Aquí os queda una entrevisa que le hicieron a Danny Elfman en 2005 sobre su participación en Pesadilla antes de Navidad, ¿qué dice de su música y su película?
Dividida en dos partes, aquí os queda la primera parte
Enlace al traductor de Google: http://www.google.es/language_tools?hl=es
Q: The Nightmare Before Christmas has such a cult following. Any pressure in making The Corpse Bride?
Elfman: No. I was really glad. I worked really hard on Nightmare. You know, two and a half years. I wore so many hats on that thing. For it to have found an audience at all was really, really rewarding. Because you’ve got to remember, when it was coming out it considered dead in the water. I mean, the merchandising stopped cold in its tracks after the first preview, and they just had the feeling like, ‘We just want to cut our losses.’ You’re not really happy when at the premiere of a movie everyone’s just trying to cut their losses and run. So kind of getting through that, and over the next decade have it grow into something that… I mean, I was approached at airports and stuff by people. Really weird. I’ve done big movies and stuff — Batman, big movies… Spider-Man — but it was Nightmare stuff that people have [for me] to sign. The following is really hardcore. I just got back from Japan, and there’s Nightmare stuff all over the place. It’s really gratifying.
But no, I didn’t feel any pressure [with Corpse Bride]. I was just glad to have a shot at doing anything in this genre again, because I was afraid that after Nightmare that would be it. There’s not a lot of stop-motion stuff anymore, and I love stop-motion. So anything that can perpetuate stop-motion as an art form and keep it going, I just want to be a part of it. I have a fear of that nail in the coffin, that no one’s going to do this again.
Q: Mike, can you talk about how the work is divided up between you and Tim?
Johnson: It’s very much a collaboration. We never really decided who was going to do what, and where to draw the line, so it was sort of like we’re making the play and passing the ball back and forth. I was there on the set daily working with the crew and the animators, and Tim sort of had an overall guiding influence over that.
Q: Danny, can you talk about the difference between working on stop-motion animation, and a live-action film?
Elfman: With animated film the music is, by nature, going to take a more important role. It’s a musical, so it becomes a little more important. But other than the fact that the songs have to be written a year before, that makes it a little different, but when I’m scoring it I’m not approaching it any differently than if it were a live-action film. In my head, I’m pretending that they are real characters and I’m scoring it like that. So the story is the story: It has a very fairy-tale like quality, and had they been live-action instead of puppets I think I would have approached it exactly the same.
Q: How do you feel about songs that you’ve written being in theme-park rides? How about Corpse Bride?
Elfman: A Corpse Bride theme park ride. Hmmmm…
Johnson: Ride the bride! [laughter]
Elfman: I don’t know. You know, to me, going to theme parks when I was kid, I would love anything that had to do with skeletons. A skeleton ride would be my #1 ride. Now [families?] don’t think that way, but if that would have been me growing up, anyplace that had a skeleton ride with singing skeletons, dancing skeletons, anything with skeletons… that’s where I would have spent my time. So if anything ever does happen, it would be for a generation of kids that grew up like, probably Tim too, ‘it’s all about skeletons’.
[Question about collaboration.]
Elfman: Well, I’ve collaborated with Tim for 20 years now. We have more or less a method [in] doing it. It’s pretty simple: He talks about an idea, and I go and I create a song or a piece of music and he doesn’t respond until he really has something to listen to. I’ll wager it’s the same with him visually. On a conceptual level it’s kind of hard to talk to Tim. He needs to see, feel, touch, listen to, and respond. So when we’re spotting a movie, it’s the quickest spotting session ever. Literally, I’ve worked with directors who take a day and a half to spot. With Tim, if it’s a 71-minute movie, it takes him 85 minutes to spot that movie. He does not want to talk about it. It’s like, ‘music here, music here, and music here.’ He’ll just come up with stuff as we play it.
Johnson: Tim, as far as the vibration (?) between the music and the visual, it’s very much sort of a back-and-forth thing. Once Danny gives us the song it really helps us to see the picture that we need to make.
Elfman: I should add that there’s kind of two levels of collaboration. The first is writing a song with him, but then there is the collaboration of production. He’ll actually come back to me and say, ‘Hey, can we like shorten 8 beats out of it, can we add two beats here’, and so there’s a lot of that. The song isn’t really finished until production has finished their notes. They take a lot of notes in editing. So that’s the second level of collaboration after the song is written.
Johnson: Mine is a similar process. Tim has a very clear idea in his mind about where he wants this to go, but it can’t aways be verbalized very clearly. So we work on storyboarding and getting something together that he can respond to from a visual sense and an emotion sense.
Q: Were there any digital effects in the movie?
Johnson: Yeah, we sprinkled a few digital effects in there for things that just couldn’t be accomplished with stop-motion or would have been too time-consuming to do. You know — fog… fire… butterflies… once in while, the veil. But really we tried to stay as true to the stop-motion tradition as we could. Everything you see on these characters, all the facial expressions, that’s all pure stop-motion.
Q: Danny, what is your favorite song in the movie?
Elfman: That’s easy. I mean, Remains The Day. You know, the Bonejangles piece. But not for the reason you’re thinking, not because I’m singing it. [laughter] It’s because of the instrumental break, that it was always going to be my favorite track. Because they essentially told me: ‘Write a big, extended thing, and skeletons will dance, they’ll play’ and it brought me back to my love of Max Fleisher cartoons. And I thought, ‘I’m never going to get a chance to have a xylophone solo played from one skeleton to playing on the ribs of another, you know, going from guitar to trombone. Mike had said we could do this thing where they transform into different instruments and just kind of go crazy. So I knew ever before I started that that was going to be my favorite. And it was. I didn’t write it for my voice, and I didn’t intend to sing it. It was my favorite track even before it became my song to sing.
Q: Do you have a full-blown live action musical in your head?
Elfman: I wrote two of them, and sold them, years ago. One sits at Fox and one sits at Disney, so who knows? Maybe they’ll get revived one day.
Q: Does that stop you from writing another one?
Elfman: No. Well, it’s hard to say. I think about it. Perhaps. I wrote a non-musical, the last thing I did, which I’m working on right now. I may switch to yet another musical again, so we’ll see.
Q: What is it about stop-motion that makes it so special?
Johnson: I don’t think there is any technology today that produces a similar effect. I think on a subconscious, emotional level people respond to it differently. It’s just the texture of it, and the tone. There’s something about seeing these real objects moving through space that’s almost like telekinesis or something. It’s very magical and computer animation hasn’t copied that yet.
Elfman: No. I was really glad. I worked really hard on Nightmare. You know, two and a half years. I wore so many hats on that thing. For it to have found an audience at all was really, really rewarding. Because you’ve got to remember, when it was coming out it considered dead in the water. I mean, the merchandising stopped cold in its tracks after the first preview, and they just had the feeling like, ‘We just want to cut our losses.’ You’re not really happy when at the premiere of a movie everyone’s just trying to cut their losses and run. So kind of getting through that, and over the next decade have it grow into something that… I mean, I was approached at airports and stuff by people. Really weird. I’ve done big movies and stuff — Batman, big movies… Spider-Man — but it was Nightmare stuff that people have [for me] to sign. The following is really hardcore. I just got back from Japan, and there’s Nightmare stuff all over the place. It’s really gratifying.
But no, I didn’t feel any pressure [with Corpse Bride]. I was just glad to have a shot at doing anything in this genre again, because I was afraid that after Nightmare that would be it. There’s not a lot of stop-motion stuff anymore, and I love stop-motion. So anything that can perpetuate stop-motion as an art form and keep it going, I just want to be a part of it. I have a fear of that nail in the coffin, that no one’s going to do this again.
Q: Mike, can you talk about how the work is divided up between you and Tim?
Johnson: It’s very much a collaboration. We never really decided who was going to do what, and where to draw the line, so it was sort of like we’re making the play and passing the ball back and forth. I was there on the set daily working with the crew and the animators, and Tim sort of had an overall guiding influence over that.
Q: Danny, can you talk about the difference between working on stop-motion animation, and a live-action film?
Elfman: With animated film the music is, by nature, going to take a more important role. It’s a musical, so it becomes a little more important. But other than the fact that the songs have to be written a year before, that makes it a little different, but when I’m scoring it I’m not approaching it any differently than if it were a live-action film. In my head, I’m pretending that they are real characters and I’m scoring it like that. So the story is the story: It has a very fairy-tale like quality, and had they been live-action instead of puppets I think I would have approached it exactly the same.
Q: How do you feel about songs that you’ve written being in theme-park rides? How about Corpse Bride?
Elfman: A Corpse Bride theme park ride. Hmmmm…
Johnson: Ride the bride! [laughter]
Elfman: I don’t know. You know, to me, going to theme parks when I was kid, I would love anything that had to do with skeletons. A skeleton ride would be my #1 ride. Now [families?] don’t think that way, but if that would have been me growing up, anyplace that had a skeleton ride with singing skeletons, dancing skeletons, anything with skeletons… that’s where I would have spent my time. So if anything ever does happen, it would be for a generation of kids that grew up like, probably Tim too, ‘it’s all about skeletons’.
[Question about collaboration.]
Elfman: Well, I’ve collaborated with Tim for 20 years now. We have more or less a method [in] doing it. It’s pretty simple: He talks about an idea, and I go and I create a song or a piece of music and he doesn’t respond until he really has something to listen to. I’ll wager it’s the same with him visually. On a conceptual level it’s kind of hard to talk to Tim. He needs to see, feel, touch, listen to, and respond. So when we’re spotting a movie, it’s the quickest spotting session ever. Literally, I’ve worked with directors who take a day and a half to spot. With Tim, if it’s a 71-minute movie, it takes him 85 minutes to spot that movie. He does not want to talk about it. It’s like, ‘music here, music here, and music here.’ He’ll just come up with stuff as we play it.
Johnson: Tim, as far as the vibration (?) between the music and the visual, it’s very much sort of a back-and-forth thing. Once Danny gives us the song it really helps us to see the picture that we need to make.
Elfman: I should add that there’s kind of two levels of collaboration. The first is writing a song with him, but then there is the collaboration of production. He’ll actually come back to me and say, ‘Hey, can we like shorten 8 beats out of it, can we add two beats here’, and so there’s a lot of that. The song isn’t really finished until production has finished their notes. They take a lot of notes in editing. So that’s the second level of collaboration after the song is written.
Johnson: Mine is a similar process. Tim has a very clear idea in his mind about where he wants this to go, but it can’t aways be verbalized very clearly. So we work on storyboarding and getting something together that he can respond to from a visual sense and an emotion sense.
Q: Were there any digital effects in the movie?
Johnson: Yeah, we sprinkled a few digital effects in there for things that just couldn’t be accomplished with stop-motion or would have been too time-consuming to do. You know — fog… fire… butterflies… once in while, the veil. But really we tried to stay as true to the stop-motion tradition as we could. Everything you see on these characters, all the facial expressions, that’s all pure stop-motion.
Q: Danny, what is your favorite song in the movie?
Elfman: That’s easy. I mean, Remains The Day. You know, the Bonejangles piece. But not for the reason you’re thinking, not because I’m singing it. [laughter] It’s because of the instrumental break, that it was always going to be my favorite track. Because they essentially told me: ‘Write a big, extended thing, and skeletons will dance, they’ll play’ and it brought me back to my love of Max Fleisher cartoons. And I thought, ‘I’m never going to get a chance to have a xylophone solo played from one skeleton to playing on the ribs of another, you know, going from guitar to trombone. Mike had said we could do this thing where they transform into different instruments and just kind of go crazy. So I knew ever before I started that that was going to be my favorite. And it was. I didn’t write it for my voice, and I didn’t intend to sing it. It was my favorite track even before it became my song to sing.
Q: Do you have a full-blown live action musical in your head?
Elfman: I wrote two of them, and sold them, years ago. One sits at Fox and one sits at Disney, so who knows? Maybe they’ll get revived one day.
Q: Does that stop you from writing another one?
Elfman: No. Well, it’s hard to say. I think about it. Perhaps. I wrote a non-musical, the last thing I did, which I’m working on right now. I may switch to yet another musical again, so we’ll see.
Q: What is it about stop-motion that makes it so special?
Johnson: I don’t think there is any technology today that produces a similar effect. I think on a subconscious, emotional level people respond to it differently. It’s just the texture of it, and the tone. There’s something about seeing these real objects moving through space that’s almost like telekinesis or something. It’s very magical and computer animation hasn’t copied that yet.
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