Danny Elfman Breaks Down Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s Biggest Musical Moments
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The post Danny Elfman Breaks Down Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s Biggest Musical Moments appeared first on Consequence.
Some people might take a little bit of a break, after headlining Coachella. But Danny Elfman didn’t have the luxury of time off. “I had multiple projects going at the same time and you know, none of their time clocks stopped for me to do Coachella,” the composer and artist tells Consequence. “So I ended up really jumping in without a break — the second weekend, I drove from Coachella directly to Costa Mesa for a 10:30 dress rehearsal, for a percussion concerto played on Sunday. There was really no time to chill.”
Still, Elfman was full of energy as we spoke via phone about his work, both past and present, as he recently reunited with long-time friend Sam Raimi to compose the score for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. While the film marks the director’s return to superheroes after over a decade, it’s a genre of cinema Elfman still knows well, as his legacy includes iconic themes for Spider-Man, Hulk, Darkman, and of course, the movie which gave birth to the modern superhero film as we know it: Tim Burton’s Batman.
As Elfman explains below, the 1989 action film is still, to date, the toughest project he’s ever worked on, due to his relative inexperience at the time and the involvement of mercurial producer Jon Peters. But it proved to be the beginning of a thrilling career, with Multiverse of Madness just the latest evidence of his talents.
In this interview, transcribed and edited for clarity, Elfman reflects on the experience of making Batman and breaks down some of the most exciting musical moments from his work on Doctor Strange. He also reveals why he has a pretty small team of employees, despite working on numerous projects simultaneously.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.]
In preparing to talk with you today, I was looking over everything you’ve got going on. And I was curious how many people there are in your sphere right now, whose job it is to just help you get done everything you have to get done?
I keep a really small crew. I’ve always been proud of having one of the smallest groups in my business — I just have an assistant who does my coordinating of meetings and stuff, And I have a studio assistant that works on making sure I’ve got the right kind of video and music and files going in and out. But other than that you know, it’s mostly on me. If it’s a film project, there’s usually a music editor that’s helping coordinate stuff. Stuff that’s like concerto classical music, it’s really just me and-or my orchestrator that I might be working with. Just us, no one else. Team Elfman is like the tiniest team in town. And I kinda like to keep it that way.
I know that with other composers, a lot of people can be involved in the process.
Yeah. But it’s also one of my criticisms of the process where it currently is. There’s too many people making it too much of a team effort.
Why do you feel like that’s an issue?
It’s only an issue that it’s becoming normal for composers to not necessarily do their own work, but to oversee a team that’s doing it. They’re acting more as a supervisor or manager than a composer. And I just think that doesn’t yield the most personalized results. I’m very old school in that sense. I don’t look at composition as a big group effort. You have a couple people you work with that you work and trust… It’s just how I prefer working, is keeping it very small.
Speaking of old school, I’m officially here to talk to you about Doctor Strange, but I want to first go back to your early days as a composer. When you were first taking on projects like Batman, did you have a sense at that time that superheroes would become a sweet spot for you?
No, I had no idea. You know, when I did Batman, it was just Tim [Burton]’s latest movie, and I was trying to come up with something, you know, that’s not Beetlejuice and not Pee Wee. I had no clue about anything, in terms of what was coming down the line.
When you were approaching Batman, what was exciting for you about that project? What were the things you were excited to play with there?
Well, everything, I mean, I’d only done a few films and I had no experience, so it was really diving off the deep end into a realm that I was just barely, barely technically able to accomplish. It was really so outside of my comfort zone and wheelhouse at that moment, of being the comedy quirky guy, you know, and I’d only done nine films and they were all like comedy. So, you know, this was my first time doing something that wasn’t a comedy.
Also, this was my first time doing a big movie. Everything I’d done up to that point, with Tim included, we had been so far under the radar that nobody was paying any attention to the music. I mean, believe me when I say in Beetlejuice and Pee-wee, nobody was really paying attention. They were small movies with low budgets and the music was just like there. I never had to play music for producers or executives or anything.
And then suddenly I’m on this big show and I have Jon Peters and the studio and a lot of skepticism if I’m really able to do this, and a lot of pushback in terms of what the score should be, and resistance. Even after like 110 films, it probably was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
There was a point where Tim was not yet really a powerful player, and there was a moment where the producer wanted the score to be a collaboration. His first thought was collaborating with Michael Jackson and Prince and George Michael.
For a score, that feels like an awful lot.
Well, any kind of collaboration, you know, was an awful lot. It finally came down to would I collaborate with Prince? And we kinda, we hit a bypass, kind of an obstacle because I love Prince’s music, but I did not want to co-write a score with him because I already knew what the score was in my mind and I felt that I would end up being a glorified orchestrator you know, because Prince was so huge at the time, and I was like nothing.
So I had to refuse and it was a thing. So there was a period of time where I actually had to walk away from the movie, before I was asked to come back again, and it was hard. Talk about feeling like you just ended a career just as it was starting. That really is how I felt. But I was stubborn and I held out and ended up getting to do the score that I wanted to do. Prince did the songs. I did the score. That’s how I saw it going — not co-writing the score.
It was just an exceptionally hard project and I was just glad to have come through it. But I’ve not experienced anything like that since. It was kind of a unique pivoting turning point in my life, where I had to commit, do I really want to do this film thing? And if so, on what basis am I willing to go with it? I had to decide right then and there, what my attitude towards [composing] was.
Because up to that point, it’d been just like fun and games. It was kind of like a side job. I was in a band and I would try to do one or two scores each year around the band’s schedule and suddenly I was faced with this moment where I had to decide, “Is this really what I want to do?” And it was like a big thing for me. Really up until Batman, it was still like me just goofing around, having fun. And then from Batman, it was kind of like, all right. I actually really want to commit to this.
Do you remember if there was a moment in the process of working on Batman where you played your score for somebody and they were like, “Oh right. This is exactly what it should be like?” Some moment of validation like that?
Yeah. There was a big moment where I was back on the project, and I was presenting music to Jon Peters for the first time. Tim was there, and at that point, I didn’t know how to do a good presentation, how to lay out what to hear in what order so they understand it. So I was playing all this shit and and John is still looking totally confused. And then Tim says to me, “Play the march, play the march.”
What he meant is what became the title piece, because it’s kind of done to a march beat. I put that on and Jon suddenly just transformed and he actually started conducting in the air, and Tim looked at me and I looked at him and it was like, “We made it.” He really transformed from an adversary, up until that point, to an ally.
And [Peters] was like, “You know what, we’re going to do two soundtrack albums.” Because at that point, there was not even going to be a score release for the soundtrack, but he says, “We’re going to do two soundtrack albums.” And I thought, “Yeah, sure, no one’s ever done that. That’s not going to happen. He’s just bullshitting me.” And he then did. I think it was probably the first time a movie released two separate soundtrack albums, one with the songs from prince, you know, which was obviously the big one and the other, the score as a separate album.
So Jon went from, “Who the fuck is this Elfman guy, this comedy guy on my film? Who doesn’t want to collaborate with one of the greatest artists on the planet?” to “Oh my God, we’re going to put this out on record and it’s going to be great.” He ended up becoming a big ally, and it was a real moment.
And I learned also from that, okay, next time I’m playing music for a producer, get my shit together and organize it. Start with the simple stuff, and then work up to the more complex stuff. And, you know, help them to understand what it is. at that point, I just didn’t know it. Thank God Tim was there.
So, fast-forwarding to today — when a new superhero project like Doctor Strange comes your way, what’s your initial approach to it? What are the first things you do in figuring out what you want the score to sound like?
That part of it it’s really no different for any film, whether it’s superheroes or if it’s a drama or if it’s a fantasy. The first thing is just figuring out what is the tone of the movie. I mean, always that’s that same first question. So the fact that it’s superheroes, it may or may not push me into a style of writing where I’m defining a good guy or hero theme or a villain theme, in the sense that you’re being a little more black and white with it, a la Star Wars.
This goes back to early film scoring, you know, your “villain walks in the room” theme. So I’m more likely to approach it that way simply with the themes, where in a drama, I’m going to mix — I still love writing thematically, but I’m rarely going to follow a theme exactly with a certain character, for the plane of a tone in the film.
But yet, here in Doctor Strange, I didn’t quite approach it that way — well, maybe I did, because interestingly, Wanda is the antagonist, but she’s hardly a Darth Vader, you know what I mean? She’s also heartbreaking at the same time. So it was a kind of a unique thing where, okay, the villain is also somebody that we love and we feel for, and I want to both make her feel powerful and awesome and scary, but also heartbreaking and tender. Because the character’s really both.
So it was a little bit unique in that way, that my antagonist was somebody that at the same time, I felt for so much. It’s very unique. I’ve never seen a movie like this, where the whole entire goal of the antagonist, while the world is at stake, is simply getting her children back. I mean, you can’t think of another film where that’s the motivating force of your quote villain.
There are a lot of good moments that I really like — one where she confronts Strange and goes, you know, “You break the rules and you’re a hero. I break the rules and I’m a villain. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?” My favorite line in the movie is, Strange goes to her and he says, “Wanda, you don’t have children. You made those with magic.” And Wanda just goes, “That’s what every mother does.” I love that response. It was really an interesting dynamic.
In all the superhero movies I do, my sympathy, scoring-wise, is always going to be with the tragic villain, whoever that is. They’re the ones that are usually the most interesting characters to follow. In this movie in particular, there was just such tragedy following our antagonist. The Joker in Batman and the Green Goblin and Doc Ock in Spider-Man, they were much more clearly okay. They’re out to do nasty stuff — there’s still tragedy in them, but it’s more clearly they’re out to create havoc in the world.
Wanda was kind of a fun, unique character to write for, and I just enjoyed writing for her so much. I mean, I enjoyed writing the whole score — it’s always great working with Sam. He just encouraged me to play the emotional side of the score and that was just such a pleasure, because that’s what I enjoy most.
Absolutely. When you’re taking on a project like this, where, score-wise, there are precedents — like, there’s a whole other score for Doctor Strange, not to mention some of the other themes this film uses — how much do you look to what came before?
It was really very simple — in the spotting we talked about, “Oh, let’s use the original Doctor Strange theme here, here, and here. Let’s use the Captain America theme over Captain Britannia here.” And there was a request to put a little bit of the X-Men animated series theme in for Professor X. For me, that stuff is just fun. I enjoy kind of twisting around other people’s themes, and I happen to be a believer that fans love stuff like that. You know, if they’ve already seen the movie and they already know the theme of the character, hearing little homages to those characters in there is a treat.
To me, you don’t get enough of that in these movies because directors seem so intent on, “No, we will never refer to the previous version of this because it’s somebody else’s.” It almost becomes like a pissing contest, you know. Whereas, to a fan, it’s a delight to have a moment where you’re coming back to an earlier theme with the character that you know. It’s like, oh, cool. Yeah, there’s that thing. And so I… Conceptually, I think that’s a good thing to do then. And I think it’s now we’re kind of embracing that concept. And so it was pretty simple.
Speaking of playing with other people’s music, I have to ask you about the music fight — talk me through your involvement in creating that sequence.
That was a concept that came together a little more generally and then got focused down. It went through a number of configurations — the first thing I did was just score it, like direct score, knowing that there’d be these elements, which I recorded separately, of Bach and Beethoven. First I used like half a dozen classical pieces, because the idea is they’re fighting with these classical pieces off the music stands, so at first I did “Night on Bald Mountain” and two or three other things.
Then I had a request from Kevin Feige: “Could you make it just one composer versus another, Bach versus Beethoven?” So then I redid it and made it Beethoven’s Fifth fighting Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
That was really done at the very last second, kind of crazy close to the release. It was an idea, and then Kevin heard it and he said, “We need to condense this down and make it like this.” We just banged into another session and recorded it, and then a day later it’s being dubbed in the movie. It was really fun to do, obviously.
Was this something that was there from the script phase?
No, it actually wasn’t in the original script. They went back and they added some scenes — it was like a second round thing. I don’t know who originated the concept — if it was Sam or the writers or Kevin, or all of them. But I know that it was later on, it’s like, “Danny, we’ve got this new scene. People are really going to love it. Battle of musical notes.” What composer’s not going to have fun with that?
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is in theaters now.
Danny Elfman Breaks Down Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s Biggest Musical Moments
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