For more than twenty years Danny Elfman has composed some of the most recognizable scores in film and television. While it would be easy to say he just simply has a gift for musical accompaniment, he takes his job extraordinarily seriously.  Likewise, he continues that, “Working closely with a director is the main job a film composer.  Interpreting what he perceives as a color, an emotion, or mood is very abstract.  A director tells you something he wants and then you have to run back to your music and respond with, ‘I think he meant something like this.’”   

The self-taught musician who first picked up an instrument at the age of eighteen would eventually grow into the multiple Oscar nominated and Grammy Award winning Danny Elfman. Having dropped out of high school and followed his older brother to France prior to journeying to Africa, Elfman managed to absorb musical styles from every place he’s lived which is evident in every one of his eclectic, offbeat, and memorable scores including Wanted which is his best in years.   

From his beginnings as a rock musician in the band Oingo Boingo to becoming a frequent collaborator of director Tim Burton — his main musical Batman theme from Burton’s 1989 film marked the very first time I became aware of the art of film scoring.  In fact, I was so distinctly affected by it that I begged for the sheet music and tried to learn it on the piano myself, but only managed to make it through a page and a half.  And although he’s provided such instantly recognizable and remarkable scores for Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the theme songs for TV’s The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives, among others, he was the cruel subject of much unfair criticism and speculation when he first made headlines. 

After being snobbishly charged by academics that a rock star couldn’t move into scoring and insinuating that perhaps Elfman wasn’t the brains behind the music in the earliest part of his career, Elfman fired back by defending himself and others with similar backgrounds as well.  However, the best revenge was the quality of the work itself, going on to move endlessly from one high profile project to another.   

Spending more than a dozen hours a day on any given score, seven days a week for several months, the prolific Elfman ,who also composed the music for three additional films this year aside from Wanted, including Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Standard Operating Procedure, and Milk, seems to take a Batman-like approach to making music.  Retreating to “his basement musical laboratory,” he compares his work to screenwriting, telling the L.A. Times that, “a movie starts with a writer alone in a room conjuring something out of vapor… And it ends with a score composer talking to himself in a little room, conjuring something out of vapor.”