Saturday Night at the Movies

by Jenny Nelson

  Burton and Elfman stepped into the unknown, with regard to their partnership, with the small-scale biographical drama Big Eyes (2014). Elfman is accustomed to scoring lower-budget films – for every Fifty Shades of Grey and The Girl on the Train he’ll compose The End of the Tour and Promised Land – but nearly three decades into his collaboration with Burton this was quite a change of pace. A refreshing one, according to him: ‘Big Eyes is like nothing I’ve done with [Burton] in the sense that the scale was so small, the budget was so limited. I mean, of course, the budget wasn’t big on Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, but it’s been a while since I’ve had a really tight low budget with Tim and it was fun!’

  Big Eyes is the most recent of Tim Burton’s directorial projects to receive the Danny Elfman scoring treatment. Fans of their partnership had been concerned at the news that Elfman was not scoring Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016), a job that went to Mike Higham and Matthew Margeson, but that was due to scheduling and availability as opposed to an Ed Wood-style separation. At the time of writing they are working on Disney’s live-action remake of Dumbo, which has the potential to be in the same league as their finest collaborations.

  While they have had clashes, there is a bond between them that has allowed the relationship to flourish over three decades. Burton clearly acknowledges how Elfman’s scores capture and embody the emotions of his films, and recognises that ‘The music is the guide post, it’s the tone and the context.’ He trusts the composer to create a complementary sound world to his vision, while Elfman attributes their successful alchemy to a shared outlook: ‘I think it’s a skewed sensibility about life in general. We grew up on many of the same influences. We’re both horror, fantasy kids growing up in Los Angeles, raised on movies. When I met Tim, one of my great film idols was the actor Peter Lorre and his was Vincent Price, and I realised later that that would actually define much of our relationship: Vincent Price was usually the master and the torturer, and Peter Lorre was always the tortured soul! But that says a lot about us: the same cheesy wonderful Roger Corman horror films that starred these two actors were among our favourites growing up.

  ‘But why it clicked? There’s no real answer to that.’ And that may be exactly how they want to keep it.

  Collaboration History

  Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

  Beetlejuice (1988)

  Batman (1989)

  Edward Scissorhands (1990)

  Batman Returns (1992)

  The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), produced by Tim Burton

  Mars Attacks! (1996)

  Sleepy Hollow (1999)

  Planet of the Apes (2001)

  Big Fish (2003)

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

  Corpse Bride (2005), co-directed by Mike Johnson

  Alice in Wonderland (2010)

  Dark Shadows (2012)

  Frankenweenie (2012)

  Big Eyes (2014)

  Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016), produced by Tim Burton

  Suggested Playlist

  Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Overture (The Big Race)

  Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Breakfast Machine

  Beetlejuice, Main Titles (Beetlejuice)

  Beetlejuice, The Aftermath

  Batman, The Batman Theme

  Batman, Love Theme

  Edward Scissorhands, The Grand Finale

  Edward Scissorhands, Ice Dance

  Batman Returns, Birth of a Penguin Parts 1 and 2

  Batman Returns, Selina Transforms Parts 1 and 2

  The Nightmare Before Christmas, What’s This?

  Mars Attacks!, Introduction and Main Titles

  Sleepy Hollow, Main Titles

  Planet of the Apes, Main Titles

  Planet of the Apes, Ape Suite #2

  Big Fish, Sandra’s Theme

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wonka’s Welcome Song

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Augustus Gloop

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Veruca Salt

  Corpse Bride, The Piano Duet

  Corpse Bride, Tears to Shed

  Alice in Wonderland, Alice’s Theme

  Dark Shadows, We Will End You!

  Frankenweenie, Mad Monster Party

  Frankenweenie, Happy Ending

  Big Eyes, Who’s the Artist?

  Big Eyes, Margaret

  Alice Through the Looking Glass, Looking Glass

  Of the five films J.J. Abrams has directed, four of them – Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek, Super 8 and Star Trek: Into Darkness – have been scored by Michael Giacchino. There is a valid reason why Giacchino didn’t work on the fifth: that was Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the unbreakable laws of the cinematic universe dictate that composing duties for the galaxy far, far away belong to John Williams and to John Williams alone. That is, unless we’re in the galaxy for a stand-alone spin-off film, in which case someone else can use the musical force. Step forward Giacchino with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, directed by Gareth Edwards.

  Four out of five is a pretty good innings, yet the Abrams–Giacchino partnership extends further than Abrams’ feature-length directorial projects. The two have collaborated on television dramas Alias, Lost and Fringe and Giacchino has scored films co-produced by Abrams such as Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Star Trek Beyond.

  Regular collaboration is vital to their individual and collective successes, Giacchino has explained: ‘I work with the same guys over and over again. Rarely do I step outside of the circle of directors who I love dearly, because I know that they’re always going to challenge me, they’re always going to ask something different and allow me to do something different.’ (Giacchino has a characteristically engaging manner; he almost pinches himself with glee when talking about his work.)

  Giacchino has achieved the rare feat of avoiding being typecast as a composer, due partly to the variety of the projects he’s worked on with Abrams, but also thanks to his long-term relationship with Disney Pixar. His first feature-length score for them was The Incredibles in 2004, the first of his five collaborations to date with director Brad Bird, and he’s also notched up various projects with directors Matt Reeves, Colin Trevorrow, Pete Docter and the Wachowskis.

  Abrams’ regular collaborators include Bryan Burk, the co-founder of his production company Bad Robot, writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof, actors Greg Grunberg and Simon Pegg, and editors Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey, but he has not forged a long-term working partnership with any other composer. Unlike most directors, Abrams also composes music for the screen and has created or contributed to themes for television shows including Alias, Lost and Person of Interest. In fact, his first film job, aged sixteen, was as composer and special-effects contributor on a sci-fi horror called Nightbeast (1982). As a result he perhaps has a greater appreciation than most of the power of music on screen, describing a score as ‘a window into the scope, the scale, and the soul of the piece’.

  Abrams and Giacchino were born just over a year apart, in June 1966 and October 1967 respectively. The young Jeffrey Jacob Abrams, as the son of a television producer and executive producer, had the more natural entry to the world of film-making, but he has described a tour of Universal Studios with his grandfather as the moment when he caught the movie bug. He was eight years old, and from then on he started to experiment with his parents’ camera. Film music was also a source of fascination for him, and he described on the eve of the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens how, as a young boy, ‘I would lie on the floor of my room with headphones on, listening to scores of films, often films I hadn’t seen, and very often scores that John Williams had written. And those were full stories; I would close my eyes and I would see the whole story. I’d look and see what the cue was called, and put together what was happening. I got it right sometimes and not quite right other times, but the music told the story.’

  Giacchino was also in thrall to Williams’ wor
k from an early age, and credits his parents for allowing him to follow his passions: ‘They said . . . “You want to make movies? Here’s my movie camera, I have no idea how to tell you what to do with it, but let’s try and figure it out.”’ In his delightful acceptance speech at the Academy Awards in 2010 when he won the Best Original Score Oscar for the Disney Pixar hit Up, Michael said, ‘I know there are kids out there that don’t have that support system, so if you’re out there and if you’re listening . . . if you want to be creative, get out there and do it, it’s not a waste of time. Do it!’

  Giacchino studied film production at the School of Visual Arts in New York before focusing on music at the prestigious Juilliard School, and his early training may be an indicator as to why he and Abrams are such a successful collaborative unit: just as Abrams’ first-hand experience as a composer informs his response to scores, Giacchino’s background of making home movies followed by studying the craft of film-making allows him to fully appreciate the roles of a producer and director. The result is a true meeting of minds, with each acknowledging the skills that the other brings to the project.

  Abrams was in college when he wrote and sold his first screenplay – the 1990 comedy Taking Care of Business, released in the UK under the somewhat outdated title of Filofax. Before the dawn of the new millennium, he had co-written the weepy Bruce Willis sci-fi hit Armageddon and successfully pitched the first of his television hits, the college drama Felicity. Co-created by Abrams and Matt Reeves, it ran for four seasons and Abrams was an executive producer, writer of seventeen episodes, director of two, as well as the theme music co-composer. It’s safe to assume he doesn’t do things half-heartedly.

  Giacchino took a slightly less conventional route, earning his stripes in the world of video games. He built a strong reputation within this increasingly competitive market, and soon he was working on high-profile projects such as DreamWorks Interactive’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park PlayStation game (one of the first console titles to be recorded with an original live orchestral score, an experience that must have been invaluable when he signed up to score Jurassic World years later) and the Medal of Honour series, created by Steven Spielberg.

  However, Giacchino had immersed himself so well in the world of video games that he was at risk of being pigeonholed: ‘No one would hire me in TV because they thought I was a video-game guy, and it took somebody like J.J., who listened to the music that I did for the games, to say, “Oh, we should work with him.”’ Abrams had been developing a new show, Alias, with college friend Jesse Alexander, a huge video-games fan who recommended Giacchino. After their first meeting, Abrams knew he didn’t need to contact any other composer: ‘It’s a weird thing to meet someone and feel so immediately in sync. Our life experiences were very different on one hand, but on the other hand we both loved movies in exactly the same way, so we hit the ground running.’

  Abrams was quick to recognise Giacchino’s ability, cementing their initial connection: ‘It got to a place incredibly early on during Alias when I realised that I didn’t have to spot music at all with him. Michael just knows where music should and shouldn’t be.’ The acclaimed show about a double agent ran for five seasons, but the duo had to wait a few more years for their breakthrough.

  Lost (2004–10) is consistently considered to be one of the greatest television dramas of the 2000s. Years later, Giacchino still sounded slightly incredulous at the impact of the story about a group of survivors from a plane crash on a mysterious tropical island: ‘Lost went to this place that I never expected. People all over the world know and love the show. I had never experienced that with something that I had worked on before, and it was really eye-opening.’

  Spanning six seasons, Lost attracted 16 million viewers an episode at its peak and was garlanded with critical praise and industry recognition. The pilot alone won four Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, for Abrams, and Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore) for Giacchino. The composer shared his first impressions: ‘I remember thinking, “Wow, what am I possibly going to do with this?” but I always have that experience. I think I don’t know what I’m going to do, but then when I watch it, I feel something and then I know what to do. It takes watching it and feeling something. The worst situation you can get yourself into is when you watch something and feel nothing. Those are the films you have to stay away from, because then it’s very difficult for me to write anything in that situation.’

  Giacchino was given creative freedom and enjoyed constructing what would become a definitive sound world, complete with unsettling sliding trombones and the use of plane fuselage within the percussion: ‘I could do whatever I wanted, and I felt that it was important to do something that didn’t sound like it was just another jungle score: “They’re in a jungle, so it’s got to sound like a jungle, and we’re gonna have shakuhachi flutes.” I didn’t want to do any of that nonsense. I wanted to come up with some strange ensemble that felt odd, that I could do weird things with. We had strings, trombones, harp, piano, percussion – and the percussion was very strange! – and that was it. We used that same ensemble for the entire run of the show. I remember someone at the studio said, “Shouldn’t we have flutes?” and I said, “No, if you do that, you’re going to make people comfortable, and this is a show about making people uncomfortable.”’

  This sparse ensemble created by Giacchino provided original music to respond to the twists, turns, plot developments and introductions – or demises – of the vast cast of characters. He estimates that he composed around 52 hours of music, because he scored a new episode every week, choosing not to ‘library’ the show (use pre-existing recordings) unlike many other television dramas: ‘It was important, I felt, that this should have an original score on every episode because the stories were so complicated and you never knew when a new character was going to come up . . . It was a sort of psychotic opera that was being created and everyone needed to have those themes. It was a way of helping the audience track everything – and helping me track everything!’

  Another bold decision by Giacchino was to score the music on a scene-by-scene basis, responding to the drama as it unfurled directly in front of him, without any spoilers or tip-offs from the writers and producers: ‘I refused to read any scripts, I didn’t watch any early cuts. I would get the show, and I would start with scene one and go in order . . . I had three days to do it, generally: you write and orchestrate it in three days, and on the fourth day you’re recording it, and on the fifth day maybe you get a day off, and then the next week you’re doing it all over again. It’s a hectic schedule but it was important for me to be reactive with the music because I felt like it’s a show that the audience is reacting to constantly, something that is being thrown at them, and I wanted the music to reflect that anxiety or that sadness or whatever it called for.’

  J.J. Abrams and Michael Giacchino during a scoring session for Star Trek: Into Darkness, 2013.

  Giacchino clearly relishes opportunities for spontaneity, finding in it both the chance to be creative and to have fun, and his unconventional approach paid off with Lost: choosing to remain in the dark about such a twist-filled storyline, in which most things the viewer is led to believe later turn out to be untrue, resulted in far greater musical impact, with the score reflecting the audience’s reaction as the story unfolded.

  For their first film collaboration, Abrams and Giacchino were entrusted with a franchise that was already known and loved by millions – themselves included. Mission: Impossible III (2006) was the first of a series of reboots that the two would work on together, based on original stories and characters that were already dear to them. Giacchino commented, ‘It is very strange to be in a place where the people who grew up loving those shows that other people made are now in charge of remaking them for a whole new audience’, but Abrams felt his television work on Alias and Lost had prepared him to inherit the action spy franchise, and he described the former as being l
ittle sister to Mission: Impossible III’s big brother. The composer was faced with the challenge of working with one of film’s most instantly recognisable pieces of music, Lalo Schifrin’s original theme.

  He decided to bite the bullet and give Schifrin a call: ‘He was a fan of The Incredibles, so he was very sweet and offered to meet me for lunch. So we met and I was talking with him and he says to me, “I really love The Incredibles”, and I was like, “Yes, but I want to talk about Mission: Impossible. I’m really worried about doing this movie, and I just want to talk to you about what should I do and what shouldn’t I do.” And he looked at me like I was crazy! From my point of view, it was like asking someone if I could marry their daughter, and it was a very nerve-racking thing for me, but he was the sweetest person and just said, “Go have fun with it!” and I did.’

  The earlier Mission: Impossible films had been scored by Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer, adding yet more pressure for Giacchino, but with Schifrin’s blessing he had the confidence to approach the existing theme on equal terms, a skill that would serve him well in future reboots, although he describes his work in a typically modest fashion: ‘I wanted his music to live amongst my music, and not just feel like we were slugging it in whenever we needed to have something punchy happen. I wanted – and I don’t think I succeeded – but I wanted to write music that lived up to what he did, and could live alongside it, which was a daunting task.’ The resulting score runs the gamut of emotions, from the plaintive piano and romantic strings in ‘Reparations’ to the ballsy action of ‘Helluvacopter Chase’, and it’s evident how much fun he had with the existing music in cues such as ‘See You in the Sewer’ and ‘Schifrin and Variations’.