Original subtitles

[MUSIC - DANNY ELFMAN]

What are you?

I'm Batman.

[YELLING AND GRUNTING]

You begin with a feeling of a tone.

My craziest story of how that happened

was on "Batman," because it hit me on a 747 coming home

from the Gotham City set.

And I was on the way home, and I heard the beginning

of the score, and I started to hear it

more than the beginning.

I started to hear this whole piece of music.

Now, unfortunately for me--

most of you who are listening to this should be able to just

take a piece of paper, take a napkin,

and go dg-dg-dg-dg-dg-dg-dg-dg-dg,

and you have it.

I can't do that.

I have no sense of solfege, meaning I can't just say,

(VOCALIZING).

OK, now on C, and then this is the [INAUDIBLE],, and here's--

I can't write without a keyboard.

For me to write, I have to have a keyboard.

And at that moment, it was just nothing but me and a Sony tape

recorder.

I had no keyboard.

I had no access to anything.

And so I couldn't make voice notes

next to the fucking guy sitting next

to me, because, I don't know, he just had that kind of vibe.

So I kept running into the bathroom.

And every time I'd come to the bathroom,

I would stay there about five minutes,

and I would do some notes, and try to-- now,

these bathrooms in the old 747s are really noisy.

And then I'd leave and I'd go back to my seat.

10 minutes, five minutes later, I'm back in the bathroom.

I open the door, and I come out, and there's a flight attendant.

Sir, are you OK?

I'm fine.

I'm fine!

Go back to my seat.

Five, 10 minutes later, I'm back in the bathroom again.

Doing more.

Doing more.

OK, I'm hearing it, I'm hearing it, I'm hearing it.

It's starting to make sense.

Open the door, there's two flight attendants.

And I did this, like, four or five times.

Now, this was pre-9/11, obviously.

But there was a point where I'd come out,

and now all the flight crew is sitting there,

and they're watching me really carefully.

And I knew that when the plane landed--

this is what they did in these days--

they played a piece of music, they

played a piece of composition or a pop song,

and it was going to erase my memory, because I was holding

onto it the whole flight.

And sure enough, the plane lands,

and they put on fucking "Yesterday" or "Hey Jude"

or something-- a memory eraser.

It's like one of those things that, oh, shit, not that.

No, not that.

Oh, not a Beatles song.

I'm-- it's gone.

That's it.

The song has totally embedded itself in my mind,

and this thing I was holding onto has evaporated to nothing.

And so I get home, I run down to my studio,

and I press the Play button, and now I'm hearing [BLOWING AIR]

a little bit of my voice in the background.

I'm going, oh, my god.

And I just a little bit and a little bit.

And then, finally, after listening for about 20 minutes,

the different parts--

French horns, trumpets, this is the low brass,

string ostinato--

it came back to me.

And it came-- that was, in fact, exactly the "Batman Theme"

as it plays in "Batman."

[MUSIC - DANNY ELFMAN, "BATMAN THEME"]

I learned after "Beetlejuice" that the best way

to go in and view a film for me--

I know this is different for every composer, but for me,

I try to picture the television screen in the beginning

of "Poltergeist"-- of course, the original "Poltergeist"--

on the end of the national anthem,

and the screen goes to snow, and it's kind of telling you this

is-- something's going to happen out of nothing.

That's how I put my mind when I go

to see a first cut of a movie.

I try to erase every preconceived idea

I had going into it, what I thought the score might be,

what the movie might be.

I try to look at it from a state of blank, absolutely blank.

And now as I'm watching what emerges from that,

and what emerges from that is going to be a tone.

And that's your job--

capture that tone.

Don't worry about the story yet.

Don't worry about characters and how

are you going to do this character or that character.

That's all down the line.

The most important thing you're going

to capture in a film score-- for many films at least,

not every film, they're all different--

is going to be the tone.

What is the tone of the film?

And get pulled into that.

Let the film instruct you.

I still believe it's the most important thing a film

score can bring to a film, because especially these days,

there's so many big scores that are

so orchestration on top of orchestration

on top of orchestration.

And I go, it sounds great, caught everything

it's supposed to catch, but I come away with nothing.

And I feel like they didn't give me

a tone uniquely for this film.

They just gave me the moments They gave me

the character, the thing, the antagonist, the protagonist.

Yeah.

That shit's easy.

[CALMING MUSIC]

The movie tells you where to go.

There's a number of elements in the movie that

tell you what type of music.

One of them is the camerawork.

If you're seeing that there's a lot of cross-dissolves,

if there's a lot of long shots, if things are moving

in a dreamy way from one thing into another,

it's a completely different score

than if you see the shots are hard cuts, hard cuts,

jolting you, bang, bang, bang.

If it's giving you a more gritty real feel,

clearly, you're not going to write something melodramatic.

You're going to go less old school

and look for something that feels right with that jarring

style.

If the style is very theatrical, and you almost--

sometimes as I'm writing with-- frequently with Tim Burton,

I almost feel like a curtain is opening on the next scene.

It tells me, musically, what I want to do with that,

because it's theatrical.

I want the music to feel effusive

and whatever the mood is of that moment

to capture the theatricality of how it feels.

The editing is incredibly important, again,

just like I'm describing, because it's

a combination of camerawork and editing,

how the camera and lighting is working.

Is the lighting feeling natural?

And of course, you can't forget the performances.

Performances will illustrate so much.

And that's where I saw "Beetlejuice,"

and I threw everything out, because I

saw what Michael Keaton was doing, how crazy he was acting

and the kind of schizophrenic, the way he moved,

the way he spoke, the way he kept shifting his tones.

That told me what to write.

I'm not writing something smooth and gentle.

It got to the point where when we were doing the main titles

to "Beetlejuice"--

it was just the beginning.

Tim doesn't like to use a lot of temp,

but they had a temp for the opening,

because it was a long shot of a gliding camera over a city.

And you're going to learn as we're

going that it's a model city.

And then, finally, we pull back and we're in this big model.

But because the camera was flying,

they wanted the music to fly.

And as soon as I saw the movie, I was going, screw that.

[MUSIC - DANNY ELFMAN]

This opening title is incredibly important,

because it has to telegraph not where the movie starts,

but where it's going to be in a second act,

because the second act is where the movie kicks into gear,

and it's going to stay.

Once Michael Keaton appears, it's

shifting into a different zone.

It's going to stay there till the end of the movie.

And I want to telegraph to the audience, that

is what you're getting.

But there's also moments where you

don't have anything specific.

You just have a feel and it's all muddled.

And this, I would say, is probably 70% of the films I do.

And it's just letting yourself start to fumble around on keys,

get in it.

I don't really know what I'm doing.

I'm not even playing specific melodies or ideas,

because I'm not even good enough on the piano

to sit down and play exactly what I'm thinking.

I'm just letting my fingers work.

And I'll try to come up with anywhere between three or four

and maybe a dozen of these ideas when I'm starting out,

because I'm starting with just I don't know what this is.

I'm not trying to make anything happen.

If I try, it's done.

It'll never happen.

You just have to give yourself to the moment.

It's just stepping off into nothing.

Those early ideas are really critical.

And grab the ones that have some potential-- even if you think,

this is all wrong--

and elaborate on it, turn it into something,

turn it into a little idea, into eight bars, into 16 bars,

into 24 bars if you can, and then put it aside,

move on to something else.

[MUSIC - DANNY ELFMAN]

I never in the beginning believe in trying to create a roadmap,

because I think that roadmap is going to be constricting down

the line.

I look for two to four moments in the film

that I'm going to put my energy into.

Sometimes there are really only two that sum it all up.

And sometimes, OK, it's four scenes.

And I'm going to put what seems like perhaps

an inordinate amount of time into those scenes,

because those scenes are going to be the--

kind of the turning points in the score.

They're going to define the score.

And of course, there's always going

to be something from the end of the movie,

because I need to always want to feel that I've got something,

if it's a thematic score, or if it's a tonal score, that I

could let it take me.

I don't want to find out at the end of a score

that what I've written just doesn't want to go there.

That's the worst situation to be in.

So sometimes it's just as simple as one big moment here

and one emotional moment here.

And once I've defined those, I'm confident enough

in what I've got that I literally go back to the top,

and I start scoring with no plan and no intention ever laid out

about what it is.

But I've got the elements in my mind.

I've got the major tonal thing.

I've got-- if it's a thematic score,

I've got my themes mostly defined.

When-- again, you look at a score as a jigsaw puzzle,

and you've defined the major areas of that jigsaw puzzle,

so you know where the big shots are going to be,

what you're trying to create, the rest of it should be fun.

It should be full of surprises.

And that's the moment that I wish for on every score

that I can get more of these moments

where the writing that I'm doing with my own hands

is leading me to where I'm going to go,

and I don't know what's around the next bend.

[MUSIC - DANNY ELFMAN]

Whether the story's animated or not animated

is irrelevant to me.

But there tends to be a style of animation which

can overlap with live action, and that would be,

for example, you're doing a superhero film,

you're doing a film that's based on a graphic novel with very

definable good guys and bad guys, and/or your animation

might clearly have delineated you're going to play characters

in a certain way that's very clear and simple, but not

necessarily.

It comes down to the style of the film.

If the style of the film is-- like, in "Star Wars"

is another great example.

When Darth Vader walks in, it's Darth Vader.

It's his theme.

It's like it follows the character.

And there's a moment when that's correct.

And particularly within a villain superhero,

that kind of genre, you tend to play,

OK, the villain is on screen.

Let's play his theme.

This just goes with the territory.

Now, in a drama, you don't want to do that.

In a serious story, you don't ever want to say,

this guy's bad.

You want to discover that.

You want to be very sneaky about what

you play over your protagonist.

But in something that's more of a cartoon, you're on the nose.

You're just saying, look, there's

nothing confusing about this guy with the black cloak

and the black mask and the voice that's distorted.

He's the bad guy!

There's nothing ambiguous about this. d And you just play it.

And animation, there's a crossover

where the two will definitely into the same zone.

But in animation, we could also find ourselves drifting

to something more heartfelt and serious

and something where we don't want to be on the nose.

So animation or live action doesn't dictate the answer

to that question, but how it's played does.

And how it's played can just as easily

be in live action or animation.

I never score to a younger or older audience.

I think you never have to worry about writing down,

I have to make this really simple for kids,

I have to make this really simple.

You don't.

It's like, you just have to do it well.

[MUSIC - DANNY ELFMAN]

When I get my first rough cut that I'm going to view,

the movie is generally pretty rough.

Now, that is also an extremely variable thing,

because I've come into movies that are almost done, finished.

When I came into "Silver Lining Playbook," the movie I saw

was pretty much the movie that was released.

There was some internal tweaking of stuff.

But I felt like it was 90% done.

Now, when I come on to one of Tim Burton's movies,

the movie's not even finished shooting.

He shows me a rough cut really early on.

He wants me to see the gist of it.

And they may still have not even shot the finale yet.

Either that or it's just been shot

and really rough assembled.

And what I'm looking at, I just have to remind myself.

this is a very first rough pass at the movie.

It's probably much longer than the film was going to be.

And if there are effects in the movie, there are none.

So I have to just imagine all that.

If it's an animation, I'm often seeing something beyond rough.

It's something where there's just a thing called animatics.

It's like sketches.

So you're really getting the gist

of the flow of the characters, and you're hearing usually

the real voices, but you're not seeing necessarily the movie.

When I first got "Alice in Wonderland," there was no set,

there was no nothing.

Sometimes it really looked like a kid's movie,

where you have a live actor and kind

of a sketched out background that somebody just

kind of put together.

It wasn't a problem, because I'm not scoring the backgrounds.

I'm really scoring the performances

and so even without anything around them,

I still got the story, Not only the story,

but the performances.

And I got a feel for the type of editing and movement of camera

movement that was going to be there.

So it actually was less of a problem

than one might think looking at something so absolutely

unfinished.

You got to remember, sometimes I'm

brought onto a film almost a year early.

And sometimes I'm brought onto a film

only five weeks before the scoring session.

And I've done plenty of both.