Saturday Night at the Movies

by Jenny Nelson

  Despite the added pressure to perform, and the challenge of creating an ‘action’ score, the main theme is considered one of Elfman’s best. Burton had asked for a dark, orchestral score, and this certainly fits the bill, starting eerily before gathering pace and power, with a robust performance by the orchestra as they hurtle towards the final cymbals. When compared to the typical crash-bang-wallops of many superhero scores, it is a classy affair, and rightly received a Grammy Award. Batman was a box-office hit, one of the first films to earn $100 million in its first ten days of release, and it changed the face of superhero movies with its blend of darkness and action. It was also one of the first films to offer two soundtracks, with music by either Elfman or Prince: Burton had originally asked Prince to write two songs for specific scenes, but the so-called ‘Purple One’ ended up writing more. On reflection, the director is not convinced: ‘I don’t think those songs work. It doesn’t have anything to do with Prince’s music; it has to do with their integration into the film.’

  Elfman’s music, however, fitted well, and the two returned for Batman Returns (1992), with the director agreeing to the role on the condition he would have more creative control. It was another financial success but received some criticism for veering further into darker and more violent realms. Burton enjoyed working with Elfman’s themes for the characters, especially for Michelle Pfeiffer’s transformation from Selina Kyle into Catwoman, and the composer has a soft spot for the music he wrote to accompany the Penguin’s death, admitting it can bring him to tears despite the oddity of the scene, as Danny DeVito’s character is lowered into the water by baby penguins. Yet while they are fond of particular cues with the benefit of hindsight, at the time it was a strained scoring process: they were working with a major studio and a larger budget, and the associated pressures that can come with both. The hits kept coming, but the cracks were starting to appear in their relationship.

  In between Batman and Batman Returns, Burton and Elfman worked on Edward Scissorhands (1990), arguably their definitive collaboration, in which both director and composer are at the height of their powers.

  Tim Burton has made no secret of his unhappy childhood and a feeling from an early age that he didn’t belong. As a teenager, he had drawn a picture of a thin man with blades for fingers. Fast-forward a decade or so, and he developed a gothic fairy tale about this character with Caroline Thompson, then a young novelist, who would go on to work with Burton on The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride. He has said this was a personal tale for him and while he was resolute about many aspects of the film – such as sticking with his first choice, Johnny Depp, to play the title role despite studio pressure to choose another actor – he gave Elfman space to create the score. His faith in the composer’s instinctive ability removed the need for detailed directorial briefs and discussion: ‘Danny and I don’t even have to talk about it. We don’t even have to intellectualise – which is good for both of us, we’re both similar that way.’ Some composers would struggle without specific steers or clarity from the director, but while leaving Elfman to get on with the job might feel like a risk on Burton’s part, such a hands-off approach clearly works for these two.

  Elfman has described the lack of a temp score as a good thing – leaving him free to jump into the composing process without preconceptions: ‘I rarely end up writing anything I set out to write. Edward Scissorhands certainly was a case in that I didn’t know where to begin, so I just started writing these melodies and I came up with these two themes and I sat down with Tim and I played them both and he says, “Oh, I like them both.” We tried to talk about which one is Edward’s theme and then we [each] said, “Both of them!” And I said, “Yeah, why not, there’s no rules” – there’s absolutely no rules – and so it’s a weird score. No other characters have a theme. Edward has two! There’s no rhyme or reason to it, it just felt right. Now later I can go, “Well, one ties in with the story and one ties in with the fairy tale and this character and that character”, but there was no intention of this at the time. It just happened.’

  He has described scoring Edward Scissorhands as ‘a really cool process of being left alone with Tim. Nobody was watching over our shoulders, nobody even seemed concerned that we were even writing a score or working on the music. We were just two weird guys working on our own, under the radar and everything.’ The resulting music feels magical but melancholic, creating an otherworldliness from the opening ‘Introduction’ to the much admired and imitated ‘The Grand Finale’, which twinkles like a mournful ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. Elfman’s trademark mischief is toned down to make way for the awestruck wonder of the chorus, and it makes for a beautiful stand-alone listening experience.

  It’s not surprising that this is one of the composer’s favourite scores, but he wasn’t wholly convinced at the time: ‘When I wrote that score, my first feeling about it was that I’d done a terrible job. It didn’t feel like a real score, and I thought I was going to get killed for that one. And that’s why it’s more amazing that it became one of my most well-known scores, but I really had no confidence whatsoever that I’d done a good job on it till years later, starting to hear other renditions of it and then I thought maybe it was OK because it seems like I’m hearing all kinds of variations on it. But I didn’t feel that as I was writing it, and I don’t actually think I ever do, so I’ll settle for: “It came out interesting.”

  ‘By the way, that’s the highest compliment I’ve ever heard Tim say about one of his own works: “I think this one came out pretty interesting.”’

  As with Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton came up with the concept for The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) when he was younger. In this case it was a poem, written when he was working at the Disney animation department. He considered making the tale of Jack Skellington, a resident of ‘Halloween Town’ who finds himself in ‘Christmas Town’, into a children’s book and showed his storyboarded ideas to animator Henry Selick. However, Burton then left the studio and plans were halted, but he returned to the idea later on, and produced the stop-motion animation film with Selick in the director’s chair due to Burton’s commitments on Batman Returns.

  The Nightmare Before Christmas feels very much a part of the Tim Burton world in its aesthetic and tone despite not being directed by him. That the film is a dark delight and remains a seasonal favourite in many households is due in no small part to Elfman’s catchy tunes that toy with musical expectations of what sounds ‘scary’ and ‘Christmassy’, often playing the two off against each other. The ‘Overture’ starts with festive brass and bells before taking us somewhere altogether more eerie, and the driving pulse of ‘Christmas Eve Montage’ is reminiscent of his Beetlejuice score with its runaway pace, but the songs, featuring lyrics and rhymes by Burton, offer the stand-out moments. Elfman provided the vocals for Jack, capturing his confusion at stumbling into Christmas in ‘What’s This?’, and the hummable motif of this cue is woven throughout the score. Another highlight is ‘Town Meeting Song’, when Jack describes the festive celebrations he’s seen, and this features the composer’s favourite lyric by Burton: when the townspeople wonder what might be wrapped up in a present box, one speculates ‘perhaps it’s the head that I found in the lake’.

  The process of bringing the film to life is significant in demonstrating Elfman’s contribution to Burton’s projects; this is definitely not a case of tacking the music on at the end. Burton had originally asked Beetlejuice writer Michael McDowell to expand his three-page poem into a feature-length script, and when he wasn’t happy with the results, he decided to approach the story from a musical angle, and brought Elfman on board.

  ‘We’d worked together so much that it didn’t matter that we didn’t know what we were doing; at least we knew each other,’ states Burton, recalling, ‘I would go over to his house and we would just treat it like an operetta . . . where the songs are more ingrained in the story. I would begin to tell him the story and he’d write a song; he wrote the
m pretty quickly, actually, at least the initial pass on them.’ The two fleshed out a storyline, the composer started to write the songs, and then Selick and the animators began to create the visuals – all before Caroline Thompson was involved in writing the screenplay.

  During this process, Elfman drew parallels between his continued role as frontman of Oingo Boingo and the character of Jack Skellington: ‘I was the singer and the songwriter, so, in a way, I was the king of my own little kingdom. But I desperately wanted out. I wanted something else. So as I was creating songs for Jack and writing those parts, I was also kind of writing from my own heart and where I felt at that time . . . I wrote most of everything in about thirty days with Tim, but when I recorded the demos with him, I finally said, “Tim, I almost couldn’t bear it if someone else was singing these songs.” And he said, “No, don’t worry. They’re your songs.”’

  The scoring process for The Nightmare Before Christmas sounds creatively fulfilling but the jumbled chronology of storywriting, composing, scriptwriting and production strained Burton and Elfman’s partnership further. A break may have been on the cards, given the build-up of creative pressures both were under. As Burton later reflected, ‘I think he was mad at me from Nightmare. Nightmare was hard because between Danny, Henry and Caroline, we were like a bunch of kids, fighting.’ When Burton started planning his next project, the biopic of real-life director Ed Wood, who was considered by some as ‘the worst director of all time’, he didn’t ask Elfman to come along for the ride, but invited Howard Shore instead. In an interview during the post-production of Ed Wood, Burton said, ‘We’re taking a little vacation from each other.’

  As the composer put it two decades later, ‘We had a two-year falling-out which I think was inevitable with our personalities.’ Audiences can be grateful that it turned out to be a short-term separation. Looking back, it might have been a necessary hiatus: ‘We lucked out because we talked early on. We used to joke we’d end up like Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock and they had a famous falling-out which they never patched up. And then that happened with Tim and me. But I had a very volatile temper and Tim is particularly strange and it was a fantastic lesson for me, because I think it had to happen somewhere, and it happened there. It was at the end of The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’d worked two years on it, and was then finishing Batman Returns in the middle of that, and it was really an intensive time.’

  When they reconciled a few years later, Burton was similarly realistic about the split: ‘I think it was just one of those times when, like in any relationship, we just needed a break, and it was probably good for all of us. Danny works with many different people, so I think every now and then it’s worth trying something new, and I enjoyed working with Howard.’

  For Elfman it taught him an important lesson about the collaborative process and how personality and ego can interfere, and about his own methods of dealing with creative conflict and pressure: ‘When I feel these feelings coming up, I try to imagine I’m looking at myself through a telescope. I back it up, back it up again, back it up a third time, and look again at what’s happening. Nine out of ten times I’ll go, “Oh, you know what, from back here it looks like a serious thing for a minute. It doesn’t look like it’s worth all that, is it?” And you go, “No, it’s not.” That lesson has helped me many times. I think it’s part of the process of a volatile personality learning to adjust to reality.’

  While they share similar outlooks and sensibilities, this partnership may differ from the others in this book because Elfman is a performer first and a film composer second. Would many lead singer-songwriters be willing to take direction or constructive criticism without putting up a bit of resistance? Other composers here have acknowledged their position within the film-making process and deferred to the vision of the director, but the Burton–Elfman partnership appears to be on more of an equal footing – and, for that very reason, one with more potential to become fractious.

  Elfman, however, is not alone in offering this significant analogy for their relationship: ‘It’s like being in a marriage. Lots of little things can happen and we had many little things in those years and then something is the straw that breaks the camel’s back and it’s usually not that big of a thing. Someone says something the wrong way and suddenly there’s just a huge fight. And the thing with Tim and I was very much like family; I’ve had huge fights with my brother but he’s my brother, and when the chips are down, that’s who I turn to. And losing Tim for that period of time, I’d actually felt like I lost a brother, a sibling, and it felt when we came back together like, “Oh, patched things up in the family, it’s as it should be.”’

  Based on the trading card series of the same name, Mars Attacks! (1996) was a homage to sci-fi B-movies like It Came from Outer Space and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. Another composer had already been hired but, according to Elfman, Burton had a change of heart: ‘The story I got from the producer was they were sitting in a hotel together and Batman Returns came on. They both watched it and at the end Tim said, “Danny should be doing this film, shouldn’t he?” And the producer called my agent, my agent called me and said, “Would you ever speak with Tim again?” Probably the next day I was on a plane for Kansas, and we met in a coffee shop and just said, “We won’t speak of this.” There was no talking it out, Tim’s not that way, he’s just like, “Let’s never speak of this again, let’s just start from scratch.” And we did.’

  Cue sighs of relief all round for fans of the Burton–Elfman alchemy, although, admittedly, Mars Attacks! is unlikely to be considered the zenith of their collaboration history. Receiving a mixed reception from critics despite a starry cast, it has retained some cult appeal, and it allowed the composer to experiment with music to match the B-movie setting, incorporating the theremin and wearing its Herrmann influences, most notably The Day the Earth Stood Still, with pride.

  Over the next two decades, the pair honed their skills and styles, creating gothic, supernatural and fantasy worlds of varying dramatic proportions with the likes of Sleepy Hollow (1999), Big Fish (2003), Corpse Bride (2005), Dark Shadows (2012) and Frankenweenie (2012). Burton has spoken of their ability to communicate through visuals rather than words, in that he shows Elfman footage which describes the emotions he wants the score to convey, but it shouldn’t be assumed that the partnership has evolved into a near telepathic state. Speaking to the Guardian in 2013, Elfman said, ‘People expect us to have some invisible shorthand but it never gets any easier. Tim is just as complex now, maybe more so. Every time I play music for him I’m as nervous as I was that first occasion. Countless times, I’ve played something and watched him just put his head in his hands and start pulling at his hair. With Tim, I’ve never been unhappy with where we’ve ended up, but most of the time we’ve had to spiral around quite a bit to get there.’

  Nearly a decade after the success of Batman and Batman Returns, Tim Burton tried his hand at contributing to another existing franchise, this time Planet of the Apes (2001). The reboot performed well at the box office but received criticism for its lighter tone in comparison with the 1968 film and suffered from production issues and last-minute script rewrites. The film was still being completed while Elfman was working on the score, so he was faced with the task of composing without seeing the final footage. He avoided the pressure of comparison with the original score by choosing not to nod to Jerry Goldsmith’s music, but instead continued with his tried-and-tested method of scoring a handful of key scenes in the film, testing those cues, and then filling in the gaps in chronological order.

  The end result doesn’t feel like a typical Elfman score, with its militaristic and efficiently layered sounds. He admits he still enjoys pushing himself and seeing where his music-making will take him: ‘I’m fuelled by the chance to do something I haven’t done before. Not every film can, not every score can, but I try, and every now and then I succeed . . . So I just wait for those moments where I could do something and it’s like, “Oh, th
at felt different.” I never know if it’s good, but it’s different.’

  Expectations were especially high for Burton’s version of Roald Dahl’s much-loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) because comparisons would inevitably be made with the popular 1971 film version, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but Elfman appears to have thrived on the pressure because his songs and score are bold, joyful and not a little bit bonkers. Burton, Elfman and Depp were also working on the stop-motion animation Corpse Bride at the same time, and the composer may have found it rejuvenating to juggle the two projects, especially as this was the first time since The Nightmare Before Christmas that he was contributing songs and his vocals to a Tim Burton film. He experimented with different styles for the songs about each of the children taking part in Wonka’s factory tour, as they are serenaded away following their demises. Layering his voice to portray all of the Oompa Loompas, he serves up a hyperactive Bollywood pastiche in ‘Augustus Gloop’ and the woozy pop number ‘Veruca Salt’, and he veers towards the unhinged with rock guitar and harmonies à la Queen in ‘Mike Teavee’.

  Other highlights from a soundtrack that fizzes with flavour include ‘Wonka’s Welcome Song’, a guaranteed earworm featuring high-pitched voices and a fairground organ that welcomes the guests to the factory. On its own, it’s a cracking singalong tune, but it’s worth experiencing with the film to witness puppets bursting into flames and a suitably macabre denouement, and it earned Elfman and screenwriter John August a Grammy nomination.

  Elfman’s and Burton’s next project together was based on another popular children’s book, this time Alice in Wonderland (2010) by Lewis Carroll. The visual nature of the story and the surreal characters within it must have been catnip to Burton, and his take on the beloved tale picked up the Academy Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design. Boasting a starry cast including Anne Hathaway and Burton regulars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, this is the director’s highest-grossing film to date, and was one of the biggest box-office successes of 2010. Elfman delivered a strong score, with ‘Alice’s Theme’ as a particular highlight, but the composing process was a tricky one, because again he had to score scenes that were not yet finished, so that Burton could fit them into last-minute edits. You wouldn’t know that from the finished product, however, because Elfman is more than adept at conjuring a score to accompany a journey of peril and wonder into the unknown.