,
"Oh, yes, perfect."

"That first theme, the opening theme."

"l bet it'll work here."

Without looking at the picture,
I'd come up with a variation

that felt like the right feel, the right mood.

And then, when I was happy with it,

I would try to see
what I would have to do to adjust it,

figuring I'm not gonna be able to play it

or I'll have to repeat this section
and that section and that section.

Then I'd put it up against the screen,

because unlike the machine type of scene,

a simple scene like the one we just saw
doesn't require the same attention to tempo,

cos we're not catching
much of the action on the screen.

We're playing a mood, a vibe,
not having to drive the tempo of the scene.

So I would take that piece of music
and I'd put it up against the picture,

happy with the piece of music,
and it would work almost perfectly.

I don't know why that was.
It happens every now and then

and when it does, it's such a lovely thing,

to see that a piece of music
that you think is correct conceptually

works almost perfectly
with the scene in its reality.

It was part of the vibe of this whole score,
this whole film, for me,

of not having to push,

being able to just float along with the movie.

To be able to pull a little here
and push a little there

and give nudges emotionally.

But never to have to drag us along
or push anybody musically.

It was more just a feeling
of floating along with it

and every scene would come up,

and it would say exactly what it wanted to be
and what it needed to be.

Almost every scene
was just such a pure pleasure and a joy.

In fact, I think this is one of the very few films
I've worked on in the last 15 years

that when I was done,
I wanted to keep writing variations.

I was sad that it was over.
Usually I'm immensely relieved -

no matter how happy or not I am
with my own achievements or lack thereof -

in finishing a score, I'm always relieved,
just because of the physical effort.

This was one where, when I'd finished,
I wished it was longer.

I wished there was going to be
an addendum or something more.

I wanted to do more little variations.
I think I could have kept doing it forever.

Tim is really good at picking artists
and songs for his movies.

It's funny how perfect I think Tom Jones
was for Edward Scissorhands,

as well as Harry Belafonte for Beetlejuice,

which was also really Tim's idea,
Tim's choice, and was so perfect.

I don't know where,
along his creative process, he gets the idea.

This is really a premonition
of a scene that's coming up soon.

So that was a precursor to the gypsy music
that will be coming to Edward the barber.

The next cue is one of my favourites.
It's a kind of a crazy one with three sections.

It starts a little bit Pee-wee like
in the boutique,

then it's going to evolve,
for reasons which I still have no idea why,

into kind of a Spanish serenade.

And then it bursts into gypsy music.

I've been asked many times why I used
the gypsy motif for the hair cutting

and I haven't a clue!

It's not something Tim and I talked about-
"Wouldn't it be great to use gypsy music?"

It was another one of those
spontaneous moments that I did,

that I was absolutely sure Tim was going to

not let me do, or hate, or not have a clue.

And quite to the contrary, it was,
"Absolutely, let's use it, let's do it. It's great."

So forever, Edward the barber
is Edward the gypsy.

Ahh.

The final cut.

Dianne Wiest was such
a wonderful character in this movie.

I love the way he prepares the seat
for her there, how tenderly he does that.

I think composers often take their cues
off attitudes or looks of people or things

that throw them in a direction
that they weren't expected to go.

Clearly, in that last scene, it was the state of
ecstasy that the women were in, in the chair.

There was something about that.
He was a conquistador, artist, warrior.

In his moment of glory, he was Michelangelo.

The women all now saw this in him,
he was oozing this quality.

And the thing that I think
I was really responding to,

which created that Spanish romanticism
over his hair cutting,

was this wonderful state of ecstasy
that they all seemed to be in.

He was really making love to them,
wasn't he?

In an odd way I think he was.

Or at least that's how
they seem to be perceiving it.

And once again,
there's Edward's innocent theme,

his theme of the heart.

And as I mentioned before,
often they get cut off or truncated,

but there is a case
where it was truncated intentionally.

Once again, it just seemed
to play the perfect length,

but we didn't want it
to complete the door shutting.

If it shut off the music,

it's shutting off Kim to Edward,
so that was an intentional truncation there.

That little statement of Edward's theme

was designed to imply that Kim, for the first
time, is feeling some tenderness towards him.

So this is kind of a turning point for her.

She begins defending Edward,

and up to this point,
she's been kind of turned off by him.

My process of composing, I think,
is kind of a strange one.

It's probably a little strange just because
it was all something I learned while doing.

No one ever gave me any instruction
about how to do any of this stuff really.

I was a big fan of film music.

I paid attention.

I had, as well as movie star idols,
like Vincent Price and Peter Lorre

and Boris Karloff, when I was a kid,

along with that was Bernard Herrmann.

He was the composer who really made me
understand and appreciate film music.

And Bernard Herrmann is still,
I think, my model, my idol,

in terms of, I believe, to me,
the best film composer of the 20th century.

Although that would be hotly debated
and people would disagree with me,

to me, he was the most consistently
inventive and brilliant.

At any rate, the process
was really this kind of strange evolution.

It started many years
before I did my first film score,

when I began writing music
for a musical theatrical troop

called The Mystic Knights
of the Oingo Boingo.

And it was a kind of a ragtag ensemble
that started on the streets,

and over the course of eight years,
got more and more ambitious.

By the end of those eight years,
I was forced to write down my musical ideas

and my musical ideas got more and more
complex and by the end of that period,

I was writing the beginning of what
would become orchestral music for me.

It's very difficult to explain.

It was not orchestral.
It was for 11, 12 musicians instead of 80 or 90,

but oddly the process of writing
for 10, 11, 12 different solo musicians,

which was what
a lot of the early compositions were,

is not astoundingly different
than writing for 60, 70, 80, 90.

When you're writing for 90 musicians,
you're not writing 90 different parts.

Very often, in fact, you may only be putting
12, 15, 17 parts down on a piece of paper.

And so, those parts
are going to get broken down into sections.

So there's a number of first violins, a number
of second violins, playing each part.

So the difference of writing
for a dozen individual instruments,

you're writing a dozen parts
that work together as a single composition.

And then taking each of those parts and
having anywhere from three to 25 players

playing each piece of music,
is not quite as big a jump as it seems.

Still, it was terrifying beyond belief

when I knew I was writing
that first score for 60 pieces.

I also hadn't written in a few years and had
to give myself a major, major crash course.

I was lucky to have the encouragement
of the guitarist Steve Bartek,

who was playing with me in the band Oingo
Boingo when I got Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

And Steve had a little bit of experience.

We both played
in the Mystic Knights together.

And... so... he...

I hired him on Pee-wee's Big Adventure,
to work and help me along,

and he did and that was a tremendous...
security that first time out,

cos I really had no idea what was gonna
happen as these parts got translated

into many players instead of a single player.

And between Pee-wee's Big Adventure
coming out, I thought, "OK, pretty good."

And five films later, Beetlejuice,

and five films later after that, Batman,

and roughly five films after that
was Edward Scissorhands.

It was kind of a joke for a while,

the first, the fifth, the tenth and the 15th.

In between each of Tim's every five films
being a Tim Burton film,

I was soaking up huge amounts
of information and knowledge,

trying to understand what worked
and what didn't work,

what was impossible to play
and what wasn't impossible to play, for ideas.

I haven't learnt as much as I should,

because I still come up with music
that's semi-impossible to play.

And I think maybe psychologically

I enjoy that strange feeling
of putting a piece in front of an orchestra

and the looks I get back from them,
"Oh, my God, what is this?"

But here on Edward,

I mentioned earlier that I was becoming
more at ease and confident.

But there was this process
of looking at things

and how to divide up themes,

lay them out
and look at them like a great puzzle

that I was... it was becoming
howl looked at a movie.

And each of these pieces of music
began to become coloured pieces of puzzles.

They were either the blue, red or green piece,

but they were parts of pieces
relating to different themes.

And they all had to fit together.

Now, I know that sounds pretty insane.

It's incredibly difficult to describe,

but it is rather like setting out all the pieces
in a huge jigsaw puzzle,

and understanding
what each of the different colour groups

are going to do for the movie.

And then breaking them down
into all these different shapes,

knowing not quite
how they're going to fit together,

but you've got all the pieces laid out

in a way that's going to make sense.

So when you need to draw
from one colour or the other colour,

you know exactly where to go,
they're right there at my fingertips.

And what I'm going to do with them,
I don't know,

but I know where I need to find
everything I'm looking for.

Now, if you want to have me committed,
locked away, go ahead.

The fun here is taking earlier themes
and twisting them around.

You may have noticed,
as Edward was walking out the door there,

that we were taking the storybook theme
and kind of twisting it into a darker sense.

That sensibility now is going to

kind of carry through
much of the rest of the score,

now that we're in the third act
and the tide is turning against Edward.

The same themes
that were innocent and tender

are now going to start appearing
as I'm grabbing for these pieces,

mixing them up and inverting them,

sometimes twisting them around
or even turning them inside out.

But always trying to keep
a melodic thread through all the music.

Even though it's going to start

breaking down into more dramatic,
sometimes melodramatic type of elements,

I still have to keep
the same melodic threads going,

even if it's subliminal.

I think that's part of carrying us
through a story like this.

The tone and the attitude is gonna change.

But some way or another, the melodic threads
are gonna keep joining together.

And in that way, music and film
becomes kind of a knitting element.

It knits together, it ties together.

I've often used that analogy,

cos a film score is a little bit
like a tapestry, weaving process,

where you're gluing things, you're weaving
things, you're tying things together,

and adding unity
where there wasn't with the melody.

So now, even suburbia
is taking on a sadder, a darker quality,

as Edward's world
is turning upside down on him.

And, as I was explaining before,

it's keeping that thread always going
in our minds, even if it's subliminal.

Edward's story, Edward's element,
his part in it, always being alive.

It's one of the areas that music
helps so much, or can help so much.

I guess if one ever had any idea
while they were doing a piece of work

what or how it might carry into the future,
it would probably be a terrible thing.

I certainly never had any idea

when I was writing the music
to Edward Scissorhands

that it was going to be imitated
and copied as much as it was.

Of all the works that I've done,

this, more than practically
all the rest of them combined.

If I'd have known that, it probably would have
scared me and affected how I was doing it.

It never occurred to me
that this little cult, funny thing that I enjoyed

was going to keep reappearing year after year.

There's one or two films per year since then,

even last year and the year before,

where variations on Edward's themes
keep popping up in film scores.

It's a joke between me and certain friends.

I'll get a call and they'll say,
"Oh, Edward's back."

We'll listen to the score and there it is.

I guess that's a form of flattery,
but it's a very weird feeling.

Worse than that, or odder than that
I should say, is television commercials,

which has been almost a constant thing
since Edward came out.

So if I'd have only known

that I was going to influence
television commercials in the future,

I probably would have...

What would I have done? I don't know.

Maybe I would have moved to a country
far away and taken on a different name.

I don't know what I'd have done,

but it would have been
a very disconcerting thought for sure.

Again, I'm not trying to say that in a way
that implies that I did such a good thing.

It's just one of those things that startles me,

and always did, in Tim's movies,
for some reason, more than others.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure I heard reiterated...

Pee-wee's Big Adventure I heard reiterated
many times and then Beetlejuice again.

But nothing like Edward Scissorhands,
that ten years after would still be appearing

in such odd places
that I would never expect it.

But I guess
that's the funny thing about film music.

You don't know who's going to notice it, or
if it's going to come and evaporate in the air

as quickly as a blink of the eye,
which happens so many times,

or if they're going to stick around
and last for decades.

It's all so incredibly random,

especially because the ones that stick around

often aren't the ones that one would imagine.

It's never what you think it is at the time.

This next cue with the ice dance

was really always
one of the major focuses of the score.

Early on I knew that it was going to define
how I would play the beginning of the movie

and how I would play the end of the movie.

It's also a cue that, for many people, I think
kind of epitomises the heart of the score.

And it was a big challenge for me.

I kind of felt that was a big scene
that was really important

and I took quite a few passes at it, actually.

Since I wrote this sequentially,

I was relieved
that I had this next cue coming up,

cos I was starting to write these long,
drawn-out cues that were very dark.

And it was coming to a rampage.

What's more fun than that?

That was an original composition
by the actress, by the way.

It's a lovely piece of music,
but I didn't write it.

Now, I believe there's a number of cues
which are going to kind of overlap.

Much of the score tends to do that
around this section of the movie,

which of course presents its own challenges.

Often the quiet cues
are really the hardest ones to write.

They're under dialogue and have to stay out
of the way, but they have to bring a tone to it

and that's actually a much more difficult
type of scene to write than a rampage.

That's definitely a favourite sequence of mine.

The tenderness between Kim and Edward
and the variations.

What I was able to do with the theme around
the two of them and their tender moment

was actually probably my greatest challenge
in the entire score.

Keeping it sweet and light,

the innocence and romanticism
mixed together,

working into the death
of Vincent Price's character.

These last few sequences were so tricky.

The death of Vincent Price's character and
also when Edward saves Kim's little brother.

The music had to take us in a different
direction than what we were seeing.

It was too easy to interpret that he might be
hurting Vincent Price when he cuts his face,

or that he might be hurting the boy,
which he's not doing.

And the music had to play
away from that direction,

to help the audience understand
that he meant no harm,

that when he touched Vincent's cheek,
it's out of affection, even though he cuts him.

And when he's over the little boy, he's not
trying to hurt him, he's trying to help him.

We had concerns
we were addressing in the music

which hopefully helped a little bit.

One of my shortcomings as a composer

is that I tend to almost relate too much
and get too involved in a weird way

when I'm scoring the music in a movie.

And my own mood tends to actually follow
the direction of what I'm writing.

I know, during the whole last act
of this movie,

I got in a very weird, dark mood
which I couldn't shake.

I used to get all emotional when I was writing
that whole segment and leading into this.

I feel silly saying it,

but movies can make me mushy
when I'm working on them.

This one definitely mushed me up.

I'll really be forever grateful that I was
able to write the score to this movie.